Yesterday (Thursday) was Mer’s and my fifteenth wedding anniversary. It has been a great time, and I am grateful to have married someone whom I love being around so much. Mer had announced that she had made plans on Thursday evening, and so she took me to Akron, to the grounds of Stan Hywet, to see the Ohio Shakespeare Festival’s production of Cymbeline.

Cymbeline is a rare play for us – a play neither of us had seen or read or really knew anything about. We both decided not to read the play’s synopsis in the playbill, to see if we could follow the play without any background in it. It was a tense first two or three minutes for me at the start of the play – I was not really following what the people on stage were saying about the main characters, who had not come on yet. Happily, once I was able to see the characters, everything snapped into place and I was able to follow the rest of the play with no real issues (Mer was fine after the opening as well, but I really expected that, since she is good with language).

In an amusing twist, the main plot boils down to a foolish and jealous husband making a really stupid love-dare bet with another man that his wife will remain true, even if the second man tries to seduce her. She resists, of course, but the husband is duped into thinking she has cheated on him. Since it is not a tragedy, all works out in the end. Quite the play for a wedding anniversary!