It’s time. The audience is waiting. The lights are all focused on the stage. As You Like It has arrived at the Iowa Thespian Festival, and a trip to the International Thespian Festival is on the line. At the competition’s end, City High had a ticket to Internationals.

“It’s always very nerve-racking, especially this time, since I know it’s for a competition,” Esme Hutchinson-Reuss ‘26 said. “It’s all very backstage-jittery, put your stuff on, super quick, do your make-up, and make sure all your props are in the right place.”

The Shakespeare play was performed alongside other Iowa high school productions such as Hadestown and Les Miserables on November 14th, 2025 at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.

“[It’s about] this girl [that] wants to win over a guy, but she’s impersonating a guy, and she has to figure out how to make that not weird,” Auggie Dickerson ‘28, who played Amiens and the Page, said. “Then she reveals her identity and they get married, and everybody [else] gets married [too].”

The play’s format presented another difficulty for the actors. Other than a few props, the cast of As You Like It had no set, and they weren’t allowed to mime.

“We basically just worked around it in a way that we wouldn’t have to mime anything,” Dickerson said, “We had to be really, really convincing that we were in the forest and like, gaslight the audience.”

The City High Theatre program won the Studio Theater award and qualified for the International competition in Indiana.