On Thursday during lunch, the annual Lear Pong finals commenced between the Killears and the Mongrel Bitches, both made up of AP Literature students. The Killears consisted of seniors Ashlyn Roeder, Meena Alvi, Sophie Ultan, and Eva Grant, while the Mongrel Bitches was made up of seniors Ajax Fu, Matthew Porter, Fiona Steinmetz, Abby Ko, and Melvyn Depeyrot.
The concept of the game revolves around reciting quotes from Shakespeare’s play King Lear combined with the drinking game beer pong. When a team sinks a cup, the opposing team must finish a quotation from the play or else they lose a cup. If both teams throw and recite quotes correctly in a given round, a quotation is read aloud and the first team to correctly identify the speaker gets to remove a cup from the other team. The game is played with six cups for each team.
The game started out very evenly matched between the two teams as Fu and Roeder went back and forth finishing quotations. Steinmetz converted her first two shots of the game, forcing the Killears to defend early which they did with ease.
It became evident after the first few rounds that the two teams would be able to finish every quotation that was provided, so sinking cups became far less important than naming the speaker as quickly as possible. Luckily for the Mongrel Bitches, Fu, Depeyrot, and Ko were incredibly quick at naming speakers, only being beaten to the punch once all game.
The Killears were unable to convert on all but one of their throws throughout the game, which was easily defended by Fu finishing the provided quotation.
Eventually the Killears were dwindled down to their final cup, and Fu was able to identify Gloucester, a character from the play, faster than anyone else to earn his team the win.
After the game, Fu said, “We all just locked in. It was really a team effort, and we had a lot of chemistry throughout the whole tournament.”
Ultan also added, “I’m really proud of our team, because we all did as best as we possibly could have. We read Lear, enjoyed Lear, and that’s the most important thing. It was so much fun and such a great thing to be a part of.”
