Romeo & Juliet, a PLP Production

Hello blog. Considering that you are reading this post in the present, it would be appropriate to say that you are a modern audience. Now that we have established that, imagine logging into Zoom to watch a presentation of grade ten students reading William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet word for word with no changes made from the original. Wait! Don’t imagine that. Instead, picture yourself (a modern audience) logging into Zoom to watch a presentation of grade ten students sharing the story of Romeo and Juliet through a carefully adapted version that will make you (modern audience) appreciate how Shakespeare is still relevant today. Much better right? You might have caught on by now that this is what actually happened in my recent project.

That was the final product for an audience to enjoy after weeks of preparing and working to answer the driving question, “How can we present a live audio story that makes an audience appreciate the relevance of Shakespeare?”. Now that the project is done, how did we do that?

It would be pretty difficult to create an adaptation of a story we didn’t know so the first step was to analyze text and in this case that text was Romeo and Juliet. By the time I was uploading my first podcast episode for this project (don’t worry, podcasting was not excluded from this project, in fact there were two episodes) I had gained a basic understanding of the text and also has analyzed it deeper, using it as evidence for what I think makes a classic.

Once I completed the next episode, I looked at multiple versions of Romeo and Juliet. These were adaptations like the one we would create at the end of this project.

Reflecting on this different forms I had seen the story take, in my episode two co-hosts and I talked discussed the topic of adaptations.

In between these two episodes, I also focused on taking historical perspective. In class we discussed how to take historical perspective and I worked on comparing social beliefs, values, and practices of a specific time to adaptations of Romeo and Juliet from the same time.

1968 was a year full of historically significant events like civil rights and anti-war movements, and was also the year that Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet was released. When I analyzed it and took historical perspective, there were a surprising amount of connections between the film and the time it was created in.

All of what I’ve talked about so far was necessary to build the knowledge I needed to go forward in actually producing our own adaptation of Romeo and Juliet as a class. As innovative designers, we needed to take this knowledge and create a solution to the driving question.

After we communicated with each other as a class a group of people had completed the task of completing the script. Once that was done I felt I was able to visualize how the final product would look. While the story team worked on the script I was in creative team working on… creative stuff? We were responsible for bringing the story to life with actors, costumed, and set up. In this group I was able to work on my leadership skills which I don’t do very often. I made an effort to lead the group in the right direction. There were other groups than creative and story, including technical and production. All of these groups efforts came together when we started rehearsing.

(Final Presentation)

After many rehearsals the time came to actually present. The story we told was Romeo and Juliet but like the driving question mentions, it was adapted for a modern audience. How did we do that? Well we took the original play and applied aspects to it that would appeal to the audience. Humour is something we definitely included. I think the main thing we did to adapt this was adding two “audience” sort of characters who narrated or commented on the story. They were able to simplify what was going on and doing so using modern slang making it hopefully more engaging for the audience.

From recording podcasts episodes as I figured out what the story of Romeo and Juliet actually is, to presenting our adaptation to a modern audience, this project made not just our audience but also made me appreciate the relevance of Shakespeare. We presented a live audio story for an audience by first understanding for ourselves the relevance of Shakespeare, then sharing that by collaborating as a whole class to the world.