Swipe Right for Tragedy! 🥀

‘How do we use parody to bring the themes of Romeo & Juliet to a modern audience?’ That was the driving question for this humanities project. As you can probably guess, this project was based on Romeo & Juliet. To answer this driving question, we decided to put on our own parody play of Romeo & Juliet to perform to our grade 10 peers. Obviously before we started creating parodies, we had to take a look at the original version and study it. We read the original play script of Romeo & Juliet as a class, exploring the different themes of each Act. I had a lot of trouble understanding the Shakespearean English used in the play, so thankfully we were allowed to read a modern English version. Reading and studying the original script helped me practice my theme statement skills, and using evidence from the play to back up my thinking.

Once we actually understood what we were supposed to be making a parody of, we were separated into different groups to write our own adaptations of each Act. It was honestly so hilarious coming up with modern equivalent of the Shakespearean slang and planning out the different Acts to line up with each other. I think it was more fun for us, seeing the end product because we could see the comparisons between the original version, and our brilliant modern adaptation. I think that we were able to create a fun parody that included elements of our modern language and the culture of North Vancouver, while still maintaining the plot and iconic parts of Shakespeare’s original work. I assigned to Act V (the final act), and the script I produced can be seen below.

Romeo and Juliet Act V Script

Though I hate to admit it, I did have a bit of fun during this project creating our script, and watching our parody come to life. And even though it was mortifying performing in front of people I go to school with, I am satisfied with the outcome. I think that this play could have been better in many ways, but it also could have been much worse than it turned out, so I am quite proud of what our group produced. Who knows? Maybe with a bit more rehearsal time and coordination, this performance could have been a comedic masterpiece! I think this will be one of the projects that I will look back fondly on, especially since the point of it was to make people laugh. Thank you for reading this blog post, and tune in for my next update!