Swipe Right for Tragedy

Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears
Moist it again, and frame some feeling line
That may discover such integrity.

Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of, well, time. Even if you haven’t read his work, you still probably know about it. Case in point: Romeo and Juliet, this tale of star-crossed lovers has been shared and adapted countless times, and despite being hundreds of years old, it is still known by many. It also happens to be the focus of our latest Humanities project. So, in the time you spend upon this page, hear the tale of our attempts to bear this timeless story to a modern stage. And stay ( or not ) to see how well we fare.¹

I’d known about this project for a while, and while the content had changed a bit from the original vision², I was looking forward to it. As the other half of the class had been doing this project while my half was doing Ology of Apology, our first exposure to this project was watching their production of Romeo and Juliet. The premise for their parody was a feud between Seycove and Windsor, in modern North Van. It was super fun seeing the other class perform, and while their presentation was good, there were still some pretty obvious… areas for growth. Of course, since we were going to be doing the project too, we had to make our play better. ³

Going into the project already knowing what we were going to do gave us some big advantages. We already had a basic idea of the story, and we knew some potential pitfalls to avoid. Even on the first day of the project, we were thinking about the details of the stage production, but I’ll save those details for that section of the blog post.

The main focus of this project was bringing the themes of Romeo and Juliet to modern audiences, so naturally we needed to read the play to do that.⁴ To fully understand the play, we used a variety of techniques. This included reading and analyzing the original text and modern translations, watching parts of stage performances and movie adaptations, and even performing scenes as a class. All of this was an absolute blast, and was so much more interesting than just reading the book on its own. On top of that, all the analysis activities we did meant we really got a good understanding of the play compared to just reading it, as even the translated versions can be tricky to understand.

With the reading done, we were about two weeks into the project, which meant we had to get started on making our parody. The first thing to do was come up with a premise. We went through a few ideas, from rival theatre troupes to Star Wars factions, but the most popular option was Canada vs US, by a landslide.⁵ With that decided, we could start figuring out some of the other details of how we would organize the production to avoid some of the pitfalls the other class fell into. One common issue people had with the other classes’ show was that there wasn’t much continuity, and the play was hard to follow. This was likely due to each act being written and performed by a group separate from any other act. At least from the perspective of an audience member, this seemed very chaotic and confusing to watch, with large gaps between acts and some characters being played by 5 separate people. To avoid this, our class decided to go the route of a more traditional theatre production, with each character being played by one (or two) people.

We finished the planning by ironing out the details of the setting (Niagara Falls ) and what the equivalents of each character would be. With all that in place, we could start writing. As I mentioned, each act was a team with a DRI to organize the team and communicate with other acts. I was the DRI for Act I, so my team’s work would be the first thing that the audience saw. We had a bit under a week to write, and while it definitely got close, we managed to get everything done in time. One issue we discovered when we did a table read was that our act was a bit too long. We had to cut it down so it wouldn’t take up 11 minutes on stage, as we were aiming for a 30-minute total runtime.

I wrote the “Chorus” and Scene I within my act, and while Scene I was alright, I loved how the chorus turned out. I wrote it as the intro for a YouTube video covering the recently concluded G7 conferences in Canada, and the AV team took it and made a great opener to the play. ⁶ The script was still being edited as we moved into rehearsals, but the stage waits for no one. In total, we ended up practicing the play 4 times, with 2 being “proper” rehearsals, and the others being closer to read-throughs. We only got to use the theatre once to practice, but we were able to figure out some important staging directions for the performance. Before we knew it, we were waiting in the greenroom for our presentation to the other class, as well as some grade 8s and other students. I think the performance went really well, all things considered, and in my ( totally unbiased ) opinion, we did way better than the other class. My character Tybalt died in the beginning of Act 3, so I was able to sit back and enjoy the show after that. Honestly, the hardest thing was remembering which side of the stage to enter on.

Anyways, I’ll stop boring you with the details, here’s the performance in it’s full glory:

Thanks for reading ( and watching? ), that’s all for this post. I’m Finn H, so long for now!