This school year, I teamed up with a new hire in order to teach Shakespeare as a Fine Arts class. Chris Hults is a great director and a wonderful guy, plus he's a full-fledged Bardolator. In short, he doesn't really need me in the class. I'm allowed to participate because that's what seniority does for a fellow. See, the scope of the class is to have a semester of fine arts--dramatic work--with Shakespeare's plays, then have a semester of language arts in which I and the students do in-depth readings of the plays. It straddles both worlds--the dramatic and the canonical.
Anyway, my relationship with Chris makes me laugh. I'm not a theater person--I've been to a lot of live theater in the past few years exclusively because of Shakespeare. I don't spend much time or money on plays that aren't from the Bard, though I find exceptions here and there. Nevertheless, I'm teaching a drama class, with a dramatist, and so I'm slowly learning more about what goes into a theatrical production.
One of the things I'm getting to do is called dramaturgy. A dramaturg is someone who helps with the context of the story--either through research, textual analysis, or both. Basically, bookish people like me enjoy the in-the-weeds approach to Shakespeare, focusing on when the play was written, in what ways it can be read, and also providing edits to the text whenever a play is too long and needs to be cut.
Today, Chris asked me to work on a version of Romeo and Juliet that he'd been tinkering with, trying to get the play smaller, more compact, and with only eight or nine potential actors. Instead of writing a longer essay on Shakespeare, I ended up spending all my writing time editing a play by Shakespeare.
It was a good day.
Anyway, my relationship with Chris makes me laugh. I'm not a theater person--I've been to a lot of live theater in the past few years exclusively because of Shakespeare. I don't spend much time or money on plays that aren't from the Bard, though I find exceptions here and there. Nevertheless, I'm teaching a drama class, with a dramatist, and so I'm slowly learning more about what goes into a theatrical production.
One of the things I'm getting to do is called dramaturgy. A dramaturg is someone who helps with the context of the story--either through research, textual analysis, or both. Basically, bookish people like me enjoy the in-the-weeds approach to Shakespeare, focusing on when the play was written, in what ways it can be read, and also providing edits to the text whenever a play is too long and needs to be cut.
Today, Chris asked me to work on a version of Romeo and Juliet that he'd been tinkering with, trying to get the play smaller, more compact, and with only eight or nine potential actors. Instead of writing a longer essay on Shakespeare, I ended up spending all my writing time editing a play by Shakespeare.
It was a good day.