words words review

I saw the mask club "words words words" on thursday. A student-run, student-directed, black-box show, taking three shakespeare plays, and cutting across several scenes of each...

 It was basically a 30 minute version of our show with some VERY distinct and important differences. 

1) the three shows were Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Much ado about Nothing. 

for obvious reasons that's different. (ours is R+J, Hamlet, and Love's Labour's)


2) their theme was not examining what shakespeare thought of love, but was examining communication.


while I understood their attempt, I did not understand the followthrough. What I got was a series of stories involving a serious lack-of-communication. 


3) their couples were in grey, white and black, which echoed the feeling of their show, I guess.


our color scheme (red, yellow, and blue) is much more fun, and well... colorful. which hopefully sets the tone for our more upbeat production.


4) their show was intended for serious drama, and to evoke intense emotion... i think...


ours is to laugh at ourselves, the ways love can go wrong, and hopefully add enough of a modern twist to shakespeare that people who wouldn't normally think to look at shakespeare, might think again. We want to bring Shakespeare literacy to a level that any person can understand, be entertained, and enjoy the show/shakespeare.



-Averill

Shakespeare Literacy

Thirty repetitions later, I finally understand what a single line of Shakespeare means.

It sounds funny, but it's true. There's a line in the back-and-forth between Rosaline and Berowne that I never quite understood until today:
Berowne: Your wit's too hot, it speeds to fast, twill tire.
Rosaline: Not till it leave the rider in the mire.
Maybe I'm just being slow on the uptake, or her wit is too fast for me too, but that always seemed like an awkward line to me. I didn't get what Rosaline was supposed to be saying. But after memorizing lines, running through them multiple times, and trying to assign meaning to what I was saying, I finally got the metaphor. Her wit is like a horse, and it's so quick that it will leave it's rider behind in a sticky situation long before it ever gets tired. Basically, she's saying that by the time she runs out of witty things to say, Berowne will be so far behind that it wont matter. Hooray for finally understanding. There are things about these plays that I never would have picked up on if we weren't doing this production.
-Martina