Shakespeare Divided

So I've come to a conclusion: people don't understand Shakespeare.

Oh, I know a lot of people say that they don't understand Shakespeare, but I think the problem is a lot wider spread than anyone has realized. How did I come to this conclusion? Well, as a Shakespeare major I have to take all kinds of interesting Shakespearean classes from both the English and Theatre departments here at SUU. In the course of this, though, I've realized that many of the people I work with believe that the Bard belongs either to just the English department or just the Theatre department. How screwed up is that?

My favorite part of my major is how integrated the two aspects of Shakespeare have become. In one class I read certain plays, talk about them, and write papers on them. In the other I perform and watch Shakespeare. To me, the line between the two sides has become blurred almost past recognition, and it frustrates me that no one else seems to see how silly it is to have them parted.

Since I got yelled at today by one of my professors about my ideas of integration, I'm simply not going to bother with trying to help SUU make the Bard whole again. They can turn out English majors who know nothing about how to speak Shakespeare for all I care. When I'm a professor, though, I intend to teach a class about Shakespeare. Not Shakespeare from an English perspective, not Shakespeare from a Theatre perspective.

Just Shakespeare.

Death of a Salesman... In Seven Minutes

Yes, you read that right. No, I am not crazy. It just happens that for my dear Acting I class I get to do yet another abridged version of a play, and this time it's Death of a Salesman. Oh joy. I was tossed into a new group composed of myself and five others, and between now and next Monday we have to put together an entire seven-to-ten minute version of the play.

Now, I am not entirely afraid of this assignment because we have already done something similar with Hamlet, which I think is a harder show to cut. It also happens that my group for the Hamlet project got extreme props from the professor, and we all earned A's on the assignment.

My fear? Well, two of the people in my group did rather badly with the last assignment, and in a play if one person slacks off the entire production suffers. It's an unfortunate fact of the theatre. However, I have decided to go into this project thinking like a director. I actually had an idea about how to stage it, since we have six people and probably about five roles. I thought it would be interesting to have two people play Willy. I figured one person could do "sane Willy" and another could do the one that is trapped in the past. What that'd do is give everyone a role and create an interesting transition as "trapped Willy" takes over the play. Besides, we have very little to work with on staging, and that would help it out a bit.

I don't know what my group thinks yet, but it was a thought I'd had and figured I should write it down. Either way, at least I know my creative juices still exist.