Shakespeare Scenes Night: Romeo and Juliet

This entire week, the our play group worked very hard to work out all the kinks in our performance. We met three extra days and felt that we had prepared as best we could considering how little time we actually got in the auditorium and despite the fact that we never had the chance to run through the ending. I am confident the audience thoroughly enjoyed our performance, however rough and unpolished it ended up looking. I stumbled a couple times, with an awkward pause as the nun, forgeting my last three lines. I ended up saying "Hold then go home....take thou this vile." At least it kind of fit. I enjoyed the rest of the groups' peformances. While no one was flawless, we all brought humor and entertainment to the work of Shakespeare. Every group took a unique spin on the adaptation, and I hope that our shortcomings, (especially mine), will be overlooked by the audience and that they focus on our great effort.

MacBeth

I have read MacBeth once before and watched a full-length theater production on film in my Introduction to the Theatre class. I found it to be the darkest, bloodiest, most unbearable play of all of Shakespeare's. Reading the text was interesting, but watching the play peformed was horrific.
However, looking at MacBeth a second time in Shakespeare's Tragedies, the approach the class took to the text was much more interesting and comfortable. Analyzing the witches and whether or not they were good, bad, or just prophetic was interesting, and the wizard in Throne of Blood was an interesting character to compare to the witches. I now also understand Lady MacBeth's character more than I did before this class. The manipulation of her husband and her thirst for power which bypasses all empathy for others is the most horrifying part of MacBeth. While I don't plan on reading MacBeth again, I have a different, more interesting opinion of the play now.

RAN and King Lear

For an audience of today's college students, the Japanese movie Ran takes patience and an open mind to watch. I found it difficult to relate to the characters and the hostile nature of the storyline. It was so different from any film, foreign or American that I have ever seen (and I've watched more recent Japanese films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon which I enjoyed). I was not used to the choreographed moments that realistically would not be choreographed-like the men falling off the horses exactly the same way. However, the movie featured amazing scenery, costumes, and stunts and successfully attributed eastern religion and culture to a western play. The tragedy here, rather than death itself, is the foolishness of a "wise" man which occurs in the beginning, resulting in separation and destruction. Unlike other Shakespearan plays where I enjoyed the movie adaptation more, reading King Lear was easier to do than watching Ran was.