Director: Alandra Anderson
Characters:
Cover Letter:
The main point that I would like to get across in this adaptation is the idea of having a diverse cast. As I was developing my cast list I kept in mind how in the original adaptation of the play you don't see many non-white characters (if any) and although I don't think that was on purpose, I think that's just how it kind of turned out to be, but in my adaptation I really want to make it evident that the cast is diverse in order to and touch many different types of people and to keep people engaged and keep play relevant. I got my ideas from the mere fact that while I was watching the play I did not see much diversity. Some of the choices that I chose to make was to modernize the play and to make it easier to follow. I wanted to put it in a time period that many people seem to resonate with and enjoy. What went really well for me was choosing my cast list, however, what didn't go so well was deciding the dispositions of the characters. A question I want to leave the readers is going to be pretty much the same as Shakespeare's. I don't want to mess with the original plot of the text too much, but I want to leave the readers with the question of whether or not reality is what we deem it to be. Director’s Pitch: I would like to modernize “A Midsummer Night's Dream” into a piece of work that would relate to today's youth as well as the not so younger people. In the art of directing, you must be able to not only incorporate the importance and significance of having a diverse cast but also displaying that physically and implementing those qualities into the actors character. A midsummer night's dream is a perfect opportunity to play around with the development of the characters and make it an even better story all the while modernizing it. I would like to modernize not only the text itself but also the time period. I want to put it in a time like the 90’s where everyone is not to far from but not too close to it. Modernizing it in this fashion would make this interpretation more like a Bard text because it will be able to resonate with all audiences. Essay: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is peculiar to most play’s you’ll read. Although the plot itself is not that difficult to follow, the intricacy of the play and character development leaves you questioning if the play was really about what you thought it was about initially. This play can be seen as an onion. It has several layers, yet when you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of it, another layer appears. In the play, mortals and fairies co-exist. Because the fairies are always meddling in the humans’ business, many times throughout the play unreasonable things occur causing the lovers, and even some other characters, to feel as if they were dreaming. The concept of dreaming is a huge part of understanding where some of these layers are originating from. Oftentimes, it will be said that a character is dreaming and that the occurrences that have taken place are nonetheless trivial. It starts to get foggy because although it feels as if the characters were to be dreaming, they were indeed awake for most of the play, so technically they were able to make conscious decisions and control the things that were happening to them. However, when the fairy magic depicted who was going to love who, although the lovers felt in control, they were not. Another element to this that I believe was completely intentional while Shakespeare wrote the play, was to make sure that you do not have any empathy for the characters. He achieved that by changing the characters behavior by having their own lives being tampered with due to fairy magic causing them to consistently putting the characters out of their own character. As we go deeper into the play we uncover another layer that is one of the more evident layers. That would be the play, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. This is a play-within-a-play and it is quite evident that Shakespeare's goal with this was to intensify the plot. Many times, the Rude Mechanicals were brought into the script even when it didn't have anything to do with the play that they were performing. One of the Rude Mechanicals was even sucked into the fairy magic with the illusion of being a donkey, thus to believe that he were also to be dreaming. This layer shows us that what we may initially expect to happen, may not actually turn out that way. It may be hard for the reader to grasp the concept of all of this dreaming and “layeredness”. However, that is the point. In the play, the fourth wall is constantly broken and we get called out on as a reader. The play does not only leave the characters question their views on reality, but also yours as a reader and I think it's very important that that is addressed. For most books or plays, the theme is clear and the plot is clear, however with this play, we will all end up having different interpretations of the story because the layers are so deep and contrived. |
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