Romeo & Juliet In Fewer Words, Words, Words: Shakespeare on the Go

Arts & Photography

Hilt, Robyn

Performing Arts

Blue Moon Plays

These dramas are designed to be performed for kids of all ages by adults or teen drama groups. They last approximately 45 to 50 minutes; can utilize a cast of various sizes depending on the doubling up schemes; but are ideal for no more than five, two females and three males or one female and four males depending on the show. When the number of characters in a Shakespearean drama usually totals more than fifteen how this can be realized? Primarily this is accomplished through the use of a FRAMING DEVICE, which means an imposed structural framework that justifies using the stage conventions inherent in the script. So, for example, in MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, a small struggling theatre company that is touring (i.e. think of Commedia dell Arte) wakes up to discover that a significant number of actors have abandoned their group to take roles in KING LEAR at a nearby city. They then have to discover creative ways of putting on the show using a greatly diminished acting company. This leads to the discovery and invention of a number of STAGE CONVENTIONS. Some of these include the use of a Narrator; puppets; rapid a-vista costume changes; elaborate doubling schemes; audience participation, and, as mentioned above, a play-within-the-play structural device which allows the audience to see the story of the actors revealed as well as the Shakespearean characters they are creating. SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE. The various adaptations do not shy away from using the Shakespearean texts as much as possible. The Bard’s eloquence and natural instinct for dramatic flair are unequaled in the English language and to offer to the audiences, no matter what age, a watered down or totally rewritten version of the stories would be a violation of the purpose of doing these plays. And that purpose is to present an abridged version of Shakespeare’s inspiring stories, introducing and challenging the audience to understand and appreciate the beauty and passion of his active and descriptive language within the context of an exciting and entertaining story. In this digitally inundated age today’s youth, with their texting, face booking, and other short hand ways of communicating are literally developing abbreviated ways of writing/reading that have reduced the rich scope of the English language to a state of being almost incomprehensible to the modern reader. Metaphor and poetry are no longer explored or appreciated; vocabulary has been reduced to the use of flashcards trying to raise ones test scores, and the soaring power of language to excite emotion and to probe inner truth and humanistic meaning has been discarded as being digressive or precious. We are in a monosyllabic age that is crying out for richer means of expression through language. 1. Young audiences are not used to hearing the language of Shakespeare. Because of this, don’t rush the opening of your show. It takes about ten minutes for an audience to begin to acculturate to the ‘sound’ of this rich language. 2.The adaptations are written to have a strong physical action base. It’s too easy to reduce Shakespeare to a talking heads approach which will distance your audience from the story being presented. 3.The FRAMING DEVICE in all of the plays is structured around ‘putting on a play’, in which a compromised theatre group is desperately trying to figure out how to do one of Shakespeare’s challenging epics with five actors. Actors can change costumes, wigs, hats, props in full view of the audience. Part of the fun of these shows can be found in the way the performers actually ‘put on a show’. 4.These adaptations using a number of PROPS. Make them colorful, and large, and functional as well as symbolic. The plays also are PARTICIPATIONAL in nature If playing to high school audiences the participation may be eliminated, leaving the frame story to appeal to adolescents.

Shakespeare On-The-Go: 4 Touring Shakespeare Plays For Young Audiences

Elvgren, Gillette

Short Shorts for Seniors consists of 5 short plays ideal for performances or readings in senior retirement communities. Plays are printed in 14 point type for easy reading and are also available at Blue Moon Plays (www.bluemoonplays.com) as email attachments Ludmilla Bollow is an award winning actress, prize winning playwright and published novelist. Hundreds of her plays have been produced in 90 theatres across the U.S. plus numerous foreign countries, from China to South Africa.

Short Shorts for Seniors

Humor & Entertainment

Bollow, Ludmilla

Humor

Lost and Found: A Play in One Act

Sheiness, Marsha Lee

SnapShots: A Family Comedy in One Act

KLEIN, JEAN

"Plays, Poems and Pratfalls: Will Shakespeare, An Introduction" is a 45-minute introduction to various works of The Bard. It includes an excerpt from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a highly condensed version of Hamlet, two well-known monologues from As You Like It, and one of the sonnets: number 18. It’s a cross between traditional theatre (incorporating as much action as the director chooses) and classic storytelling -- narration to set the scene, make the transitions and move the tales along. Written in a 2- and 4-actor version, this play is great for touring and for classroom use to introduce young audiences to Shakespeare and his language.

Plays, Poems and Pratfalls: Will Shakespeare, An Introduction: An introductory story-play for children ages 8-12

Guilford-Blake, Evan

As it grew dark that evening, a young woman walked out of the ghetto of Lodz, Poland, where the Jewish population of the city had been confined after the Nazi invasion in 1939. A guard stopped her. She swore at him in Polish and complained that he was delaying her return home after a long day of cleaning houses. He let her pass. She trudged on, holding her bundle of cleaning rags close to her chest. The woman was Sophie Salzer, a Jewish resident of Lodz, making her escape from the ghetto. Hidden in the bundle of rags was her baby, Yadwiga. The baby would grow up to be June Prager—director for the stage and resident of Poughkeepsie. It was only the beginning of a perilous journey. Sophie and Yadwiga made it across Poland to Russia—walking and getting rides when possible, with jewelry and money for bribes, with brave people hiding them—one night in a June’s father, Morris, weeks earlier had left the family’s Lodz apartment to meet some friends on the street. As they stood talking, several German soldiers approached and, without warning, started shooting at the group of Jewish men. Satisfied that the men were dead, the soldiers walked on. Morris had fallen to the street when the shooting started. The others, all dead, were on top of him. He stayed motionless until it was safe to crawl out and hurry home. Sophie convinced him to escape from Lodz and try to reach Russia. He would leave that night and she would follow when she could. It took months for Sophie and Yadwiga to reach Russia. There they were thrown in jail, since Sophie might be a spy. Convincing the Russians that she was just looking for her husband, they were released and—one more miracle—she found him. Since Morris was a medical student before the occupation, the Russian army had accepted him as a medic. He had managed to stay close to the Polish border so Sophie would be able to find him. The rest of the war years were spent on a farm. June remembers digging up potatoes to eat. After the war, the family spent five years in camps for displaced persons in the U.S.-occupied zone in Germany. Finally an American uncle sponsored their immigration to the U.S., promising Sophie a job in his factory in Paterson, New Jersey. Besides directing plays at a number of NYC theaters, she served as artistic director for several theatres in New York and Philadelphia. Most recently, in 2010 she assumed leadership of Mirage Theatre Company, which from its founding in 1988 has presented new and classic plays in and around New York City. Its latest production is Distant Survivors, based on Holocaust poetry by William Heyen. Heyen, an award-winning poet and a longtime faculty member at SUNY colleges, wrote several books of poems based on his research about the Holocaust and on his own family history. His parents immigrated to New York State before World War II; his uncles, SS soldiers stayed in Germany and died in the war. The poems present the perspective of a non-Jew trying to understand what happened, asking himself what he would have done if his parents had stayed in Germany and he had been born there. Would he have helped the victims? Would he have ignored what was happening? Prager says, “I think Heyen was looking for some redemption to offset the evil done by his people. I think more people should do that, to accept responsibility.” Heyen gave Prager permission to work on an adaptation of his poems as a work for the stage. They communicated by letter and email, and he came to one of the early performances. Prager says, “He was very pleased with what we had done.” The work is staged with five actors: a man on a quest for answers while visiting Germany; a Nazi soldier; and three survivors of concentration camps. This is the best that theater can accomplish—beginning in artists’ memory and imagination, and involving an audience profoundly in a confrontation with the truth.

Distant Survivors: based on the poetry of William Heyen

Literature & Fiction

Heyen, William

Prager, June

Dramas & Plays

MONOLOGUES for MEN: Old Testament Voices from the Bible

The Canterbury Tales

Sniper

Culver, Bonnie

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