A colleague from the Fine Arts Dept and I are considering team-teaching a senior English elective next spring. He’s an actor/director and I am, well, me. We thought Shakespeare would be a great vehicle for an interdisciplinary course, and we’ll be meeting this spring to start planning what we’d like to do to see if we can make our ideas fit well together.
Here’s what I want.
One of my favorite English assignments of all time is the one to rewrite the opening scene of Hamlet. Here’s what I like about it. First, if you want the opening scene to get right to the heart of the play, you first have to decide what “the main point” of the play is. As it could legitimately be argued that the play has many potential “main points,” you have to analyze (or have superb intuition about) the script to see which of the possible points you want to be the focus of your production.
Next, you have to convey succinctly with support why you made the choice you did. If you want backing for your writing process–if you already have a big enough name to get the backing to write the screenplay, you can omit this step formally but need at some level to do it if you want to be reasonably sure what you write will get produced. We’ll assume that students in the class don’t have this reputation yet and need to justify their choice.
Then, you need to decide which dramatic techniques will be most effective in hooking your target audience (for the purposes of this assignment, educated teenagers of early 21st-century America like themselves). Ideally, they’d justify these choices with some research beyond simply “The movies I like have….” though I haven’t always required that additional research.
At some point in this process, perhaps earlier, you need to view several different productions of the same scene (Hamlet is a good choice here, for several reasons) to get a sense for how other directors have handled the issues (main point, effective cinematographic/dramatic techniques, setting, and dialog editing among others). Reflections on which techniques produce what effects in the audience and an analysis of which ones are most effective is probably a good idea here, too.
It’s now time for decisions, to actually answer the questions that prompted this exercise: what is the main point of the play? How can you best get it across in your opening scene (or at least, set the stage for it in your audience’s mind)?
At this point, another question creeps in (if it hasn’t already): is this a stage production or a film? How much money is available for what you want to do? Are you having to produce the scene (or a sample of it)? If so, what resources are available to you? (Ideally, these questions should have been considered earlier, as their answers will have a huge impact on what you write. There’s no point in incorporating hugely expensive special effects if you’re having to present or shoot your scene in high school with no budget…)