My group’s second meeting with our community partners was just as productive and fun as the first. To our surprise, we had a few more students join us for this meeting. We began by explaining JSP in more detail for those weren’t in attendance last week. We then focused on the logistics of our virtual project, determining who wants a speaking role and who wants to work on the technical side of our adaptation. Fortunately, we had many volunteers for both of these positions. The students also expressed interest in creating stop-motion style images for the project, along with the use of Legos and action figures.

After getting these technical questions settled, I went through the plot of act 1 very briefly for the students who were not with us last meeting. I was surprised by how much plot information the students retained, especially since they’ve never even read or seen the play. I think this is a testament to how engaged they are during our meetings. Overall, we had the most student participation when we began to decide on character names and personalities. I was happily shocked by the fact that the students so willingly wanted to change Claudio to Claudia, with the further intent of making her “emo.” I support these changes—I think having a girl be the star of the high school’s football team makes our story more interesting and potentially more progressive. Along with the Claudio/Claudia switch, the students basically modernized all of the character names except for Hero, which I found intriguing because it seemed like our class also wanted to keep her name the same. Maybe we can incorporate Hero’s unique name into the script as we begin to write it (maybe it’s a nickname with a relevant backstory). Furthermore, it seemed like the students also wanted the characters to reflect their own interests. For example, one student really wanted at least one character be in the theatre club. I look forward to continuing to draft our abridged script of act 1 and present it to the kids next week!