This week’s JSP meeting did not necessarily go according to our plan but was nonetheless crucial for our act. We Jepson students had planned to record the audio of our community partners reading through our abridged script. We were a bit unsure about how to record via Microsoft Teams (we had suggested using Zoom this week but that did not end up happening); however, it ended up not even being an issue, since we ultimately decided not to record yet. Instead, we focused on finalizing the drawings of our “stock images,” and we also did a few practice runs of the script. During our first script run-through, a student brought up an extremely important point: we UR students had unintentionally cut all of Hero’s speaking lines from the first act! Keeping true to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, we wanted our Hero to be more reserved and less talkative than our Beatrice character. However, we all agreed that Hero needs to use her own voice in these first few scenes instead of letting other characters talk for her. We brainstormed ways of incorporating Hero’s lines into our script in order to create more speaking opportunities for the students and to give Hero more agency as her own character independent from others. We also had a brief discussion of what pronouns Claudia uses, which I was happily surprised by. I mentioned that Claudia could definitely use they/them pronouns, however, at the moment we wrote her character with she/her pronouns in mind. I think it would be worthwhile to switch the pronouns to they/them (or maybe Claudia uses she/them pronouns?) to incorporate a gender non-conforming character into the play, especially if our students want that perspective. Overall, I look forward to finally recording the audio of our script after Thanksgiving Break!