After our final day at Higher Achievement on Tuesday, we realized we would need to cut down our play because the final rehearsal we had done was about 30 minutes long. Not only were we facing the time constraint, but the kids definitely were finding it hard to read a long set of lines, and we figured it would be even harder when they were actually on stage in front of an audience. We also shortened the lines in the hopes of keeping the other actors (who weren’t speaking at the time) focused on the play and ready to read their lines. Because there were such lengthy paragraphs read by characters at a time, it was easy to see the other characters get distracted and fidget while on stage. We knew this would be a distraction to both the audience and the kid speaking, so we cut down our play rather significantly from 9 to 7 pages. When editing, we keep the most essential lines to relay what was happening in the plot and took out the more unnecessary language for certain characters. Overall, I think it was a good decision to cut some lines.

The second half of our work day was spent deciding which props the kids should use during the play and which props we would use to differentiate characters. We had the two different scarves for Helena and Hermia and different hats for all of the boys characters. We had a lot of fun with this and tried to think of what each kid would want to wear. They had given us a few requests about hats/mustaches the week before so we made sure to factor that in too! We think they are going to love the props and hopefully it will inspire them to be more enthusiastic about their character’s lines.