This past week my partner, Lydia, and I worked on cutting Act II of Midsummer Night’s Dream for the purpose of making the act quicker and more readable for the children of the Youth Life program. We are looking forward to meeting the kids and getting to know their personalities a bit before casting them in their respective roles. Hopefully we will have approximately 8 kids because there are 8 actors within our act, but if we have more than we can always cast them as fairies.

The premise of our act is based around the love flower and the trick that Oberon and Puck play on Titania and the Athenian youths. I’m specifically looking forward to seeing how excited the kids may be to jump into their roles. Also, I’m interested to see how well the kids will grasp the various themes.

My group will be working with CHAT (Churchill Activity and Tutoring) a christian based organization that strives to provide opportunities to underprivileged children in the Richmond area. In preparation of meeting our group in the next few weeks we have begun to cut our script and jot down preliminary thoughts regarding staging. We have read carefully though about half of our scene, cutting repetitive lines. Our group has also discussed the major themes Shakespeare sought to convey in the last scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the ways in which we can preserve his vision of the play, while keeping it an appropriate length for our production. We will continue to work towards a final version of our script over the next week or so and look forward to meeting our group!

As a class, LDST 368 – Leadership on Stage and Screen will be putting on a low-budget production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, working with several Jepson Community Partners throughout the semester.

This blog will chronicle the production process from forming groups to cutting the script to casting, rehearsing, and performing the production. It is an informal record of our thoughts, feelings, and observations throughout the process.

This blog is beginning in the Fall semester of 2015, with the fourth show of the Jepson Shakespeare Project. Previous productions include The Tempest (Fall 2012), The Merchant of Venice (Fall 2013), and The Winter’s Tale (Spring 2015).