A small crowd of people stopped in front of Bracken Library to watch as a group of students performed their own, modernized version of William Shakespeare’s "Taming of the Shrew." Some just stopped for a few minutes then kept walking, but others stayed to watch the rest of the show.
The HONR 202 Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment humanities course has been working all semester on writing and practicing their performance, called "Fakespeare," and will be using these performances as their final project for the class.
They performed the first show at 1 p.m. on April 21 and will have another April 23 outside of Bracken Library.
Ali Ball, a junior actuarial science major and student in the honors humanities course, said the play would be a 30-minute presentation with seven actors.
She described the play as “a modern twist to a Shakespearean classic.”
The goal of the class was to study how society has changed through two Shakespeare plays. The class worked to make them more modern to better appeal to the college audience.
“It’s just kind of an experiment to see how our campus reacts to it,” Ball said.
Rachel Harvey, the director of the play and a freshman computer science major, said when writing the script for the play, they took parts of what Shakespeare had written and branched out, modernizing some of the characters.
“We just kind of stayed true to it, but we did our own thing,” Harvey said. “We kind of juxtaposed some of the characters, some of the ones who have backwards ideas are speaking in Shakespearean. And most of them are speaking in the vernacular we would use now.”
The idea for the play originally started off as a flash mob, but once the class started preparing, they realized their work was too long to be able to pull off a flash mob routine.
“As we started putting more work into it, it started getting longer and started to be more of a bigger production,” Harvey said.
So instead they made vague flyers—only telling where and when the performance would be—and distributed them around campus.
Harvey said they wanted to have an audience for the performance, but she said it didn’t matter whether people stayed the whole time or just dropped in for a few scenes.
They have someone holding up signs during the play to let the audience know where they are, so people who walk up aren’t confused, Harvey said.
“We’ve got quite a bit of one-liner stuff that could attract attention definitely, so it would be nice to have an audience there the whole time, [or] just to stop for a little bit would be pretty cool,” Harvey said.
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