Disco Shakespeare

Midsummer's Night Dream is my least favorite Shakespeare play so when my husband informed me that we were going to attend a high school disco version, I nearly wept.

But we were going for a good cause. My husband's best friend's youngest son was playing Lysander and we attended in support of his art.

A month or so ago, I also attended my first ever Friday night high school football game to support this same kid's band performance at half-time, which was pretty nifty. The bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed cheerleaders were incredibly annoying, though, and my mumbled feminist critiques caused my husband to warn me that I was going to get us expelled from the game. While no such thing happened, I won't be going to any more high school football games. And I sure am glad that I don't have a high-school aged girl who wants to be a cheerleader.

Surprisingly, the play tonight was sometimes delightful. The play itself remains boring, stupid and long as hell, but the disco version was actually hilarious at moments and I couldn't help but remember with a certain degree of fondness my own stint as a disco queen when I was in college, a gazillion years ago.

And there was a lot of creativity in the idea of making Shakespeare more accessible by disco-izing him and it was obvious that the kids were having a ball. Some were actually excellent, including my husband's best friend's son, who acquitted himself admirably as a credible Lysander.

The drama teacher decided to keep Shakespeare's dialogue unmodernized, noting in the play's program that this was so because his words are "hallowed." But I found myself disagreeing somewhat. If you're going to modernize Shakespeare to the point that you set him to disco music, then keeping the Old English version seems contrived.

Plus, while some kids, like my husband's best friend's son, learned his lines well and enunciated them perfectly, other kids ran through Shakespeare's words like they were a foreign language, and they couldn't be understood, even when they were speaking English. One girl, who played one of the female leads, had a voice so high that we couldn't make out her lines.

"I think the bats are the only ones who can hear her," my husband's best friend said, and I concurred, thinking that the director should've helped her lower her voice a few notches, at the very least.

Being in a high school auditorium also reminded me of my high school graduation play, which I wrote and directed. I loved that experience and, because something was going on with our high school's auditorium (I think it was flooded after some heavy rains), we got to stage our play at the University of Puerto Rico theater. I was thrilled to direct my play in a real, wonderful theater, with as much mystique and beauty as that one has.

That was the last of my theater career, though. Well, the one on the actual stage. A lot of what I do as a teacher is theater, especially when I act out scenes of the books we read. I do modernize them a bit for my students, re-staging the dialogue as if the characters were contemporary people. My students crack up when I do that and it allows the actress in me a moment in the spotlight, so to speak.

Still, I won't go as far as teaching Jane Eyre or Heart of Darkness to a disco beat. I have to admit that while the idea of a Disco Shakespeare sounded preposterous at first, the actual event was a lot more fun than I thought. Kudos to the teacher who thought of setting Shakespeare to the beat of Donna Summer!