product

PRODUCT

Student artifacts included both their classes' filmed acts as well as a website they created to contextualize their adaptation. Explore the classes' sites as well as their acts. Though each of the classes took their source texts in vastly different directions - from a film noir Act Five to a very meta Act Two to an Act One rendered as a twenty-first-century corporate takeover - together the sites and filmed acts demonstrate DARING interpretative moves, DELIBERATE planning and decision-making, DYNAMIC problem-solving, and delight in DISCOVERY and learning.

ACT ONE

Our reenactment of Act 1 of Hamlet changes the play so that its setting is corporate rather than royal. Hamlet's father is the CEO of Elsinore Co., not the king of Denmark, and he does not die, but is instead sent to jail on charges of corruption. Aligning with the basic plot of the original play, Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, is responsible for secretly framing the previous CEO, and he takes control of the company soon after Hamlet's father is gone. Hamlet finds out about his uncle's misdeeds and is enraged, and thus the theme of revenge is preserved.

ACT ONE

ACT TWO

From an all female cast to making Ophelia a robot, we had a lot of ideas that seemed to just be ideas. However, ... we realized that we needed to figure out what argument we would make about Act II of Hamlet. We started by analyzing the questions we talked about in class until we locked into a question that captivated our interests: Is Hamlet truly mad? We went back and forth arguing both sides when we came to a realization: the extent of Hamlet’s madness depends on the perspective of the character. This idea is one of the main focuses of our project, and we explore it by resituating the action in our scenes so that each character describes the action to our Reader, a character we added to our adaptation."

ACT THREE

Missing and dysfunctional communication, to us, drove the tension and disaster that characterize Hamlet. To demonstrate this, in our version of Act Three, a sixteenth-century Hamlet somehow finds himself in a twenty-first-century office trying to communicate his feelings and situation to his puzzled coworkers who, like us, feel perplexed and occasionally alienated by Shakespeare's language. The climax of Act Three, the Mousetrap scene, occurs during the office holiday party.

ACT THREE

ACT FOUR

As a class, we decided to use Modern Family as the inspiration for our interpretation of Hamlet. In order to mimic the style of Modern Family, we we created asides like those in a reality television show. In these asides, the characters express their emotions and show their reactions to what is happening in the plot. Our class decided to keep the original text of the play, in order to preserve the text's original intent and meaning. By adding in our own asides, we contrasted the more serious aspects of the play with humorous interludes. Additionally, instead of adapting the text, we interpreted the characters emotions in a unique way to modernize emotional aspects of the play."

ACT FIVE

We decided to adapt Act 5 into the genre of 1920's crime noir. We chose crime noir because a lot of death happens in Act 5, and we thought crime noir was a fun and creative way portray all the deaths. Our idea was to have Fortinbras, a detective, arrive at the scene just after everyone dies. The only survivor and witness, Horatio, tells Fortinbras the whole story through one long flashback, a key trait of noir films.

ACT FIVE