First draft

The assignment that what I was asked to do was to choose one theme and show it in three scenes by acting. There was few themes such as feud, love between Romeo and Juliet, and new perspective that Romeo and Juliet could be a comedy instead of tragedy which I was really interested in. Although Romeo and Juliet is the one of the most famous romantic tragedy, our group thought this story wouldn't make sense if this happened in the modern days and we found unreal parts out from the several scenes. So, we approached with totally new perspective and analyzed in our own way. Also, we put some laughter points in the each scenes to make our performance as comedy. The scenes that we chose to reproduce was the first meeting scene of Romeo and Juliet, the balcony scene, and the fighting scene between Tybalt, Mercutio, and Romeo.

In the original story, Romeo and Juliets' first meeting is very romantic, beautiful, and pretty serious. However, we imagined that first meeting in the club with loud music might not be so romantic if that happened in modern days. We interrupted Romeo and Juliet and cut their conversation off by loud music and crowded people in the club, so we expressed what would really happen in real life.

The second scene was a balcony scene which is one of the most beautiful and famous scene in the entire story. In the original scene, Romeo and Juliet confirms their love toward each other. Everything becomes serious by that confirmation and the real tragedy begins from this significant scene. However, we tried to think outside the box because we thought it will be extremely hilarious if we reinterpret this scene as a comedy successfully. Firstly, we slightly changed Juliet's characteristic from lovely girl who fell in love to girl who is crazily obsessed with Romeo. We tried to show the craziness that every normal girl has. Therefore, Juliet acted her monologue exaggeratingly to show the ordinary girl in reality. Second point of this scene was when Romeo climbs up the wall of Juliet's house and reach to the balcony. It sounds really cool when the male main character climbs up the wall and reaches there like a hero, but we doubted it. Honestly, in real life, it won't look really cool as how they described in the book. So, we decided to make climbing scene as the biggest laughter point. We inserted music from the movie '"Mission Impossible" when I who acted Romeo in second scene mimed climbing. The hardest thing to act in this scene was suppressing a smile because I had to act most hilariously that I could do. Also, the important point of this scene was Romeo acts like he is the coolest guy, but in audience's perspective, he is just a funny character.

The final scene was the scene that we put most effort to make the scene more fun. In the book this scene is the beginning of the peak in the story. Two sub-characters, Mercutio and Tybalt, die, and this scene leads lots of people to death. As we approached to the previous scenes, we tried to make this extremely serious scene to a hilarious scene. Our group had the most difficult time in the progress because every single lines were so serious and heavy, but we couldn't change any lines. "The reason that I have to love thee Doth much excuse the appertaining rage to such a greeting. I do protest I never injured thee but love thee better than thou canst devise till thou shalt know the reason of my love."(Act 3, Scene 1, Romeo's line) So, the first thing we started to think was changing the characteristic of Mercutio and Tybalt like how we did to Julie in the second scene. So, we made Mercutio and Tybalt cowards who pretend to be strong men. And then we came up with an idea that it will be fun if there is a mood change when Romeo appears and speaks about love and peace while Mercutio and Tybalt are fighting. To give an immediate mood change, we put very serious music from the movie "Crows Zero" when two sub-characters are fighting, and peaceful and calm music when Romeo starts to give long speech about love.

Fortunately, most of our ideas that we intended came out successfully. All of our group members acted adequately based on the new characteristics that we altered. Also, new concepts and laughter points in each scenes worked properly as we meant. Only thing that I would wanted more was about our acting. We didn't have enough time to practice as a group and memorize the lines perfectly, so there were some parts that wasn't smooth enough. Also, I think we could've put some more funny sources and made the first scene more detailed and funny if we had more actors. Actually our group was so nervous and afraid about this assignment at the beginning. We were all worrying and suspicious about how it would come out when we actually act it before the first rehearsal. However, most of our performance went pretty well in the first rehearsal, and I was so glad when audiences, classmates and teacher, understood our concepts and those make them laugh. We became more confident after the first draft and we could complete the final draft successfully.