Adapting Shakespeare's plays to a different historical or social context is a common Shakespeare project. One example is Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet." While adaptation can be difficult to do without having to remove lines and scenes that are overly specific to the play's original setting -- for example, references to Denmark in "Hamlet" -- it opens up new possibilities for the performance and understanding of Shakespeare. Some obvious possibilities include adapting "Macbeth" to a present-day corporate setting or adapting "Titus Andronicus" to a military school context.
This project involves taking a famous scene from a more recent film or play -- for example, the "goodbye" scene at the end of "Casablanca" -- and converting it to Shakespearean language and form. The challenge is not only to rewrite the scene using Elizabethan English, but also to render it in the iambic pentameter blank verse form that Shakespeare used most of the time. This project can be used to explore the history of stage performance or the differences between contemporary and Shakespearean dramatic form and technique.
This project is for individual actors requiring a project they can work on independently. In this case, an actor plays every role in a famous Shakespearean scene. This requires an understanding of the individual motives and emotions of each character portrayed and hones an actor's ability to rapidly switch between different acting techniques and characterizations. For example, an actor might play every role in the opening scene of "King Lear," which would require the actor to play both male and female roles, each one having very different motivations and reactions to events.
This project involves crossing elements of two or more plays in order to explore characterization and theme in Shakespeare's plays. For example, choose two or more characters from different Shakespeare plays and create a new scene in which those characters interact. The idea is to preserve as many of each character's original lines as possible while still creating a coherent scene. Prospero ("The Tempest"), Othello and Puck ("A Midsummer Night's Dream") could discuss fate, for example. Another approach is to place one of Shakespeare's tragic heroes in a scene from one of the comedies or histories (or vice versa). Hamlet could discuss the nature of existence with Falstaff ("Henry IV"), or King Lear and Richard III could discuss the burdens of political power.