An adaptation for kids

On Saturday, January 28, I went to go see a BYU production of The Merchant of Venice  for kids.

BYU Arts 'The Merchant of Venice'

It was based off of the adaptation by Teresa Dayly Love. BYU really made the play kid friendly by changing a couple of things: 

1. They seated the kids on the floor and interacted with them by having them play minor characters such as Nerissa, Jessica, Gratiano, etc
2. It was only 50 minutes long (mas o menos) 
3. In Portia's monologue the princes are more modern themes such as: Lord of the Nerds, Prince of the West, etc. 
4. They had necklaces with emblems on them to show and remind the audience who was on whose side
5. They asked questions of the audience like "Do you think that was fair?" 
6. They changed the names of the places/ names by letting the audience choose (involving the kids before the play even started) 

Overall, I think they did an awesome job adapting The Merchant of Venice  for kids. However, I had some qualms with the sixth adaptation I mentioned. They reasoned it out by saying they wanted to make the play so that you could not place it in a time or specific place. They changed the titles of 'Jew' and 'Christian' to 'Curan' and 'Tharian' along with having Portia be from Andalasia (relations to Enchanted), Merchant of Stratford instead of Venice, and having Shylock work at the Purple Turtle Yogurtland. I think this weakened the authenticity of the play by making it into more of an alternate reality not really applicable to our experiences, while the original play has lots of other "baggage" with the names of Jew and Christian that I feel like gave the play weight in authenticity. However, they definitively met their goal of making the play in a unknown place and time by changing all these names and using technology- I just feel it made the play unrealistic. 

I did really like the elements of the adaptation that BYU kept. 

1. They stayed true to the Shakespearian language even though it is hard for children
2. The important characters kept their monologues so we got valuable character development
3. (My personal favorite) In the gold chest, they had a skull

In Act II, scene vii the Prince of Morocco opens the gold chest and finds a skull and note. When I was reading the play I did not get that it was supposed to be a skull, but when I visually saw it I instantaneously thought of Hamlet! The Prince refers to it as "carrion death" which makes sense because most of the time skulls symbolize mortality and death. 

In Hamlet, Hamlet sees many skulls reminding him of death and mortality- the inability of man to live forever. One of these skulls is the skull of Yorick, a previous king's jester, which Hamlet holds up and has a very famous monologue about death to. 

I really enjoyed watching the BYU children adaptation of The Merchant of Venice and I was able to pick up on things that I did not originally through reading the text.