Shaping the Plays for Teen Movie Audiences

VICKI BOTNICK: There's so much going on in any one Shakespeare play that it's easy to cut, to use only the themes that are relevant to the time, only a theme that might be hot for the time, or to cut it down so that it can be a shorter length, because they are all so long and complex on the stage. And with something like O, which is based on Othello, there's a whole important theme running through about age difference because Othello and Desdemona and Iago are all different in age and there's a jealousy going on about that. But since O is set in a high school where everyone is a teenager, you can just completely cut that whole theme and still have this incredibly complex story with lots of other themes that you can work through.

10 Things I Hate About You is based on Taming of the Shrew, and again it's set in teenage times. There's much more of an emphasis on the bawdy humor in the play, on a woman who—in the play, there's a sort of anti-feminist theme running through where she needs to be tamed, whereas in a 1990s update of that, of course, the woman's going to be strong throughout and it's really probably the man who's going to be tamed romantically instead. So you can tweak things but still have all the important themes there.

Romeo and Juliet—in the play, religion is pretty important and many, many adaptations onscreen have sort of excised that whole theme out of the story because it wasn't very vogue at the time. Whereas Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet brings it back again. So, you can really cut and pick different themes as you choose.