I thought that our adaptation of the Two Noble Kinsmen was extremely exciting and engaging for us. We completely changed the dialogue of the characters and kept their original names, sometimes having slight modifications to them. The three queens who have lost their husband’s to the cruel Creon have become the three thugs, who seek debt repayment from the drug dealer Creon. Theseus has become Thesús, a Cuban drug lord; and his very Cuban family, his wife Hippolita, and Emilia, her little sister, whom he helped raise. The adaptation drew a lot of influence from multiple movies in the 80s and 90s, such as The Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Walk Hard. The dialogue is extremely comedic and lets the adaptation lean much more towards the comedy side of the tragicomedy. Probably the best example of this is when Theseus says that Palamon and Arcite will fight to the death over Emilia, and of course this is a modern adaptation, so everyone realizes that it’s outright ridiculous that Theseus is making this happen, he comes off more as a coked up Cuban drug lord than a wise and benevolent king, and therefore everything he says ends up being outright hilarious, his character is in my opinion drawn from Sebastian Cisneros from East Bound & Down.

The dialogues of the character’s take on extremely stereotypical accents, Thesus and his family all have Hispanic accents. The Wooer is an extremely flamboyant transvestite/prostitute who is willing to be paid to become Palamon in order to convince the jailors daughter that he is in fact Palamon and then marry her and restore her sanity. The Jailor’s daughter is delusional because she took way too much LSD combined with her intense feelings for Palamon and is constantly singing Kenny Rogers in her delusional state. The other characters all have heavy southern accents or western California dude accents, which were influenced heavily by Walk Hard and The Big Lebowski. The prologue is in the style of the prologue of the big lebowski, meant to be read in a very rough south-west accent. Instead of cutting out any dialogue in the play, we would just replace it, or sometimes add to the text to make it even funnier, a great example of this being when Emilia is shocked about how Thesus is making the two friends fight each other to the death in order to win her hand in marriage. She is shocked, questioning how this is her fault, to which Hippolita responds by saying, “Emilia, just play along. Thesús would kill me if I told him this was ridiculous. He’s out of his mind!(Aloud, exaggerated) Go, weep for what you have brought upon these poor men. At least you will have the better of them in the end, as if you deserve him.”

The process of re-creating these characters was a relatively easy process for Kieran and I, who have both spent a lot of time watching these great movies which inspired the dialogue. We brought Daniel and Marissa up to speed by showing them as many clips of these movies as possible (especially the narrator clips from The Big Lebowski). Our collective creativity created the re-imagined characters of Palamon and Arcite, two part time drug dealers and consumers, who happen to be roommates. Other things that we as a group are really fond of are the ridiculous dialogues of minor characters, such as the wooer, or the herald in Act I scene IV, whom when describing to Theseus the severity of the injuries inflicted on Palamon and Arcite during the shootout to recover the money of the three thugs, says, “well this is a particularly bad case of getting shot 24 times, but they might could make it.” In general, we had a lot of fun with these adaptations, although I wish that all the members of my group could have listened to the same music and watched the same movies as I have in the past 4-5 years of my life. Although I think that the final product would have ended up being way too over the top ridiculous. I think that the balance in our group really helped our adaptation take form.