Being President of my schools Drama Club, it's up to me to manage what we do, when we do it, how, and where. That includes what plays I propose for the club to do. Normally, I would just have someone write a play of their own and edit it for them, but I have come to realize that the members of this club are... not the best writers, to say the very least.

So this thread is very simple. Name me plays that you think 6-12 dumb High School teenagers can handle. I would also appreciate if we can steer away from comedy, as the club has already done to many terrible attempts at that genre in the past year.

Anything by Shakespeare? Some of the shorter plays are easy to perform.

Even if your club-mates can't write, you could always try adapting something. When I was in highschool I remember the drama kids did a stage adaptation of the hobbit, which was sort of fun. Admittedly, the cast needed to be trimmed down to just Bilbo, Gandalf and Thorin.... but at least it was unique!

Breaking Bad: The Musical.

This stuff can be done legally? We sell tickets for the shows is why I ask.

Not just any Shakespeare but Romeo and Juliet----I swear this play has been done ever since it first hit the stage and I still consider it a lame play---Othello and Hamlet arn't any better. The one thing I hate about Shakespeare's plays is that the characters are talking to themselves while other people are around like a bunch of schizophrenics...yeah I'm not a huge William Shakespeare fan .

Yeah, Shakespeare won't work at all. I have my own personal bias against his plays, simply because I feel like he is fairly over-rated, and nobody else in the club is really up for anything written by him thanks to everyone being forced into a terribly-made monologue contest last semester.

Short play for Edger Alan Poe's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tell-Tale_Heart?

I remember during English class we done a video for it, just the teacher taking a new technique to teaching. The video got our English teacher an award and it gave every student a role - even in such a short time frame.

The Man of La Mancha always did well in our highschool.

Oh good grief.

Nevermind, I can't help you.

Why, how dare I have a different opinion toward an author! I'm a monster! I think I should point out before anyone else says anything that I haven't said I hate Shakespeare, I simply don't think he deserves the massive amount of reverence he gets, and I have my reasons.

Anywho, I'm liking a fair amount of these suggestions. I never considered Poe to this point, so that definitely opened up a little list. Keep them coming folks!

Yeah, no, I'm afraid you just haven't immersed youself enough in the plays yet then.

You can't just say Shakespeare is overrated, do you have any idea how ignorant that makes you sound?

Shakespeare introduced to the English language such words as but not limited to: 'Accused, addiction, advertising, aroused, assasination, bandit, bedroom, birthplace, blanket, courtship.."

I haven't even reached the letter D yet..

Well I'll tell you what. Maybe the way it was taught to us gave me the wrong impression, so I'll give his stuff my own personal look later. I imagine it would possibly be more easier to appreciate when I don't have a personally degrading project to do beside the reading, accompanied by even more degrading people.

Everything is better if it's not forced on you. Honestly, sometimes I wonder why teachers forget that.

My personal favorite is A Midsummer Night's Dream. There are modern translations available so you don't have to deal with arcane and outdated language, but if you can get one of those books that has the original text on the left-hand page and the modern annotated translation on the right-hand page, that would be best of course for study purposes.

Godot: ...

Awesome play.

Reminds me ofhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern_Are_Dead one for some reason, which is a favorite of mine also.

It's also a great play for the actors, great fun to play around with the inherent themes of stage acting.

Of Mice and Men? Not sure if that can even be used for stage, but with they way it's structured and all, it may work.

Fair enough. Not everyone likes ol' Shakey. However Macbeth for instance is not particularly long or complicated, and has some great fun lines in there (like the Witches' chants).

I personally think Shakespeare himself isn't overrated, but in a modern context his plays are. Sure they invented/popularised certain archetypes and plots, but they are still pretty derivative in and of themselves simply because I don't think they have aged that well.

When I did Drama in my first year of high school we performed some horrible play that I'm pretty sure the teacher wrote about students making amusing comments to a teacher. That was the whole play. I haven't seen many good plays firsthand living out in woop woop, most of the traveling performers that come to the high school perform "wacky" takes on Romeo and Juliet or motivational speakers. Most of the plays I know of are also musicals (like Bran Nue Dae and Grease), and I'm not sure if they'd work without the musical aspect.

Macbeth is probably one of the easier Shakespeare plays to do (none of the parts are particularly complicated to perform, falling into some easy archetypes to act: feverish and guilty, cackling crone, heroic etc.), and although I think it has become cliched, I think it's still a fairly good story with some fight scenes and death scenes which are always fun. And as with all of Shakespeare's plays there is an updated version written in 'modern' English, which probably makes it easier to memorise. The updated version I read overly simplified it (I think it was too make the original look more descriptive in comparison) so maybe revising it a bit so it doesn't sound silly would be good, unless you find a good version.

Amadeus was a great movie that apparently was adapted from a play, I'm not sure how well it would downscale to a high school production, but that was a good story that could be good.

Yeah, no.

"I don't understand why Shakespeare is so popular, it's just a collection of famous old quotes."

You do realise that all these cliche's in fact originate from him, don't you? It's not derivative, he is the one people derive from.

It really doesn't happen often that someone comes along who changes the world, changes humanity.

Alexander the Great was one of these men. So was Shakespeare.

My point was that while the plays have historical significance for originating these cliches, the plays themselves are still cliched, not through any fault of Shakespeare's himself. The plays were not cliched when he wrote them, but nowadays they are cliched.

I appreciate them, but for the most part I'd rather see a newer approach to the archetypes that Shakespeare established, I also think that the emphasis on Shakespeare is maybe a bit too much? He's really the only playwright who has crossed over into popular culture, if everyone just studies his plays the genre will stagnate, as although his plays were once revolutionary, others have built on his foundations since.
It is important for Shakespeare's plays to be remembered, but not necessarily held as the benchmark.

As an anology, I appreciate B.B. King's guitar playing for popularising a lot of stock blues licks, but I'd still rather listen to something that adds something t that basic formula, because although it isn't any fault of B.B. King's, his style/licks have been outdated by others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_Suite, the play that inspired the film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PkOc-B64dY.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a good play building on the foundations (and making fun) of Shakespeare. I linked it earlier in the thread.

So was Hitler, G.Washington, Caesar, Augustus, Genghis Khan... so did a lot more people but I really doubt Shakespeare is among them.