Schools
Area High Schoolers Take a Swing at Cyberbullying
The audience can 'friend' Beatrice and Benedick—and talk to them too—as a national campaign against cyberbullying stages "Much Ado About Nothing" on Facebook starting Tuesday.
An educational publisher, a national non-profit fighting cyberbullying and the White Plains High School drama club are embarking April 26 on a 3-day performance of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing using Facebook's platform to create the first ever interactive performance in cyberspace.
The Ophelia Project, a not-for-profit organization that combats cyberbullying and other forms of aggression, and the Weekly Reader's literary magazine READ Magazine teamed up with the high school's drama club to create the interactive project combining social media and Shakespeare.
The students had performed the play in the fall on a traditional wooden stage. English teacher Doug Cronk, faculty advisor for the club, connected the students with the staff at Weekly Reader, the 109-year-old company that produces educational magazines includingREAD Magazine for sixth- through 10th-graders.
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The Weekly Reader, which has offices in White Plains, decided to team up with their local high school since WPHS recently performed the play. The unique presentation of the centuries-old play is timely given the public scandal over “” that have appeared on Facebook. The pages were recently found to have listed girls at several schools in the New York City suburbs, , a situation that brought national attention to cyberbullying in the region.
At 4 p.m. tomorrow, the students will begin a three-day rendition of the Shakespeare work completely through Facebook. They will take on the roles of individual characters and interact with each other, and the audience, through posts, status updates and videos.
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The audience members will watch, and comment, on their individual Facebook news feeds.
Participation can begin now: http://www.weeklyreader.com/ado allows you to "like" the characters, brush up on the plot, and check in on the chatter the actors have started up to provide backstories.
“I think in lots of ways a project like this has the potential to connect with kids that other things can’t because they’re using Shakespeare’s work in a way that’s befitting of so many of these issues,” Cronk said.
The plot of Much Ado About Nothing involves two couples who become caught up in a web of lies wherein one character tries to embarrass another. The translation of Shakespeare’s work to the current issue of cyberbullying was a natural fit, but Ira Wolfman, senior vice president for editorial at Weekly Reader, said that the Facebook production will not be a lecture on online harassment.
“We’re not presenting this to kids as ‘Come watch a show about cyberbullying,’” Wolfman said. “It’s an engaging Shakespearian Facebook experiment.”
The students, acting as the characters in the play, will post on each other’s walls and use status updates, comments and videos to advance the plot. The audience can also comment to the characters in real time and elicit responses from them.
The unorthodox presentation style intrigued Griffin Taylor, a senior at White Plains High School who played Benedick in the fall production and will play Claudio in the Facebook version. Taylor said presenting the play in such a manner could help to curtail cyberbullying simply because of the amount of people on Facebook.
“I can’t think of one person I know that doesn’t have a Facebook account,” Taylor said. “Putting it on Facebook, at the place where cyberbullying happens, (it has a) good chance of working.”
Cronk, too, said the online presentation could reach more people than a traditional play ever could, and that the medium could influence people in a more profound way.
“We have 90 or 100 seats in our theater. To do the play one to three times, that’s one thing. To have something over Facebook that thousands of people could view (is another),” Cronk said. “Seeing it played out…in the same fashion that cyberbullying is played out, it’s really reflecting and giving them a chance to see it from a distance because it’s not their lives.”
Daniela Poppe, a freshman at White Plains High School who will play Hero in the play, said via e-mail that even the production just reaches a few people it will have started to do its job.
“Whether only one or a thousand viewers gain the understanding that just a simple click, short message or innocent picture can hurt someone emotionally and socially, I think that’s already a great step in preventing cyberbullying,” Poppe said.
