just thinking about how Baz Luhrman solved the "how do we put guns in modern adaptations of Romeo and Juliet when they're always talking about swords?" problem by just showing a close up of a gun that had "sword" written on it. Legend.

in graduate school we learned about a certain kind of "research dramaturgy" that was practiced by, as far as I can tell, basically one famous person who was a dramaturg and served as the basis for the word we did, and one of the things this person talked about were "concretes"

a "concrete" was something that, when you transposed the play into a new millieu ("research dramaturgy" seems to be exclusively based on transposing classic plays into new millieus) you couldn't change because people kept talking about it in the script.

I got into a big fight with the head Priest of the program who was also an Augustinian Monk about which things were concretes in Macbeth &, even though I was right (a "dagger" cannot be replaced with a butcher's knife because they are different knives; anything can be a "light")

I didn't really win because I was at a theater program run by priests.

Anyway, Baz Luhrman just running circles around both of us.

upshot of this is, people think Romeo and Juliet is about Romance, but actually it's about how Elizabethans thought all Italians were hot sweaty idiots, and Baz Luhrman understood this.

Augustinian Monk: "Well you could put any kind of a knife in Macbeth"

me: "They call it a dagger though, a dagger isn't just any kind of knife, you're making a mockery of the very idea of 'concrete' elements--"

Baz Luhrmann: