just thinking about how Baz Luhrman solved the "how do we put guns in modern adaptations of Romeo and Juliet when they& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s knife because they are different knives; anything can be a "light")
I didn& #39;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& #39;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& #39;t just any kind of knife, you& #39;re making a mockery of the very idea of & #39;concrete& #39; elements--"

Baz Luhrmann:
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