We finished blocking the show on Friday. We're on Boji time, it seems. We were able to work a lot of character things in with blocking, so it was fun. What's been taking up a lot of time is our character work. Director E has been letting us do character exercises in rehearsal to help us build these characters. Some days we have to walk around and interact with each other at our different ages in the script. We have a research assignment every day about our characters that we share. On Friday, we came into rehearsal and the middle of the floor was filled with random things. Director gave us 2 minutes to grab what we thought would be in our character's room, then we had to sit down in our 'space' and write a letter to one of the characters in the play. It was really hard, but it was incredibly useful. It took about 20 minutes, and then we read them out loud.
We get to do all of these exercises with the swing cast, which is great for interpretation. We get to understand how another person thinks of our character from a different point of view. By Monday, we were working the show. We started at scene 1, and we just started and stopped every time Director E had an idea. It was a lot of moment work, which is always great to focus on. We tried out a lot of new choices for our characters and discarded the ones that Director E didn't like. We've been working off book for scenes 1-3 since Monday, and the rest is off book by Friday. It's so nice to have the script out of my hands!
We met individually with Director E last night to talk about our characters and what directions we're thinking of going. It was nice to finally hear where she would like me to go. She'd been giving me a lot of freedom lately, and I toned my character down. It turns out she'd much rather I go bigger and crazier. I'm really excited to start on that! I got to do it a little last night. We reviewed Act II so we could have the lines in our bones again before getting off book.
Director E gave us an updated time line for our characters. The ages change so rapidly in the play, we had to map it out to be able to grab how old we were in a certain scene. It turns out Dorothea (my character) was born in 1910! Our assignment for tonight was to pick what kind of music we think our characters listen to. I've got some research to do.
I've been working all last week and this week on the poster.
It's gone through more revisions than my previous ones, I feel like. But I'm happy with the final outcome. The faculty and the board had input on this one, and it was nice to hear the opinions and be able to fix the problems.
I've been a little stressed this week because there's so much to do. There was the frustration of feeling like I wasn't doing things right in rehearsal (which I know now to be because we were going in 2 different directions), homework for classes which includes memorizing new monologues, memorizing for the show, memorizing for Acting for the Camera, working in Box Office on Boji things, and midterms for Creating Online Media and Voice. When it gets to this weekend, I'm going to RELAX.
Last weekend, I had some fun seeing a show downtown with one of the former teachers here. Addison was fantastic! It was a two man show, called Halper and Johnson. I hung out with some friends last weekend, which seems to be something I don't get to do a whole lot, so that was great too! I also watched the movie Auntie Mame for some character study, and it was very helpful.
We had an assignment for Comedy class to be a man doing a task. Last night I went down to the boys and 4 of them were nice enough to take our the trash for me so I could observe them. Then they walked me through their thought process of taking out the trash, and then they helped me make sure I looked like a man while doing it. Definitely one of my favorite assignments I think.
Today in rehearsal, we're going to get hypnotized by a certified hypno-therapist. My character is an eccentric who regularly takes her daughter to be hypnotized, so we thought it would be great to know what it's like. I'm SO excited!
The weather on Monday was horrible--it snowed 6 inches. But for the past 2 days it's been 70 degrees outside. I love it! I can only hope New York stays semi-warm for my visit. I'm very excited for Spring Break. Not only does a week off sound fantastic, but I'm getting pumped to see some amazing shows!
Class time!
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