May 7, 2013

Today we were all relieved when the participant playing Antonio returned. We had thought she wasn’t coming back, but she is back! We spent the day working on Act I Scene i. We focused on putting more and more energy into a scene that is very talky, and that currently is not very exciting to watch. We tried to find more places for people to move around the stage, and we worked on committing to the characters even when reading from the script.

It has become clear that not all of the participants will be memorizing all of their lines, and that some may not memorize any of their lines. Since it is up to them to make this experience what they want, I am not being hard on them about this. I have been encouraging them, though, to at least become so familiar with the lines that they only have to reference the script rather than having their eyes glued to it. I have been encouraging them to do this not for the sake of pushing them, but because they will be much more comfortable on stage this way. The experience will be a far more positive one.

May 3, 2013

We finished up our work on Act I Scene ii today, with someone standing in for Ferdinand, who was absent. Although this participant frequently warns us ahead of time that what she will be doing will not be up to snuff, she really did a great job with a  scene she’d never worked on before, and everyone was very encouraging of her efforts. After working the end of the scene, we decided to run the entire thing, which we’ve never been able to do before because it’s so long. It went very well for the most part. After our work last time, the women playing Caliban and Prospero are playing off of each other beautifully. What the scene needs now to progress is a bit more commitment from some of the actors – Prospero needs to be more aggressive, while Miranda needs to channel her inner 15-year-old more.

I was very happy, as always, when our “director”, who has been with the group the longest, pointed out a change in blocking that was easy to execute but enhanced the dynamic between Prospero and Miranda. She has such great instincts, and we are always so appreciate of her input.

We also determined today that we have lost both our Antonio and our Sebastian. At this point in the process, no one feels comfortable switching characters, so the group’s solution is for our new volunteer, who will begin attending next week, and me to step into these roles. It isn’t an ideal situation, but it will cause far less stress for the group to solve the problem this way than any other we could come up with.

April 30, 2013

We began today by going over our “rehearsal schedule” for the remainder of our time. One of the participants had offered me some constructive criticism that, while she appreciates how flexible and open ended things have been, she feels that a little more structure would greatly benefit the group. As always, I listened to her and have provided some more structure. It seems to be a good thing for everyone to have something solid to look at that tells us ahead of time what we should be doing each day. We continued our work on Act I Scene ii today. Since everyone has such a great understanding of the characters at this point, we are working mostly on physicality. This is a challenge for everyone, but they are all making good progress. We also talked about Miranda’s challenge in this scene – even though she doesn’t have many lines, she must be constantly listening and reacting to what’s going on.

We also spent some time discussing the power struggle between Caliban and Prospero. The woman playing Caliban has been very aggressive in this first scene, and the woman playing Prospero feels that it may be too much. We discussed how Caliban’s rage comes from his actual lack of power, and that feeling of helplessness makes him lash out. The group determined that a good way for the woman playing Prospero to justify the fact that she lets him go on is to look at where Prospero is silent for awhile and then pulls the rug out from under Caliban with threats of physical violence, which scare him.

At this point, I asked the two women to take all of this in and then just follow their instincts in reacting to one another, whatever they did. This freed them up quite a bit, and the scene started to flow much more easily.

Masks!

These masks were made by Nina Barlow and Holly Conroy for Water Works Theatre Company's 2011 production of The Tempest. They are currently on loan to our group for their performance. We are all very grateful to be able to use such beautiful pieces.