Midterms

I was really really happy with how the midterm turned out! I have to admit that I was pretty scared that it wouldn't go that great, we would forget our lines, blocking, something...but it turned out really well. I give a lot of credit to Brittney - instead of just running the scene over and over again and giving us different directions (which is most likely what I would have done if I was the director) we did a lot of exercises to better understand our characters and the situation of the scene. For example, we went through each of the lines and discovered a verb that captured what the line was supposed to be in the script for...an action that could describe the emotion behind the line and its purpose. At first I did not think that this was going to amount to anything or actually help us...I felt that what we needed more was going over lines and more run throughs. But in actuality this was a great exercise for us. I think that Andrew and I really discovered how to approach our characters in a new light. At first it was a little difficult, Andrew kept talking about how he had to be a large black man and talk in "ebonics" and we had to completely put ourselves in a setting we didn't know about and into a lifestyle completely foreign to our own. But what I really felt from the scene was the emotion and the tension...for me it was less about that different location and time period and more about the universality of emotions when a wife finds out that her husband is cheating on her and got another woman pregnant. This is what I sought to really get across to the audience. And I think that we were very successful in that. I really did FEEL angry, and our peers and classmates felt the tension and said they were angry and sad and upset right along with me in the scene. I was very happy with how it turned out. I feel like I am reaching a spot in my acting where I can totally imagine myself as the character and thus, not read the lines and act it out as Ellie, but become the person and feel and react in the ways that the character would.