Week 26: Classwork

Monday

After working on the start of Woman Alone last Wednesday, we were given the section of the play that we would be working on to perform later on this month. My group was given the end of the play and so we decided, after reading through the play, that we would begin 5 pages from the end as we thought with synchronized actions and lines added in it would make the extract up to the 15 minutes that it needed to be and if not we could always add in extra lines at the start.

Our group discussed the extra element of her personality that we would add in because there was now 4 of us in our group. We decided on sexy as we wanted all of the elements to be juxtaposing so that it was clearer to the audience but it would also add in a comical element to the piece. With us wanting the different elements to be completely the opposite of each other we wanted to push them to the extreme so:

• Bubbly became extremely excited about everything
• House wife became patronizing and spoke to everyone as though they were a child
• Psychotic became angry at anything whether it was directed at them or not
• Sexy was just trying to be sexual with anyone (and anything)

As we were reading through the lines we discussed what it would be like to have the complete opposite personality to what it really meant saying the lines to add more to the comical value of the piece. For example, the line "Now, then, sweetie pie, I'll get you something to eat," was originally going to be said by the housewife but to add more comedy and juxtaposition the sexy person now says it. 

In the lesson, we managed to divide up all the lines and also decide on some lines and actions that can be done in unison. We made sure that we finished it in the lesson so that on Wednesday we would be able to go straight into blocking the section and then having more time to work on it and also add in any more if the segment is not 15 minutes.

Wednesday

We went straight into devising our section and throughout the lesson we focused on the movements that were going with the specific lines. We discussed one of my lines which is "Look, I'm getting to the end of my tether, and if your not careful I'm going to make you really really sorry." and we were thinking about whether I should just do the actions to show that I was in control of the woman's mind and body or whether the whole group should do it and react alongside the actions. We decided on the unison movement but only me saying the line so that the audience's perception of us all being the same woman would be sustained.

Our group took it upon ourselves to limit the amount of set that we would use so that it would force us to us each other for height and it would make the whole performance look more dynamic as we would be forced to pull and push each other which would add to the Berkoff style. We decided to just use the metal base of a riser without the wooden lid as we thought that we could make some interesting visual images with it and we could also use it to separate the different personalities.

One section of the script describes the way she reacts once she has stabbed the boy's hand with a spoon and we decided that during those lines we could use our arms to create the boy's hand. We realized that we can't have one person's hand being the boy who is trying to get in through the kitchen all the way through our piece and so we made sure that the hand was always being brought back in to reiterate that it was still there to the audience. Likewise, we also made a door out of our bodies when she realizes that the boy has actually got his head stuck in the door and so one of us became the boy's head and the others were the door around him.