Discuss your progress

It has been three weeks since scenario was decided. Unlike other groups project, the scenario of our play was made up by me and Nancy together. So far, our group had faced many difficulties and made many changes to our scenes. Things didn’t happened as what we thought, and many were hard to achieve. We planned to have a bed and a sofa, but they are too heavy to move ,and we are not able to change the scene in a short time. One of the biggest difficulties is that  we decided to make Caroline read her mom dairy while her mom is dreaming about the diary. If our play was in a movie adaptation that would be so much easier to show that this is such a coincidence for both of them thinking about the same matter. As a result, we asked for Ms. Guarino’s advice and changed Caroline’s mom’s part from sleeping at night to daydreaming. Therefore, if Caroline and her mom are saying the same lines: “Today you left. I stood at the wharf, watching you left. That figure on boat now is gone,” as we do in Scene Two, audiences can clearly understand that they are both thinking about the good old days. Another thing is that the way we write is different from the way we speak. When we were writing scripts, the words were in a serious writing expression. However, people, especially between parents and child, speak more casually. In these three weeks, we tried our best to complete our scenes and make it better.

By reading other students’ feedback, here are some main problems. The biggest one is that all of us speaks too fast. We are not totally familiar with our scripts and didn’t combine our emotion with the words. This problem makes our acting only has less than 10 minutes. Even if we speak slower and add in the time to change scene, we will probably only have 12 minutes. To fix this problem, we need to add more lines. For example, Caroline’s mom and her daughter could talk more in the last scene when they solve the conflict. I personally think the last scene ends up too fast. We used more than half of the acting to show and explain their conflict, but we solve the conflict in only 13 sentences. Another problem is that we were too focus on our own acting and line which make the reaction with other characters’ words less. When we were acting, we had enough staging except in Scene Three. But we were lack of body language, which is also a really important part to express emotion and make the acting more vivid. The biggest problem for me is that I need to show two character in different age: one is 17, the other is 50. I have never observed how a 50 years old lady would talk to their children, and how they would sit and stand. Except using different costume to show the age difference, I need to learn from the actor in Warrior Don’t Cry who used different postures and different body languages to show the difference by using limited props.