A Loose Theatrical Cannon

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For our final performance, we were assigned partners and plays from which we are to our pick scenes. I was very excited for my assignment. Joseph is my partner. The time that I have spent around him, I have really enjoyed so I was excited to work with him. It also made me laugh that we ended up being scene partners because there was a member of our class who couldn’t keep us straight, and now we are working together in a scene where we play brothers! We were given a couple of plays to choose from but the play we ended up going with is called As Is . It is a play about two gay men and their struggle as one of them has AIDS. For a play that has such heavy subject matter, the play has a surprising amount of comedic moments. The scene we chose though is not very comedic. We chose a scene where Rich, the man dying of AIDS, is visited by his brother in the hospital. Joseph is playing Rich and I am playing the brother. Something that I find interesting is that my character is just known a...

I have really enjoyed watching other people perform their scenes in this class. It is fun to see my peers act. I feel like I do have a slight problem with watching them. My issue is that I don’t really know how to critique them most of the time. It feels like I all I have to say about their performances is that I liked it. That isn’t enough. If people are looking to improve, they need to hear the things that I have to say. I am not exactly sure where the problem lies. One thought I have is that I may not be paying enough attention. This doesn’t mean that I am not paying any attention, but that I am watching through rose-colored glasses of “this is good and I really like it” and I don’t think any deeper about it. I feel like this way of thinking doesn’t happen all of the time. There are some times that I do have criticisms and things to say about a performance. Yet there are other times where I glaze over and think, “I’m having fun at the theatre!” I really would like to pinpoint what...

One day in class, we began talking about letting the character live in you. I really liked this discussion. There are many things that have so much meaning to us as people. The characters that we are portraying are no different. When someone mentions the name of a person, behind the mention of that name is all of their feelings about that person. They could be good or bad feelings which all could be portrayed in different ways. Someone could have good feelings about the aforementioned person and they could be excited that the person was even brought up because they are a good friend or even a lover. They could have these same feelings but for whatever reason need to hide their feelings because they don’t want to give anything away. The same can be true for bad feelings towards that person. They could show that they don’t like that person or feel the need to hide their negative feelings. All of this can be true about an object as well. In all of these cases, the mere mention of these ...

While yes, I may have had plenty to complain about for my scene from True West , mostly my scene partner, there were many great things about that scene. I really enjoyed my character. To me, it really did feel like it was within my type, but it was still quite fun to play. Something that was interesting about the first two scenes that we performed in this class was that our first scene was supposed to be within our type and our second scene was supposed to be against type. I think I switched them, to be honest. Brian in Jerry Finnegan’s Sister is not a character that I have played before. As a person, I am very similar to Brian, which made it very fun to put myself into that scene because it was so similar to things that I would do. On the other hand, Lee in True West is very similar to other parts that I have played but is nothing like me as a person. This is a note that I received from the first performance for the class from my classmates. I wasn’t that surprised by that nor did...

Our latest assignment in my acting class has been working on scenes where we play characters that are against our “types” or how we are typically cast. Overall, I have had a positive experience with this assignment, but somethings have bothered me. It all started with one day when this one guy in my class, who is not well liked, asked whose type is the big, powerful, and can be villainous. Without thinking about the fact that if I respond that I will most likely end up scene partners with him, I mentioned that is my type. Just like that, I became scene partners with this kid that I really didn’t want to. I was looking forward to the experience though because I thought that it would be a helpful experience to work with someone that I may not have a huge desire to work with. We started thinking of scenes that we wanted to work on. I very quickly thought of the play True West because the whole theme of the play is the differences of versions of masculinity. The two versions of masculin...

After these fantasies, we received a new assignment that was a continuation of these fantasies. Similarly to the prior assignment, we were to come up with the worst thing that could ever happen to us or the best thing that could ever happen to us. A couple of things were different about this new assignment. The first was that this fantasy needed to be based on real circumstances but still needed to be imaginary. While this may not have been that different from the other fantasy, it was something more specific that I think confused a few members of the class. The other thing that was different about this assignment was that we were then to act out going home and doing whatever we would have done after receiving the absolute best or absolute worst news that we could possibly receive. The point of going home to do something was for us to let the emotions of those imaginary circumstances to flow and let them happen. I had an interesting relationship with this assignment. First looking into...