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 as Brother and isn’t given a name. It is a really great scene. There is so much going on with these characters that is intriguing to delve into.

I have had the opportunity to do the free writing exercises that I mentioned before for this character. I really enjoyed that! The things that I have found for this character is that he is battling between love and fear. He really does love Rich as his brother, but there is some fear from the lack of knowledge about AIDS and his own homophobia. These really are the two battling forces within the brother. It was an eye opening experience to do these free writes to see how love and fear are fighting each other. Something that I enjoyed is that even among the very serious thoughts within the free write, there were still some very silly thoughts. I am grateful for those silly thoughts because I think that it brings more humanity to the brother. Even amongst a lot of anger, he still loves and he still thinks just stupidly. This shows that he isn’t so serious all the time and that he also doesn’t have all of the answers.