Drama Journal #7

Drama Journal #7

         As I predicted last week, this week was all about the prompt book.  One of the exercises that we did in class today was an activity to determine the underlying actions and emotions in each one of our lines.  This forced me to look deeper into the character of John Proctor, and what he was really trying to achieve with each line, and how each of his lines was affecting the characters around him.  Some of these lines were very easy, but when I looked back and saw that 7/10 of my lines were "I question you" I realized I had a problem.  I was being too superficial.  I erased my work and started again.  Slowly, each of the lines except for two of them became clear to me, and not only did it allow me to dramatize John Proctor more accurately, but it allowed me to dissect each of John Proctor's actions, and understand why he did what he did.

         Prompt books have usually just annoyed me in the past, but I realized in class today just how much they help me.  Jessica was gone the last class, so Bella and I just ran lines with no actions.  This left me a little foggy this morning as to which actions we had picked out before.  Luckily, I had written most of them down on the sides of my prompt book, so I picked them back up again fairly quickly.

         The last thing I wanted to comment on was how Mr. Newman changed the normal one on one line test into more of a rehearsal grade.  This was both good and bad for me.  The good: it allowed me and my group to have a more productive work period that class, and was obviously less stressful.  Now the downside to this was that I am usually not prepared for the one on one line tests, but I had it down cold this time.  I was looking forward to getting as high of a grade as possible for just straight line memorization.

         In conclusion, this week in drama was spent mostly working on prompt books, but our scene is really coming together as the date for the performance is getting closer.  While doing the prompt books, the exercise that Mr. Newman threw at us was challenging, but also very interesting and helpful at the same time, and I am looking forward to finding out if he has anything else like that to help us further deepen our understandings of our characters.