Scene Work #3

It's been another week and Andie and I only had one more rehearsal time. I feel a little nervous at this point but I'm going to talk to Andie and see if we can practice someday at lunch. The lines are solid in my head but the accent is still weak, but that isn't really important anymore. Though I would still like to perform with the accent because it's awkward to talk about living back in Italy without the accent. For now I think we just need to put in more practice for the scene to be good.

            In class on Tuesday we did an exercise where you put a verb next to your line that describes what the line does to who you are talking to. Both Andie and I found it very difficult, especially on one-word lines. We still managed to do it and the result was very interesting. Having to think about the lines made you think about why the character was saying them. This also led us to some of the sub-text of the scene.

            At the beginning especially, there is a lot of sub-text. Catherine asks if Rodolpho is hungry and he responds by saying: "not for anything to eat". This combined with the fact that they exit the stage in the direction of the bedrooms at the end of the scene makes it very clear what he means. But at the same time he wants to sort out whatever it is that is bothering Catherine. He then tries to recover conversation by explaining that he has $300 to try and show her that things could be okay. The beginning of the scene has a lot of sub-text that can be hard to convey, but Andie and I think we can do it.

            The other thing that I've done is starting to mark in pauses and emphasis in the scene booklet. I find that I have to think about how I say the lines normally and if it makes sense that way. There were a few spots where I changed my mind about a pause but for the most part the way I say something works and I just write it in.

            Those are the things that I've noticed since last week. The scene work is going well, I just think that Andie and I need more rehearsal time, but we'll work that out.