Scenework Reflection

Right now we are making decent progress and have a firm, steady basis on the direction we are heading in with this assignment. We have a firm script that we are still cleaning and polishing up but other than that all we have to do is memorize our lines and we will be ready to perform. We need to work on memorizing our lines and remembering our blocking but otherwise, the chemistry between the actors in our scene is really good, we all get along and are the same page about everything. After watching others work, we feel like we are in good shape about most things, today in class, we just took time to run through our lines and try and get some memorization down while we could have been running some blocking as well which we should have done, we just read our scripts aloud and tried to memorize what we could which was basically our whole first scene and a lot of the second scene. Our progress up to this point has been quite stellar and we are in a good spot and are ahead of a few groups in terms of our preparations and our performance is looking very promising. Our interpretation of the text is clearly interpreted in the scene quite clearly, we will be using more props and costumes to depict where we are and who we are so yes, I do believe that the audience will understand who we are and where we are and that we will do a good job of interpreting the scene to the audience. Also we are having issues with timing and how fast we speak. We are all decently fast speakers so we are definitely going to have to slow down if we are going to get 20 minutes in, also we could add a little bit more dialogue to our scripts for some characters such as Papa Ge's character who doesn't speak as much in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th scenes as much as he speaks in the 1st scene. Erzulie also fades out near the end of the performance but Erzulie did almost all of the talking in the first scene so she has enough lines, Asaka and Agwe have  dialogue in, I believe, the 3rd scene. If anyone needs more lines it is definitely Papa Ge because I feel like maybe sometimes he doesn't speak enough towards the end and the way the performance is enacted, he is supposed to stand in a corner with a toothpick in his mouth muttering comments whenever he feels like it. I feel like that if we leave him standing around for too long that the crowd will forget that he's there and when he finally does say something in the 3rd or 4th scene, they will be like "wait, who's that again?", so if we need to amp up anyone's line count it's definitely Papa Ge. Other than this I feel like our performance is stellar and that with a little bit of time to run our performance in the black box and memorize we will be ready to give a good show.

Proposal

For this project, we decided to change the perspective of the story of My Love, My Love. The main characters of the script will be the gods- Erzulie played by Charlie Swan, Papa Ge played by Taylor, Asaka played by Grace Greene and Agwe played by Michael Davis- and the story will be told from their point of view. Desiree always looked to the gods for guidance in the beginning of her journey, and though we, the readers, do not see much of them, they are accredited with responsibility for many of the story’s events.  They are the puppet masters of everything that goes on on Earth. To show this in our scene, we have set the gods in a control center. The setting is going to be an office where each god handles their daily tasks of controlling the universe. The gods will be doing tedious office work, but their decisions will be affecting many lives. The Gods will receive mail concerning their “principles.” (Erzulie will deal with love, Agwe with storms, etc.) The scene is going to show a fantasy-reality situation. The Gods are going to be dressed as businessmen, but they are going to be making decisions about people’s lives. We’ve decided to present the story this way to show how the gods just treated people as their pawns. 

The main conflict for our scene will be gods messing in each other’s departments. Agwe will be messing with Erzulie’s and no one will be listening to Papa Ge. Asaka and Agwe are in an underlying conflict that has disrupted the entire office (proving once and for all that office romances are not a good decision,) but most of the story will be focused on the gods trying to navigate around each other in regards to Desiree’s life.