To end our Year 1 Theater course, We were not sure of which play to perform. However, after careful thought and discussion we agreed on doing the Laramie Project, a play about the crime committed against Matthew Shepard, a homosexual murdered in Laramie, Wyoming. We are going to perform only 2/3 of the play, as we have little time (less than two weeks) to perform the play and performing the whole play would be insanity. Our teacher had the kindness of taking his time to choose which scenes to perform and assign characters to the whole group.
The play is from the verbatim theater genre, it is not realistic theater, which is the genre for which Stanislavsky's techniques were developed for. Verbatim theater is a very wordy kind of theater, so we will have to memorize a lot of lines. My two characters are Doug Laws and Matt Galloway.
Doug laws is the leader of the Mormon Church; I picture him as a man of authority, a man who wants to make sure everybody else knows the word of God. I haven't had a lot of interaction with Mormons, I just remember seeing a lot of "missionary's" back home on the streets who are very well dressed people that go to different places to spread the word of the lord. The fact that they are very well dressed makes me think that the leader of this church may think of himself as somebody who always says the truth, somebody in authority. That makes everything possible to sound as convincing as he can be (I presume this is why missionaries dress very well, to be convincing when they are talking to other people about God).
Matt Galloway is a barman of the last bar Matt Galloway was seen in. I always think of barman as very friendly people, they are always friendly people to make their customers keep coming. I tried to find information about Matt but the only information I could find about him is on this blog: http://laramieblog.blogspot.com/ where it says:
"There was Matt Galloway, who runs his father's bar up in Casper, and who still feels the sting of guilt for not having stopped Matthew from leaving with Russell and Aaron that night, and who (repeatedly) made the point of telling me how proud he is that his bar is a place where his gay friends can come in and feel comfortable being who they are. This from a former small-town frat boy who didn't even know that he knew gay people before Matt was killed. He remains a funny, talkative, thoughtful and huge-hearted person. "
This blog seems to be run by "Tectonic Theater Project" so I think it may be the blog of the producers of the play with entries of while they were conducting the interviews and preparing the play in general.
The
guilt that Matt Galloway feels towards not having stopped Aaron and
Russell is genuine according to this journal entry. In the line where he
says:
"Ultimately,
no matter how you dice it, I did have an opportunity.... If I had -
amazing hindsight 20/20 to have stopped.. what ocurred... and I keep
thinkin' to myself "I should have noticed. This guys shouldn't be
talking to this guy. If I hadn't put my head down for 20 seconds while I
was washing the dishes. This I could've done.. what was I thinking?"
I
thought of interpreting this line in a funny way, like he was just
trying to lie to the interviewers of how much he cared because he wanted
attention. But this piece of information tells me that he seems
genuinely sorry he couldn't do anything. I think this goes in align with
the fact that he is a "huge-hearted person." With a big ego, as Steve
told me, but huge-hearted. He is a person who likes this attention, a
person who is very excited that he will be interviewed by this group who
wants to take his opinion and make it famous.
The guilt that Matt Galloway feels towards not having stopped Aaron and Russell is genuine according to this journal entry. In the line where he says:
"Ultimately, no matter how you dice it, I did have an opportunity.... If I had - amazing hindsight 20/20 to have stopped.. what ocurred... and I keep thinkin' to myself "I should have noticed. This guys shouldn't be talking to this guy. If I hadn't put my head down for 20 seconds while I was washing the dishes. This I could've done.. what was I thinking?"
I thought of interpreting this line in a funny way, like he was just trying to lie to the interviewers of how much he cared because he wanted attention. But reading the piece of information above tells me that Matt Galloway seems genuinely sorry he couldn't do anything. I think this goes in align with the fact that he is a "huge-hearted person." With a big ego, as Steve told me, but huge-hearted. He is a person who likes this attention, a person who is very excited that he will be interviewed by this group who wants to take his opinion and make it famous.
The first few rehearsals were with script; mostly to get used to the way the stage will be organized and how the organization will change in different scenes. The first few rehearsals didn't have any focus in the way we were going to say our lines itself. An important thing that we did during this first few rehearsals was organizing the things that actors who were not talking were going to do and at which cues like pretending to be reporters, pretending to be protesters, the church, etc. All those things that add on to the play while other people are performing their lines and monologues.
We also focused on staying neutral while other actors where talking.
This Sunday, we performed an exercise that would let us get more involved in our characters. Our teacher asked us to divide in groups of three. We separated in different groups and, in character, we asked questions about each other's characters. The point of this exercise was to make us feel into character, to make sure each one of us could handle each of our characters and had things like before time, objectives, and different things clear. Speaking in character gets you used to the state in which you should be while saying your lines, it lets you invoke your character in different situations and, as you know how to invoke your character in different situations, you get a more holistic view of the character which you can then apply when saying your lines.
I felt that, during the exercise, not only my body language and tone of voice changed but also the vocabulary and the structure of my sentences. Each character on stage has a distinct personality that the actor should represent; and this personality includes a whole range of things. An actor has to be able to incorporate all these things to himself.
The play takes place in Laramie, Wyoming, a place in the United States. For this reason, it is most likely that all of the characters will have an American accent. I tried mimicking an American accent and in fact I did some rehearsals trying to speak in that accent but then I got feedback from some of the other members in the ensemble; I can't really mimic it :P The fact that I have been living in an English environment for less than a year I think limits me a little bit from learning the lines fluently and being able to speak them without focusing thoughts on them.
"
During the rehearsals, we kept on doing the "putzika" exercise. This exercise focuses on different sounds that are important while announciating. I have taken a video of myself doing the exercise below: (apologies for the poor sound/video quality)
The other exercise that we did for voice was the "maaa" exercise, which focuses on projection. For this exercise, we have to open our mouth and start creating a "maaa" sound and projecting it to the farthest point possible. You can watch me doing this exercise in the following video:
This exercise was not as useful personally, given that I think I don't have any problems with voice projection (sometimes my overly loud voice has got me into trouble in the past xD)
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