Beatrice Newcomb

What We Wanted To Do:

This week we mainly focused on the pauses and given circumstances. My lord Annie Baker has a lot of pauses. A good few of them we realized we were just injecting ourselves, which helped to weed them out, but a couple of them were just awkwardly placed.

What We (Like Actually) Did:

We looked over the lines, our beats, and our actual performance, making sure every silence corresponded to the text, and cutting those that didn't.

What We Learned:

The thing about the pauses that were included in the text is that they shape the meaning of the scene. The pauses that we put in ourselves made the scene more monotonous, yet awkward. Kinda like a party where you don't know anyone there, but feel the need to at least have a conversation with someone. This means that taking them out and replacing them with only those in the script changed the meaning of a lot of character choices; instead of Rose not even giving Sam the time of day, she highly considers being with him, but holds herself back due to her inhibitions. Sam, on the other hand, instead of just being spiteful over the rejection, has only just begun to see both his time at the theatre and with Rose as wasted thus lashing out in a time of vulnerability. 

Problems We Encountered:

The only problem was really just working with the text. Annie Baker doesn't make it easy!