Nathan Destigter
Blog entry by Nathan Destigter
It was recently discovered that Negasi's first entry never ended up being posted, so I guess this is officially post number one. There will be more to come in the next few days.
When Negasi and I first chose the scene, we sat down and spent about an hour reading through the whole show to get the full scope of the relationship between Sam and Avery because it is built up so much throughout the story. We started the reading performing the characters as we would speak and as the play went along, we let the changes in the characters change the way we delivered each line.
The next thing we did was try and figure out how the set was going to be designed. Negasi and I had very different views on how the chairs should be set up. I wanted the chairs to face the projector wall so it felt like the audience would be incorporated into the scene, like it was a real movie theatre, while Negasi wanted the chairs to face the audience and pretend that the screen would be between the audience and the actors. We had a discussion about this for at least an hour over the course of a few meetings.
The next step we took was making our beat analysis. At first we tried to work together on each of our beats but we realized that our characters have such different goals that it was getting difficult to work on each other's beats.