Elizabeth King
Blog entry by Elizabeth King
Kayla and I have been rehearsing in the Black Box a few times thus far, and it’s been fun to get deep into the underlying meaning of the lines and our characters’ motivations. However, our challenges have really been to figure out what exactly those motivations are throughout the scene, since there’s a lot running beneath the surface of the text, as well as the challenge of projection in the space. Rebecca has consistently given us notes on projecting the text to the audience, and we’ve found that it’s a challenge to maintain our sense of intimacy and interpersonal energy within the scene while at the same time actually conveying the text to an (imaginary) audience sitting far away from us, since it inherently breaks a little bit of the “realism” of the acting. Another challenge has been finding meaning in the lines which we know so well at this point — the words have started to become more like sequences of sounds than actual sentences, and it’s becoming hard for us to let each other’s lines affect our responses and psychological actions, so we’re going to work on that and hopefully find a way to mitigate that effect.