Eli Cagan

For this blog, I will primarily discussing the beginning portions of memorizing and attempting to properly act out our scene from The Motherfucker With the Hat.  For some reason, the beginning stages of this process strangely resembles an old family vacation I took with my family where we walked single file in a pitch black cave and had to trust each other for the next proper step; acting this performance properly kind of feels like walking straight ahead into pitch-black-unkown-nothingness.  We are still feeling out what feels appropriate, what needs to be exaggerated, and how everything gets pieced together.  For myself, I have found out that I hate monologues, especially the ones that I open the scene with.  Damian's character is putting off what I am saying, so it feels like that I am acting towards a wall, for awhile...This has made it difficult for me to have an interesting give and take effect from this portion of the performance, making it difficult for the audience to connect with the scene and have the scene be believable...It is something we are working on, and hopefully with some new blocking ideas (Damian will now be facing me while I am sitting), it might seem more like a believable scene.  With my huge monologues in the beginning, we have not had too much chance to practice the rest of the performance, so that is what is going to happen next, and hopefully as we progress through the rest of the scene, comfort levels will progress, and then the possibility to work backwards from the end of the scene might be a smart and useful strategy to take.