Shani Berenholz

I went into the blackbox and noticed that Thea was not there. I had gotten there a few minutes early so I set the scene up for the rehearsal. I finished setting up and Thea walked in. We decided that it would be best to start out with running the lines to each other to see how much we both knew. I told her that I still haven't quite memorized them all since it was only a day, but nevertheless we ran the lines quite soothly for our first run through. We did that a few more times and decided it was time to try out the lines with our physical actions. We ran through the scene a few more times and we finally got our lines down, but decided that we needed to figure out some of our blocking and most importantly what were our stakes. We decided that our stakes would be the sexual tension between our characters. With that in mind we ran the scene again, but it still was not quite where we wanted it. So we decided to run the scene like we were obviously flirting, trying to get each others attention and being in love with each other; we did this run through not to really block anything, but to get more of the sexuality out in the open. It seemed very silly while we were doing it, but once we went back to our normal blocking there was a change! All of the sudden the tension between the two characters was more obvious and it was easier for us to be comfortable with our characters. Finally, we touched up on a little bit of our blocking, like deciding which moments in the scene we could show the most tension in and what we wanted from each others characters through our actions. We ran it one more time and felt satisfied enough to present it to class.