Rehearsals 19-22 november

This week we started off with an improvisation activity. First off we filled out some sheets surrounding our characters and their profiles. They included the 6 w's (who, what, where, when, why, how). Within the activity we decided to take our characters out of the play and place them in a 21st century classroom. We threw away the script but kept the characters, their traits and stories. This was really beneficial because it was a challenge to be able to keep all of the traits that make our characters who they are, when we take them out of the enviroment we are most familiar with them being in.

In rehearsals this week our main focus was to make sure everything was starting to look prefect and just tweaking a few things that didn’t feel true to our characters. I decided to change a few things my character Olga did because it helped me place truth behind what I was saying.
Firstly I felt like I wasn’t getting excited enough over meeting Vershinin. He was from Moscow and that’s where Olga wished she was right now so I should super happy and trying to squeeze as much information about Moscow out of him as I can. Right now I just wasn’t portraying that and was pretty relaxed about his arrival. Therefore now when I get dragged on scene by my sister to meet him, I get seated in the chair next to him and have wide eyes filled with joy and don’t take my eyes off him. I basically hang on to his every word.
Next thing I slightly tweaked was the way I delivered the line about my mother being buried “ in the novidevinchy cemetery”. The lines I say before this are very happy and fast with characters bouncing off each other in the wake of Vershinins arrival but then it turns to the subject of my mother who is dead. I’m finding it hard to suddenly lose a bit of my energy and have a moment of sad remembering but then finding that upwards energy again so soon afterwards. Right now I am adding to much happy energy into the deliverance of the line and so just needed to work on it. By the end of the week I had managed to do this and it felt real when I said the line and so I am happy with this progress.


For the last week of rehearsals we decided to not change anything because we were happy with what we had and didn’t want to add things in last minute that might throw the group off guard in the performance. We just ran it through continuously and made sure it was all polished and ready to be performed.