Berkoff/ A Woman Alone - Week 9

Wednesday 

Unfortunately, this past week I've been seriously ill and had to be quarantined in the hospital for a little bit...this therefore has set my drama group behind quite a bit. We were meant to be performing this performance today, however, it seemed that we wouldn't be doing our absolute best if we performed today because we've lost time. So Mr. Chipp graciously gave us until next Monday in the lesson to finish our piece.

This means that we won't have an audience of people outside of our class, as the rest of the groups will, but we will have too cope. It'll be interesting only performing to our classmates, but we will still do our makeup and dress up in our costumes and have dimmed lights, etc...so it may not feel too different.

So we started our rehearsal out by doing a full run through, and filming it so that we could watch it back and improve bits of it:

We talked about adding the gun prop into our performance, because we've tried to do this in the past, but have always practiced it without the gun. In the stage directions it says that there is a shotgun on the wall...however, what we have is a hand gun and we need to place it somewhere that Melody (as the Psycho character) can easily get to because she is the person using it in our extract.

We found that we would have to strategically place the gun somewhere around the stage or keep the gun in Melody's pocket. We also talked about the possibility of having an audience member hold the gun, contributing to the proxemics between the audience and the actors...however, we thought that there was too much possibility of things going wrong if we did that. We decided on placing the gun on the floor, stage left. This way, the audience can be aware of the gun the entire time, but it's also out of the way but easily accessible by Melody.

After watching the video, we also decided we needed to clean up how we pick up the gun and load/ shoot it. We've been picking it up as a group recently, or all bending down and forward to get it. So, we decided to just push Melody down as a group, but let her step forward and pick it up on her own. Then, as group we would load the gun, using onomatopoeic sound and corresponding movements, then show the audience our individual reactions to the situation before firing the gun. Looking at the audience, we thought that we could reconnect with them, and with the fact that we are not living in reality as The Woman -making a reference to 'the neighbour'. I think that in reconnecting with the audience, it will create a moment of tension before we fire the gun and allow for the audience to see that we are absolutely insane...especially with the psycho as our voice and the leading character at the end of the monologue.

We also talked about incorporating the riser more, if possible. We don't think that, all the time, the movement of the riser is completely motivated by the lines or anything at all...the sometimes we pick it up and incorporate it for no apparent function. Additionally, we have problem with moving the riser too far stage left.

Section 2

After talking about the general changes we needed to make, we decided to start going through the sections of the monologue that we came up with last time we were together.

Here is the video of the section with no changes:

Here's what we need to change:

• more emphasis out of the 'stabbing with the spoon' from me
• smoother transitions 
• snap heads towards the person who is speaking, allows for the audience to see who has the 'voice' of The Woman and directs their attention
• "What are you talking about?" becomes our motivation to snap the attention off me, and onto Melody
• The proxemics between us as a group needs to be stronger and more focused -we need to have more reactions between us

Here's another run through, with more changes: 

More changes we made after this run through: 

• blocking, to fix that Megan was blocking me after 'stabbing me', she should walk around the back of me, rather than in front of me
• Melody shouldn't move away from the group as much...she was kind of floating stage right
• Overall pace needs to be picked up slightly

Final run through and final version: 

Section 3

Here is video of this section with no changes: 

Changes we made: 

• To make the 'trumpet' sound of the brother in law clearer, we decided it would work well if Melody made the noise...considering she's at the end of our line
• Spacing also needs to be fixed. Emily needs to not lunge so far so that we can keep a connection between us
• Emily needs to a make her movement more sharp when 'slaughtering' Megan
• When Melody steps out of line, it needs to be more staccato so that the audience can see clearly what is going on
• We need to stay in our 'sod off' positioning's to draw attention to Melody, who is the voice of the next line
• Melody shouldn't turn on my line, "this is no time to start playing jazz"

Here is a video with these new changes: 

Section 4

Another video with no changes: 

Changes we need to make: 

• add some onomatopoeic sound after "pigging phone pig", and do a synchronised snorting sound
• When Megan takes the phone, Melody is going to be more verbally angry with her -this allows for more interaction between the elements of The Woman and is an indication that she is breaking down mentally
• Sort out the blocking of Emily, by Melody taking a step to her right
• "Pregnant" motion needs to be in time and much larger so that the audience can see
• Came up with some new movements for "locked up" 
• On "click", when we put our phones down, we need to put our heads down too...so that only the people who have lines should have their heads up -drawing the attention to the voice of The Woman

Run through with changes: 

Some more changes we made:

• after Emily says, "what a pig", we have another synchronised pig snort...in agreement 
• another locked up motion, after I say it as well...we just move our arms above our heads and I say, "my husband keeps me locked up"