Show day

Today we began working at 9. We went through all the box transitions to make sure everyone knew when and how to move the box. This helped to finalise everything we had done in the tech previously. We then went on to do a dress run. This run was messy, but everyone was doing what they could. We lost some of the energy of the piece but overall it was ok.

Our second dress run was more successful. The feedback we got made it feel like we had a fully successful performance. Everyone was listening and responding onstage. In particular the prison scene with me and Dennis felt different to any other time we had performed it, and it felt better. I let go of how the scene had been before and I found a more insane side to my character. 

In one of the dress runs of the killing scene the fridge wasn't working so the boy who comes in to grab ruby offstage wasn't in the fridge. This meant that me and other actor playing ruby had to improvise lines for about 2 minutes until the director told her to just get off the stage. This shouldn't happen again seeing as the boy coming into the fridge now knows how to work it. 

Over the course of the day we didn't have much of an oppiurtnity to have a break. Most of us coped well and adapted to this. There were a couple of people who had negative attitudes on show day which affected cast dynamics but I think we managed to ignore any negative behaviour and focus on ourselves and looking after eachother onstage.

Our first performance in front of the audience went really well. The response we got from the audience was extremely positive. They understood and followed the story and reacted in the way we would hope. It was extremely satisfying to get such a great response from fellow students, teachers and family members.

In our feedback session we went over the directors notes from the performance and discussed what we needed to do in order to maintain the standard of the previous performance and to improve. I need to work on filling the gaps in the smoking scene between Sarah and John.  This scene has always needed work. It is tricky because when speaking to audience members they said they liked it because they saw both characters were getting something totally different from one another. But as an actor the scene feels awkward and we should apply some meisner technique in order to make in natural again. 

Some of the actors needed to project their voices more as the audience lost most of what they were saying. I am aware my accent slipped up at a few points. This was partly because I didn't focus on it as I have been doing it for so long. It was also due to me not taking the time to do the Amy walker American accent warm up and tutorial before the performance. 

Technical rehearsals

Our tech rehearsal was extremely challenging. We all had to adapt to using the box for the first time, with very little time before the performance to perfect the transitions. At first I feel like the focus and energy of the cast was high, but everyone was tense and nervous. The lack of rehearsal time with box left everyone feeling anxious about the quality of our first performance. However, I think the majority of our cast remained well focused and hard working through both technical rehearsals. It took about 11 hours over 2 days but eventually we got through the entire show.

The tech gave us all a chance to finally get a real sense of what our final show would be. For me personally I learned that I had a lot more to do with the moving and opening of the box. It is my job to unpin the box for all the American house scenes. This can be quite tricky as I have to remove everything from the table, and find the pins which usually fall to floor and pin the box quickly so they can begin to move the box back into its place. This can be done however, it's hard to do quickly and safely and it's easy for the door to fall too far forward and for the pins to be quite stiff and tricky to put in place. 

It was hard during our tech to perform the script to the best of our abilities. The stop/start rythm to rehearsal meant you couldn't fully let a scene develop and for me personally stopped me feeling like I could listen to the other actors onstage and organically respond. However, this was part of the plan and I'm sure next time we rehearse on the day of the performance we will be able to do this.