Acting #2 - How Much Do You Know about Death Row?

In this session, we performed our pieces off script to the rest of the class and were able to give feedback in rotation to each group. After summarising most groups' feedback from our performance, it occurred to me that we had a lot of positives on our levels and accent - which in the previous week was a piece of constructive criticism. It was clear through our use of levels and accent, that our audience could tell the setting of the scene, and the characters awareness of surroundings. They knew it was Joyce's kitchen from the way I was sitting and making tea, whereas Marlene was the complete opposite.

Our most common piece of constructive feedback was to punctuate the scene more, as it felt a bit stiff and still when it was performed. I do agree with this, as we hadn't rehearsed prior to the lesson due to myself, Faye and Saskia all living in different households. To add on to this, I definitely feel like if we were to perform it again, we could hit the mark better and punctuate the scene more. Although we had a lot of constructive criticism, we also had a lot of positive feedback which was good to hear for our first piece back. A lot of people mentioned both in passing discussion and some quite obviously that our stereotype casting was really well done. I don’t think this means any harm to anyone, as I understand what they mean - Faye’s characterisation of Angie was done really well to the point where you not only believed that she was a child, but that Angie was younger than she came across. Saskia and I work really well together, and so the playing of polar opposites was fun - I’ve been in Top Girls before and played Marlene; therefore I wanted to try playing Joyce. I found that both mine and Saskia’s portrayal of the sisters highlighted the different ways in which wealth and status can change a person, and completely separate them off from the world they grew up in. For sisters, Marlene and Joyce really don’t have a lot in common and I believe we did well to show that. I think Saskia’s portrayal of Marlene was, too, really enjoyable to watch as it’s so far from the person she is normally, and the way she annunciated her words really made you believe that she was of a posh background.

When we began discussing ideas for our final assessment we needed to remember the context of the characters we’re creating, why they are there, how they find themselves in the situation they’re in, and what will happen next. There were a lot of things we had to juggle, however Faye, Saskia and I had briefly discussed ideas earlier in the week of what we wanted to do, and we knew that with our most exciting idea that we would have a lot of work to do to make our narrative believable.

We had the idea of setting it in a prison, specifically in America as some of their states still have the death penalty, and we wanted to relay that into our narrative. As we discussed it deeper, we liked the thought that it was a prisoner talking to two guests. At first we brainstormed the idea that the guests were the victims family who were coming for closure, to ask why their loved one was murdered, however we figured in the time we have to create the piece it wouldn’t have been as straightforward as we originally hoped, so we decided that the three people would be sisters. After a bit of quick research, we settled on Texas State Penitentiary, Huntsville, Texas, which has the most active execution chamber in America. A lot of research is going to have to go into this piece, as we'll need to know what qualifies someone for the death penalty, we'll need to try and figure out as much as we can about the length of time people are on the death row list before they actually get executed, and we'll need to settle on a storyline that is easy to follow but interesting and fun at the same time, which will definitely prove a difficult task if we don't work hard.

With a short amount of time left, we wrote a very small exchange between the three characters, with me playing the prisoner and Faye and Saskia being the guests. It was a very short glimpse into the world of script writing, and potentially what our script could withhold, but the issue for us was that it wasn’t as believable a narrative as everyone else's, which was the issue we would have with this piece.