dinnertime!

After Dinner:
So dudes, i luuuuuuuuuuurveee this play and am very happy we chose to do it! as soon as i read the brief synopsis on it in the handout from scotty, i knew i liked it. After more and more research, my love only grew, deepened and strengthened hehe.
So here are some questions i decided to answer regarding our play, feel free to go ahead and answer them too (i’d love to see other opinions)
What do i like about this play?
The most appealing parts to are the characters and setting. The characters, with being humourous are all deep and challenging roles to play. They’re all very realistic and have their own individual, intriguing stories behind them. i love how these stories intertwein (prob. spelt wrong) as the play goes on. For example, Monika expresses her interest to go home with a man for a one-night stand and then wake up and leave him while he’ still sleeping. And Stephen, expresses an interest to take a woman home with hope that they have a future together and an ambition to build a relationship with this woman. The two, with their conflicting interests go home together at the end of the evening. I believe our class was ready for more challenging roles and this play provides that, i also believe that we excell with humour and this play also provides that. The characters are all single, lonely and each have their own serious problems, they’re looking for a good night out and an escape from their regular 9-5 routines. While we’re a lot younger than these characters, i think we can relate to a lot of what happens and the emotions that they’re feeling which helps very much with a believable performance. Moving on to the setting, i loved the idea of having the play set in a suburban pub bistro, i think its a simple, yet fantastic set that can set a great atmosphere and focus audience attention on the performance while impressing them with a different, and shweeet set.
2) What do you think will be challenging? why?
Scotty has been speaking to us about ensuring that we don’t play these roles as caricatures. I think this will be a challenge, as i think a lot of us are used to this kind of acting, this is what we mostly did in the past in order to make our plays humerous, i think it’ll be tough for us to keep our play more on the serious side(which i believe we should do) while incorporating humour rather than the other way around. This will be hard as we may slip into old routine of aiming to get as many laughs as possible, rather than aiming to be deep and thought provoking.
3) How do you propose to meet/solve this problem?
I think we need to establish our vision of how funny and how serious we want this play to be. We then, with the help of our director and dramaturg need to stick to this vision and maintain the level of seriousness, humour in the play that we aimed for. Also, i think ( as Scotty has suggested) that it is a great idea for each actor to establish a backround story of their character in order to stay in touch with the emotions and serious life aspects of the character. We need to understand the reasons behind their actions (e.g monika getting drugged and drunk) rather than focussing on these scenes as “funny parts” and playing them up but at the same time we need to maintain the comic aspect. I think this will be a challenge, but one that we can face head on and that with some hard work we are all ready for.
In the cold read today - i personally realised that i need to stay more in touch with my character, her emotions and the reasons behind her actions and maintain her serious element rather than acting out certain scenes too comically and thus losing the story behind it.
4) Audience/actor relationship…
I think audience/actor relationship is a key element in our play as the audience are part of the set, they’re in the restaraunt with us and therefore we must acknowledge their existance and in a sence include them in the performance. this can also add to the comic element of the play. Plus, audience members love it when you talk to them (hehe, i know i do when i’m on that side of the bench, or stage, either way, you know)
O.k this blog is done now, peace out friends and i hope everyone else is as happy with this play as i am MWA