Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Acting in Young Playwrights Festival

As an actor, I was thrilled to be cast in Astray The Sun as Aurora! It's a fantastic play, Charles (the playwright) did an amazing job with the language. Of course, Samantha and Kevin (the other winning playwrights) are wonderful too, we have three great plays for the festival! They are all so unique and interesting.

Astray The Sun is a one-act set in Vesper, a fictional Renaissance town. It is an inventive play with themes about love, friendship and duty. Vibrant characters provide for colorful relationships, unexpected humor and clever dialogue written entirely in verse!

These first two weeks of rehearsal have been a blast! We started out by working through the text in a read-through to analyze the character relationships and intentions. Then we worked out the blocking to help our bodies get an overall sense for the flow of things. This was especially helpful to our cast for memorizing since the language is hightened and takes a little more to get to a place where it comes naturally. Carol, our brilliant director (and a founder of Windfall Theatre), also had fantastic tips for how to use the language given to us. As with Shakespearean lines, it is powerful to use the sounds in the words to feed your emotion. For example, words with soft sounds like "fff" "ww" and "sh" help to connect to sad feelings, just as plosive sounds like "k" "T" "D" and "B" can help feed the frustration in the moment.

So we're all finishing up our memorization so we can really dive into the details of our character relationships and their emotions in each moment!

1 comment: