design lab blog

Imagine that a play has been written about you, and you are designing a costume for the actor playing you. What sort of outfit would this actor wear and why? What clues would the costume give about your personality? Be sure to mention the fabric, color, and length of the garments. This prompt can also relate to the monodrama you've created. If you are reenacting an event from your past, what would you have worn at that time, and why?

The outfit would be modern. I want the costume to be athletic to accommodate the movments of the character playing me, since I'm very active. However, I don't want the costume to make the character's gender ambiguous, since I am neither transsexual nor androgynous. The colors incorporated in the costume would be warm colors to convey a general optimism and happiness, but not particularly flashy colors, to convey that I'm not the center of attention. The costume would have a coral top, to convey a youthful feeling with the sort-of pink and a confidence and loudness with the sort-of orange. Also, in staying with the period, my character would wear stretch blue jeans to accommodate the actress' movements and to fit in with the other teenager characters. The shirt would be short-sleeved and t-shirt material to convey un-self conciousness and not caring particularely about my outer appearance. Yet, the t-shirt would be tight-fitting to be subtly feminine.

Antigone set design

Using the theme you and your group chose to highlight in your collage, write a paragraph or two describing how you would transfer the images incorporated with that theme into a set design. You can describe the overall set design or focus on an important item that would be on stage. (For example, if your theme involved chaos vs. order, and you put a picture of a prison on your collage, how would you represent that prison on stage?) How do these set elements reflect your theme?

In my group's collage, the whole conflict of Antigone versus the king is based upon the blood and bones of the war. In the collage, we represented this by gray and red paper squares littering the bottom of the paper. For a set, I would actually want to have dried skeletons w/clothing and other artifacts that would clearly label them as recently dead. I want the stage to be littered with theses bodies, so that the entire play takes place with the characters walking around them to act, literally have the war directly influence every action on stage. I think that the war is a big theme in antigone- it is chaos (bloody killing on the battlefield) and order (the systematic and historical acceptance of war as a way to solve differences). Antigone wants to bury her brother and thus complete the god's end to a war, whereas the King wants to enforce his law, which is the government end of a war- a new government & its regulations. I don't know if this would be possible, but if the performance was set in a small theater, I would want a stench, like rotting flesh- or just a disgusting smell that can't be labelled as anything known (like rotten milk) to permeate the performance space. For practical reasons, I would want it to be a smell that actors could breath and smell for the entirety of rehearsal time and the performance- but one that when the audience walked out of the theater- they would wonder how they could have stood the smell for so long.

My group also saw the theme of Antigone's inevitable death as a continuing thread throughout the entire play. We represented this with all the pictures and themes of out collage leading up (like a mountain) to a cave with a over-sized noose.
blood & bones
cave w/noose
law of the people-kingship vs. law of god- moral
chained hands vs. unchained

Unemployed

I don't know if I can ever check my email again or open another letter. I just can't. The emotional stress that I undertake in those 30 seconds or so of reading that email or letter just might make me burst. Or rather implode from the shear depletion of hope or self worth. I don't even know where this letter comes from. Do you know how sad that is, when I've sent out that many job applications that I don't remember where I applied last? How will they remember me, when I can barely remember them? Only I DO know them.Not them in particular but the job, I know the job. I can smell it, that technical writer job or even perhaps a manager position. Some are in the healthcare sector, the tech industry or a non-profit- but they all have the beautiful, alluring quality of offering me the security of a year-round job with a salary and benefits. I want the feeling of having a job so bad, that the idea is always on the edge of my consciousness, slipping in and out of my direct thoughts throughout the day. The warm comfort of a job that could bandage and sooth the wounds of the last....what is it now? ....7 years.....gosh. Seven years to be unemployed, what a huge chunk of my life to not be working, earning money, supporting my family. What a waste, what a goddamn waste! The whole point of the American dream, heck the whole American dream, is to work and make your life miraculously better. But that miracle can't happen if your unemployed...like me.

unemployed = no identity/useless to society- what do you do?...."nothing"
unemployed statistics- dont' count someone as unemployed after so many months.

I wonder, how long can you not work before you can be on Welfare, get food stamps, take advantage of that big ol' safety net that Uncle Sam is supposed to have for hard working folks like me? That would really help me out, to get my food for free, one less bill to pay. Just the cell phone bill, the cable bill, the internet bill, electricity, gas, water....they all pick away at me, one bill a month. My savings dwindles, bill by bill, month by month, year by year. I don't want to look at the cash left. Its not even cash anymore, nope its beyond the stage where you can measure it in solid money amounts, I measure it by the nitty gritty dollars and cents that measure the time that is left for me. There is no life without my savings acounnt and without a job. I will be beyond a nobody in society, I will be nothingness, not even a vacant body to mourn my loss of existence.

Scene Design- Equus

Describe a performance that you have seen in which you were moved by a vivid scenic image. What elements of the image make it memorable for you? How did they enhance the meaning of the play (or film) for you? Do you think the image fit the director's interpretation of the play (or film)? How did it help convey the mood? When describing the image, incorporate terminology from the text and ideas discussed in lab.

I saw Equus two years ago and the most striking image I remember was the sparse stage- only a raised circular platform. The horses heads were metal and were more like frames that had not yet been wrapped in horse skin (a kind of gross image) but the point was they were representational and allowed the audience to see the actor's faces. The horses also wore horse shoe platforms that made them about 6 inches off the ground. The horses galloped on the stage at one point and the noise I could hear as the metal horse shoes struck the wooden platform was one of the main sounds on the stage besides the Alan Strang, the main character's, yelling. I think that the horses heads, horse shoes, and sparse stage complemented the story in which Alan's thoughts, relationships, and religious ideas are stripped down to their core and origins by his psychiatrist. The beauty of the design concept was that although the story of a boy stabbing the eyes of horses is horrific and weird story- the design of the set was so sparse that it could have been set almost anywhere which helps the story- which doesn't directly apply to many people (I hope) relate to Alan, his psychiatrist, and his family by letting the audience concentrate on the relationships not on the time and place. The costumes for the people were realistic and the horse's costumes were the bare minimum to indicate to the audience that they were horse, which all followed with the entire design of the play.

I can do whatever the hell I want to!!!!!!

So....had a meeting with the professor and he said essentially..why are you asking for limits? You can do whatever you want to, only limit: one actor. BUT it can be billions of characters. And as far as linking it to the items we felt, I'm sure my subject will be inspired by what I remembered from feeling the letter, stuffed animal, cup, and shoe, but not directly correlated- that's just too limiting

Monodrama research: Camryn Manheim, Betty Shamieh- Chocolate in Heat, Spalding Gray, Danny Hoch....

Camryn Manheim's one woman show is about her life, being overweight, being an actress, always waiting for life to start happening instead of getting life started herself.
Her writing about her own particular burden that pervaded her life made me think of doing an ADD play- but with various characters- each affected differently and with a different attitude towards their "disability." I don't know if there have been many ADD plays, but it seems so interesting to portray. For me, the stereotypical AD/HD person has been hyperactive and crazy. While I do know thats one manifetation of ADD, I want to do the distracted kind, the can't organize thoughts kinds- all of them. Heck, I could even explore it across time- like Albert Einstein

Or just another thought- I could do two characters: a mom and her teenage son. The dynamic that I've seen between mother and son in high school can be so different from each other- some are really dependent, some don't even talk to their mom's. Also, the moms are so different- they can be doting, overbearing, distractedly caring, oblivious, accepting of every behavior...

Or the process of looking for a job- over a period of 5 years- the person who applies for the job is also the interviewer, the manager, the human resources personnel, and the person who calls with the rejection/acceptance.

There's also another way to go with a monodrama- one that I've seen Joseph Bamudi- he's amazing! He recites his own poetry, almost like rap, but acts out what happening- they're scenes from his own life or political commentary- hilarious at times, but also makes the audience seriously think

playwriting & acting

The chapter that we had to read for this last Wednesday made me wonder. It described many things an actor could do to be "good." The first half of being an actor is having the tools that project a character to the audience can "see" it. These tools are your body, your voice, centering- which orchestrates the previous two tools so utilizing them become natural and don't "look" as if they actor is only trying to perform a part of themselves. The second half of acting is being a character, pretending to be someone else. Stanislavski formalized the processes used in his time to achieve being another person. He wanted an actor to have to outward features & movements of their character, as well as having the wants, motivations, feelings, objectives, and relationships of their character. Tangentally he wanted all this to be performed continuously whether or not something important was happening or the character was in the middle of the drama on stage, or off in the corner watching the other characters- the character had to be watching- not the actor. Stanislavski does give techniques by which to achieve the goals he set for actors, which overall result in the actor creating every single detail about their character from personal history to color preferences in order to make their character become alive to themselves & give the actors answers to specifically HOW they should act and WHY. Later acting theorists wrote in further detail how to be able to act like someone who is not yourself, like Uta Hagen in Respect for Acting.

HOWEVER, the book does not really tell what is that quality that separates some actors from the rest- some actors get parts and some don't- but the book only skims the topic by saying that if an actor is unconvincing- they aren't being truthful- but what if they ARE being truthful- what if their "terrified, yet excited by the letter" doesn't translate to the audience? Is it the actor's fault for not being truthful to the audience's idea of "terrified yet excited" or has the audience just not understood what the actor is trying to emote.

Another interesting thought that comes from instructions on how to act is how these instructions could be used to write a play. If a playwright could first think of characters, then their super objectives, their objectives, and even split the objectives into beats, especially when characters conflict their different objectives, wouldn't that greatly facilitate the dialogue because then the playwright would only have to voice the emotions that he/she knows their characters are feeling and they don't have to make up a plot/conflict by themselves- clashing objectives of different characters will do that by themselves.

Roar response

I really liked Roar, it was a much easier read than Purple (not a dig at Purple- just definitely a different kind of play). What especially hooked me was not the different culture, although the new cultural references about instruments and whistling tea kettles added depth and uniqueness to the story. Also they added familiarity in another way- every family has its own rituals and quirks and those particular items reminded me of the unique routines that my family does. But what really interested me was the family dynamics and how quickly the conflict of Irene trying to get a break in the music world- pitting her and her family vs. the cruel producers- escalated into a conflict that ultimately tore her family wide open. The escalated conflict opened up all the secrets that had been covered up and ignored and shared them with everyone- eventually disintegrating the family- at least the particular bond between husband and wife.

The dialog was very accessible and what was more amazing to me (with the billion page play that I'm supposed to write this semester), all the lines seemed very writable to me. I'm not saying that "I could have written this play," but it seems like she could have experienced these moments herself- coming home as a teenage girl and bragging that her voice was better than the angels. It was so relatable and so real to me (partially because when I read that opening line, I cringed with the embarrassing memories of how I used to brag about myself when I was younger), that I could write a similar line- taking cringe-worthy, or wonderfully memorable moments of my life and others and stringing them into a story. Of course the story has to have more than amusing dialog, but I could see how thinking of specific moments could give the playwright something to build off.