Medea: The Performance

Tonight was the official night of our performance for Medea. After this past week of rehearsal, we were finally able to showcase all our efforts in acting and costuming. Our piece in act one fit in right before Guys and Dolls which was right before the intermission. As we heard our cues we made our way towards stage left which marked our entrance. As we were backstage, Jackie, Dhara, and I quickly reviewed our lines one last time. We realized that all our work amounted to this one performance. For me, I was not nervous as I pretended that the performance was just another rehearsal; however, I was anxious to get on stage. As I spoke our first line, everything that our director had reminded us to do this past week reverberated in my head: remember to create clumps and not lines, project your voice, move with purpose, and keep your hands at your sides. When one of the chorus members had made a minor mistake, it had once been natural instinct for everyone else to laugh and giggle. However, tonight, everyone remained in character because we knew that regardless of what happened, it was important to maintain our characters because for these five minutes onstage we were no one else aside from being the people of Corinth. The piece was over before I knew it and we were making our way offstage.

The next time we were onstage would be during the Seussical piece. Our only role was to sing and and do the movements as was done by the cast onstage. As we sang, we put our hearts into the song realizing that all the efforts in rehearsal was for this one night. In thinking back on this experience, it makes me grateful that I decided to participate in this year's May Show. After being a part of the crew in Seussical, it made me want to do more than just perform before the class. This one experience set in motion the motivation for me to be a part of our school productions and to therefore be more involved in our theatre program. It made me realize that theatre HL goes way beyond what we do in class but that it is a means for us to be a part of our theatre program.

Dress Rehearsal: Take Two

As our costumes were not up to par with what our director had expected, we were still required to get into costume for our after school dress rehearsal. Rather than having only the 20 minutes that we had in class to prepare, we were able to fix our costumes. We realized that our costumes would look neater if we flipped the costume inside out. This is because we would be able to eliminate the number of different flaps and folds that were visible. As a result, our costumes looked significantly better especially after we had ironed out all the folds. Coincidentally, the four different groups were color coordinated in that all the group members had the same colored sheets. This worked to our advantage because this would help the audience distinguish the different groups. After running through our piece one last time at the dress rehearsal, everything was finally in place for our show tomorrow.

Our group became part of the Seussical piece which also acted as the curtain call. We came in at the tail end of the song which started with the lines: "Just think! Oh the thinks you can think, think and wonder and dream far and wide as you dare." We were at first confused about our placement and the different hand motions, but we finally caught on. For this last song we got out of costume and wore solid, bright-colored shirts to still embrace the happy, cheeriness of Seussical. Being a part of this definately reminded me of working crew during the actual spring show and it helped me to appreciate being a part of the May Show.

Medea: Dress Rehearsal

During our in-class rehearsal, we were instructed to put together our costumes for a dress rehearsal so that we would not need to dress for the after school dress rehearsal. Our costumes consisted of a draped bed sheet. This idea came from Dhara who helped to costume the entire cast of our piece. She got the idea from when she helped dress her brother for his Greek fair. We folded the sheet in half or however long was necessary depending on the individual and the size of the sheet. Then we draped it over the left shoulder and placed safety pins to hold the sheet in place over the shoulder. Then we tied a rope around our waists to hold our togas in place. Our director asked us to have our hair in a bun and to wear sandals with a back in order to create this Greek costume. We wore tank tops and shorts underneath our costumes.

When we walked onstage with our completed costumes, our director was unimpressed with our work. She felt that our costumes looked incomplete, sloppy, and not uniform with the exception of two costumes. This was because some of our cast members had forgotten certain pieces of their costume whether it was shorts or sandals. The nonconformity also came from the fact that we all had different colored tank tops and that our costumes were all draped differently where certain cast members looked neat while others looked uncomfortable. The critique was that we needed to cover more of the upper half of our bodies with the costume to show a minimal amount of the clothing underneath. Another thing was that the toga should have reached our ankles as Greek clothing was longer than the knee-length Roman styles. Luckily, the costuming was the only critique that we had received, something that we would be able to improve. We were glad to hear that our acting had not been critiqued upon which meant that it was up to par in terms of dramatization and physicality. We were sent back to fix our costumes before our after school dress rehearsal.

Medea in the Theatre

Without the theatre to rehearse in, we had to rehearse in the classroom. As a result, today was the first day in which we were able to have a quick rehearsal inside the theatre. We rehearsed our piece as we had practiced in class. The one thing that did not work out was that the blocking did not fit with the stage which was larger than the area in which we had rehearsed in. In order for the first group that entered from the stairs to meet up with our group, they were forced to move a great distance within their short line. With this, our director decided on having them stop at the top of the steps. This actually worked out for the better because it allotted for the variation that our director was striving for. Another thing was that because the chorus did not wear mics, we needed to project our voices so that the last audience member could receive the same effect as the member in the first row. Rehearsing in the theatre helped us to give us an idea of the space that we would need to fill up.

The Making of Medea

Our first in-class rehearsal including the two nurses and Medea focused a lot on cutting the script as the original script that was used during the fall show ran for ten minutes. Our director wanted each piece to be a maximum of five minutes so that all the fall and spring productions of ten years could be compiled into a two hour show. In the end, our director was able to shorten the scene into a five minute snippet by cut out extraneous lines and still maintain the intent of the play. In this rehearsal, our director was able to block all the lines so that we would be able to move with purpose. Entrances would be either from stage left or from the stairs leading up to stage left. Our group was placed to enter from stage left in order to give our piece the idea of different levels. One of the problems that we encountered was the fact that the chorus would naturally form lines. Our director told us that lines in theatre were not interesting and that we should instead form clumps and create unevenness. I realized that although we were a collective group, we still portrayed individual people and therefore did not need to move uniformly.

Creating Chorus

With three main actors to portray Nurse #1, Nurse #2, and Medea, this left the remaining of the class to be the chorus in this short snippet of Medea. The purpose of the chorus in the play is to provide explanations to the audience and to serve as a group loyal to Medea in a time when she cannot trust her own family. Shivani was put in charge of organizing the chorus members into groups and delineating which actors said which lines. I was placed in a group with Dhara and Jackie. As some of the lines were long, she decided on dividing the lines at sentence breaks to provide variation. Rather than having the audience focus on one group for a block of lines, the audience would be able to move from one group to the next as the lines created this wave onstage within the four different groups.