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.