Acting Class: Scene Work

Tuesday, Oct. 07, 2003 - 11:40 pm

(Original Posting on http://irmabelle.diaryland.com)

In my Acting Techniques class, I'm doing two scenes: The first scene I play a nun who wants to leave the convent, and has looked up the guy she had a crush on in the 8th grade, she's been dreaming about him for the past 20 years. And it turns out he's been dreaming about her too! But he doesn't want to take the dream, so the scene is them arguing, and her trying to convince him to go for it. I'm not having as much fun with this scene as I could have because my acting partner has a completely different rehearsal style than I do. He only wants to go through the scene once or twice and then we're done, if I suggest we rehearse more, he says, "no, this is good." And he went and changed all our blocking around, it doesn't feel natural or comfortable to me at all anymore, and when I tried to tell him that we should leave the blocking the way it was before, he said, "No, it's better this way." So I'm stuck with no rehearsal and crappy blocking.

My second scene is a lot more fun, it's a comic scene a la Saturday Night Live. It takes place in the DMV, a guy comes in to get his permanent driving lisence but his temporary liscence has expired, and the DMV has no record of him taking the driving test. So he comes to me, and I am reading a book, not paying attention to him, not being at all helpful, completely oblivious to the fact that he's becoming more and more frustrated and agitated. I've never played a comic character like this before, it's a lot of fun, but kinda weird to play such a silly character! Definitely stretching and increasing my acting skills for this one!

(Note: I performed the DMV scene for a second time at my scene partner's church talent show, everyone loved it! For months afterwards, whenever I met one of his friends, they would say, "I remember you! You were the DMV lady!" 4-2-2005)