Acting Class: Scenework

Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2003 - 8:01 pm

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

We started working on new scenes in my acting class this week, and I'll be working with "Duck" again, I worked with him before on the DMV scene. There's one scene that I've been wanting to work on for *YEARS*, ever since I saw it performed in an acting class I took 5 or 6 years ago. Duck and I read the scene for our teacher on Monday night, and she really likes it. It's an extremely intense scene. It's from "The Woolgatherer", I play Rose, a waitress in a diner who has one or two wires loose in her head. Character History: When she was younger, she used to go to the zoo every night to look at the cranes, and she thought they were the most beautiful thing in the world. Then one night, some teenagers came in and started throwing stones at the cranes, and they killed 4 of them. Rose became hysterical and had to be hospitalized for a while. More recently, she hasn't been able to have a real relationship with a guy, she can't connect with the guys meaningfully, so she collects their sweaters and drives the guy away and has an imagined relationship with the guy by wearing his sweater. So Duck plays Cliff, the truck driver, Rose's most current love interest, but he's only interested in slam-bam-thank- you-ma'm, she's not willing to give that to him, so he leaves. In the scene Duck and I will be performing, Cliff has just pulled his first U-turn in his truck and come back to Rose. She's acting guilty because she'd been having an affair with his sweater when he came back. So he starts to get suspicious, and thinks there's another guy in the closet. Rose won't let him near the closet, but finally he gets by and opens it up, and sees all her sweaters. So he is furious and starts throwing all the sweaters at her, she's screaming at him to stop, and then it triggers the memory of the cranes and she gets all hysterical over that again. So Cliff is trying to calm her down, and the scene ends when he finally gets through to her, and helps her realize that 3 of the cranes are still alive, there's still hope. Very powerful, very frightening, very very intense.