DAY 9

This morning we had our Audition class with Joanne. The woman is a genius. In a matter of days since initially meeting all of us, she found monologues that fit us each perfectly. She gave me a piece from Reckless by Craig Lucas in which the character confesses she is not, in fact, deaf and mute, but has just been pretending to be so to get the attention of her love interest. Other popular pieces were from Lobby Hero by Kenneth Lonergan, Oleanna by David Mamet, Hitchcock Blonde by Terry Johnson, and Autobahn by Neil LaBute. Everyone was very happy to be handed a monologue that was just right for them, as the process for finding one for yourself can take weeks... or just remain unfound.

In Scott's Camera class we shot the master shots of our scenes. It's really interesting for me to see the technical side of film in little ways, like holding the boom for a scene: I had no idea about any of it. We continued to work on our Girl, Interrupted scene, and I got to use Hal's "mentally disturbed" imaginary center technique. We'll see how well it worked when we see the playback next Tuesday.

Finally we had Karen's rehearsal class and worked through Act II of The Three Sisters. It seems like no matter how much research and prep I do, she still always comes up with questions that make me think, "How the hell did I not think of that before?" It is so fun doing scene work with such talented classmates, especially in a text that we all seem to be fairly unfamiliar with, stumbling through and making discoveries about the text together. Our voice teacher Greg played Vershinin for a while, adding an interesting (and obviously more experienced) layer to our group. Our homework for the weekend is to create a character bio in which we fill in all of the details, reasons, and answers that Chekhov didn't specify.