A New Name is Inevitable

Last night was the culmination of a few weeks work into putting together a student run (as in written, directed, produced, performed by) staged reading. A group of college students who love theatre and need something to do with their spare time got together, scrounged some short plays and performed them for an audience of the artsiest folks in town, pretty much.

I was in three of the pieces, and I would have preferred an actual staging without the scripts in hand, but this was so informal and small and I have so much else going on that it wasn't feasible. It went off pretty well - the pieces were well recieved (laughter is always a good cue of that) and we actually had more people show up than we had chairs for them. A delightful surprise.

I'll put this on my resume just to fill up space, I suppose - it was small but it was theatre. I still learned something, or several things. Lessons learned through Winter Session Staged Readings:

1. Work on losing feminine traits if I plan on playing a male character.

2. Have a basic idea of what sort of performance we have in mind before planning it.

3. I am personally driven by character. It's how I work.

4. Don't forget black pants at home.

5. Don't take on three out of five mini-shows if I have ACTF work to do.

Out of all of those, I find that 3 is the most relevant to growing as an actor, along with 5 and 1. Five only because I've overloaded myself before (Summer 2006 = Footloose/Kiss Me Kate HELL) and need to learn balance, and 1 because dropping my voice an octave and tying my hair back in a ponytail does not do enough, in my opinion, to denote a masculine character. I wasn't satisfied with my portrayal of Luke/Lucifer (yes, I was the devil and rather amused), but I'm never satisfied with anything I do.



In a little postscript, me and my fellow players were accosted by a random man who began preaching about heaven and life after death to us, and I could only wonder what this man thought of us doing shows about lesbians and the devil with a shitfaced angel friend. I was a lesbian and the devil all in one night - if I'm not sprinting to hell, I don't know who is. :)

aurgasm.us - excellent website.