The Holiday Scenework

I got some extra work on Sunday, which was really lovely, especially since it was such a short day and I got to spend it with friends 🙂 Not to mention the girl we work with who was playing one of the leads!

Then yesterday, I had class with Suzanna. Everything is kind of weird this month as far as everyone’s schedules go, and they keep changing, then we went way over for classtime. In the end, we pushed my Rachel Getting Married scene to tomorrow, since Ashleigh and I will both be there. We also saw the same scene twice.

Now I don’t do this so much with TV and movies, but when I am in class, I kind of can’t help thinking about how I would play a scene differently if Suzanna had given it to me. I mentioned that I like being the reader for auditions, since I can kind of try it out, but yesterday, Ashleigh and Lorraine actually got to do the same scene, one after the other. (So did the guys, but I don’t think I would have made a good Carlito 😉 )

It was so interesting to see how they broached the same scene so differently. One of them smiled through the whole thing, in a way like ‘I’m almost crying and this is the only way I know how to keep it in’, with disbelief the major emotion, while the other yelled and talked fast and was so angry, like maybe she hoped she could scare him into staying. Both were really entertaining to watch, and it was nice seeing the added touches, like one of them went super soft for a line before pushing him away when he tries to comfort her, instead of yelling at each other like the other two had done. I think I might have done a cross between the two, and maybe a little different, but all of their performances were really well done 🙂

As for my scene with Carolyne, I decided not to do the British accent. Yes, it sounded super weird when I said drip and blooming and shagging, but when I ran it with Carolyne so she could give me pointers on my accent, it was horrible. Although I think I sounded much more uniform in the car, when I did it in the hallway, I was mixing up about 3 different kind of accents, which I was painfully aware of, and one of them was cockney. Which was a bit much. So I decided to lose the accent. However, once I get back from LAMDA, I can do all of my roles in a British accent, to make up for it.

Other than the accent, the scenes were fun. And weird for me, because I was choosing to be slightly tipsy, but I don’t think I committed to that all of the time. Sometimes I went bigger with it and other times I went smaller. And it was awkward, just spending the entire scene being mean to Carolyne. Especially when there are many points in my life when I could have wholeheartedly recited her ‘pathetic’ monologue about myself. Still, it was a lot of fun to make those choices, that weren’t indicated in the script, and to roll with them. We had the only non-screaming match/breakup fight of the night.

“Go big or go home.”