My Production Paper

Social Issue: Teenage Development – Puberty
Directors: Lauren Jamieson, Kaushal Puran
Group Members: Arin, Manife, Anshu

Theatre for development was a very interesting phase of our course. It was absolute fun to work in and the way that everyone contributed to the final show product was truly inspirational. That’s not without saying that we didn’t have our difficult times, like people not turning up for rehearsals on time, or not turning up at all, even for the final performance. But let me begin from the beginning…

We started our rehearsals with an in class session of brainstorming various ideas on what social/environmental issue that we could work with. We came up with several different ideas like:

Suicide Prevention
Peer Pressure
HIV/AIDS

And the one that we picked was: Puberty. We had come up with a lot of different ideas that we could use to tie in our issue. I had several stories from personal experience. The one that Lauren and Kaushal found really funny was one where a friend of mine had her first period in class and she thought that she was going to die from all that blood loss; she kept screaming over and over again, “I’m dying!” at the top of her lungs. Our form teacher had to take her out of the class and explain to her that what she had was her first period and that she wasn’t dying. Lauren thought that we could use that story very well. N.B. we all decided to tryout a comedic approach to the play. It wasn’t going to be funny all through out; it would all come to a point where the audience could see the point to all our stories. But I’m rushing ahead of myself.

When we sat down as a team after all the brainstorming, Lauren and Kaushal came up with the idea of pre-arranging our rehearsals to work around our collective timetables. I was fine; I had no classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays so I didn’t have much to worry about. Our timetable was like this:

Mondays – 4 to 6pm
Tuesdays – In class
Wednesday s – 4 to 6pm
Thursdays – In class
Fridays – 11am to 1pm
There were no weekend rehearsals because we decided to have the weekends as a break from work. After we had planned our timetable for rehearsals, several things happened that we couldn’t have prepared for. Like for one, the Performance Space was booked from Monday to Wednesday in our first week of rehearsals during the hours we had wanted to use it. It was hard, especially since we only had three weeks to work through our concepts, get our blocking down and sell the issue to Ian for approval. He did approve only that we needed to focus on what it was we were presenting. One good point he emphasized was that in doing developmental theatre, one must always be precise; in movement, blocking and speech. If we aren’t precise about what it is we’re doing then the audience will only be left confused and we would’ve lost the whole plot.

If there was one thing that made it a little tough for me, it was me having to be the one to carry the performance through. Of course there were others in the group but Ian had reminded Kaushal and Lauren that I could be the X-factor they needed in the team. Well, I did get a major ego boost from that statement but it also made it a little difficult for me to focus on my characterization. I had to play several characters in the play:

1. The closet homosexual
2. An Indian father of two
3. An English teacher
4. An over enthused P.E. teacher

The others in the team played the following:

Anshu – A skinny girl who thinks she’s fat
Manife – A geeky loner in need of friends
Arin – A wannabe who wants a girlfriend badly

One of the hardest things about working with my team mates was trying to get them to stay in character and visualize what their characters could look like or should act in real life. Arin was the worst. Not only was he late for a lot of practices, he also has this irritating habit for disappearing in the middle of rehearsals to check his email or bebo somewhere and then return like nothing happened. Then there’s Anshu. I don’t know where to begin with this girl. She’s got great potential to do well in acting, she just isn’t using her full potential and she can’t raise her voice louder than normal conversation level. The one thing I found irritating with her performance in the rehearsal level was the fact that she never wanted to change or add to her lines once she had memorized them. I tried to help her clean up her lines so she’s not so repetitive but she didn’t want to change her lines because to her it would be too difficult to remember the new lines. Here’s an example of a change to her lines:

Old line: You think I’m fat don’t you? I know you all think that I’m fat!
New: You think I’m fat don’t you? Look at me! I’m fat!

Now is that so difficult to remember? Anyway, back to the case at hand, it didn’t matter how bad she was, she didn’t make it for the final performance assessment. She fell sick with the flu in the final week of rehearsals and so missed the final changes to our script and then there was a death in her family so she couldn’t perform, which left Lauren no choice but to step into her place. I couldn’t have asked for anything better! She helped me get back into focus with my characterization. This only left one irritation left to me: Arin.

Arin had added a new chapter to his acting, constantly laughing; at nothing. Lauren and Kaushal would often be left exasperated at him. It didn’t matter how many times I threatened to do bodily harm to him, he just wouldn’t stop laughing. Then there’s the case of him not being able to speak out loud because it wasn’t normal for him. Lauren and I tried several techniques we knew of but none of them worked. One of the ideas was to talk out loud to him and get him to respond at the same level as you were. Here’s an example:

Me: ARIN! WHAT DID YOU HAVE FOR LUNCH TODAY?
Arin: I had roti
Me: WHAT?
Arin: Roti
Lauren: I CAN’T HEAR YOU?
(Arin laughs yet again)

But despite it all, the one thing I was grateful for was being able to watch Manife grow and develop her character. She pulled off an amazing rendition of the dorky loner. Out of all of us, I think she did the best considering that we only had three weeks to work and she’s always on time for rehearsals and sends her apologies to either Lauren or Kaushal if she’s not able to be there on time. Manife did real good on this performance, better than all her other performances I think.

Speaking of performances, this play has to be the most improvised play I have ever done. Of course there were lines that we had rehearsed along with the blocking but they were only cues that we needed to use so that we can move along with the story. Our first public performance gig was a dress rehearsal on Tuesday (3/06). It was an absolute blast and real fun too, the only downside to it was me fumbling and laughing at my own jokes in the middle of performance (a big no! no!). The best part of it was getting the audience feedback for our work. I had several friends come to watch our performance and give me some pointers on what I could clear up. It really helped. I was definitely prepared me for our Thursday performance.

The final performance assessment was an absolute sell out! We were five minutes to show time and the space was filled only with theatre students and 3 extra people. So Fabiana ran out and pulled people in to watch our performance. We had a full house that day. The space was packed out! There were even people standing at the doorway watching our performance. It was awesome!

Pretty soon, our group performance came up. It was fun, crazy at some points and scary even! We got so caught up with how big the crowd was that we had forgotten most of our cues and everything had to happen by improv. It was especially hard for me; I was trying so hard not to laugh at my own jokes that I lost concentration and missed out some important lines and cues. The whole experience was exhilarating and totally mind-blowing! I felt such an adrenaline rush performing; it was a performance like no other.

Overall, the final performance assignment was a real learning experience for me and for my team mates. I learned that sometimes it’s not easy working with others in a play, sometimes I had to learn to accept the fact that I can’t do everything for everyone else and that I had to focus on what character I was playing. Precision is everything in developmental theatre and that’s one thing I will always remember. It was a true privilege to work with Lauren and Kaushal and alongside Anshu, Arin and most of all Manife.