blog, week 7:

Friday April 15, 2011

Our past class was pretty successful. Despite having a structured outline for the class, we were able to go through what we have of the script a couple times to examine what we had and what could be cut out in order to make the script presentable and yet still comprehensive enough to reflect Shakespeare's play. I think some of the guys, especially Travis, became very bored with the process - from what I understood, he felt like most of the information we would try to incorporate was excessive and could be cut. He actually did a good job condensing his parts to the most basic parts.

Steveo was very excited to be in class that day, and to have us read the work he and the other students wrote for class. I was happy to see him so thrilled about his work and excited to be at class. As Gabby and I discussed later on in the day, it's good to be able to see such a change in his attitude. I remember the first day Gabby and I went to the prison, he was so dismayed and seemed unenthused about having to put on a performance at the end of the semester. However, I feel like he is among the most enthusiastic, happily taking the part of Portia and making it his own.

We were able to collect the majority of the work for the rest of the script. Because Bruce did not show up for class again, Gabby and I have had to make up for the rest of the scenes necessary for the script to be finished. I am sad that he has become absent more frequently. I finally asked Steveo and Travis what happened to Victor since he stopped showing up three weeks ago. He decided to leave our class and join a computer class, which was also disappointing. However, we knew going in that we would lose students - it was just that losing them more than half way through makes me feel like I've done something to offend them, Victor in particular.

Unfortunately, because we couldn't attend on the 22 nd, the students have had to practice the full script on their own. We will only have one full practice before May 6 th - the performance date. Only we won't find out until next week how long the performance will be. Since the script is currently six and a half pages long, I hope that the performance will not be more than twenty minutes long. I hope that the students took our advice and continued to cut lines from the script that they felt was unnecessary. We will see how much they have worked on it in the ensuing week.

 

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