First Draft Reflection

Reflection:

Our group haven’t practiced that much time before we acted out our first draft. We were unfamiliar with the blocking and some lines. And we didn’t cooperated very well. It was quite a failure. I was very unsatisfied with it. There were so many things needed to be improved which made me feel overwhelmed. Especially when I saw Chantelle, Nancy and Johnny’s group, they did a very good job, and I just wanted to trash our script. 

Classmates gave us many good suggestions. Basically were asking us to be louder, and make the story clearer. I felt quite lost because I wrote it, and I actually don't know how to fix those flaws. To be honest, that’s a really tough mission. I think we really need to try to separate the work more wisely in order to push our team to move forward. 

According to the suggestions, we need to separate the stage into three parts more clearly in order to let the audiences can distinguish the home(reality), heaven, dream(some place between reality and heaven). Actually I thought a lot about this, and I think we can solve the problem by practicing more and reading carefully of the script. Secondly, our adaptation was not that understandable without the lighting staff. And our stage model showed the lighting choices, but we didn't fully explain it. Such as blue light for the first dream, and pink light for the second dream. Besides, one thing I want to explain more is the red light and the red pants part. At first, Grace should hold those red pants given by Ma entering Caroline’s room (however, we didn’t show it clearly when we acted), and then in the book it says the red pant could protect the widows from being taken away by the dead husband; and Caroline and Grace look a lot like their mother, so Ma asks them to wear those red pants as well just for protecting them. And I used the original texts from book, but it seems not clear enough to explain this concept to the audiences. So we need to think about adding more information to let it make more sense. And because Ma herself was wearing the red pant all the time for preventing dead father’s returning, dead father was not able to get close or even see his wife. When he tried to enter his wife's dream, he was blocked by the red pant. And he also can’t see his wife in heaven that’s why there’s no “Ma” this character.  

We will ask Johnny, the god, to read the note part. 

“kevin, point to other side (stage left) to show eric waiting -- other side is "heaven" and stage left is real world so keep those the same always.”

Answer: he supposed to point at the audiences, but he did it wrong. But if he points at the audiences, will it make sense?  

Some suggestions also say that we need to add more body contacts to show the close relationships between the two sisters and some how connect with the father. In fact we planed to let Grace to sit next to Caroline and pat her shoulders to comfort her, but because of our lack of practices, we were not able to show that. And we even drove it further from the plan. But there actually are many places needed to add more body languages such as when Grace and Caroline first meet their father in dream, as Kat said, they should react more surprised and exaggerated to express their miss. But I have no idea what kind of actions is appropriate because I am not very good at developing the characters on stage. And none of us in our group figured that out.