This week we did not attend our class with the higher Achievement students. Although we did figure out some aspects of our act that will further help the students. One of the first decisions we have come up with is how to distribute lines to the students when more than one person is playing the part. Also some creative and fun ways to have two students playing the same two parts. One idea was to tie them together by the ankles and they play both parts together throughout the act. The students would definitely have fun with this.

Another issue we have is having more students then there are parts. We might be adding fairies to help with this problem and the girls would have no issue dressing and acting as fairies.We also have a solution of adding extra mechanicals to the play and splitting up those lines so they each have parts to read.

Lastly the students were very interested in putting the play on for their classmates. In order to do this we may offer the option to do a rehearsal for the rest of the higher achievement students. This would give us an idea of how it would go for the actual performance. Hopefully they will like this idea and it could benefit us.

Last Monday, Molly Allison and I returned to John Marshall High School for the second time. When we arrived, there were only three students in the classroom, one of which was new to the Jepson Shakespeare Project.

Laura informed us that a few of the students who would have stayed for rehearsal went home because there was such a long gap of time between school ending and us arriving, so only three students were present. She asked if we could possibly arrive earlier so they wouldn’t have to wait so long between school ending and rehearsal. Unfortunately, I have class until 2:45 so I told her we would try to get there as soon as possible, but I can’t leave class earlier than that time.

We gave the new student a script and gave a synopsis of Act 4 and the characters involved. Since there were only a few students, we couldn’t start rehearsal. Instead, we talked about college applications, scholarships, Richmond, and high school classes with the students for a bit before leaving. We also reminded Laura that we are on fall break this coming Monday, and will meet with the group the following Monday, October 19th.

During the class work day on Thursday, we read through the first part of scene one and wrote down any props we may need as well as possible staging directions. We also worked with the script to see if we could combine any fairy characters since we are probably only going to have around six or seven students at John Marshall and need to fill fourteen characters.