Yes, it can as we proved Wednesday night.  We had a small group of Osher participants this week, however, our meeting was still productive.  One of the women in our group, who is beyond enthusiastic about acting and performance, brought in props and a costume she had made for Wall. Another participant got the opportunity to read though his lines and start learning the blocking (since he was not present last week).  We made a few more adjustments to the script and discussed the concept of where to put the nobles who are watching the play within the play.  We came to the conclusion that we want them to be on the stage and can have them sitting on an angle facing the players and the audience.  We had a conversation about inflection and how the lines are supposed to be read and thought about the meaning behind some of the lines in order to reflect the full emotion and humor though tone and gestures. We had planed to play the game we played on the first day we met, but with characters and situations from act 5, however, we did not have enough people present nor enough distinctive characters to make it really fun.  Hopefully next week we will have a bigger group and can continue to block and rehearse scenes.  We are well on our way to having a great production of the last act!

Success! At long last a week where Oliver and I have a semblance of authority and don’t get eaten alive by 12 year olds! Rehearsal went smoothly today for the first time. We were not able to cast a Lysander because the same 2 boys were absent (and might not be coming back.. it’s unknown..), but the shy kid (Kevaughn) miraculously stepped up to the plate today and temporarily volunteered for the role. Oliver and I split our kids into two groups to read over blocks of lines for the first time in character. I took Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander, and Oliver took Puck, Oberon, Titania and the Fairy. This way everyone got to focus on their lines and practice reading Shakespeare, but they didn’t have to wait so long for their turn in the script to come up. We were able to cut down on the distracting side conversations this way and keep everyone on task. We completed our goal work in a record 30 minutes!! As a reward (this system works beautifully) we played frisbee, tag and football outside for the remaining time. I think Oliver and I are winning them over. They seem to kind of like us now! Kevaughn may even agree to permanently play a speaking role! We have a lot of work to do, but I think next week we will finally be able to move on to some acting and block some scenes.

You could call last week a minor breakthrough. While rehearsal went far smoother than the week before, there were still a few bumps. Oliver and I gave out roles at this practice. We tried to assign roles based on reading level rather than personality or look, the better readers, in theory, getting the most lines. We also had 8 written roles to cast and 10 kids in the group (meaning we have to make more parts or 2 kids won’t have speaking roles). The girls were really easy to assign because they are all fairly good readers and fairly well behaved. We picked their roles for them and told them who they would be playing at the start of rehearsal. They seemed pretty content. The boys were a little more difficult. Because most of them wouldn’t cooperate or participate the week before, we had less of an understanding of their reading levels and who to cast as who. After telling the girls their roles, we held minor auditions for the boys by asking each to read a passage. Only 4 of our 6 boys were present. One of these 4 refused to read and said he didn’t want a speaking part (which makes things a little easier for us, actually). He’s painfully shy. We decided he could be part of Oberon’s train of male fairies. We cast the other 3 boys present as Oberon, Puck and Demetrius, meaning we will need to audition for the part of Lysander at our next practice when everyone (hopefully) is there. Unfortunately, Lamar, who is by no means the best reader, insisted on being Oberon (who has the largest speaking role in our Act). We obliged to avoid rioting, but I’m not happy about it. It’s not about perfection, it’s about the time constraint of our performance.  He struggles a lot with the lines, gets easily frustrated, and is quick to give up and say “forget this” or lower his volume to the point where no one can hear him speak. This is clearly a problem for our leading role. I think we will have to work one on one with him to get him ready and up to speed. As promised at the beginning of practice, once we finished casting we let everyone have free time. We are starting to use free time as an incentive to stay on task during rehearsal. We ended up playing basketball in the auditorium, and it was a good time.

This week we did not meet with Higher Achievement because they had outside mentors coming in to work with the kids. During class time this past week, we started talking about props, line/character distribution, more theater games, and the possibility of the students performing their act in front of their own school. We came up with the idea that on the last day of rehearsal, they would put on the act for their classmates. This could help prepare them for performing the act at our school as well!

In terms of props, we have a few things that we know we need. We know we need two crowns for Theseus and Hippolyta, as well as possible fairy wings (if we decide to add fairies instead of splitting roles). We also discussed the idea of having the children wear certain colors for their characters. For example, Hermia might wear blue whereas Helena might wear pink, and all teh mechanical’s might wear different shades of green. Next time we meet with the children we will ask them what colors they have (or prefer) to wear and figure out of those who are splitting lines would rather just be fairies or extra mechanical’s. I’m excited to get back to working with the kids next week and starting our line rehearsals!

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.

This was I believe the most successful meeting at the Villa. We have a rather small group considering we do have a lot of characters in our act. No matter, we will move through the process and quite possibly may have to participate in the acting as well. Moving through the plot was a little tedious. Yet the students were very receptive and even volunteered to read the characters summaries. I think the most important part of our meeting was the game that Kieran led. While the game initially seemed to just get the students out and moving, it led to actual team building. These students do not always interact with each other as they are in different programs. Therefore there is a lack of relationships between a lot of the students. Learning each other’s names will be an important part of the team building and this game was a great stepping stone to doing so. With this in mind, I believe the next time we meet with the students we should play a name game so as to remember everyone’s name. I think there is less apprehension now than there was before with the students and I believe this group could really thrive with this experience.

This week we read through the script that we finalized earlier in the week and giving out parts. It is turning out to be really easy with the old folks. They are all very excited about the play and all have really helpful ideas. When we read through the play for the second time, a few of the old folks started putting inflection on the lines and really acting out certain parts. I was given a much bigger role than I thought I would be given, but after reading through it a few times I am sure it will go well. For the next week we are going to begin with spacing on stage. Our scene is going to be tough because we have a play within a play and have to have two groups of actors on stage at once. We have a few ideas as to how we will make it work and I am sure our actors will be really helpful like they have been so far.

During our work day on Tuesday our group started to discuss costumes and props needed for Act 5.  Then during our rehearsal on Wednesday night we proposed our ideas to the group.  We had some great conversations about props with out Osher folks, including what exactly a horned moon is (evidently it is a crescent moon for anyone that is curious).  We came to the conclusion that the nobles, who are observing the play within the play,  should be dressed in business attire while the mechanicals should be in jeans and or coveralls (which we learned are called dungarees in Britain).  We went though the scene and started doing a bit of blocking to make sure the scene held together even with the cuts.  A few adjustments were made the stage directions, and a few lines were reassigned to different characters. It was a successful rehearsal and we look forward to continuing to block and work though our script next week.

This is a tad late and I am still trying to get the hang of the timing with the blogs. Last week marked the first time that we met as a group. Unfortunately, the group was not set in stone. When we arrived, we rallied the group from the three different schools. The room that we believed to be ours was either taken or not available to us. Yet after finally getting a room and the group,  we started sharing basic information. The diversity of individuals brought a little disruption as the students all have somewhat different backgrounds. Overall, the students seemed interested and intrigued about how to best be apart of the group. People shared what they thought they knew about Shakespeare and we relayed a small amount of knowledge about the play and the history behind it. Due to a lack of time, we were not able to truly delve into the script and parts. However, we did get a pretty good idea of personalities which may help with characters. As we get deeper into the semester, I believe that we will get to know the students even better and be able to reach them all. One student in particular seems to be a little bit shy about acting. She spoke out and was a little inconsiderate. I still think she may be an important part of the act. Hopefully she will be able to accept what we are trying to do. I do feel more comfortable now than I did when I started. I believe by the end of the program I will not have any apprehensions at all.