Unfortunately, this week, we took a few steps back in our rehearsals. Things the last few weeks just seemed as though they were too good to be true at times. While we had made great strides in our line reading the last few weeks with Adrian, Jemiah and Tamaiah, this week we had Khalil back. While it is a pleasure to have Khalil at rehearsal, he can at times be very distracting to the other students, and has a very apathetic approach to the performance. While Adrian, who is currently playing Duke Orsino, is very invested in the performance, Khalil is very much not insisting that he is not attending. Thus, at times durring rehearsal, he and Adrian antagonize one another to annoy one another. This week, Khalil kept yelling that Adrian wasn’t reading his lines clear enough, then Adrian would respond that Khalil couldn’t say “easy” words in his monologue. The two would then proceed to get into arguments, and both were so frustrated, that they could not proceed with the rehearsal. So this week, instead of working on reading our lines, we usually had to divert our attention to breaking up Khalil and Adrian from their continuous arguments.

Another huge setback to our performance was that this week, we learned that Marcus, who was supposed to play a number of roles, will not be in attendance at the performance. This was big for us because Marcus has consistently been a calming presence at rehearsal. Additionally, Marcus has always been willing to pick up the slack when other performers do not want to take on a role, thus his presence in our performance will be missed very much.

Given the setbacks we experienced this week, one positive did come of all of it. Finally, amongst the arguing and joking around, we were able to see some glimpses of passion from our students regarding the performance. We noticed that many of the arguments that were taking place between the students were a result of their passion and their desire for the performance to be good. While this detracted from the rehearsal itself as I outlined above, I thought that it was really cool to see how much the students cared about the performance. This reassured, at least me, that our performance, no matter how bad it may seem in rehearsal at times, will be acted properly and well so long as the students have passion for what they are doing.