Week one at St. Joseph’s Villa basically entailed everything we had expected.  First we arrived at St. Joseph’s Villa to meet Timone, a familiar face who had given us a tour of the campus a week prior.  Timone let us know that we’d be meeting a few participants for the first time.  He also mentioned that though we’d only be meeting three last Thursday, that more would be jumping on board and there was the potential for ten participants.

After meeting up with Timone we made our way over to the Chapel, outside of which we met our first three participants.  Though the conversation was a little scarce at first, our group soon fell into comfort and began to make conversation with the three young men we had just met.  After a little getting to know one another, we moved into the plot of the play and finally, a little bit of casting. One of the young men took a liking to the evil side of things, sending him in the direction of the witches, while others wanted to be more benevolent characters such as Banquo.  Hopefully next week we’ll get the chance to meet some new participants and hopefully move forward with the casting!

This Monday was our second rehearsal with the Osher participants. This week we started out by having the Osher participants self cast themselves. We took time to discuss each role in Macbeth and the corresponding characteristics of each character. After we discussed the characters the Osher participants chose the roles they wanted to play and the self casting process went fairly easy. It was great to see how excited our participants were to get up and start reading through the play. We had a few last minute drop outs in our group which made it difficult to fill all the parts, but our remaining participants were very excited to fill the remaining roles. The only problem that occurred during this practice was over some of the language in Macbeth that the Osher participants felt uncomfortable with, words such as niggard, which has a completely different meaning than the word’s current association, and other racially loaded lines. Our participants were very aware of the potential impact of these lines and requested that we find a way around this immediately. I was very impressed by the attention to detail each participant had, especially because of the current social climate. Im looking forward to next weeks rehearsal! We will be adding a new participant into the mix!