As soon as we arrived today, I was happy to see some faces for the first time in a while, including Destiny, Jayvon, and Keteira, and a couple new ones as well. One of these is James, who has met with the Monday group and played the part of Malvolio, which he may continue with our group. He seemed to be so enthusiastic about the show and eager to contribute, even offering to memorize his lines and ensuring that his friends were speaking loud enough on the stage so that an audience would be able to hear them.

We also had Charles, Talya, Rufus, and Christina, which gave us 8 total people – the most we have had for a rehearsal so far. After our last group meeting, we cut down some parts of the script even further, and changed some words to make it more readable, which helped a bit. We struggled once again with Christina, who really wants to play the role of Olivia, but would have to read a lot of difficult lines that she may not be able to work through, and this was frustrating Destiny, who was playing Viola in Scene 1 where it is just Olivia and Viola speaking. After we got through the scene, Christina walked up to me and told me that sometimes when she doesn’t know a line, she freezes up, so I reminded her that if she just does her best with the reading, and focuses on the acting, nobody will even notices if she messes up a word or two.

Keteira, who played a couple of different roles today, is one of our strongest readers, and she speaks loudly enough that we know we won’t have any issues with our audience hearing her. But since we have a couple of small scenes with only 2 actors on the stage at a time, we had trouble keeping our bigger group engaged and listening to the rest of the act, especially if people were struggling with lines. Thankfully, the last scene involves all of our actors, and people paid more attention.

After the rehearsal, we played a game where one person had to act out specific emotions using only facial expressions and everyone else had to try to guess what they were, which ended up being a lot of fun because some people, like Charles, got creative with emotions such as “flirtatious” or “really?”

I would definitely consider today a success, but we know that we have a few things to do in order to make sure we have a seamless performance. With one rehearsal left, the day before the actual show, we have to make sure that people know which (or have an idea) role they will be playing, which scenes they are involved in, and which costumes/props they will need. I think it might be a good idea to print different scripts with different roles highlighted in each, that we people don’t accidentally miss a line or forget to walk on/off stage when they need to. I am glad that our actors seem to be looking forward to the performance, and I know that when we meet next, they will be really motivated to learn because it will be their last chance to perfect their roles and lines.