Romeo and Juliet Scenes - 1st Draft reflection

                          In class for the past  two weeks, I have been working with my group on our combination of multiple scenes , where I play the character of Juliet. My group’s goal in our performance is to support the idea that Romeo and Juliet are very similar in “Romeo and Juilet.” Yesterday, we recorded our performance of our first draft of these scenes. After watching the performance on my iPad, I made several observations of our work and also noticed several important improvements that could be made to our scenes.

          I think that my group did a very good job at making progress on our scenes. After Bryn, who plays Romeo, and I made notes about  the emotions we displayed in the separate scenes we were not in before recording it, the emotions became more clear to the audience and helped support our claim  that Romeo and Juliet are similar. We also increased our understanding of our lines, which let us have less trouble with reciting them and behave in more ways that support our thesis. Bryn  and I, also, were able  to act in a similar manor to each other, especially in our movements, such as when we both fell down on the bed in our respective scenes. Adler, who plays Friar Lawrence and the Nurse, also uses his own body language and tone in his two scenes to separately contrast to the behaviors of Romeo and Juliet in different ways, such as his calm manor about Romeo’s banishment in his scene with Romeo and his frantic anger over Tybalt’s death in his scene with me.

          Despite our excellent work, there are still some areas that need to be improved. Our performance itself was too long, as it took eight minutes and 30 seconds in total to shoot. The re are certain scenes that are longer than others, as the monologues in the beginning are  very similar to each other and fit similar timing that is needed for a double monologue. This is not true with the later scenes, especially the last scene with Romeo and  Friar Lawrence. The length of this scene can be explained by the lengthy monologues by both the Friar and Romeo.  The other scenes do not have monologues from more than one character, as in the second scene and  the first scene is a double monologue, where Romeo and Juliet are saying their monologues at the same time for the majority of the scene.
My group also need to develop more blocking in the last two scenes. As a viewer of the performance, someone might think that the scenes got boring after the first scene, because the first scene was very dynamic and including more movement, while the later two scenes have very limited movement. This can be fixed by going through the two scenes and adding more blocking to help convey the similarities between Romeo and Juliet.
     I am excited to share my ideas about our scenes with my group. Hopefully, we will work together with our own ideas to make our scenes even better.


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