Out and About

Yesterday was the last day of my section of DRA 10 -- the acting class for non-major undergrads that I teach. After last quarter and all of the sarcastic sassy-pants in my class, I was fortunate to get a really good group. In fact many of them are now good friends and they hang out regularly. How cool is that?

I used A Streetcar Named Desire and The Shape of Things for their final scenes. I ask them if they have a preference and then I cast them with the best role and partner for them. I accidentally put two slackers together and needless to say, their scene was the weakest of the bunch.

For some odd reason my class is mostly guys so it made scene selection very difficult. The first flirty scene in The Shape of Things -- in the museum -- we did with 2 men. One of them was uncomfortable with the homosexuality so as they cut down their own scene they took most of that out. I do have to say it was probably the strongest scene of the day.

I saw The Shape of Things a few years ago at Emory. A group of alums and students produced it themselves. They did it outside at various locations around campus. The audience had a guide that let us from location to location. And the actors for the most part had to run around us or run ahead to get to the next location before we did. It was wild. I mentioned this to my class LAST quarter and it was one of the only times they got excited. So I decided that we would do the Streetcar scenes in our classroom with props and costumes and the Shape scenes outside. We did the same this quarter.

The first scene in the museum was done outside Mrak Hall. They used the egghead "Eye on Mrak" as the sculpture Evelyn (or in this case Alex) defaces. From there we went into the Arboretum and then did two scenes between some classroom buildings.

It was interesting to see the people around us who sometimes stopped to watch and who sometimes did not even look up from their studies.  Melanie came by to watch the scenes and we spoke after the presentation.  Since we studied these plays for 2 quarters now I am thinking it's time to change things up.  I am currently reading Boy Gets Girl, but I am not digging it.  I have a lot of reading on my plate, but I think I will take the next week or so to keep reading plays.  Ah, I have not done THAT in a while.

And now for the grading...