Dear Even Hansen assignment - Production Diaries 18th - 22nd Nov

Monday,

absent

Tuesday, 

Today I came in when I was very ill for the assessment of our Dear Evan Hanssen duologue. It’s being filmed to add to our showreel to use when we leave college as well as being assessed. Me and Delroy are more than ready to do this, we understand our characters motives and we really opened up to listening  and responding in our characters. I believe it went really well, we took 2 takes of the scene and we were  very impressed with the outcome. I'm really happy that me and Delroy decided to work with each other, we could really get to work and bring out these characters. After this I had to go home as I was very ill but the grainy voice helped me to sound more angry in the assessment. To start off with, me and delroy chose the scene between Connor and Evan, which is really the only time they have a real interaction. It’s one of the first encounters of the two character so the personality’s and status are very clear from the get go. Looking back on this I think we made the right choice, we have some very clear given circumstances which is a heavy focus for the assignment. The two character are in the library when Connor makes his way over to Evan, he taunts and intimidates him however there is a lot of sadness in connors need belittle, mostly because he thinks he’s similar to Evan as he feels lonely and vulnerable. Connor then proceeds to hand Evan a note he had found that he believes belongs to Evan that he found at the printer, he then opens and reads it to then find that Evan had wrote about his sister in the letter (The letter is actually a diary style letter that he writes to himself as he was instructed by his therapist to do as some sort therapy). It then escalates leading to Connor stealing the letter and storming out. The text gives us a lot to go of. There’s a lot of beats and moments between characters that shows Evans vulnerability and Connors attempts to be intimidating and passive aggressive. This makes for some interesting pacing and and rhythm. To take on the role of Connor I thought a lot about what makes people perceive someone as stand-offish and intimidating and most importantly what makes them this way, in Connors case he is obviously dealing with some pretty serious mental health issues as in the story he ends up committing suicide. We never find out the real reason of his suffering but we could tell he was not telling it all up, he was disassociated with friends and family and had a lot of anger towards people. My character personally is very different to Connors so this was definitely a challenge for me. There is one part of subtext that really interests me, was when Connor writes his name in massive capitals in Evans cast and then proceeds to say “now we can pretend like we both have friends”, this could sound like someone sort of actual attempt of connections between Connor and Evan but the since he says the word “Pretend” it’s really a big dig at Evan while also showing a lot of sadness in Connors life. Given all this, we put a lot of effort into this very short duologue, we put on a convincing monologue with clear motives and emotions. I faced the challenge of truly dropping my own personality, it was quite hard and even in the end there was still a bit of me in the performance. I think this piece definitely taught me a lot more about naturalism and how there’s so much more to nitpick. 

Wednesday,

absent

Thursday, 

We are hoping to get a full run through done today, and when we aren't doing anything we should be running scenes with anyone who needs to. Being off for a while I needed to catch up on some blocking and working out what we are doing with our marionets. We have two people that will be playing Stromboli's marionets that he can control and talk to. So far its really great fun to experiment with how I can move about the stage, it adds a whole new level to the performance. 

Friday,

Today we and a few others were involved in  a project with film and tv, our friend Olly is making a mock take of the Jeremy Kyle show called "the Jimmy Fent show", after readying the scrip we were very interested in being apart of it. Taking part in it I was the character of Dave who is the only normal one participation in the show, its almost like they have dragged him off the street to make him participate in fake drama for the show. This was actually a big challenge because nobody could stop laughing, keeping a straight face was very hard but it only took a day of filming to complete. We were given a lot of freedom to improvise which led to some funny moments as well.