First Draft Reflection

      After a few weeks of preparation, me and my partner Yichen finally made our first run on the stage this Thursday. Although it was a pretty rough draft, we got many valuable feedbacks from our teacher and classmates and had a discussion about our next step. Here are some main problems of our first performance, which were pointed out in the feedbacks, and the corresponding reflections on them. 

      First of all, too many monologues fade out the color of the play. Monologues were set as a big part in the overall four scenes. At first, we wanted to use such internal monologues to express some detailed feelings of the two characters, which were not mentioned a lot in the original text. Since the author wrote this story from only the daughter's perspective, the mother's thoughts were not clearly conveyed to the readers. However, after the first performance, we found that it is a huge challenge thing to make the monologue more vivid. When I read my monologue at the stage, I did not know what else I could do. I was just standing there at a fixed position. I tried to add some body movements  like walking around a little bit but I still can feel how stiff I was. Thus, I was thinking that if we can change some parts of monologue into the form of dialogue so that more interactions would be added into the play and it also would be easier to show more emotions. However, this is still not an ideal solution because dialogues cannot be added in some circumstances like when the mom has her first monologue in the second scene (she is standing in the hallway and peeking at her daughter). Therefore, maybe the only solution would be to "enrich" our monologues by using some props. For example, when I say "she is that irresponsible and indifferent mom", I can through my coat or schoolbag on the floor to show my anger. In the following week, I will try to figure out adding more detailed movement like this into my monologue. 

      Except the lack of interaction, we also need to work on many details. Start with the stage setting, we need to reconsider the placement of some props. Be more specifically, in the first scene where I was braiding Yichen's hair, our teacher pointed out that it would be better for me to stand behind Yichen to braid her hair instead of sitting there because that was how she would usually braid her daughter's hair. I thought that was a pretty interesting point. Since braiding someone's hair is not a thing that I would usually do in my life, I might ignore some "common sense". Besides, we also met a question that whether we really need some "huge props". In the second scene where the daughter was sitting in the classroom, we wanted to use that huge triangle boards to show that the place was at classroom and another grey board to show that the daughter and mother were not in the same place. However, when we had our first run on the stage, we found that it was really a time-consuming thing to set up all the props between each scene, which would eventually waste a lot of time. Thus, we were reconsidering that how can we mostly simplify the props but still can express the same thing. Beyond that, the only left thing is to memorize our lines. I will keep practicing the speaking pace, the tone and emotion. And for the grammatical mistakes made in our scripts, we would go to the writing center to ask for helps.