Lost Girl Monologue Final Draft Reflection

 

Monologue due -- post video on your blog and reflect on the process and product -- what did you learn? what did you do well? what was difficult? what do you need to work on?

    After working on this monologue for the past couple weeks, I am pretty happy with the final product. When we first started looking for monologues I had no idea what I wanted to perform. I looked through several monologues on the internet and through some of the monologue books in the black box, but nothing that I was looking at necessarily felt right or felt like something that I could relate to. I decided to look through a couple more scripts that Ms. Guarino brought into the black box. The very first script that I picked up was Lost Girl by Kimberly Belflower and the first page that I flipped to was the first part of my final monologue. After reading over the first part of this monologue, I immediately felt like this monologue was one that I wanted to work with and make my own. The first thing that I did in my process was read over the entire play to get some context for the monologue and a full idea of the play. When I picked this monologue I had no idea that this play was about the original musical/story Peter Pan, but I was pleased to learn this after reading the play because I realized that this creates so many new levels and complexities to the monologue that stem from the continued story of Peter Pan in Lost Girl. 

   The next step in my process was to splice two different parts of the play together to create my monologue. There were two different overriding emotions that I wanted to capture in this monologue: sadness/frustration and happiness when in memory. I was able to find two different parts of the play that suggested these emotions. Next I took extensive notes on my character, the context of the monologue, and the emotions/meaning behind the monologue. I used the exercises in the Theater in Practice book to guide my notetaking/research. After this I began to annotate my monologue: I spliced the monologue  into sections of beginning, middle, and ending, changes in emotion, pauses, actions/movements, etc. After annotating my monologue I practiced with my script several times to try out some of the ideas I had for different actions, emotions, and body language. I changed my mind several times on how to best present the emotions, ideas, and meaning in my monologue, so some of my initial ideas or annotations were not in the final product. What really helped me decide what to change and keep was feedback from my peers and Ms. Guarino; I tried to consider all of the suggestions that I got and make some changes after each feedback session to improve my monologue. For my final product, I memorized my script and applied the changes to my original concept, and recorded! 

    I learned a lot from this monologue project! Reading through the Theater in Practice book was very helpful for this project because the exercises really helped me better understand my character and their emotions. This project helped me learn a lot about the long process of working on a monologue; I had no idea how much work, research, and practice goes into creating a successful monologue. I think I probably learned the most about communicating emotions through body language while performing my monologue because my monologue was particularly dependent on body language. 

     Throughout this project I think I did a good job at trying to apply some of the feedback and constructive criticism to my second and final drafts. I tried to incorporate some of my own new ideas and my classmates' feedback to improve my monologue. Because the process seems to be about quite a lot of experimentation, I think I did a good job exploring different possibilities for this scene. I hope that I was able to take this monologue to new levels with the final draft that go farther than the draft that I initially started with. 

    One thing that I struggled with in this process that was even mentioned in the Theater in Practice book was that I noticed myself analyzing the play and the monologue from a literary point of view instead of a theatrical stance. I think I often resorted to this because I was constantly thinking of all of the complexities and possible routes that I could take with this monologue so I wanted to break down and explain everything which was easiest to do from a literary/English class perspective. I hope that I was able to break away from this a little bit with my final product while doing the story of Lost Girl justice, as well as create a monologue that can stand on its own and still hold meaning. I also struggled with feeling awkward and uncomfortable with presenting/recording a monologue where my character is very vulnerable, therefore making me feel vulnerable (especially to criticism). I would like to try to build my confidence so that I am not as nervous to share and try new things in theater that will improve my acting skills.