This week we ran through the last few ending scenes. The last few scenes of the play are the most difficult to interpret within the play, the lack of stage directions makes it hard to know how the other characters react to the situation. We decided to workshop a few ideas.
Our first approach to the situation was to act scared and shocked. This is when we looked into the fight or flight theory. When we looked at each of our characters we all decided that none of our characters were the fighting type. Instead we decided to all react shocked and scared, fleeing from their chairs and screaming for a few brief moments. I decided that Cissy would be the most likely to hide behind Bennett for protection, although Bennett wouldn't be of much help. Tristan (Tanya) would be the one to scream out of the group, possibly fall of his chair. Nicky, I believe, would freeze in his seat, but I'm not he would freeze out of fear, more out of caution. Chadwick is already standing so I think he would back up to the wall with a look of shocked fear. When trying out this idea, we showed it to our teacher. Our teacher picked out the fact that it looked too staged, and perhaps to over the top. After reflecting upon this, we found this scene was to similar to the wasp scene. The wasp scene is dramatic for comedic values, this scene had to be far more serious.
We then tried a different approach. We all sat and discussed what we would do if this situation was to occur in real life. We all decided that we wouldn't know what we would do, we would be frozen in fear. We then work shopped this idea. When we showed this back to our teacher he told us that this idea was far more realistic and would work perfectly for our play.
We came across another problem within this last scene when rehearsing. We had to include 3 deaths within this. Murders are extremely hard to perform in a play in a realistic way, especially with a gun. We have two main problems with a shooting in the play. The first is we have to make their deaths believable. The second is that we have to do so from a long distance with a fake gun, so the timing and gun usage has to be perfect. When discussing this scene we decided to invest in a fake gun that fires nothing but sounds real. Dan told us that he has a few guns like this where he works. I came up with the idea of blood capsules that the characters can either place in their mouth or in their pockets. Bennett is the first character to die and he is shot twice. Cissy then runs over to him, screaming. If Dan had a blood capsule in his pocket, Cissy would be able to run over to him place her hand in his pocket and pull it out with blood all over her hands. This adds a gory, horror effect to the scene, making their deaths more realistic.
I have never worked with a naturalistic death scene before, so the challenges we face are fun to experiment with, working with different ideas to compose the perfect outcome.
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