Assignment 6 Harrison Inocencio

      Theater work has been around since the  very first amphitheater was built in ancient Greece, and it has always been considered a work of great artistic significance. The purpose of plays is not only to tell a story and entertain the audience but it is also to often teach a lesson, or explain a point. Whether that point be a very deep one like the meaning of life, or something less deep like life of an average person, is up to the play writer. Plays have also been used as a satirical tool as well, as it is in "The Importance of Being Earnest". Through clever puns and settle references to real world figures and real parts of society, the viewer is able to laugh along with the play-writer and poke fun at the upper classes of Victorian times, that were so often seen in a negative light. I believe that us actually performing the play for this assignment, helped us to better understand the play and to better maybe better understand the feelings and images being attached to the Victorian upper class by watching it play out in front of our eyes between different figures rather than reading it from a script.
      In the evaluation of our own groups performance I personally though we did quite well, but their was definitely still some areas where we could've improved to push our performance above and beyond. Starting off with mannerisms, I thought we did good in that field, as I think our etiquette and even our accents helped reflect that. However some of our accents were a bit lack luster, and maybe the voices we did were a little to over the top for the style of the play. That evaluation bleeds over into the next voice statement in which I believe much of the same thing. The voices were good, but may have been a little to much and may have distracted from the main theme. Projection and articulation however, I thought were fairly clear. We spoke loud enough and even through our silly impressions I think we could be understood. Our use of space I believe, was pretty mediocre. We kept it isolated to only one portion of the stage and there was little movement as we spoke our dialogue. It was difficult to realize when we were rehearsing but now watching the recording, I can clearly see that space was something we could've improved upon considerably. Overall I thought I performance was very exaggerated and funny, but I think their were some areas that could've been built up, and even some that could've been tuned down, to create a more balanced performance.
      I think that the performance added some real life to the text, and even helped me to better understand the situation that was playing out, by being able to see the actions and events play out on stage rather than read them from the script. In the script, you had to try and create the situations based on just dialogue and a few stage directions, while in the performance, all of that is satisfied for you visually, so you can focus on the events and better understand the play.