Assignment 6: Madye Moore

Personally, I am not a fan of presenting of any sort, especially performances in front of a large group of people. However, I believe that the actual performances of "The Importance of Being Earnest" not only enhanced my reading of the text and brought on some new and different interpretations, but it also forced a lot of people to go out of their comfort zone in a good way (me included, although I didn't have many lines). I think that my group did an exceptional job with the execution of our scene, with the little amount of time and on-stage preparation we were given before the actual performance. We acted the scene out exactly as it was on our script, followed our stage directons, had props for each character, projected our voices well to the audience, stayed in character/portrayed each of our characters accurately, and I feel that we conveyed the comedy of manners very well throughout our scene. However, there were definitely some places where we fell short of where we probably should have been. Although I feel that our group was prepared when it comes to stage directions and where we were supposed to be throughout our scene, I do not think we were very prepared when it comes to line memorization. Sure, I had my lines memorized (considering I only had 8), but I definitely think that the rest of the group had difficulty memorizing theirs (understandably so, considering that both Samantha and Keionna often had paragraphs to memorize for just one line). I am not pointing fingers towards either of them for not having memorized their lines, since I know I probably wouldn't have been able to memorize them either, but I do feel that there could have been more time put into the memorization of lines, and I feel that the lack of memorization took away from our actual performance. Perhaps we should have chosen another scene with an equal distribution of memorization across characters rather than a heavy emphasis on just two characters, or we should have split the roles up differently, but I do feel that memorization is a big part when it comes to performing, and we definitely lacked in that area. I also feel that we lacked in utilization of space. Yes, we wanted to focus on just one area of the stage (where we set up our table for our scene), but I feel that we may have been better off with a table in the middle, or even just having different parts of the scene in different areas of the stage. However, I still believe that the table we chose was a perfect setting for our scene, and I believe that we worked well with what we had. 

All in all, although I despised this project when we were presented with it, I think that the performances definitely enhanced my meaning of the play as a whole. The performances opened my eyes to the many different interpretations one could have of each scene and how it is to be acted out, as well as forced me to take a deeper look into separate scenes of the play as well, which definitely helped when it comes to my comprehension of the play as a whole.