Monday, February 26, 2018

800-1000 Word First Draft

The Glass Menagerie is a play that is about a very poor disfunctional family that lives in St. Louis. The three characters are Amanda who is the mother, Tom who is the son and Laura who is the daughter. They all live together and Tom is the one who works to pay the bills for the family. Tom is 22 years old and is works in a shoe factory. He has dreams of being a writer but is stopped by his mother Amanda.

Tom is a very angry person. One moment he is quiet and minding his own business and then the next moment he is yelling. This is for good reason though because Amanda is always telling him what to do. For instance, in the scene we performed, Tom had just arrived at home from his job and sat down and started eating. Amanda notices and starts to tell Tom how to eat his food in great detail. This always makes Tom mad enough to where he has to leave the room and get a cigarette.  His feeling towards Amanda is very negative. Because she constantly disturbes him, Tom has an extreme motivation to leave the house and let Amanda and Laura live on their own which is nods up happening at the end of the book. When I was playing Toms character I felt the anger he was feeling in the book. Playing his role really helped me to understand how angry he was because I needed to understand when to raise my voice. Tom feels trapped and the only thing that calms him down is smoking and drinking.

One of the only reasons that Tom stays is because of Laura. Toms stays because he knows that Laura would have nothing if he left because she is so afraid to do anything accept play with her glass menagerie. She does not have any life skills to use and Amanda allows her to not do anything. However, by the end of the book, Tom is so fed up with how Amanda treats him, that he leaves anyway.

In my performance we acted out a combination of the first scene and the arguement between Tom and Amanda when he goes to the movies. We also included some of the beggining of Toms monologue. In the monologue I was talking very slowly and very sad. The monologue was to show that Tom is all on his own in the world. In the monologue, I felt like Tom was upset with himself because he left, but then he remembers all that had happened to him when he was living with Amanda and he then remembers why he did leave. In our performance, Tom entered into the scene from the bridge. We did this because we wanted to show Tom entering into his own memories. After the first scene that we performed, Tom exited out of the scene through the bridge.

There were two monologues that we did in our performamce. The first one was for Tom and the second one was for Laura. We did this because Laura did not have very many lines but also because we wanted to show the audience what Laura thinks about when Tom and Amanda are fighting. Tom and Amanda froze and the spotlight was on Laura and she started to talk about her glass animals. This is important for Laura because she always keeps her feelings to herself and does not like to talk to other people at all. When Tom and Amanda are fighting, this is what Laura thinks about because she cannot deal with all of the arguing.

Our second part of the performance was the climax of what we performed. It was the breaking point for Tom. This was our way of showing that Tom left them for good. In the beginning of this scene, Tom is minding his own business and writing. Laura tells Amanda that Tom is trying to write and so instead of leaving him alone, Amanda starts to bother him by telling him to turn the lights on and to sit up. She does not understand that Tom wants to be on his own and he gets very angry very quickly. Amanda treats Tom like he is a child even though he pays for the house and he does everything for both Amanda and Laura. She does not own a single thing in the house yet she refers to the house as her own and Tom raises a valid point when he asks her "who pays the rent on the house?"

This house is very dysfunctional and Tom gets so sick of the same thing every day that he leaves at the end of the book and does not care what happens to Laura or Amanda.  

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Essay Outline

• In my paper I will write about how angry Tom is because of the way his life is going. This drives his motivation to leave.
• I will also talk about the feelings toward Amanda that Tom has.
• I will do the same for Laura because that is one of the only people that keeps Tom around.
• I will talk about the amount of practice and preparation for the scene.
• I will discuss Toms character a lot because that is who I played.
• I will also talk about what changes we made to the script and actions.

Tom is very angry with his life and it is very evident in the script. He gets mad very easily because he feels stuck in a life of mediocrity.

Amanda is forcing him to stay because they need money and a house and food. So Tom is their only support.


Laura does not know what to think because she lives in her own world.



Monday, February 5, 2018

Peer Refloction for Performamce

I received a lot of good feed back from my peers in class who watched our performance. They were a very good audience I learned a lot about what I needed to do, to execute a better performance. One of the big things that people said was that I was talking too fast for people to understand very well. This is important for me to work on so that I can make sure to connect with the audience. My goal is to help the audience understand Tom for how he feels, what his daily life is like, what his goals are and what he thinks about the situation that he is in. It is important to understand this because if helps me and the audience to have a well rounded opinion about what they think about Tom. I have done a few things to work on this. One thing was just practicing my lines in a slower manner. It is hard to speak slowly so I have to work on that extra hard. Sometimes I tend to mumble when I have to say a lot of words. This is a problem that I need to fix for my performance so it does not affect my grade or my groups grade. I am also going to start working harder at memorizing my lines so that I do not have to read out of the book. This will help my overall performance because I can focus o my actions and feeling rather than the line that I have to find in the book to read. I have been working on me origins them this past weekend to know them better. Hopefully working on both of these things will help my performance be better and ready for the final performance do the IB.