What have you done?

I DID TWO TOURS OF DUTY IN VIETNAM.

Okay, now that that opening line for my character is out of my system, let's get to the analysis of tonight's work.

Tonight I had another character rehearsal. The one I had last week was a breakthrough, and I was hoping for the same thing tonight, but knew it would be hard to top.

It was hard to top, but I (rather, my director and I) may just have done it. AND on a great side note: I didn't have any e-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-i-o-n problems tonight.

So we worked one of my letters, who's opening line starts this post.

The major growth of this letter happened when my director told me to shout my speech. So I did, or at least thought I was until he said,

"That's not shouting. I want you to shout it."

And I replied with,

"You want we to shout it? Okay."

This was mostly to myself, trying to work my way up to it.

So then I opened my mouth and the words carried me home.

Some great things came out of this rehearsal, and some great compliments that I had never heard anyone tell me before. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, I'm just trying to keep it as a personal record of my growth.

ANYways...

I am part of a choreographed fight scene at the top of the show and my director told me that in that scene, which is downstage, I "have the movement of both an athlete and a dancer." But upstage, for my letter we tried to do marching, I tried to do marching, while saying the letter and it was an uncoordinated sloppy marching mess. Maybe, being on a "actual" stage for the marching part intimidated me, matter of fact that probably is exactly what happened. But, we ended up scratching that march anyways, so it's not that big a deal, except for the fact that I couldn't do it.

Another thing that was nice to hear from my director was,

"Don't ignore your talent, by not going there."

This was in regards to when I thought I was shouting, but was really just talking slightly louder compared to when I actually accepted what my character needed to say and convey. I feel like I do this more times than not too. Maybe the reason why I feel that I have so much progress in these character rehearsals is because there are less people watching me than during a standard rehearsal with the entire company. It probably goes back to me still being rather shy, but that I can get over. I just can no longer be afraid to take that extra step whenever the character is leading me.

Another thing I took away from,

"Don't ignore your talent, by not going there."

Was the fact that this was the first time somebody has used the word "talent" to describe my acting.