Ava Rose Paul

1st Scene Reflection

Jason Jacobs
September 25, 2019
Madge and Mille

In the first Rehearsal we immediately dove into the essence of the play, which is solely
frustration for all of the characters, because everyone wants something that they can’t have.
Madge wants adventure and to leave this town, and to be swept off her feet, but in reality she’s
been groomed and pricked to be the trophy of the town that no one can have, but at the same
time anyone with money can have her. It’s funny because in the showing I was asked what’s her
objective and I said to get Alan to marry her, because that’s what her Mom wants, but really it’s
to get out of this lonely miserable town. I knew that’s what she wanted, but I never looked at it as
her objective. I love one of the lines in the play saying: beauty is equal to being a king. She has
so much power with her beauty, but at the same time people don’t take her seriously because of
it. All they see is her beauty but what about her voice and her opinions. Madge never gets a say.
All in all we talked a lot about our characters, elements of the home, our father, and our
relationship as sisters.
The second time that we met, we did a lot of sourcing with characters. We talked about
people in our life that would be Hal, Alan, and Juanita. Doing this helped us bond together as
scene partners and also our characters, so that we would know who we were talking about. We
felt that it helped us a lot, to get into character and realize that the neighbors can hear us. Adding
the neighbors helped raise the stakes of the scene as well. We used rope to look at power
between the characters. We feel like Millie is really driving the scene because Madge just wants
to relax. Using the rope was a great discovery because it really helped us see the power struggle
but also helped with listening and impacting.
In the third rehearsal I felt like I found a lot of discovery with Madge because I was
having a hard time figuring out why she changes the conversation and talks about painting her
toenails. What she’s trying to do is not talk about Hal, because when Millie does all these new
feelings come up.
During the scene showing, it definitely wasn’t our best run, but it was still decent. It’s
funny that Jason pointed out that Madge is on her “5 minute break” because that’s how I
originally played it in the very beginning stages and then it switched to trying to help Millie. But
I loved playing that, so I’m going to keep playing it to see where it goes.
Our next steps to bettering the scene is to try all different types of tactics, because we feel
like there are so many ways to take the scene. I feel like we’ve done so much to the characters
and around them, that now it is really about playing and seeing what works best. Also, to work
more on the objectives because obviously we need to hone in on it more, because it wasn’t
coming out to the audience. This scene is hard to do because for Madge this is her break, while
Millie is trying to get information from me for the picnic. The scene is before everything
important happens in the play, so it’s a kind of a liminal scene. So, I feel like that’s the most
challenging part about it. I think by just playing with the scene more and more we will find the
purpose and meaning of the scene.