Character Choices and Portrayal Justifications

We are adapting Life As We Knew It for our final project and I am very excited. I’ve read the book a couple of times already, so I feel like I’ve gotten to know our characters. I am playing Miranda in our adaptation. I was torn between playing her and the Mom, but Random.org picked for me.

Miranda is the ‘lead’ of the book, meaning that it is her point of view that the story is told from. The book is written as a diary that follows her through the events that result from the moon falling out of its orbit. This book is very heavy, but the beginning is mostly lighthearted. It is looking back on those first few entries that I feel the most burdened by the story. Seeing the good times now after reading through the bad, they appear to be tinged in grey and almost harder to get through, harder to recall than the events post-moon. This mournful feeling that these happy scenes can bring when contrasted with the harsh realities of this family’s new world is what inspired me to adapt the book in the way we have with a post-moon scene being followed by a before moment.

We tried to establish our characters through small snippets, but almost more important that showing who they are, is using the next scene to show that they’re not anything like that anymore. Miranda was a girl who cared a lot about her grades. She was a type-A student who wanted to follow in her brother’s footsteps and get into college. She’s smart, but she was also a teenage girl with boy problems and a strange best friend. She’s normal, but we see this shift in her when she has to step up and contribute because her family’s life depends on it to a person that isn’t a whole person. I need to show a clear contrast to what her priorities were before* and after- to what occupied her thoughts. There needs to be a shift in her entire demeanor from frustrated but happy to struggling and suicidal. One moment when we see this shift to a world this family doesn't recognize and to people who don’t recognize themselves is when Miranda is confronted by an eerily silent mother in scene 1. I think it’s crucial to showing this shift that I am surprised when my mother gets quiet, but that by the end I am just resigned to this reality and show no clear emotions. Miranda also becomes pragmatic after, so much so that she yells at her brother to just shut up and don’t feel guilty for eating two meals when they have only one- so much so that she recognizes that it would be easier if she killed herself.

Miranda is just a normal teenage girl. I don’t think she needs to be played as anything despite that stereotype for the before scenes. I don’t think she needs to have a serious disposition or already have been showing herself to be a leader and a strong woman because she just wasn’t. That’s part of the reason why the story is so powerful; she was normal and then she wasn’t. This contrast and change in her is what I want to highlight most, so I’ll act normally for the before scenes and noticeably withdrawn for after. A transition from a teenage girl’s emotion to having none will show how drastically the moon issue affected their lives. It is this demonstration of change that I think will make our script powerful.

*(I realized I had been referring to before and after without explaining them. They are just shorthand for the point in the story. After refers to the world after the moon crisis and before to life pre-moon.)