For our final project, we adapted Susan Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It. It's been one of my favorite books since middle school and was very excited about the possibility of performing it. I found it on my bookshelf when trying to come up with some idea to pitch. It became almost entirely different story now that I was looking at it with the intention of adapting it. My experience is this class made me seek out key relationships and made me pay closer attention to their affect on the story and the characters upon rereading it. I got this cool idea of focusing on this shift between how the characters changed due to the events of the books. These characters are facing a world post-apocalypse scenario. The moon fell out of position and the world is dying. The book focuses on one family, specifically the young girl in that family, and now they cope with their new lives, how they live in this new world. The family dynamics have to adjust rapidly. Not only is their environment changing, but so are they, and consequently, so are their relationships with each other. I wanted to highlight these differences, which gave me the idea of staging only parts of the story in terms of BEFORE the moonpocalypse and AFTER.
We had some problems starting up just because I'm the only one who had read the book, but we worked hard on developing our characters and trying to figure out how they would treat each other. Not everyone needed to know exactly what happened because it was about just making sure how the characters felt in this new situation where they were powerless to what was around them contrasted with the BEFORE scenes. We had a small hiccup when Maddie and I switched roles because there was some awkwardness with the relationship we were trying to portray. Maddie felt she wasn't exactly right for the Mother's role and overall, I think it worked out for the best.
Our script was kind of abstract because we didn't want to waste time explaining what's happened because it makes the conversation seem kind of contrived and takes away from how the conversation between the characters was changing. Jack's character gave us the opportunity to explain to the audience a very general idea of what the family's situation was. He became a character in Scene 3, so the first two scenes were without this background, which I think allowed the audience to just focus on the relationship dynamic because that's all we presented to them.
I think the performance went well. We only wanted the very center of the stage in the shot and I hadn't realized how much more of the stage that not only the cameras were seeing but the lights were hitting. If we were to run it again, I'd want to limit the amount of stage that was lit up perhaps by just dimming their brightness. They were a little strong. I would also have had them a little lower just so it didn't appear so bright, especially due to the somber nature of the adaptation.
The stage layout for the AFTER scenes looks a little odd after seeing it from this perspective. The second bench (the one I use) shouldn't have been angled out so much. It separates me from the other people talking in the scene and looks awkward in some places in which I'm trying to look at someone but I can't quite face them directly. Otherwise, I liked how bare our set was. It was convenient, but also showed how the same things can be viewed so differently because of a changing situation.
I think we did OK with getting progressively weaker emotionally and physically as the scenes went on, but at some points, the shivering seemed a little too much or someone got a little to animated. Overall, I think everyone worked to keep the tone consistent , but also the shift between BEFORE and AFTER clear. I think the last scene may have been a little too down, especially since we had established a pattern of sharp contrast, but that was in part due to some mixup so with blocking and some fumbling of lines. There was also at times confusion with where and when people should be entering or exiting, which at times, caused pausing or some awkward staging.
I liked that I got a chance to do something heavier for my final project. I also liked that it was something that we got to adapt for ourselves, and though not having anyone's work to get ideas from was daunting, I think it was a good experience to come up with a creative idea on my own and then try to make it applicable to the stage. I think in some parts there musts have been some confusion for the audience, which is just a flaw in our adaptation. I think additions to the script helped clear things up a bit, but some things were left open to interpretation simply because explicit explanation would have cluttered up the mirroring dialogue between BEFORE and AFTER that we established. I think my group did well, especially for having not read the characters for themselves and then having to step into their roles and portray these key emotional shifts and expressions. I applaud their patience with me when I was trying to work things out and their character development skills that allowed me to just focus on the script changes and not building characters. I'm happy I got to work with this book and due something I hadn't tried before. It was a good way to end a fantastic year in this class.
Here's one last moon picture for good measure.
This is too show how reflective the spelling of final is of my state of mind this week.
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