I don't know why I find this image so appealing, but I do. In the background, I'm setting up a Playbook scene with Sol, Mark, and Ben. But there's Mike, looking good for the camera. The other pictures from this class (127 of them!) can be found in the album.
We had a smaller and more experienced group this night, so we got in a few more smaller group scenes. After a warm-up of Pass the Clap and 1-Word Story, we started the scene work with some Last Letter scenes. My favorite scene in this set took place at the Renaissance Faire with Eric, Mark, and Andre. Mark, who was trying to play a woman in the scene, had a unique way of emphasizing his non-intuitive gender.
We then moved on to a series of Sound Effects scenes which I intended to be based on a set of random, recorded sound effects. For a couple of scenes this worked wonderfully. But then, the battery ran out on my ipod, and we were left with the more traditional, mouth based sounds. However, I think everyone agreed that the scenes with the technical effects were great - so we'll be trying that again.
We moved on to three person Playbook scenes (also known as Actor's Nightmare). There were some very intense scenes in that set, and since I'm sure that describing those scenes won't do them justice, I'm not even going to try. But I'm really glad those scenes happened.
We also got in a round of Irish Drinking Songs. Since this is an experienced group, I'm sorry we didn't try a new song. I believe it's time to bring back a few of the more difficult song rotations to keep challenging all the players.
We got in a set of 3-Line Drills, and then we did a few rounds of Montage. As I mentioned last week, it's time that we started using some of the skills we've been practicing and move into multi-scene structures. This week, we re-introduced basic scene transitions and sequences of open scenes. We'll work on these structures for the next few weeks.
That's it for this week!