David Chiu

Tonight I performed my scene from “One Sunday Afternoon” with one of my two partners for Tom. Honestly, I wasn’t very prepared and had not worked on the scene since Saturday’s class. Even worse, I forgot to bring my script. Now I do have it pretty much memorized, but since we are finishing up performing the scene as a “table reading” I like to have the script with me “just in case”.

In tonights performance I was trying to address the major issues Tom had with my performance: making Biff Grimes bigger in his actions and making him more awkward. On our first run-through we got a third of the way through the scene and then I realized I didn’t know my next line. After a couple moments of me being silent it was obvious I didn’t know my lines and Tom stopped the scene. He then told me, “You realize you should really have your lines memorized by now.” I said, “But I do, I swear”. He replied, “You better not swear too hard.”

After looking at my partner’s script real quick we started the scene again. This time I didn’t drop any lines.

Tom’s critique tonight was still pretty much the same. Yes, I was more awkward and bigger this time around but I was “acting” instead of having this behavior come naturally. All the behavior should come from the emotional place of feeling grateful and unworthy of Amy’s love.

As I was thinking about the emotional character of Biff Grimes it hit me. My scene seems very similar to the Bible story of the prodigal son who returns to his father after he spent all his inheritance money and how much he wanted to be back in his fathers house. Instead of his father scolding him, he welcomes his son with open arms. This feeling of redemption and unworthiness I feel is reflected in my scene.

More and more I am starting to realize that acting is like playing music. In music there are many notes and ways of a playing those notes to communicate emotion. In acting there are many emotions and different ways to portray that emotion to communicate a message.