Great work Priscilla and Michael! It's so nice to see how this script has come alive throughout the semester. I'm sorry I couldn't come to the full read-though (parents in town...) so my comments about the play are restricted to act two.
Affirmations:
My biggest affirmation is you've really deepened all of the characters in this revision. Their language is more specific, their desires are more clear, and I completely buy their relationships. John, in particular, has become more interesting to me (I always loved Betty and Anna). See the question section for a little more on John...
I also really like the integration of the poetic language - as I said in class, it helps me believe in the possibility of magic in this play. Does this kind of language permeate act one as well?
The last moment of the play is lovely.
I really love the way Anna is situated as the center of this world and other characters kind of revolve around her. And yes it doesn't feel like she's the only developed character - just that her POV is the one the audience is asked to take. Which is doubly interesting because she's less easy to sympathize with than Betty and John. Very cool.
Questions:
This question would have been answered if I'f been able to see act one, but i'll ask it anyway... as an audience, are we building up to Anna's confession of her "black widow-ness"? I'm sure that we are building a tension of "why is she so afraid of commitment?" "Why does she act so strangely in relationships?" but I'm not sure those tensions alone earn the black widow confession. Are there other clues peppered throughout? The black widow conversation feels a little unearned right now, and I'm not sure whether smaller cues will help us with that, or if the black widow idea is just one too many interesting ideas in this play.
In this draft I started to really get a sense of how the idea of memory/fogetting/choosing to forget was connected to choices around Anna's ability to love and commit. I'm not sure that I can TOTALLY articulate how it's connected - the emotional logic was there for me, but I think you could push it further so that the parallels and connections are a *little* more on the surface. Connected to this, I wonder about how John is connected to ideas of memory and forgetting. The connection is a little less tricky with Betty for me - maybe because the themes of aging and femininity that are also tied up in the hair idea can apply to her more directly. While John has become more likable and interesting in this draft, he still seems a bit like he's only a character in reference to Anna. How might he connect more to the forgetting? What does he want to forget? What are his thoughts on remembering painful memories? How could the hair/memory stuff be related to the ways that he fights to keep Anna?
Opinion:
As you know, I have trouble with Carol in the play. I think she's a fun character (and so beautifully performed by Allison) but I think the structures you've set up (at least in act two) are just aching for this to exist as a three-person play. Like a little atom with Anna at the center. I have an image of this play becoming more and more tightly would as Anna negotiates her love, loss, memory, and commitments with John and Betty. Every time I add Carol into this mental image, that momentum and tightness diffuses...This may not be true in act one, but in act two she feels SOMEWHAT like a character who is there to offer Anna a chance to express herself verbally in ways that she can't with J and B. But to this I say, there are much more interesting ways for Anna to express herself (a la the scene where we watch her cut her own hair). Ok, I'll stop banging the kill Carol drum. I just think she might need her own play and to leave this one to the very dynamic trio at it's center.
Nice job in class - you both have done great work, and the restructuring of act two feels really right!
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