DNA Performance Evaluation

For DNA, I played the role of Adam, the boy the group of friends "kill" before it is revealed he survived and is severely brain damaged.  On the surface, he seems to be just a minor role, appearing in the third scene and delivering a monologue, before being escorted off stage by Brian (Or Bri) to be killed, however there was so many layers to this character that I had to unpack if I wanted to portray him in a convincing manner.  An objective of mine was to show the audience truly how much of a victim of the group he is, aswell as the true fear he has of them, which I portrayed by staying very closed off with my body language, hugging myself in a ball and being incredibly jumpy.  For his monologue, I knew I had to deliver it with all the emotion I could, which made me think I should come on stage already quite teary, until I got to my monologue where I began to full on sob.  This was a challenge as while ugly crying I had to make sure my diction was still perfectly clear, and the audience could still understand me.  Furthermore, to contrast the first monologue that Macey had about killing me, we had Bri crying as we believed that Bri and Adam were best friends, so for my monologue, we had Bri laughing, as it also showed his journey of also becoming physiologically damaged.  Due to this, it was also even more of a struggle as I had to battle over the noise of the laughter, aswell as choking back sobs. 

For his costume, I tore up an old school tshirt and pushed it through mud and dirt, aswell as my trousers, to make them look like I had truly been living in the woods for a month.  I also had my face covered by cuts and bruises by a makeup artist, and cuts placed where my shirt was torn.  For the first home performances,  we had the whole set and our wing space, so I could focus on getting myself to cry, which I did by focussing on a single spot on the wall and thinking unpleasant thoughts, which led me to successfully start crying.  When I got thrown onto the stage, I heard the audience collectively gasp, as this was the first time they had seen me and they all were under the assumption I was dead.  Because I was in the moment, this was the first time I was completely in character, which made it easy for me to start sobbing when it got to the point of my monologue, which really helped sell the fear and confusion Adam was going through.  After our home performances, I had to make sure to stay on top of his lines as I still had another  2 school performances to go, one of which I'm still yet to do.  For my first school performance, the stage was incredibly limited, as we had no lighting, aswell as only one entrance and exit.  For this show, I made sure to play him the exact same as these students were actually studying this script.







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