The story of two different wolrds

The novel that our group adapted to a new version is "my love, my love" by Rosa Guy. The novel is basically about a tragic destiny of peasant girl "Ti moune" and her star crossed love story. Ti moune's tragedy begins when she finds out Daniel crushed in his car in the forest. She falls in love with the rich boy Daniel at first sight which she is not supposed to desire. At the beginning, she only cares about the boy's well being. However at the last part, her desire toward Daniel becomes too huge so that she couldn't handle. Although she has been grown up in the peasant village, since she was adopted by her parents, there are a lot of part that shows Ti moune's difference from other peasants. She always had the desire and curiosity about outside world of the peasant village and the book emphasized that desire and curiosity as the cause of her death. But also, her death can be interpreted as a true freedom because of the butterflies that come out from her body after she dies.

In the scene that our group reinterpreted, we emphasized the contrast between rich and poor. Our group didn't agree with how the book described that her death was her fault. So, we decided to make the rich as villain. In the book, Daniel actually loves Ti moune but he had no choice but to chooses his fiance "Andrea" because he is in the situation that he can't change or do anything with. That characteristic reduces Daniel's fault for Ti moune's death in the book, so we gave a slight change to Daniel's characteristic. We changed his character from indecisive young man to womanizer playboy so that we can show how the rich ruins the peasants which also represents the strong and the weak. To show the extreme contrast we used music as the biggest source. Fortunately, since our group had amazing musicians, we used ukulele for the peasant's side and piano for the rich side.

To act a Daniel, my key point was showing the different attitude between in front of Ti moune and his father Gabriel. I acted very gentle and sweet to Ti moune but I showed Daniel's real personality which is a playboy who never thinks about girls seriously in the conversation with father.

 

For the staging, we put couch and piano on the left side of the stage which represents rich side and we put ukulele and some cushion on the right side of the stage. Our scene starts from the narrator standing middle of the stage introducing the play. Then we perform peasant side and rich side in an order.

 

 

Being an actor

Our group's interpretation is mostly based on the original text. Instead of creating whole new settings, we inserted few things to emphasize the contrast between rich and poor. First thing that we used to describe the contrast was music. Since our group has wonderful musicians, music was the first source that we came up with. James who plays Tonton plays ukulele which represents poor side and Ben who plays Gabriel plays piano which represents rich side. More than only playing those instruments, we also used music in our lines. While peasants concern about their daily survival, riches have conversation about old classical music which also show extreme contrast. Also, we focused on creating the characteristic of riches. Since the original text really didn't describe the riches, we needed to imagine what riches talk about and make the personalities up. And that is where we came up with Daniel's character which is really different from original Daniel's character.
 We tried to make Daniel as mean character as we could so audience can feel that rich actually destroyed poor. Original text is more focused on Desiree's desire. Story begins with her own desire and ends up to the tragedy which is result of her desire. However, we didn't really agree with the ending and wanted more realistic and critical ending. So, we started our scene with showing the contrast and led to the tragedy which is all caused by riches. Our goal is to make audience feel this story is about how cruel the rich are, not a naive peasant girl's sad love story.

 There are a lot of personal challenges for me to do this project. The biggest issue is acting out our performance for 20 minutes and keeping our energy which also requires the perfect memorization of lines. Since all of our group members never had an experience of performing on the stage for 20 minutes and are not professional actors, it is really challenging to be an actor who can deliver what author meant to show. To do so, first, we all need to memorize the lines perfectly which is really challenging work for me. Secondly, we need to create and put emotions in the lines and control them. Even if I got that second step, it is extremely difficult to recall and expose those same level of emotions every time when we perform. I think it is because my personal level of energy changes by what happened to me on that day in real life, but I still need to express appointed amount of energy when I perform. And I think that is one of the most important skill that is required to actors. Also, to make our scene better, actors need to create more chemistry with each other and better teamwork which we are not really good at yet. Ben and I are still focusing on remembering our lines when we practice on the stage. As soon as we are completely done with lines, we are going to work on our emotions and character.