Speak the Speech

The second meeting of our cast went off without a hitch. Both actors arrived on time, and we began our warm-ups immediately. We played a few improv-ish character games, just to get Brendan and Jason interacting with each-other, and then I sat them down and showed them where their picnic was probably going to be on stage. I explained how they were going to have to adjust their play style because they weren't just playing out to a one-directional audience, but were rather surrounded. They took pretty kindly to this idea, and given the staging of this particular show it shouldn't prove too much of an issue.

I had them read a bit of the script, and after a few minutes it became apparent that some decent amount of annunciation work needed to be done. I ran to the back of the theatre and shouted that I wanted to hear them from there, and they started slowing down, so as to speak more loudly and more clearly. We'll probably do some more speech work in other rehearsals, maybe some tongue twisters (or maybe I'll even make them sing).