Commedia dell'Arte (continued)

As we continue working on this unit, Mrs. Morris divided us into two groups so that we each do a performance surrounding the various stock characters and comedy techniques we have learned. In my group I had Rema, Talah, JC, Abdul, and Yara. Our story consists of me playing Grace's (Talah) father in the form of the Capitano stock character, and I force Grace (the Colombina, of female lover) to marry Richard, short for Dick (who plays Pantalone as hinted by his nickname). Grace refuses to marry Richard, because she is already in love with Alex (Abdul, who plays the Brighella), so she desperately turns to Baba Ghanoush (Yara, who is Dottore) for help. Baba Ghanoush tells Grace to write a love letter for Alex to explain her feelings, and after she listens to this advice and writes the letter, she tells Chung Woo (Rema, who is the Arlecchino and the servant), to give the letter to her lover. Chung Woo mistakes Richard to be Grace's lover, so she accidentally gives the letter to Richard. Richard gets so excited by this letter that he replies with a sexual letter for Grace, but once again Chung Woo accidentally gives this to Alex instead of Grace. After Alex reads this letter, which he believes to be dedicated to him, he finds Richard and they run away together (so they turn out to have a different sexual orientation than expected), and Grace is left all alone. The scene ends with me consoling her that I will find "another Dick" for her.

I had a lot of fun practicing and performing the formative for this performance, and playing the various stock characters was very interesting and entertaining (es

pecially for JC I think).