A Not So Cruel End to a Very Cruel Performance

So let me catch up on what has being going on since I last left off from Theater of Cruelty: the compromise thing turned out to be a disaster. It turned out that I was not the only one ignoring my feelings of hesitation towards the idea on which we had decided, but Talah felt very strongly against the idea as well. We have been practicing our creepy-twin-couple script for the past few classes, but it feels like we have not made much progress. Because the underlying feelings of unhappiness in many of us, we are missing that “wow” factor in our performance and it is not very believable. Because we were so focused on the actual set design of our scene, we forgot to put more effort into our cruel actions as Theater of Cruelty performers, and it often seems like a comedy more than it does a horror piece. But everyone has been putting so much effort into it: Alia made most of the script, which was very thoughtful of her – she is a hard worker. Abdul has been helping with the lights and music. Talah is continuously practicing her role so that it is more believable. I am proud of the hard work everyone is putting in, but I think the “cruel” aspect of our piece was definitely missing. Even when Mrs. Morris sat in our audience for a test run of our production, it was clear that we were not making a big enough impact on the audience. So Talah messaged on our theater group that she wants to change the entire idea two days before the summative performance: rightfully, even though her ideas sounded amazing, our entire class was afraid of the lack of time. But since I have worked with Talah before last year in our mock collaborative project, I know that she can put together amazing ideas last minute. Although initially Chris wanted to split our group into two, I’m happy that we all decided to give it a try. The next day we all met during lunch and during break, working hard in every minute we could in order to carry out Talah’s idea. It was important that we trusted her vision despite the lack of time, because trust is vital in an ensemble.

On the day of our performance, I couldn’t be more than happy with what we were able to show to our audience of AIS-R administration. Everyone really shined with their roles, and the “wow” factor was finally there. Suddenly playing a creepy, screaming, child-stabbing grandmother was not easy: I had to lick an open jar of intestines (aka pasta) only a centimeter from the audience’s faces. But I forced myself and was cruel to myself, and because of that I was literally able to get a “wow” from one of the audience member’s. That was the point at which I realized we were doing a powerful performance.

Although there were many bumps along the road, our group was able to pull together 2 performances effectively with only 2-3 days of practice and that is what was amazing. We all have such different things to contribute, and I’m proud of our theater class for trusting each other with Talah’s idea. At the same time, the issue of too many directors in our class has stuck in my mind: for the collaborative project, I really hope that either we can figure out how to work together as a whole class, or preferably go our own ways and work with people who understand and respect our individual ideas.