Memorization

Something that's horribly hard, memorization. Thankfully Luke gave me an easier method to work with so that I don't have to memorize the monologue word for word, but still, it's hard.

Luke's method is that you read the monologue or script once and then flip it over and try to say everything, without looking, and pantomime the parts that you don't know. I can see this working well, but the thing is, I don't really know any of the script enough to pantomime it.

So, today I spent most of the day reading and re-reading the script, to get a feel of all of the beats, and what Karen Kohlhass calls "the Climax" of a monologue. I found that the climax of my monologue happens to be when the character says "Connie - my best friend - I guess she was getting hysterical. I know she didn't mean it, but she said 'You had to go and open your Jew mouth.'"

I feel as if though that is the climax because that's when the story starts to turn to what she does after the fact, and how she actually got to the place that she's currently in that you know absolutely nothing about until the last line of the monologue, and even then it's still a little unclear. It also is the point in the monologue when you realize that the persecution is getting really serious, and you can tell that that is absolutely her breaking point, because the line that follows it is "I went home that night."

I think reading, and re-reading the monologue was a good thing for me to do today, because now that I've sectioned most of it off into beats and now that I have the "climax," I can start using Luke's memorization technique so that I have it memorized and then I can really start applying the acting to it, and putting myself into the monologue, more so than before.