Where's it from?

Jitney, a play by August Wilson

Set in Pensilvaniya in the 70's, it mainly focus on the poorer black neighbourhoods and focused on 5 taxi drivers dealing with hardships

Who is the character?

I play Youngblood, real name Darnell, who was a guy who used to run the streets and make money illegally until he decides to change and try and live a better life for his family

What have I learnt?

Researching plays and movies like Foxxy Brown, Shaft and other films set in the 70s which are about black communities and living in that enviroment.. even though it's set in the 80's I watched NWA which really helped me get a sense of how the community was treated as second class citizens, being from a poorer neighbourhood and wanting to strive for a better life

How I connected with this character?

I chose this monologue because I understand the feeling of people thinking you aren't enough, and actually stepping up to try and prove them wrong.. knowing that you can be something more than what people see you as

At first when I first was practicing my lines it really didn't feel natural, was really struggling to connect with my character beccause I just didn't know who I was playing, after thinking of the given circumstances and looking at the play with my partner Rem.

We made some decisions using the given circumstances.. We were both in our mid 20's, a couple but we love each other very much and we are basically doing a little therapy session, maybe we were told by our couples therapist that we should have a moment to air out our feelings and say what we think about each other to air out our feelings.

After doing the who, what, when, where and why... knowing my age and who I was, what my relationship to my girlfriend, it really made it easier to play my character more naturally

I commented after the exercise saying that catatonic is like you've just woken up from a coma or like a marionette puppet who's just learned the ability to walk. Saying this made me realise that this exercise is so useful because every character you play on screen can fall into these 7 categories and knowing the tensions can help you play them.

What I found difficult was trying to switch up the tensions and try and play the lower tensions and imagine a bad situation you'd be catatonic instead of relaxed like you were at the beach (which is how I was playing it before) and playing the higher tensions positively. I found this hard because when you become more alert and paranoid it's hard to be happy

How I overcame this was by imagining a scenario where I would have to be really tense even when happy and pictured I was just walking into my house and got ambushed by my friends and family planning a surprise party for me. Picturing scenarios in my head helped me play these more naturally

For next time I will remember this technique so when I have a character to work on I can just refer back to this technique and it'll really help me play tensions and raise the intensity a lot easier

Performing your lines to a person all kind of in one tone like it's a conversation is a very naturalistic way of doing it. First of all it makes you think of the intentions... why you are saying it, it also has the same affect as hot seating. When I was saying my lines with Cay we would go off script and she'd ask me questions about why i'm saying the words i'm saying to her. Really developed my monologue because instead of saying the lines because they need to be said, I actually understood the subtext and knew why these words needed to be said to my girlfriend

What I found difficult: I didn't especially find the exercise difficult, what I found a bit challenging was when Cay was performing her monologue to me I wanted to ask her questions while she was talking about why she felt so alone, but not ask too many questions as to pull her out of the scene

How I overcame this was by taking my time and letting Cay speak before asking important questions to engage her with what she was saying

For next time: I think this technique has made me change the way I think of acting to be honest. I've always done theatre acting growing up so I find it really easy to overperform my lines and to acsensuate every line and physicalise what i'm saying when playing to an audience. But acting to camera is so different and this is the career path I want to follow. Basically everything i'm doing on stage needs to still be there but internalise everything i'm doing instead... I know it sounds stupid but I didn't realise it's supposed to seem realistic, like a normal conversation and not larger than life... from now on when I have my lines i'll say them as a conversation and it'll help me play it realistically

This helped me have a clear goal in mind when doing my monologue, after every line thinking about a clear theme changed my intentions and the way I was delivering it... the natural way to deliver it was obviously more intense and stern but afte thinking of that theme I was a bit softer to the person I love, and it came from a place of change and redemption

Then I was told to think of who am I actually talking to in the scene, and picture them when i'm doing my monologue. I'm not just speaking to a wall I need to imagine that i'm telling my girlfriend i've been working day in and day out for her and our child. After performing the opening, we went round again but were tasked to speed run our lines. This was to break out of just thinking of your lines while performing and to instead, play around with it, it's very good to perform it differently when you have your lines (obviously have it ingrained in your dna so you know every word off by heart without thinking), you should try it differently, if you are performing your monologue too fast then slow it down and think about the pauses, if there's no rhythm and you're saying them too slowly just speed it up.

So after speed running our lines which I found quite difficult because I like to take my lines, Karl got me up and asked me to say the lines but as I am sprinting around the room as fast as I can... saying them i'm basically screaming them while still focusing on the point where i'm imagining Rena (my girlfriend) is. Then doing my lines again but while doing pushups. I think Karl asked us to do this to get out of your own head and basically say the lines without thinking of them, breaking that barrier of just thinking of your lines the way you practiced it will improve it from a gcse performance to something more honest and true.

Karl then stood in front of me and told me to say the lines to him as if he was my partner, I started doing it and every time he stopped me and kept saying "No tell me that you've been working all day to provide for your family" I was saying the lines and kind of looking past him but the last time I actually looked at him and said "YOU don't see i'm trying to feed my family" This really helped ground my performance and imagine this conversation in the real world... and not just a performance