Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Mar. 23 Crepes of Wrath DCF show 8:00pm



The Crepes of Wrath show that we put up for the Dallas Comedy Festival was fantastic in my opinion. It was clever without meaning to be clever, it was physical, we played emotions very high and had a lot of fun. I keep feeling better and better about the mono scene after each time we do one. The Crepes show before this one was not stellar, but still interesting and good to learn from. We did a few short mono scenes in the back before the show to kind of get our footing, and warm up at the same time. I think it was successful in getting us in the right frame of mind for doing a 30 minute show without stopping. The scene itself was between a father and a son on the day of the son's wedding. The father was let out of prison to attend the wedding, after which he would have to go back inside. Marc is the reason all of that information got out at the top of the scene, and none of it felt invented or heavy handed. That's where I feel our partnership has it's dynamic, cause he's great at initiating, and I'm great at going with initiations. I do feel bad though because he mentioned I had an ankle bracelet on that tracks all of my movements, but in the next couple of lines I changed it to being in shackles so that I could jump around the stage with my feet together to make a physical joke that we could go back to. I suppose you can have the bracelet and the shackles, but why would you? It was a minor thing and we used it for what it was and didn't make the scene about that, thankfully. We actually grabbed on to the relationship between the father and son early on. Making the father disappointed in the son that he had never shanked a man before. The fact that his son had become an upstanding member of society made him feel ashamed, and the son knew this. We introduced such things as a "toothbrush shank" as a wedding present, the father offering to murder one of his future daughter in-law's boyfriends at the wedding, and finally revealing that the father of the bride was the lawyer that put prison dad in prison. We had a lot of good details and I don't feel we overpowered the scene with useless information. We made it about the father and son the whole time, and when Marc, as the son, finally snapped and started to take on his old man in a role playing/teaching scene within the scene, it really brought it to a different level where I felt neither one of us were thinking about where it was going, it was just going. I would crawl around on the ground playing the part of the lawyer about to get shanked. The show ended on a humorous line instead of any catharsis between the two characters, but i'd like to think we put them on the right path, and their problems were hashed out by the two of them shortly after we'd left the stage.

No comments:

Post a Comment