Personal Journey Through The Crucible

Personal Journey through the Crucible

Dramatization, an action in which language is seen as a mode of symbolic act rather than a mode of knowledge, was my primary drawback. I have always been a quite person and performing on stage has been my frail point, but nonetheless I chose to perform on stage casing my fears inside and performing in Authur Miller's The Crucible. As I commenced my drive, with frustration and aggravation, I began to make it my aim to advance in my shortcoming, dramatization. Ultimately we reached a point where success was within our reach, at the night of the performance. This brought me satisfaction and fulfillment for my endeavor in the play.

In developing the plot and progression of our play our class evaluated the use of literary techniques that were used with in the play while reading. What we found was that a very momentous technique was used in which the content of the play dealt with fictional tellings of historical figures and events. This technique was first employed by Bertolt Brecht's historicisation in his poem "Speech to Danish working-class actors on the art of observation". Brecht said 'historicization,'for the actor, constitutes a fundamental interpretative attitude. Throught out our reading process we felt we neeeded to keep this theory in our mind in order to interpertate what each of the charcters in the play felt and for this it was inmportant for us to understand the nature of each of the characters.

In the first reading of the Crucible, I was able to understand the theocratic nature of the society, moral laws and state laws to which the characters were bound. Since the play was essentially written in response to Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee's crusade against supposed communist sympathizers, we could easily see some of the themes, such as intolerance, hysteria and reputation in the play. Due to this our group decided to keep the play as it is since it portrayed the crude reality of the 1950'S McCarthyism.

Editing was a vital technique we, as a group, had decide to use in order to conceal our weak points in the play. We used this method firstly because as apprentice actors we were unable to cope with the pressures of learning massive amounts of lines. The length of the play was our second reason. The time we were allocated was two hours and thus editing was important, as the play's initial length was a lot longer than the time quota we were given. Nonetheless, we had kept all the characters in their true role and didn't edit any of them.

Each character was kept to its true essence in order to preserve their sincerity. Sequentially, to do this we were required to grasp the motive of each characters action. We, and especially I, wanted to illustrate to the audience each characters deeper want for control, attention and preservation of truth, whether it be Abigail's exceeding needs for notice, John Putman's power over Abigail, or Reverend Parris's protection for his daughter's secret. Constantin Stanislavski had first introduced this technique in his Stanislavski's Ð''system' in which he focused on the development of realistic characters as well as stage worlds. It was a systematic approach to training actors to work from the inside outward. Our aim for the audience was to see the characters reaction towards the non-accepted truth by tradition about reality; in this case it was witchcraft, and this was only possible by using Stanislavski's system. By appraising our characters during rehearsals we were able to identify ourselves with each of our characters motives.

The character that I performed in the play was called Betty. This character was given to me due to two reasons, I believe. The main reason is the fact that I am not a very outspoken person in class. This is interesting because my character's role in the play is completely different to me in person. Betty's character required a lot of dramatization in which it obligated me to be very loud with my actions and my voice. Performing Betty's role was the hardest part for me in the play, as, like I said, I had to case my fears and perform Betty's character. Another reason for my allocation of this role was due to my appearance. Betty is seen as petit, small and scared looking character in the play, according to