First Draft/#23

Reflection on Performance, Romeo and Juliet

Love is an eternal topic that people always talk about. A tragic love story is even more impressive and enduring throughout centuries. As one of William Shakespeare’s most famous plays, the story of Romeo and Juliet, as well as their families, is an inevitable tragedy, which includes a series of intense turning points, therefore promoting the ultimate sad ending. To portray and reveal some of the characters’ personalities, our group chose Act 3 Scene 5 from the whole play, mainly focusing on the Capulet family: Juliet, Lord and Lady Capulet. In this scene, Juliet faces a huge trouble about the coming wedding and had an extreme conflict with her parents. In response, Lord and Lady Capulet show different attitudes towards Juliet by expressing various emotions and body languages. During the course of the final performance on our scene, I tried my best to show Lady Capulet’s complicated but intense personality, further demonstrating the significance of this character who promotes Juliet’s change and tragic ending, and also showing Lady Capulet’s special role in this part of the play.

For my character, Lady Capulet, she is such a quick-tempered woman who is concerned with outward appearances. She is obsessed with money, reputation and social status. We can see this in her praise for Paris: “The gallant, young, and noble gentleman/ The County Paris, at Saint Peter’s Church” (3.5.113-114). And like her husband, Lord Capulet, ultimately she sees her daughter as more of a burden and a responsibility than a true loving member of Capulet’s family. This can be seen in our scene when Lady Capulet says “Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee” (3.5.204), showing that she thinks the wedding with Paris is more important than her daughter’s feeling. And this illustrates the practical feature of Lady Capulet. However, in our version of the performance, I tried to make my character more complicated with more humanities, but not simply a bad mother and indifferent woman.

After deciding which scene we should play, our group started thinking about the costume for the characters we had. For my character, Lady Capulet, she needs to be in red and with some shiny jewelries and a necklace to show her richness and high social status. In addition, in order to show a contrast among Juliet and her parents, the more luxury and exaggerated Lady Capulet wears, and the more simple and pure Juliet wears, the more distinct differences can be shown to the audience. Their personalities are like the costume they have. Juliet, without consideration, is naive and a little childish in the scene. Lady Capulet is like her costume, meaning that she is fond of power and status. Costume is really essential for us to reveal each character's personalities.

When talking about how the stage is going to be set up, we chose to set Juliet's bed on the upper right corner, a door on the right stage and another one on the left stage. We also put two beds in Juliet's room in order to let Lord and Lady Capulet to go into the room separately. Especially for Lady Capulet, I need to enter the room through the door which is the closest to Juliet's bed. When Lord Capulet comes in, he needs to appear from the other door. Overall, the balcony is set on the down stage because we need Juliet to speak her monologue such as “O Fortune, Fortune, all men call thee fickle” (3.5.60) when facing the balcony. However, after rehearsing and receiving feedbacks from the class, we found it distracting if we set two doors in the opposite way since it would probably make the audience confused. As a result, we cut the extra door, and left one door on the left stage, letting Lady and Lord Capulet enter and exit in the same direction. And then this further illustrate the relationship and the attitude that Juliet’s parents hold.

There are a lot of emotion changes throughout the scene. For Lady Capulet, the main emotions she has are happiness, anger, anxiety and indifference. And there is a clear flow of emotional changes within lines. In the original scene, there should not have an emotion like anxiety because Lady Capulet is such an indifferent woman who does not really care about her daughter’s feelings. But in our version, since I added extra lines from the Nurse’s to Lady Capulet’s, a more complicated person can be shown due to the different and various moods. Basically, as Lady Capulet enters, she says “Ho, daughter, are you up?” (3.5.65) happily because she visits Juliet in order to tell her about the wedding. She then becomes angry as soon as she finds out Juliet does not want to obey what she thinks. The emotion that Lady Capulet does not have in the original play is anxiety. When she says “God in heaven bless her!” (3.5.169) to Lord Capulet, it shows that she is caring about her daughter while witnessing Juliet is being scolded by Lord Capulet. This is also a contrast, for I have completely portrayed Lady Capulet as a practical woman in the previous section of the scene, but at this point, I let her express her concern for Juliet. However, as the story goes on, I then let Lady Capulet become the “normal” Lady Capulet as we thought. When Juliet comes to her to beg for her compassion again, Lady Capulet says “Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word. Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee” (3.5.203-204) to Juliet and then exits. This again shows her practical and indifferent features, connecting to how I performed my character previously.

For myself, I think the most important section of portraying a character is body language. During the performance, I did focus a lot on my movements and gestures. As I entered, I either held Juliet’s hands or patted her back gently to try to comfort her. Then I immediately stood up as Juliet mentioned Romeo, who Lady Capulet hates a lot, waved my arms, and even pointed to the ground angrily. This series of actions also showed a change of emotions. As I said Lady Capulet is a quick-tempered woman, I then had to become happy again, turned back to the bed where Juliet sat, held her hands and touched her face, saying “Find thou the means, and I’ll find such a man/ But now I’ll tell thee joyful tidings, girl” (3.5.103-104) with a happy and energetic voice. When Juliet refuses to marry Paris, Lady Capulet then turns angry again, and asks Lord Capulet for assistance after he comes into Juliet’s room. However, she stands out again, trying to separate Juliet and Lord Capulet to prevent a more serious argument, and screams to Lord Capulet: “Fie, fie, what, are you mad?” (3.5.158). And She even kneels down to the ground and holds Juliet to criticize that Lord Capulet is being way too mean. Then she becomes indifferent again. These changes of emotions and actions helped demonstrate Lady Capulet’s quick-tempered characteristic. In order to show her practical feature, I stood up and walked around when talking about Paris and praised him as “gallant, young and noble gentleman” (3.5.113).

Overall, I thought the progress our group made was satisfying enough. We cooperated well in memorizing those lines and giving reactions. As for me, I did well in memorizing all the lines with ancient languages. In the video, I found that I expressed the emotion changes through the intonation and my body languages. There were some obvious changes of emotions within Lady Capulet's lines. I either changed my intonation or changed my actions to show her different moods. However, what seemed unnatural was that my some of my movements were a little confusing. I was not sure where I should go or how I should stand on the stage, especially when Juliet was talking to Lord Capulet and there was no lines from Lady Capulet during their conversations. I felt uncomfortable when there was a camera in front of me and my brain was almost blank. Also, I think I could be more confident when I was acting. I could show more facial expressions to help express Lady Capulet's emotions. Body language was not the only thing that can help show a character's emotion. What's more essential for establishing a character's personalities is more likely to relate to the facial expressions from the role I acted. There is a huge space for me to practice my facial expressions--to be more confident on stage and express emotions naturally to the audience.