Our group chose two of the stories in the book Krik? Krak! into our adaptation.
- Understanding of the book and the texts
Ranging from different languages, areas, and races, fighting for freedom is a long-lasting and eternal topic in literary. This is quite obvious in Edwidge Danticat's book. As an author who used to live in Haiti and moved to the United States later, Edwidge Danticat is a peace promoter who uses attractive and precise voices to appeal for freedom, equality and civil rights as well as commemorating the old Haitian stories. The novel Krik? Krak! consists of seemingly different pieces of stories to portray Haitian's life. Love and hope are the two distinct element throughout the book, and they are the reasons why I wanted to convert the book into our group's own adaptation on stage. In every story, we can see struggling life with love and hope for every character. For example, there is love between the girl and the boy on the boat in the story Children of the Sea, though they two are encountering the pressure given by the government. The girl is writing letters to the boy, who is sent to a boat leaving Haiti. The boy is also writing to the girl on his notebook on boat. In their letters, they talk about how the government is giving pressure to the citizens by killing people and making terrifying atmosphere. The girl and the boy are in love, but they are forced to be apart. It's very sad to see the lovers missing each other but never going to see each other forever. In Caroline's Wedding, the relationship between Caroline and her mother is actually really strong. However, they still have some different opinions about cultures and traditions. Caroline is born in the United States. What she sees or thinks is in an American way. In contrast, Caroline's mom is a pure Haitian immigrating to USA many years ago. She wants Caroline to marry someone who is also a Haitian, but Caroline's fiancé, Eric, is a Bahamian. In the story, Caroline's mom is not very satisfied with this. They two almost have an argument, but they actually don't. If I were to put their untouchable relationship into words, I would say "love and wish". These two stories really attract our group, so we chose them and combined them into our version.
- Transforming the texts into our version
Set the place mainly in New York City when Caroline is an adult
Create a conflict between Caroline and her mother -- to reveal the cultural differences.
Insert a flashback where the boy is in Haiti -- to connect the present and the past and therefore indicating why Caroline's mother is not satisfied with Caroline's wedding.
Set the plot as Caroline reading diary and the boy from Children of the Sea at the same time to give audience a clue of what's going on.
After the boy's monologue, let Caroline talk to her mother and therefore setting a resolution.
Five scenes in total
For each scene, there are different settings.
(Summarize it in the oral)
For my character Caroline, I tired to portray a young but kind of stubborn girl who comments something disrespectful on her mother's culture. With the emotional words, such as "How dare you!" "I'm so done with you", I showed Caroline's impatience. Caroline is really a "free-style" person. She thinks in an American way. This is very important because that's how the conflict explodes between Caroline and her mother due to the cultural differences. In our adaptation, mostly I showed her emotional face in scene 1 because this is where Caroline shows many of her emotional changes. At the beginning of scene 1, I am walking around with a bit anxiety. When I remind myself that "I won't have bone soup any more", I am really happy about that. Then I become a little impatient when the mother is looking for me to drink the bone soup. My voice then change immediately in scene one after hearing mom's word "so-called fiancé". Then I explode straightforward because mom thinks I am "the shame of the whole family". I end up this scene with anger and disappointment.
In scene two, I am just surprised about the new finding in mother's room. I read the old diary with a calm and a little curious voice.
Scene 3 is where I continue reading through the diary.
In scene 5, I open the scene with a gentle sigh, showing that I realize that I did something wrong to my mother before. I talk to my mother with a regretful voice, seeking for forgiveness. When mother says I am "the honor of the family", I am happy and touched.
These series of emotional changes help establish a young and emotional figure on stage.
- Talking about the difficulties
Personally I think the biggest difficulty for me is showing enough facial expressions. I am able to deeply understand my character Caroline, so in our script I successfully show what is needed to establish the role and promote the plot. Memorizing the lines is also not a big deal for me. However, to convert what I've written down into movements--gestures, movings, and facial expressions--is not easy for me. In order to make my character more realistic, I used more body languages instead of the facial expressions. For our group, one of our problems was to memorize the script. Especially in scene 1, we got stuck between lines for several times, so we had to restart over and over again. It's really hard when facing the camera to complete a fluent performance with scripts perfectly memorized for the first time. Sometimes we even stopped and began thinking about what the next line is. This was a big flaw of our performance. We actually spent too much time changing the scene, so it looked embarrassing when we watched our own video, noticing there was a long gap between scenes.
I think our voice could be louder. In the video the voice is sometimes not clear enough to hear when character is saying something softly.
More facial expressions are needed. Every one in our group could show more emotional changes -- looked a little calm but not that furious when arguing in scene 1. In scene 3, looked weird because there were not enough body interactions between the lovers.
Could be more confident on stage.
This is the first time converting a book into performance and videoing our adaptation. I am satisfied that we cooperated well when discussing about our lines, costumes and settings before performing. Everyone came with different ideas to make our version more realistic and complicated. I enjoy being Caroline, showing her different moods and expressing my understanding of the text into Caroline's words. It's a good experience for me to know more about performing when I finish it with my classmates. We did everything by ourselves except for videoing our own version. We came up with ideas, solved the problems, and cooperated together to give an imperfect but meaningful acting. I really appreciate this chance.
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