Once in a Tragedy

For this IB Internal Assessment project, my group directed a play which combined My Love, My Love and the Little Red Riding Hood, and I played the one of the protagonists, Desiree and the Little Red Riding Hood. Since planing in the classroom to acting in the theatre, this was a learning process for me. Personally, I can clearly see the difference in my writing skills, acting and theatre knowledge. 

From literary perspective, the adaptation showed the significant points for both of My Love, My Love and the Little Red Riding Hood. My Love, My Love is already an adaptation of the Little Mermaids, but the setting is in modern time. Desiree was the protagonist, who I think was the embodiment of the little mermaid. She is a poor peasant, but she falls in love with the son of a rich businessman, Daniel. To chase her true love, she travels far to a big city, where she does not belong to. Sadly, the story is a tragedy; it ends at Daniel’s abandonment and Desiree’s death.  In the story, gods also play important roles. Desiree’s journey is also a fight between gods. The goddess of love, Erzulie always helps Desiree. However, Papa Ge is always trying to destroy Desiree and her love. To show the connection between My Love, My Love and the Little Red Riding Hood, we actually made Papa Ge become the wolf in the story of the Little Red Riding Hood. Then Desiree was also the Little Red Riding Hood. We followed the ending in My Love, My Love. We actually made it sad, because we want to show that “That is how reality work, you are not live in a fairy tale.” In short, we combine two distinct stories— one is a novel, one is fairytale, but we still focus more on My Love, My Love. 

Personally, I did improve a lot during the process. Instead of everybody worked on his own, my group preferred to do team work. Basically, from writing scripts to acting, everyone in our group were engaged in every part of our project, so we could learn about every process we went through. When we wrote scripts, we were picking up some lines from the original text. During this process, I was able to share many of my opinions about the plots, and this actually made me understand the book deeper. Writing scripts was actually interesting.  I always wrote simple sentences while others were writing down bunch of beautiful SAT sentences. Therefore, this actually helped my writing skills. Then my biggest progress was actually the acting part. I know I was a really bad actor. At first, it seemed that I could not stop smiling when I was on the stage. I thought that was actually an intuition, because I was not aware of that. Thus I always made the tragedy to a comedy. However, because of much practicing, I finally got over this. Moreover, I could not express the feelings to the audience correctly, even though I knew the emotions. About the acting part, other members in my group gave me much help. We discussed the emotions together, and sometimes they showed me how to act. In addition, I also learned how the whole theatre works. I came to the class with a little theater knowledge, but after the past month, I know Enunciation, Upstage, and downstage. I know when I talk on the stage I should face to the audience. Consequently, from playing the role, Desiree and the Little Red Riding Hood, I actually can see a big difference of my understanding of the story and acting. 

In conclusion, I did achieve a big progress in the past month. At first, playing Desiree was a huge challenge to me. I think we had a fantastic idea which was to combine My Love, My Love and the Little Red Riding Hood together, and I want to show the best to the audience. During this time, I learned much about writing scripts, acting on the stage and the whole theatre process. This was really an amazing and helpful experience.