It all comes down to the end

The final scene of Titus was, for me, a mix of comedy, tragedy, and just plain "grossness." I knew that the play involved cannibalism before I began reading it, and even when I read it I wasn't too alarmed, but watching the way that Titus announced the ingredients of the pies put a chill in my body. It was frightening to see an almost insanity bubble up in his eyes as he "jumped for joy" at finally being able to tell them 'who' they were eating. The pairing of the serial killer like scene where he slits the throats of the Tamora's sons and asks Lavinia to collect their blood and this announcement, I believe that Titus is mentally crazy. I am not sure if he began the play as the crazy that he ends it as, but anyone who just kills their son without contemplation isn't completely there. As the play progresses I think we see him become more and more disgusted with the world that he is living in which causes him to lose touch with reality: this can be seen on the face of Titus as he dies in the movie potrayal. He looks up at Saturninus with a look that seems to say "Go ahead and kill me, death will not be worse than what I have just done to you. Your wife is dead after she and you consumed her sons, your stepsons." This one look is my favorite look in the whole movie. It shows that, despite having lost touch with reality, Titus wins.

The Queen's Women

The dinamics of my playgroup seem pretty alright. I like the people I am working with and we all seem to be getting along. Everyone seems relatively in-sync with the vision...if they aren't, they aren't saying anything about it. I am playing Romeo which feels pretty weird. I was not too cracked about playing a male until we, as a group, decided to sort of disregard gender. Most of the characters are going to be turned into females for our version of Romeo and Juliet because we didn't want to try to hide the fact that we are women. We aren't setting out to make a big deal about the fact that Romeo is now a woman, we just won't try to make "him" a guy.
Also, I am not too cracked up about the name we choose, but we figured we needed a working name so there it is. We also talked about a name like that is similar to a title for a book or a paper--once you get started and see what you are really working with you get the name. I think it will be the jokes along the way that will give us the most powerful name for our playgroup.

makeup and hair

When I was put into the group for makeup this week I thought to myself, “is Paul crazy?” I didn’t think that there could be a whole lot learned from the makeup of a movie, let alone the hair. As we began to watch clips from the film, I realized that these two elements mean more than they get credit for. I began to understand why there is an award category for makeup. It also made me think about the skills of those people who do these jobs for a living. I take for granted putting on makeup in the morning and doing my hair, I send the same message everyday—not that I know what that message is—and the professionals have to create countless looks every year, maybe everyday. There is a lot of variety in the world, I think that is one of the biggest lessons I learned this week. There is a lot of variety and how that variety is portrayed can mean the difference between innocent and naive, and angry and fuming. In the complex world of film and theater, there are a lot of things I don’t understand, but a lot can be learned from a few moments of taking a deeper look.