Twilight Los Angeles: The Creation of A Monologue
The following is an assignment due on Edmodo. It is due tonight, but Edmodo refuses to work on my laptop, and it is the only way I have of submitting it, so I'm posting it to my blog and submitting it to Edmodo if/when it works on my laptop.
Directions:In the empty space provided, answer the following question:
What does ADS mean when she says that she tries to perform her characters, "utterance by utterance" and not just "word for word"?
Include a personal reflection on your process of creating your assigned Twilight Los Angeles Character. This reflection should include a well thought out exploration of the challenges, pitfalls, and victories of your creative process.
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I feel that when ADS says “utterance by utterance”, she doesn’t just mean the words someone says, verbatim. She means the exact way someone says those words; the way the words come out of their mouth. Timbre, resonance, pitch, volume, accent, dialect, fluctuation - all of these things are intended to be considered in the Twilight pieces. To fully become someone, you shouldn’t just parrot them. Impersonation is required in the presentation of Anna Deavere Smith’s monologues and interviews.
Impersonating someone onstage is just as hard as I imagine impersonating someone offstage would be. You see it in a bizarre rom-com, or a thrilling sci-fi movie: someone wakes up in someone else's body, and try to pass as the other person to avoid attracting suspicion. They can pull it off sometimes, but they’re always found out in the end. Through a bizarre nervous mechanism, a deeply-kept secret, an odd mannerism - something that they forgot to add in there. Something that they couldn’t impersonate.
The hardest thing for me, when looking at the character of Maxine Waters, was accepting that there is going to be something I will miss. I cannot fully impersonate a character unless I am a carbon copy of that character. I will not know any nervous mechanisms, any secrets, any mannerisms. The goal, for me, was to present the facets of Maxine Waters that make who she is obvious. I adopted her way of speaking in a clearly enunciated manner, and throwing words out rather than speaking them - it was as if she was speaking to an annoying toddler who didn’t understand what she was saying.
Waters uses frequent filler language, such as “um” and “uh”, and breathes with a strange patient urgency, which reminded me of a parent calmly berating a child. She sits ramrod straight, but hunches when she stands, only straightening when she feels the need to make a very loud point. She is not above yelling - her fluctuations in pitch and volume are rapid and unpredictable. Her voice is of a very nasally timbre. All of the above were things I tried to incorporate into the Twilight side.
