Site Specific (11) - Cutting scenes 1 & 2

Characters:   In order to know how to start cutting we discussed who the key characters were. Obviously, Abigail is crucial to the story (as she is the leader of the girls), and so are Mary and Mercy (two of Abigail's group), and Betty (as she is the one who falls ill at the beginning). We agreed that we don't need all of the group of girls as they are not essential to the plot (and it also saves the issue of us not having many girls in our class). Also an obvious observation, but John and Elizabeth Proctor are essential to the plot - John had a short affair with Abigail (their old servant), and Abigail wants Elizabeth dead. Reverend Parris, Abigail's uncle, is definitely needed as he is the reverend of the village. We decided we don't need Giles Corey or Rebecca Nurse for our version as their opinions and activities don't add much to our main story - they have their own stories (i.e. Giles' issue with land), but it doesn't aid the main events. We also felt that the Putnam's weren't needed - for the same reason we discarded Giles and Rebecca.

Scene One:   Having worked out what characters we need and what ones we shall cut, we began editing our first scene. We decided that we didn't need the very beginning of the scene, and could instead start from Mary's line "I just come from the farm...". We could use an additional cast member as Betty, and have them in the audience to start with. They could then collapse, and Mary would burst through from the back of the audience with her line. We then cut from Parris' line "What happened? What are you doing to her! Betty!" to Hale's entrance and line "Pray you, someone take these!". By doing this, our script still made sense, we managed to cut over two pages and the characters that we said we didn't need. The rest of the scene was cut in a similar way - either cutting lines said by the characters we've cut, or changing them so another character says them instead. We then read of this scene again to ensure it all still made sense.

Scene Two:   We decided to cut the very beginning of this scene as it is not relevant, so we started from Elizabeth's line "I thought you'd gone to Salem this afternoon". We cut parts of the script where we felt they repeated themselves or we already got the gist of it. We also obviously cut the section that contained Nurse Rebecca and Corey.