Site Specific (14) - Cutting scene 4 & Running scene 3

Scene 4:

• This scene originally opened with Willard welcoming people and discussing Hale. However, we felt that this section wasn't very relevant, so we cut to Parris' line to Danforth "Oh, good morning, sir, thank you for comin'". We felt this was a sensible place to cut to as it still includes the important information that Hale has returned, despite not being part of the official high court anymore. 
• As we had cut the role of Mercy Lewis, we changed her mention to Mary Warren as this would still make sense - at the end of scene 3 Abigail and Mary were friends, so it would make sense for Abigail and Mary to have left together.
• In addition, we had cut Rebecca Nurse, so we changed the line "Reverend Hale has returned to bring Rebecca Nurse to God" to "Reverend Hale has returned to bring Proctor to God". We thought Proctor would be a suitable replacement here as he is in a similar situation to Rebecca, as they have both been arrested and are facing execution. We then cut Parris' next line about Rebecca but left the bit about Hale and the other prisoners: "he pleads with them confess their crimes and save their lives". 
• As Ollie M is playing the parts of Hathorne and Cheever, we have had to combine these roles. We have decided against multi-rolling in this play. The reason for this is because we are trying to make our play naturalistic (though all slightly heightened) and we think multi-rolling would detach the audience from our characters - multi-rolling works better for comedies rather than serious pieces. We therefore have decided to call Ollie's character Cheever whenever his name is said (as we couldn't agree on how to pronounce "Hathorne", "Cheever" seemed the logical choice). 
• We felt the dialogue about Hale was a bit excessive as he isn't our main focus, so we trimmed it down - we now go from Cheever's exit to Danforth's line "Mister Hale, have you preached in Andover this month?"
• We felt that we needed to keep the majority of the dialogue between Elizabeth and John but we cut the mention of Rebecca. Although we had cut the character of Giles Corey, we have decided to keep the dialogue in about him, as it is really descriptive and quite moving. Instead of saying "And Giles?" "Giles is dead", we have given Elizabeth the line "A man is dead. Giles". I shall emphasise the word "man" to infer that this is the first man who has been killed in the witch trials. My line acts as an introduction to the character, Giles. 
• We cut the whole section with Rebecca and changed who said what was Rebecca's line "Let you fear nothing. There is another judgement waits us all". We have split it so Elizabeth says the first half of this line and Hale says the other part. We thought it would be sweet for Elizabeth to say "let you fear nothing" as it shows that she supports her husband, regardless of his decision. 
• We discussed the ending of the film version. We really liked the use of the Lord's Prayer. We thought that we could include a movement piece at the end (but not too complicated) that we could say the Lord's Prayer over - we considered John starting this off, Elizabeth then joins in and then others all join in, but John wouldn't get to say "amen".

Scene 3:   We performed this scene in the space for the first time today. One of our main worries was where we would position the audience. We were conscious of having our backs to the audience - we automatically performed the scene imagining our audience facing the table of judges and reverends. However, we then thought about putting the audience behind the table as we would want them to emotionally connect to the characters who are being tried. It is also more important for the audience to see the girls and the Proctors' faces - especially as Elizabeth looks between Abigail and her husband, and Abigail and Proctor share looks. Moreover, by having our audience behind the table, it would mean that when Abigail starts "seeing" the bird, she can point above the audience and just behind them, to involve the audience more. For our first time, I thought this scene worked really well.