Week #16 types of comedy

Trying to get everything ready in time is going to be a big challenge now; I just realized that we have 5 rehearsals left and we dont have the play ready. Even though it is clear that now we are working faster than before and it is not like we are very far away from getting everything ready with time to spare, but what I am worried about is that we may get it ready in time but there wont be enough time to polish the play.
Apart from this I believe that the play is coming together better than I expected, it is mainly because there is one scene in the play where we use slapstick and I am part of it and first of all it is very entertaining to do, second I think it looks very good and third it adds that comedy element that I think the play was lacking. I say this because even though we do have some jokes here and there, they are very few of them and the ones that are there are very lame. I really believe that the slapstick may be the most memorable part of our play because if we are going for a comedic performance this kind of comedy is the one that will be most popular with the audience.
A couple of weeks ago I was discussing with a friend about the different kids of humor in different places, doing this we came to the conclusion that humor in Europe (specially England) is sarcastic and smart, humor in the united states of america is "realistic"or talks about real life situations, we can see this in sitcoms or stand up comedy shows where the comedians mock different real life situations. We were not very sure about how comedy was in places like Japan or China but we had an idea, it is more outrageous, what we meant by that is that for example if you watch prank videos from that part of the world or even game shows you can notice that they are very over the top, with things that would never be accepted by people from this side of the world.
Then we had to decide what comedy was like here in Peru and it was not hard at all, comedy here is mostly slapstick, people here like seeing other people get hit or falling down or geting a pie thrown at their face, and as far as verbal comedy goes we like very simple and raunchy jokes sometimes even being very obscene. We like to see a guy dressed as a woman calling another man a homosexual while falling down the stairs.
That is why I think that if we stick with the slapstick, even though the audience is part of the BSP their perception of comedy is influenced by the country they live in and if we have stupid, simple and raunchy jokes like for example a man dressed as a nurse with big boobs we will have the audience laughing because that is what people here really enjoy, including myself.

Week #15 Game Changer

The last time I wrote an entry it was before Paucartambo, and I could write about it right now but with the one act play in a month I think that it is better to write about it right now than Paucartambo. That does not mean that I wont write about Paucartambo, it just means that I will write about it but later, maybe next week or the week after the one act play because right now we are against time and there are other things to write about. Also we will be doing the Paucartambo thing later this year and there will be plenty to write about then. 

Color Scheme

This past week we continued where we left off with the one act play(appart from the fact that we had already sent in our scenes for the script, that will most likely be completely changed) on tuesday we started with the planning in class and later that evening we continued with a little bit of rehearsing and changing some lines around. On wednesday in class our production tasks were assigned, I got costumes and because the game was supposed to be characters with two sides(each side representing a different character) I had to design costumes that represented two different characters one for each side. For thursday I did the male/female nurse and the doctor. 

Salad Fingers

The male/female nurse had two options it would have been either having the male(nurso) use the blue/green from the color scheme and the female(nursa) use the green from the color scheme and have both use classic male nurse hospital clothes but each side having a different color. Option two would have been the same for the male nurse but the female nurse would have used a white short skirt and a white blouse. The doctor will use a white long over coat, a white shirt, a purple tie, black rubber gloves and a black apron. 

Freaky Fred

Katz

Later on thursday we continued with the rehearsal and worked on our characterization, my first approach to a character was salad fingers that is a character from a youtube series, salad fingers has a soft voice and gives a very creepy vibe that I thought would go well with the coroner(doctor) because of the way he speaks. Then I thought about Freaky Fred, Le Quack and Katz from courage the cowardly dog but I didn't try them so I just went for an angry doctor, maybe I can incorporate them to the character. But the same day we realized that the game would not work and decided that we had to change it to just everyone having two characters and dressing in a different way for each. That meant that the ideas I had for other characters had to be changed. Having to change the game means that the costumes cant be very complicated and we may be looking at another play that used the black base and just another item of clothing. 

Le Quack

The designs I have finished up to right now are the boy, the Father in law and the mother in law but I may need to change them because of the black base that may be used. Im not sure if the black base thing will work for this play because in shadow queendom there were a whole lot of characters and it made sense that we would do that because for example half of them used the same clothes or the arch bishop used a big robe so it did not matter and we had masks so it worked, but in the one act play it may look like the characters are missing something. It is true that we did focus more on the puppets and masks in the school play and in this one we are focusing on characterization so maybe it wont matter if we have a black base and some pieces of clothing on top, but maybe the lack of clothes makes the characterization harder to understand or less effective but we will have to see. Maybe the characters don't have to be in full costume to work, and if they do what is the thing that makes an actor be the character appart from saying his lines and doing the actions properly if its not the looks? is it the presence of the stimuli in the characters or maybe how the actor looks with or without the characters costume? what about me I am a big guy if I try to do a character like Salad fingers, Freaky fred or Katz would it work for me or do I have to look a certain way first?