I Love My Senior Project: (in which I vent optimism and excitement)

I love working on My Name is Rachel Corrie. I love that this is my senior project.

Unfortunately, while I love working on it and talking about it, I don't want to talk about it all the time, nor do I feel like I can talk about it with everyone. Therefore I'll just vent all my excitement here. So. If you're reading this, yay for you. ILOVETHISPROJECT.

We did a full run-through on Thursday that ran an hour and twenty minutes (EXACTLY my target run-time!), shaving an entire twenty minutes off my previous run-time.

I mean, I'll take it.

In the run-through, I was present with the text--very much in the moment. My energy stayed up, and my director said she could feel it driving the run. I did call for line once, and there were a handful of times when I got stuck because of lines--I still can't get through the whole thing without getting stuck in a couple of places. My stage manager, Honey, and my media-tech designer, Daniel, both saw it for the first time, and perhaps MOST encouraging to me was that they both came out of it saying that I held their attention and kept them engaged the entire time. Which is more than I could have hoped for in an hour-twenty-minute performance of a one-woman show. Maybe there's hope yet.

I'm now in the middle of working on acquiring costume and some final props. Which, when you're budgetless, can be merciless to college student pockets. But I really love this project, and so I don't mind paying for things at all. It's just difficult.

I still need:
An ash try (note to self: check props closet)
Fake stage cigarettes
3 to 4 1990s fashion magazines
A package or two of black ballpoint pens

Khaki cargo pants
Black or charcoal rib-knit tank top
Hiking boots (I'm currently highest bidder for a pair on Ebay--guess we'll see. I've never bid for anything on Ebay before. I'm thinking of it as an adventure.)

I found some of these recently. These first two are from the very first staging of My Name is Rachel Corrie--directed by Alan Rickman and starring Megan Dodds--at the Playhouse Theatre in London, April 2005. I really liked them.

And the rest of these images are from other productions of the show.