It´s all business

I swear I had never sweated so much in a rehearsal! Everything was done, lights went out and, what seemed to be like five minutes of applause, ended. Every face I saw was covered in sweat but they were smiling so big that it was almost stupid I was thinking about it. We were changing clothes when Miss Alicia came and congratulated us. “You did great guys!”


It was so frustrating to try to perform Mrs. Middleton. First it was the move… or the NOT-moves. I tried the best I could to not move, don’t move your feet Claudia, don’t separate your feet Claudia, don’t move your hands Claudia…Then we realized that it would be so boring to watch if I didn’t move. So the voice, facial expressions and partly hands should be my focus. It wasn’t that easy. At all. My accent was so strange that when I focused in getting the accent right, I actually didn’t pronounce the words correctly and people ended up not understanding what I said. Then the monologue. Good heavens, why do you do this to me? I could have easily died before performing that part! First of all, the sentences were so similar to each other that it was really hard to get them right. Then it was the intentions of what I said, I couldn’t get them right. The energy! The hardest thing ever! I tried so hard that I couldn’t get it right! Or at least right enough.
Then in the main presentation, the props failed me. I couldn’t find the money! Money! Money! Money! Fifteen minutes searching for money! Well, honestly, it would have been worse if the others wouldn’t have felt Felipe and me. We were arranging the props we couldn’t find. Felipe came finally with an improvisation of a rat with waipe. We tried to make it look like a rat and we finally did. But when we arrived, the money wasn’t there!


The start point in which I finally became aware of the fact that it was it, it was the real thing, was when three girls came into the theatre and I started to feel nervous, my heart, which at that point was at its normal-rehearsal speed, was pounding much faster. That feeling was doubled when I heard all the people in the audience. Too late to go to the bathroom now. Fortunately, my glasses we used as props so I couldn’t really see the people and their faces, but their voices were much more frightening, I say fright because I had a new feeling of disappointing people. What if I didn’t..? What if I forget..? What if? What if? Even in the muted parts I couldn’t really say my lines right. It was when the third scene was up when I finally found my voice and started. I messed up a few parts and I tried to cover them up as smoothly as I could. I guess you can’t expect accurately how something is going to turn out if a factor is not present. The simple presence of the audience is a huge factor that changed a great deal of not only my performance, but all of ours. I really wonder in what ways did the character limit me from showing energy and to what extent I did it?