Oral Presentation

1. Story chosen

• Caroline's Wedding
• Why: It shows a lot of important themes: Love, Family Struggle, and Identity
• Why appeal: It shows the struggles for people to get their own identity. 
• Why good piece: dinner scene highlights the family struggle; monologues highlights the identity issue. 

2. Literary analysis of Story

• Themes: Love; Identity; family struggle
• Character: Eric
• Conflict: Eric & Mom (dinner scene, Eric's monologues as a result)
• Historical context: Eric's identity is Bahamian. (In Eric's monologue mentioning horrible armed  robbery)
• Relationship: Eric & Caroline (Couple); Eric & Mom (protagonist vs. antagonist)
• Setting: Eric's monologue (outside of the house) -> showing the separation

3. Your adaptation

• Vision for the piece: thoroughly; identify the themes well
• What you did: Blocking and staging - how to best present and highlight those themes, emotion, and characteristics(could mention the triangles(periactoids) that separate Mom and Eric). Eric's characteristics: weak (coward) at first; getting stronger at the end. In order to show it, dinner scene: low down heads, talk quietly. Monologue: voice is loud. Come up the idea of teddy bear. (As a connection between Caroline and Eric). Show to audience: how hard for foreigners to integrate into America; the effort foreigners made.

4. Performance

Talking about previous mistakes

in table scene: 

• lower my head (movement)
• talk quietly
• scared of looking at mom (facial expression)
• take off Caroline's coat (since she is disabled); pull the chair for her

in monologue scene:

• voice is louder 
• at first look at mom, but later on look at the camera, showing that I am talking to myself
• gazing at the bunny, showing that I am talking to myself at that time

5. Evaluation

I think I did a great job on some details, like take off the coat. My voice is also clear and loud. But I do not think I show Eric's emotion well. Eric is a person who desires to get Mom's permission, but I do not think I show this. Also, from the performance I did not show the love between Eric and Caroline well.

6. What you could have improved

Did well:

• voice is clear
• details in movement
• facial expression

Need to improve:

• Add more lines to describe the relationship between Eric and Caroline
• Add more movements so that the monologue will be more interesting

7. What you learn

• Background of Haiti
• How culture differences matter
• how hard it is for foreigners to integrate into another country
• How do props like periactoids improve the play