I started to write this note to the Delicate Balance people, but I've decided to send it to you all as it may start your creative minds going....
Hi You Albee People:
This note is to let you know that I ran into Katie in Dominick's today and we decided that y'all will sign up for characterization work one day this week.
We will work individually on creating character.
Of all the forces, currents, pulls in the world of A Delicate Balance, which becomes most important to a person becoming a Tobias? Manifested in what stimuli and expressed through what specific behavior? How does a spine become motivated by a person's basic driving force?
What plays against Agnes' essential driving force? How strong is it? How, specifically, does she resist? With what success? With what resulting behavior?
What are Claire's opposites? Touched off by what specific stimuli in the upperclass of America's Northeast?
Start with yourself: What fragment of you can you locate at the heart and spine of your character? What touches that off in you? (Remember the day J.L.Lipp worked to touch off the part of her that understood Lady Macbeth's great desire to possess, to own, to stand firm on, Scotland?)
Do you have a life model for your character? For specific capacities for response that are your character?
Metaphor?
Can you locate the character in fiction?
etc. etc.
So, all 243-ers: Let these beginning ideas touch off creative thinking/working with your own characters. Let the play guide you. Let the play's themes lead you. What is your play about? What does the playwright have to say about this theme? What specific forces, whose conflict underpins the world of the play, help to dramatize the themes? How does each character embody a major force of the world/play so that the conflict among/between characters can create a theatre dramatization for an audience to experience what the play is about?
Happy working.
DD