‘Love First, Live Incidentally’
(Crowe, 2016).
Reflection:
A couple of days ago, we performed our debut show, Love First, Live Incidentally and honestly it’s taken me a while to come down from the incredible highs of the performance. I think I can speak for every member of the Lifting the Barriers Theatre Company when I say that we were all very pleased with how the show went on the night. The amount of hard work and determination had all paid off and the set, costume, lighting and sound effects all came together on the night.
Zelda Fitzgerald is one of the most exciting and colourful characters I have yet portrayed on the stage. I enjoyed playing her because she had so much passion and spirit. Zelda was very passionate about wanting to have a life of her own. In the 1920’s she became the ultimate icon, resembling high spirits and loose morals. She was a judges daughter but she rebelled against his conforms and restrictions, she became the jazz age high priestess.
My objectives as the ‘in love’ Zelda had ambition and determination. Zelda’s super objective was to be free from her parent’s watchful gaze and to marry Scott. From the research I did from Zelda’s biographies, Her Voice in Paradise, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, The Collective Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, I knew that her objectives for her life was not to just to get married and settle down without having a life for herself. I watched films featuring actresses based on Zelda, including Midnight in Paris (2011) and The Great Gatsby (2013). I watched the performance of The Great Gatsby at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre and Zelda, The Musical (2004). Zelda, from a very early age was told how special she was and was adored and spoilt by all. She sacrificed her family and dreams of becoming an artist to be married to F. Scott Fitzgerald. We will never know what Zelda actually thought, but from reading the love letters and biographies, I came to the assumption that when she first met Scott she was blown away with his charming Yankee qualities. In rehearsals I made it my aim to develop the actions and constantly develop my character through units, objectives, super objectives, actions, obstacles and given circumstances. The most important thing I found during the rehearsal and performance was perusing my actions and objectives in the scene. Stella Adler stated, ‘If the actor understands the nature of his actions he performs he is helping the audience understand its own behaviour more deeply.’ (2000. p.265). I pushed the action in the scene to try and achieve my objectives. I used actions to know what I want to do, where I am doing it, when I do it and why I do it. In Scene two, I am at home in Montgomery, after spending an evening with Scott. I use the action of persuading my mother into letting me marry Scott because at this moment Zelda is in love with the idea of being in love and escaping home.
Zelda aged 18. Available from: www.scottandzelda.com.
(Crowe, 2016).
Love Letters
I read the love letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda. These letters were what Zelda and Scott sent each other when they were still courting and when Scott was away. One of the first monologues in our production involves Zelda reading an actual letter she sent her mother. We found this letter at (Schmitd, 2016). http://loveathighspeeds.tumblr.com/post/116579382067/napowrimo-day-9-zelda-fitzgeralds-letter-home
During rehearsals we developed this monologue/letter and used it to really exaggerate how determined Zelda was to marry Scott. We came across Slam Poetry, changing the world one word at a time. The three young girls spoke with conviction, confidence and in unison at moments and I think this was very powerful and showed their determination to inspire the people of America. We used this as inspiration and rehearsed until we got the letter in sync with one another and were very confident.
(Rehearsing the love letter scene to Zelda’s mother).
During the performance, we made sure that everything was spoken clearly, projected in the Alabama deep south accent, while showing from our facial expressions how happy Zelda was at the thought of marrying Scott and being in his novels.
(Crowe, 2016).
Research for Zelda.
Zelda had flaming self-respect, she was passionate, life loving and a rebel. During the very early stages of rehearsals I worked with our director to develop my physicality of Zelda and how I believed she would have carried herself in different social situations, of course we will never know how exactly Zelda would have reacted in every social situation but from reading personal letters from Scott and Zelda’s writings helped knowing what sort of personality traits she had and how she was raised in her society. She was a socialite and therefore I portrayed her with a very confident, fun loving, carefree attitude. Her father was a judge and she was very passionate about becoming a professional ballet dancer. Ballet dancers have a tremendous amount of self-control, free from tension and they carry themselves very well. It was important for the portrayal of Zelda to make everything about my physicality very precise from the very tip of my nose to my toes. I made sure my body was relaxed from warming up and releasing tension before the performance and made all my movements look very delicate and elegant.
I researched the character as I would have with any other character. I created my objectives, super objectives, obstacles, goals, actions, conflicts, paraphrasing and given circumstances. Also, I read a lot of her biographies, learning how she grew up, what her ambitions were, what her characteristics were, and reading her love letters that her and Scott sent each other during their courtship. Dear Scott and Dearest Zelda by Bryer and Barks is an excellent book that shares their personal letters. Also, watching musicals, (Zelda, The Musical,) documentaries, researching the high society in 1920’s, prohibition, flapper girls and bipolar. YouTube was a real blessing I found, because there was documentaries, performances and history of how the social elite would have lived in 1920’s America and a really interesting documentary on bipolar by Steven Fry (2006). I took influence from the film star Clara Bow, because she was the ‘it’ girl of the 1920’s film industry at the time when Zelda was the ‘icon’ and ‘muse’. Clara Bow also shared similar personality traits as Zelda, she was very charismatic, reckless behaviour, very passionate, sensual, life loving. I watched the films of Clara Bow to help me both get into the world of the play but also to take inspiration from a 20’s icon that might have influenced Zelda at the time.
Clara Bow (1927) on set during filming for It directed by Clarence Badger. Clara Bow became a iconic star during the late 1920’s.
Zelda Fitzgerald in her 20’s. Zelda in this photo shares similar rouge lips, dark eyes and bobbed hair as Clara Bow in the 1927 film.
Zelda’s Characteristics
(Crowe, 2016).
I made a decisive decision to make Zelda very bouncy and loose in her physicality. At this point in Zelda’s life (1918-1923) she was flirting and going on other dates with men in the army and anybody who would show her attention but Scott was her ‘dream’. Zelda was ‘in love’ with the idea of being in love with a fashionable, sophisticated Yankee. I created a ‘bouncy’ ‘free spirited’ persona of Zelda from watching films of movie stars in that period and I used the gestures they used. I experimented with the way Zelda may have held her face, her posture, with her head held high. You have to find who was underneath the way she was described as larger than life and her reckless behaviour. I couldn’t play all of her characteristics all at once, I had to make a choice of what was going to serve the story that we were telling. I was playing ‘in love’ Zelda so I had to ask myself what would work to show her passion, excitement of her being in love with F.Scott Fitzgerald. As a performer, I collected all of the information of the character, how she would have spoken, her pitch, walk, her little wiggle, her flirtatiousness, her curiosity and passion for life. Once I worked out all of these things, I had to look beneath all of that and ask what she was really like and who she wanted to become. It helped me to start from the inside out, how Zelda would have felt. Zelda was fragile underneath all of her bravado and risky behaviour, she wanted a life of her own but she didn’t know how to do this until she had lost everything. Zelda’s family had a history of mental illness, her grandmother and brother both committed suicide and her older sister Marjorie suffered from mental breakdowns, how could that have not have had a huge effect on Zelda’s life. She was brought up in a society where young women should hold their back’s straight, act respectfully, wear long dresses and elegant hats. Zelda defied all of this and she enjoyed being a rebel, bobbing her hair, wearing her dresses short and jumping into the fountain at union square. I loved playing Zelda, it’s interesting to play somebody who has actually lived. She was a writer, so I could read and use her letters and actually understand what she was really feeling which is different from picking up a script where you have to develop a back story for your character. Her private moments where never captured on film and you can’t really tell how somebody reacts from reading letters so I had to use my imagination of who she was in the moments of her life that were never written about or recorded.
(Crowe, 2016).
Once we had the entire script fully completed, I could sit down and read it in one sitting. As soon as we came with the idea of producing a show on Zelda Fitzgerald, I immediately started to prepare and read as much as I could about this incredible icon and muse of the 1920’s era. The Southern accent was hard to develop at first, but I watched old Hollywood films where there leading English actresses played Southern belles, such as Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939,) and again as Blanche Dubois in a Streetcar Named Desire. Thankfully these are two great films that I strongly recommend so it was enjoyable for me to watch scenes over and over again to pick up the accent and perfect the accent.
Vivien Leigh, (1939) played Southern belle Scarlett O’ Hara in David O Selznick’s Gone with the Wind.
I most enjoyed performing the nurse scene. I got to experiment from changing my objectives and fighting for status with the nurse in rehearsal and along with the director we used distance between the two characters to show who was in control. The ‘in love’ Zelda has the most power over the nurse.
(Crowe, 2016).
I hope the show fills out our audience’s impression of Zelda Fitzgerald, that she was not just a ‘muse’ to one of America’s greatest novelists but she was a woman who had an incredible passion for life, a woman who was misdiagnosed. She was allowed through us as a theatre company and actors to expand and there was so much the audience may have not have understood about her, her wit, her desire to be taken seriously as an artist and I hoped that some of those things can be understood in the common view of who she was. A biographic theatrical production exploring on going mental health, including physical theatre is possibly not the way our audience would usually spent their evening, but I hope from our commitment in the production that they are inspired to see more art and culture that is different from the norm. We hope we succeeded in fulfilling the Arts Council England’s policies. ‘When we talk about the value of arts and culture, we should always start the intrinsic. How art and culture illuminate our lives and enrich our emotional world.’ (Mowlah, 2014).
Citation
Abbott, J. (2012). The Acting Book. London. Nick Hern Books.
Adler, S. (2000). The Art of Acting. New York. Applause Books.
Bryer, J and Barks, C. (2002). Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda. The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. London. Bloomsbury.
Churchwell, S. (2013). Careless People: Murder Mayhem and the invention of The Great Gatsby. London. Penguin.
Fitzgerald, Z. (1991). The Collected Writings Zelda Fitzgerald. United States. Little Brown and Company.
Fowler, T. (2013). Z, A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Great Britain. Two Roads Books.
Fry, S. (2006). The Secret Life of The Manic Depressive. Youtube. Online Recourse. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3rHTm1YLxA
Latifah, Q. (2014). Changing the world one word at a time. The Queen Latifah Show. Youtube. Online resource. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YshUDa10JYY [Accessed 24th May 2016].
Midnight in Paris. (2011). Directed by Woody Allen. California. Gravier Productions.
Mowlah, A. (2014).The Value of Arts and Culture to people and society. Value Arts Culture Review. Arts Council England.
Schmitd, L. (2016). Zelda Fitzgerald Letter Home. Online Resource. Available from: http://loveathighspeeds.tumblr.com/post/116579382067/napowrimo-day-9-zelda-fitzgeralds-letter-home [Accessed 24th May 2016].
Sharky, S. (2016). The Great Gatsby. [Performance Art]. Black Eyed Theatre. Lincoln. Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. England. Friday 4th March 2016.
The Great Gatsby. (2013). Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Warner Bros.
Zelda, The Musical. (2003). [Performance Art]. Directed by Craig Revel Horwood.