Today went back over the first half, but not before a few activities to get people in the right frame of mind.
Chepe started off with a brief tutorial/exercise in iambic pentameter. (Wish we'd had on video the bit from Looking for Richard where Pacino gets some random fellow on the street to explain iambic pentameter to the camera.) Talked about how the verse inflects the lines and discussed a few individual lines to show how it works. The group's restraint noticeable when we got to the exercise of sounding out iambic pentameter in nonsense sounds -- once Chepe got going with some donkey-like noises, the rest of the group eventually began to chip in ("ah-CHOO! ah-CHOO!")
Then the Mirror theatre game -- first full-body, then facial. Have never been very good at this and admit that I tried to squirm out of it, with no success -- got paired off with a late-arriving cast member. :-)
Finally, Trust Falls. Concluded that it is in very bad taste to tell stories of bad trust falls (fourth graders saying, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if he REALLY fell?!") when someone is in the circle and in the process of falling! No one got hurt, though -- perhaps this is a good sign that we have a reliable group. :-)
Oh yeah, the read-through. It went noticeably better tonight -- perhaps the discussion of verse helped people get a grasp of the text? Clocked in at a little over an hour -- good pacing.
An evening of minor verbal faux pas. Two most memorable. During Trust falls, someone (names left out to protect the "innocent") was heard to observe that, "there's a place for your hand somewhere in there." Later, during read-through, "inch-thick" got mangled to "inch-dick," leading someone to comment, vis-a-vis Leontes, "Oh, so that's what his problem is!"
Still holding back on the deep textual questions, although tonight the question was raised as to why Paulina helps to keep Hermione in hiding for 16 years. Possible responses -- something to do with Perdita, and the need to wait for her as per the oracle. The extent of the damage that Leontes has done, needing that long a time to repair. Something to discuss further when conferencing with Nat and Amy.