Performances so far (not ELP)

I received my grades back from my solo performance of my own story and my first performance of my piece from Trestle, so I figured I'd write on both of them.
The solo performance was kind of nerve-wrecking for me, I don't like to perform myself. Interesting, isn't it, how it is so much easier to hide behind a character that someone else has created? All actors are storytellers, but how hesitant we are to tell our own stories on stage. (Backstage... well, that's something else entirely.) So of course, I didn't execute my story exactly how I had rehearsed it, (and of course none of you knew any better, but there was even more great repetition and so fourth), but the plot was still communicated, so on that most basic level, I was still successful. As I said in my pre-story, I really don’t think I have many good stories to tell, in fact only one that I can produce on command that is really worthwhile, and even then it has to be for the right audience. It was very helpful to have someone say, in essence, “just tell. Me. A. Story. It doesn’t have to be epic, or ironic, or profound, it just has to have characters and action.” Time and again I find myself struggling as a student because I get too immersed in what I have been asked to do, and then I get overwhelmed and half the time I quit. When I don’t quit, I often end up settling for something less than what I had envisioned in my head, even though it still meets the assignment’s requirements. What did Shakespeare say about ambition?

Approaching Dray’s monologue was a different sort of challenge, as I had to figure out if/how to present it within the context of the play without someone playing Gin, and what to do with this need to destroy things-physical things-in order to manifest his frustration with his situation. I also wish I had spent more time playing with the physical tearing itself, and that I had sucked it up and brought something woven which I could tear. (I think someone I know occasionally does this as a stress relief mechanism. She also has been known to smash aluminum cans with a sledgehammer. Maybe I should interview her.) I want to work more with using the tears as punctuation.
In the future, I am also going to do the whole scene, I think, since we talked so much about honoring the script, and it really does make a huge difference in the action of the scene.
What I really like about this scene is they way that Dray is finally able to put his finger on something, to form the sentence “I don’t know how to belong to my life.” It gives a sense of hope, in the sense, at least, that progress is being made, and progress is the number one thing really missing from the lives of these characters. The stagnancy has smothered any remaining hope in just about everyone but Gin. What about Pace? In some ways, she is the driving force of the play, but she also doesn’t really know where she’s going.