'Going Solo' during Winter Term

Author: Emma Stanford

No term paper can compare to the stress of standing up before one's peers and performing, alone, an original monologue. But four days a week this Winter Term, the twelve students in Visting Lecturer in Theatre Dana Yeaton's "Going Solo" class do exactly that. On Tuesday morning, they walked into the Mahaney Center for the Arts and shed their shoes and winter coats. Through five-minute original monologues, they shared nuances of their characters that would not come to light in any ordinary class discussion.

The class has attracted a wide range of students. There are theatre majors and creative writers, as well as students without experience in either. To bring the class together, Yeaton organized a sleepover the first week at a friend's house, where the students performed and critiqued their first pieces.

"By the time you've put up with somebody snoring, you start to feel like you know them a little bit," said Yeaton. That feeling of intimacy and trust is crucial in a class where the stress of performing is compounded by the stress of sharing original writing.

On the way to publicly performing their collected short pieces, the students write and perform work every day of class. To become better acquainted with their medium, they also study different kinds of one-actor plays.

"Solo performance isn't a very well-known phenomenon," Yeaton admitted. All the course literature was written after 1990, but there is still a wide range of exemplary material, from personal monologues to complex multi-character stories performed by one actor.

On Tuesday, Jan. 13 to warm up for the intimidating task of performing in front of their peers, Yeaton gathered the students in the middle of the room. For five minutes they played an artistic game of "Follow the Leader," imitating each other's goofy and expressive walks. There was laughter and confusion and the odd game of bumper-butts. Finally Yeaton called all movement to a halt.

"Do you feel your body still vibrating?" he asked. The students nodded. "This is energy. You need it. If you come into a class and you don't have it, fake it."

Sufficiently energized, the class sat down in a broad arc. One by one they left the room, got into character and returned to give their performances. For Tuesday's class, Yeaton had instructed the students to prepare a monologue with the theme of "interview," real or fictional. Each student took this theme in a different direction. One conducted both sides of an interview; some pretended to be talking on the phone; one, as a 20-year-old trying to persuade an imaginary clerk to accept her mother's credit card, explored his character's views on abortion and self-image. As the students performed, the others watched intently. After finishing, during the brief applause, each actor hurried to Yeaton, eager for criticism, and the other students scribbled comments on torn-up corners of paper to be handed back to the actor.

The goal of such an intimate class is for each student to observe his or her work's effect on the audience. In his criticism and in the class's critiquing discussions, Yeaton tries to get students to see what worked in their performances and what could use tweaking. At the beginning of the term, Yeaton restricted the discussions to merely stating the stand out aspects of a performance. Now that trust has been established among the students, they are moving into more concrete judgments of each other's work.

This format could be terrifying, but Yeaton and his students do their best to keep it relaxed. As Yeaton critiqued each performer, the others talked quietly. Despite the written comments and the emphasis on peer critiquing, Heath Rassner '11 said that he was in the class not to criticize others' performances but to enjoy them.

Rassner, a self-described "performing arts major" who prepared for his performance on Tuesday by carefully ripping the collar off his t-shirt, also praised Yeaton's teaching, saying he was "very respectful of [the students'] processes." Although Yeaton's instructions can be vague, he is receptive to anything the students choose to do.

Yeaton agreed. "Every day I get a good surprise or two," he said, whether it be a particularly daring character portrayal or a newly revealed aspect of a student's personality. "People come into this with such a mix of dread and excitement." If Winter Term is about self-exploration and trying new things, the students in "Going Solo" are making the most of it.