Achievements as well as improvements

  Our group's performance is based on the theme which shows a comparison between rich and poor. In progress, we have already finished script and blocking. One good thing about our performance is that every scene has close connection to one another. For example, we showed that how Gabriel and Daniel are talking about the engagement so Daniel went visiting Monsieur Galimar, how Desiree got a car accident and Daniel didn't care. We followed the original plot's story development but we did come up with a few new scenes, such as the "rich" conversations. Also, in order to make maximize the gap between rich and poor, a huge portion of the plot are different adaptations from the original work. In the novel, Daniel was a jerk but he did not say really mean words to Desiree but to hurt her feelings. We made him a "better" jerk in the play, such as asking Desiree if she wants money and say that she is an annoying peasant girl. In additional, we are pretty  satisfied with the length of the performance, which totally exceeded our expectations. We wanted to create a 20 minutes plot but it eventually became half-hour long. Every single scenes in our performance straightly makes contrast between rich and poor and there's not much to delete. For example, in a lot of the scenes, rich people(Daniel and Gabriel) express their opinions to the things in one side of the stage, while poor people(Desiree and Tonton) show their attitudes after. Rich people's conversations are full of disrespect to the poors and arrogant attitudes. But the peasants really accept the reality and help other people. I think it's a great demonstration of the novel.
  One of the biggest weaknesses in our script, however, is that there are too many grammar mistakes and unnecessary sentences. It's mainly because of that we came up with our own lines instead of copying the original conversations, and our abilities to manage the language are weak.  However, Every member of our group contributed although sometimes we don't agree with each other's ideas. So it's a really nice process that we have to communicate well and make the script fits everyone's flavor. Another thing that we are worrying about is that the language is not close enough to the novel's. We simplified some conversations between Desiree and Tonton,  as well as made the "rich" conversations fancier, just to distinguish their social status. During this process, we thought of that the language we wrote might not be what the actual characters might say, but still, adaptations are necessary. Those are the sacrifices that we had to make in order to present our theme more efficiently.
  By observing other's performances, I found that our performance is actually the one that stays loyal with the original novel. Other groups came up with really creative ideas such as the "little red riding hood"s adaptations. I like that one the best because it gives audience a different perspective of the novel, our group is urged to achieve that too.