September 11, 2008: Romeo and Juliet, Act IV, Scene I, pages 94-99

For our scene from Romeo and Juliet (Act IV, Scene I) my group had specific ideas on how we wanted to portray the main characters (Paris, Juliet, and Friar Laurence) and that determined how we blocked out the particular scene. The interaction between Juliet and Paris was first. As we saw it, Paris believed that Juliet already belonged to him because despite the fact that they weren’t yet married, Lord Capulet had bequeathed her to him. At this point Juliet was already married and had no romantic interest in Paris; she wanted to avoid him entirely. To get this feeling across, we had Paris slowly advance towards Juliet as he spoke. We wanted him to get uncomfortably close to Juliet, to show the possessiveness of the character. Juliet, in turn, would react by moving away from him, showing her reluctance to even be near him. Once or twice she even walked around him to avoid him (although this was partially influenced by the amount of space we had, it worked well for the scene). In the second part of the scene between Juliet and Friar Laurence, we used blocking to emphasize the difference between the two characters’ state of mind. Juliet moved around a lot; her movements got more dramatic as her speech reached its peak. The friar, on the other hand, we had stay in the same spot throughout that part of the scene. We felt he was the levelheaded, grounded character in this scene. He remains calm during Juliet’s tirade, just as he is the calm planner throughout the play.