The First Read Through

The cast of “Almost Maine” did a read through, which means we literally just read through the play to familiarize ourselves with both the play and our co-stars.

Before we started, we talked about the play to see what everyone thought and what we were afraid that might or might not happen. The biggest concern for me was that all of these characters are in love somehow. They all need to express it, and they all do that in different ways. This makes the characters vulnerable to being sappy and possibly even unrealistic. Sometimes actors will over-act and make it seem unrealistic. We want to avoid that, because if it is not realistic the audience will not enjoy it.

We then read through all the scenes of the play.  Before the read through there was no preparation by the actors. The only thing we had done was to read through the play when we were first told we were cast. Even with no preparation, we found out that we, in the moment, really got into it. We just became our characters.

My outlook on this play before the read through was that it would be almost all comedy. There is a lot of comedy and humor in this play. For example, when I read one scene, the characters are falling over from becoming weak in the knees in love. I thought that was comedy but it actually turns out to be a touching and scary moment for both of them. After the read through I realized that almost every scene was touching and romantic, along with being funny. A lot of people were touched as we did the read through by the scenes, and by the actors who were so good at being the characters. We all kind of awed each other. We took our characters and put ourselves in those shoes. 

Afterwords we all talked about it and told what we saw in the play. We all realized that there is no doubt that these characters will not be phony and sappy. These characters touched all of our hearts. They are in tough and romantic situations, but they pull through and just find love in their hearts, and I hope they touch yours as well.

­Travis Cooper

Randy and Man