To find out about the themes we conducted many group research tasks as well as individual ones. These tasks included having group discussions about some of the themes and how they are seen in the eyes of society; for example, one of our discussions was about religion because two of the main characters are associated with religion. Jas believes in Islam and Massie is an atheist but her dad is a vicar, so we were discussing about how Jas is treated because he's gay for example when he told his brother he was gay, Bash his brother and Omar his cousin beat him on. We discussed things like Bash may feel humiliated by who his brother is and he may be worried about his family name and what other people would think of them.
Also we had a woman for a charity foundation to come in and talk to us about F.G.M and to give us more insight about it. Another group research task we did that was vital to us learning and finding out more about the play and the themes was that we got the playwright to come in and talk to us about the play. This helped us a lot because we found out what the playwright wanted to show in the stories behind each character and why those themes were so important. For example I didn't know much about F.G.M until this play but while working and researching my knowledge improved and I was much more aware of the topic and I'm sure by performing it we have educated and inform many people about it too.
As well as group research I did my own individual research about my character. Most of my research was secondary research, many things I found in books and on the internet. One thing I done for my research was I asked some people what they thought about someone that was gay and then I asked them what they thought about someone that is gay and religious. I found out that by adding the religion aspect to it some people perception changed while some remained the same, in my research I found that by adding religion it makes it harder for family and friends to accept them because if they were gay that would caused some contradiction but they would come to terms with it in the end. On the other hand, if they were Muslim and gay it would be much more difficult to accept them because of their believes. If you were followed Islam and you were gay in some countries you will be killed.
Also some more research I done was talking to my friend who is a Muslim and is gay. I was able to asked him questions like how did he tell his family and friends? , how they reacted? and some challenges he faced when coming out? etc. All that research helped me to formed and shaped my character from the way he acts, talks and also what he would be thinking about his inner thoughts. By using all the information I have acquired and my acting techniques I have gained, this helped me to transformed into my character Jas not only physical wise also mentally to think and respond like my character would. The acting method I used was Constantine Stanislavsky method acting and I used this acting style because two of my favourite actors Al Pacino and Robert De Niro uses this method to transform into the characters they portray.
Some other research that I had done to get into my character was to read books base on the themes of the play also I looked at other plays that had similar themes to Last Summer. This helped me because by reading other plays with similar themes it caused me to look at my play from a different prospective. I personally think this was knowledgeable because it helped to give me a better understanding of my play itself.
It was hard to research about the play especially because it wasn't a published play and it was a first draft. By the play not being published it was difficult for us to research and find out information about it. Also the play had never been done before, we couldn't look at any theatre companies that had done it or read about things people had thought about it , we couldn't look at different interpretation about it to try and see how it was done before we had to do everything from scratch. Having all those challenges made researching about the play and the themes within the play ten times harder and we done as much as we can.
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