Our Country's good
Who I played
what i learned
How i grew
In Our Country's Good, I played Dabby, a British convict in an Australian penal colony. Loud, crass, and outspoken, Dabby spends her days in the colony with her best friend, Mary, often acting as her voice and offsetting her shy demeanor. She yearns for her childhood home back in Devon, and secretly plots to run away from the colony and escape to her home. Throughout the play, she rehearses for a play that one of the officers is putting on, and realizes along the way the power that words can hold as she begins to see herself mirrored in one of the characters. While she is bold and gutsy, she is faced with many situations where male officers humiliate her and attempt to take away her power and sense of self. In the end, however, she comes out as confident in her convictions as ever.
Dabby taught me many things as an actor. On paper, we are complete opposites; Dabby expresses her inappropriate behavior and perceived lack of manners in ways that I couldn't even imagine carrying out in private, let alone in front of my friends and superiors. And yet, after looking deeper, I realized that we were more alike than I first realized. Dabby's boldness is a defense mechanism, a tactic she uses to shield herself from the cruelty and unknown of her new environment. After realizing that, I began to see myself in her. Every time she made a joke or insulted an officer, I remembered how many times I had smiled and joked to defuse a difficult situation, even when I felt like breaking down. Even though I had started my acting process by viewing her as my fundamental opposite, it seemed as though we had both gone through life wearing masks of a similar nature. Thanks to Dabby, I learned that words don't always equal objectives, and sometimes, the loudest people are hiding the most.
Our Country's Good provided me with so many wonderful opportunities for growth. As an actor, self-confidence has always been a point of contention for me. Dabby forced me to confront that problem and change it. I still remember what my director reminded me over the course of the first few rehearsals: "Be louder. Be bolder." I went into the rehearsal process worrying that I was going to be too much. What if my Devon accent wasn't accurate enough? What if I over-acted? These fears caused me to pause in the first week of rehearsals, stopping just shy of my full potential. It was my director's words that made me change me mind. Be bolder. After I heard those words, I sat down in my bedroom, looking over the script. I was in the processing of beginning to do my text work, and when I looked down at the verbs that I had written on the page, I realized that I was completely wrong. I was using my tactics in a way that caused me to hold back the power that Dabby held. I knew exactly what she wanted. It was right there in the text. I had to stop overthinking and just go get it. Dabby wasn't embarrassed. She was powerful, unwavering, and maybe a little lost sometimes, but she was not going to let herself be shamed. Dabby taught me, more than anything, that it is okay to take up space onstage. In fact, it's vital. I learned that when you want and feel as deeply and strongly as Dabby does, making a mess in the midst of your fight can create the most beautiful, compelling story. Thanks to her, I will never need to hear the words "Be bolder" again.