Pantelone - Lecherous old fool, greedy and deluded
(high, top of the pecking order. Pantalone IS Money. His orders are obeyed.)
Il Dottore - A bumbling quack who doesn't know a thing about medicine, pompous windbad (e.g Captain Mennering)
(A bachelor or widow. High.)
Capitano - A complete coward and a fake with a huge nose, likes to strut around somehow he is in charge!
(Pretends high status, a loner)
Pedrolino - A cunning servant who dreams of love, has a white face on account of working in the kitchen.
(low, the youngest son of the family)
Arlecchino - A cunning sevant who still retains the devils horn, mischievous deliberately mixes up his masters orders, agile and acrobatic part monkey part dog.
(Low, A servant)
Columbina - A servant, often the subject of love interest.
(Low, a servant usually a ladies maid.)
My experience on acting all five characters was quite hard because they were all so unique from one another. The way I overcome this was relating them to animals in the ways they walk and act towards one another. For example when playing Capitano I related myself to a giraffe who walked with his nose because he was a 'know it all'. He pretends he is at a high status when really in reality he is a loner.
I think the hardest character to play was Il Dottore because he is a character who you wouldn't know how to act as one thing but show that your meaning the other. For example, I would need to show him as somebody who thinks he knows it all and thinks he is in charge of everything however I would also have to show that he doesn't really know what he's talking about when it comes to medicines. He was of a high status as well which made it twice as hard to act however I compared him to a donkey.
The character I chose to focus on was Columbina. In our improvised performance this suited our story line best. The story line was: A dysfunctional family involving Pantelone, Columbina (who I played), Capitano, Arlecchino and 2 Pedrolino's. Our day was set on a beach where we all began to fight over the sun. The two Pedrolino's fell in love with one another and Capitano found it hard to control our family. Pantelone was trying to make a move on his own sister Columbina. Meanwhile the mischievous Arlecchino was stealing things from other peoples bags.
I was attracted into playing Columbina because it fed into my work of Barlocco-Pizzocca in the Devil in drag. They were both similar characters at this point because Columbina was a very sexually motivated woman as she is usually the subject of love interest and as was Barlocco-Pizzocca during the scene that I play where she is in court.
The strengths of our performance was that it all came together in the end and made sense that we were a dysfunctional family with many unique personalities. We all showed our individual personalities either through facial expression, voice or body movement. We made sure that each of our characters were clear to the audience so that it wouldn't made the main story line confusing.
The weakness' of our performance were that it took a while to create a story line that involved all characters. We could of worked harder together to make it clearer and more characteristic. If our characters were acted further we could of shown the audience that we understood them fully and linked them well into our story line. For example we could have made Columbina more sexually motivated by the way she walks and does her facial expressions. I think its important when doing Commedia that our body and facial expressions are clear because we don't always need to speak to show a story line. The next step is to make our expressions louder and more extravagant for a really good performance.
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