Welcome to the making of DIY - Selfwritten Monologue Project at East 15 Acting School

DIY was a self written one man show inspired by Petya Trofimov. A character from Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. This blog is talking about the process of inspiration, writing, blocking and teching.

I was tutored by Zois Pigadas and had two sessions with Ed Harris. I want to say thank you to both of them for helping me develop a piece that I grew very fond of.

INSPIRATION

The first time I got in touch with The Cherry Orchard, I felt very connected to Trofimov. And I definitely wanted to talk about something I had strong feelings about. Especially reading his monologue All of Russia is our orchard inspired me to choose him as my source character. Having a strong opinion in politics but being trapped in an even stronger system is a timeless problem. I wanted to show that this is a topic which is still as relevant as it was in Chekhov's time. Since I have only experience living in the western first world, my life is shaped by capitalism. As much as capitalism raises my life standard, it has a huge impact on other countries, our environment. The repetition of political structures rising and falling is the message I wanted to explore. But I wanted to bring that to a personal level of a character going through the desire of changing the social structure around him. How does his ideology contradict with his behaviour.

IDEA FOR THE SCENARIO

I saw Trofimov travelling to the year 2020 as a time traveller around 120 years after the play and let him experience what changed. The monologue would be set after around two or three weeks being in the future and he takes his conclusions. The journey to where I ended up was wild!