The Days of Wine and Roses: Joe character analysis

The first scene of the semester that I will be in will be from “The Days of Wine and Roses“ by JP Miller with Hannah as Kirsten and myself as Joe. Now, I have had a moderate amount of experience with acting. I did six of my high school plays and of course I have done scenes while in college and other types of acting projects. Until I got to college, I thought acting was simple and that I was just amazing at it. Once I got to college though, I realized just how much work acting and developing a character really takes. It takes much more than just acting as a person. It takes emotional recall, and producing realistic emotions and motivations while on stage. It also takes an in depth look into the play and character to figure out just how the character ticks and what kinds of physicalizations they will have. I have realized that I have a lot to improve on, but am ready for whatever acting throws at me.
The play “The Days of Wine and Roses” is about a guy named Joe and his story about struggling with being an alcoholic. The play is basically told by Joe at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Joe meets his wife Kirsten and they bond over liking to drink alcohol. The play is all about them struggling over this addiction and them living their life as an alcoholic. They have a child and they are not the best parents because of their addiction. In the course of the play, they then decide they want to try to quit drinking and during this scene, we see that they are not handling quitting very well. They are shaking and having a very hard time. Eventually they just get so desperate that they decide to resort to drinking vanilla extract which has alcohol in it. Eventually during the play, they are doing a lot better with quitting, but Joe mistakenly decides to celebrate their success with alcohol. This plan does not go over as well as it was supposed to and at the end of this scene they end up tearing apart Kirsten’s dad greenhouse looking for a bottle of alcohol. Eventually, Joe is able to succeed with quitting alcohol, but Kirsten ends up having a much harder time. Joe eventually has to leave Kirsten because Kirsten remains an alcoholic and gives up trying to quit. Joe realizes their relationship has been founded on alcohol and realizes that it can not continue until Kirsten also quits, so Joe ends up leaving her and basically tells her to come back to him when she has quit and recovered.
The character I am playing is Joe and changes a lot through out the action of the play. What’s interesting about this character is that in the time of the play, he actually remains the same because the play is him talking at an alcoholics anonymous meeting, but Joe changes immensely throughout the story he tells. Joe starts out as a guy who is having difficulty with alcohol and at first does not really realize that he necessarily has a problem. But once him and his wife, who are both alcoholics, have a child and realize that what they are doing could be destructive to both themselves and the child, they decide they need to make a change. So at this point they are going to try to quit, which is the first big change. The next one occurs after they have been off alcohol for awhile and are starting to go through withdrawal. They end up giving in and looking for anything with alcohol, they get so desperate. Arnesen, Kirstens father is the next person who tries to make a change with them. He sees his daughter drunk and thinks Joe is a bad influence and decides to take them away for a little bit to work hard with no alcohol. Kirsten and Joe go and after this trip is when the next big change can be seen.
For the first time we see them acting fine and healthy again. They are no longer going through major withdrawals and are finally happy. They also seem very comfortable since they decide to celebrate their success by drinking alcohol. It shows their confidence that they were able to quit. Another change occurs right after this scene when Joe tears a part the greenhouse looking for his last bottle of alcohol. This shows them relapse back into who they were before this scene. Joe makes one final, what seems like permanent, change at the end of the play. It seems that he sees how destructive the alcoholic lifestyle is and decides to really go for quitting and putting his life back together. By the end of the play we see that he has finally put his life back together and has given up on alcohol. In contrast his wife has stayed in the relapsed state and never is able to recover from alcoholism and gives up on quitting.
The objective of my character in the first part of my scene at first is to figure out any way to get around having to tell Kirstens dad that all of the money he lent them was spent on alcohol. All the while he is also trying to compose himself for his business partner who is coming by to discuss a big deal. Towards the end of this beginning part, Joe basically gives up on trying to act “cool” and is now craving alcohol and is trying to find alcohol somewhere in the house. By the end of the first part he is ashamed that he is so desperate and is again trying to tell himself that his business partner will understand why he is so shaky and jittery.
The second part of the scene has a whole different list of objectives. At the beginning, his objective is probably to sleep with his wife later on that night by seducing her with alcohol that he has obtained as a prize for them being so “good.” His objective gradually shifts to him trying to convince his wife that it is okay for them to drink just a little bit, but then shifts to obtaining more alcohol after they have had a little bit to drink.
So far, the rehearsals for our scene have been going great. Hannah and I have been getting our blocking down. Performing in front of the class and getting Professor Cirino’s advice has also been very helpful. I also believe the exercise he did with me, where he had me run around to get tired for my scene and had me lifted and pushed randomly has also really helped me develop my character more. Through the rehearsal process, I have been experimenting with my character and ways that my character would move and I think it is really coming along. The last time Hannah and I rehearsed, I was really happy with the way my character was coming along and thought that so far the scene is going very good. The thing that we really have to think about now is props and using the props. Our scene requires a lot of props so we really need to find what we will be using and we need to start practicing with them.
So far so good, and I believe that when it comes time to perform our scene, it will be very good and very entertaining for the audience.