Candice Jean-Jacques as Miranda

Candice Jean-Jacques, a senior theatre major, plays the role of Miranda. Jean-Jacques' attraction to acting and her process of discovering this specific role relate to her cross-cultural experience as a young woman from Haiti who is studying at a university in the United States.

On Acting

Jean-Jacques describes her upbringing as very structured. She grew up in a small community in Haiti and she was raised with a very strict code of appropriate behavior. She is attracted to theatre as a way to explore alternative realms of human experience. She explains, "Reading a play helps you understand the variety of humans, the reasons and realities that they are living in." For her, learning to act has been a very freeing experience because "there's no good or bad, right or wrong way of doing things. It's just all a learning experience of how you are, how the world works, how relationships work." But the necessity of revealing her emotions on stage has been a challenge to her because it is so contrary to the very structured, intellectual way in which she was raised. In acting, she says, "my struggle is to get out of my head."

On the Character of Miranda

Jean-Jacques loves the script of Alchemy/Blues because she finds the characters to be very much like real people: "Miranda changes her mind so much in this play. She wants to see the world. She doesn't want to see the world. It's like everyday people. We change our minds all the time." The actor also enjoys the complexity of a character that is "so full of levels and life and sadness." She believes the character is in a rather unique position as the youngest one in a community where everybody else already had their youth. Miranda also makes a tremendous journey throughout the course of the play, from the little girl who hopes things will get better and wants to fight to the wiser soul who sees spirits and takes responsibility for this vision. In spite of this growth, the character retains certain contradictions. Jean-Jacques finds comedy in these conflicting impulses: "There's an open innocent side of her that is ready to see spirits. But other side of her that wants to have a normal life and wants to do things like go fishing and spend time with her grandma"

On the Rehearsal Process

Jean-Jacques originally thought her skills might be more suited to the role of Simone, so she was surprised and challenged when she was cast as Miranda. She recalls thinking "Yes I do look young and have energy. But she's too impulsive for me. For me there is always a strict planned journey to what I do as an actor." The actor not only felt the character was at odds with her own "controlling personality" but she also faced another challenge in approaching the role. The world of the play seemed very "close to the earth" in a way that reminded Jean-Jacques of Haitian culture. But it was hard for her to identify this familiar world with the language of the script. She explains, "The language was a barrier for me. I would get into the process physically, but speaking English felt wrong. It felt so close to home that I felt like I wanted to speak Creole or French. I felt like my body was separate from my voice."

The actor found her own method for connecting her vocal performance to the world of the play: "One day I went home and put on some Haitian music, and warmed up physically and worked with breathing. Those songs make you grounded because they bring you close to the earth. Then I read the script in Creole ­ just to see how it would feel in my language. I did that and I went to rehearsal I was so much more grounded and so much more connected to everything. I felt my body getting closer to my voice. They were working as a team now." Jean-Jacques found this technique helpful to "get a foundation" for her role. She explains "what you need to do to get there does not even have to be connected to the play. It's whatever it takes to get you there."

Jean-Jacques also had to discover her character's conflicted relationship to the play's spiritual world. She explains, "In the scene with Selah, Miranda is afraid but she also WANTS to see the spirit. The comedy is in her eagerness and that she doesn't know what it means. She just wants to see it. She is excited but doesn't understand the implications." Miranda's internal conflicts also inform her relationship to the other women in the community, so the actor "played a lot with the side of her that doesn't want to hang out with the other women. But there's also the side of her that needs them."

Jean-Jacques' initial uncertainty about the character of Miranda ultimately grew into a sense of excitement about what new discoveries would accompany each rehearsal. The actor learned to speak of her character with great anticipation: "She's so impulsive. What is she going to do today? What am I going to find out about her today?" Jean-Jacques knows that process of discovery will continue for as long as she performs the play: "Those characters are so three dimensional that there is no way we can know everything about them by opening night. Juanita told us that we would never know everything about the characters."