Whose afraid of Virginia Woolf

For Whose afraid of Virginia Woolf written by Edward Albee which is a drama, a black comedy, my partner Suyin and I were assigned to choose a scene from the play and perform it, we chose a part where Martha was talking to her guests Honey and Nick about George, however she was criticizing George on his career and also insulting him. We chose this particular scene since it portrayed their personalities quite well at the beginning of the play where Martha was empowering over George and the audience could tell that the two people were very distinct from each other, we wanted to make this evident by our performances. Also present in this scene emerges some of the themes throughout the play such as alcohol, mental abuse and fantasy. Suyin played George and I played Martha, I thought that performing this scene would be quite easy since I already knew the characters and their personalities, and how they act. When we presented the formative in front of the class, we had to think about blocking and so what we decided was that I being Martha would be sitting down while I talk to the guests and George would just arrive and also he stands up to pour himself a drink, which adds different levels to the scene, also another aspect I liked about this scene is that it adds suspense and tension towards the end where there's a climax. I thought for the first time we did the blocking great and in my mind I thought I depicted Martha's character well, however the feedback we got was that I was not 'mean' enough or not treating Suyin (George) more as if he were nothing, it was a challenge for me to play this type of 'meaty' character, since I'm not generally an aggressive person and also another struggle I found was that every time I have to play a person who is older than me, I can't seem to get the tone correct to make it sound more of the age I'm playing. For Suyin I noticed that for the first performance she was somewhat holding back her character, George is vulnerable however he should be reacting to everything I am saying since I am insulting him. To overcome these obstacles I just had to allow my myself to be more endured into the character and have that thought of talking to someone who is useless and has no purpose in life, someone who is lazy and slacking around, that's the image I had in my mind, and for the tone I just had to pace myself and had to lower and make my voice higher at times, also I changed my gestures and always faced Suyin when I was talking to her so she can know I am always focused on her and belittling him in front of people and even at times pointing at him, and making facial expressions which looked disgusted. Also I saw Suyins character come out more, because at one time he drops his drink in a glass on the floor, and so there she lashed out really well to build the suspense in the end where we end up screaming on top of one another, so at the beginning we were quite mellow however building up the tension.