Telephone Booths, Cat’s Paws, and Wanderlust, Part 2

Posted on November 21, 2014 by J.

Cat’s Feet is what happens when a director tells someone with Telephone Booth Syndrome to “move around, use the stage”.

Have you ever seen a cat knead? If you have, imagine an actor doing the same thing with his feet.

Kneading doesn’t require that you leave the telephone booth. Because actual movement is involved, actors think they are doing what the director asked. They honestly don’t realize that they haven’t really relocated their body but instead are wearing a hole in the carpet.

They may be rotating left to right, and both feet may be moving, but they haven’t actually taken a full step in any direction. It’s more like a quarter step. Keep encouraging them to move, and you might get them to use 6 square feet of space (3 feet wide, 2 feet deep). But that’s about it.

It’s as if there is a leash that keeps pulling them back to their original position every time they stray too far from “home base”.

Eventually, they realize that physical movement means horizontal, not vertical, movement. They may even come to understand that the stage is their oyster, and they are welcome – no, encouraged – to use every bit of it.

This is when they become Wanderers.

Wanderers move, alright. They may cover the entire stage (although typically, they wear a path in the carpet from point A to point B.) But usually, they move slowly in one direction and then reverse when they reach the “end point”.

The important thing to understand about Wanderers is that there is no connection between their emotional life and their movement. They are walking because the director told them, “this is your scene, use the whole stage.”

Name one person you know who wanders aimlessly while they are talking and who doesn’t have a distinct psychiatric disorder. I doubt that you can.

There is ALWAYS a purpose to our movement which results in a distinct start, movement with purpose, and a distinct end. Wanderers tend to blur these divisions. They stay in motion for the sake of staying in motion, not because they have any practical or emotion need to be in motion.

Let’s say that I’m playing a scene where my character is very angry at someone and has a lengthy speech where I rail at my scene partner. “Work the room,” says my director. “Use the whole stage.” Given these instructions, I’ve seen actors slowly and deliberately, often without relating back to their scene partner in any meaningful way, traverse the set in a way that is counter to the deep emotions they are feeling. Sometimes they are in constant motion, but any stops along the way rarely have any connection to what is going on in the text.

To the audience, they look like they’re wandering. Because, in fact, they are.

Stage movement is essentially punctuation to the script. It needs to buttress the emotional arc of the characters. It therefore needs some intentionality and to be chosen carefully.

Actor’s Etiquette: When Things Go Wrong (and They Will)

Posted on November 16, 2014 by J.

Things don’t always happen the way they are supposed to on stage, beyond the matter of whether or not you remember your lines. Props don’t get placed, or they’re in the wrong place. Things break. Sound cues go awry. What’s an actor to do?

The first thing, as with dropped lines, is not to panic. There is always a way out or around the problem, even if it’s not ideal. It’s easier to deal with than dropped lines or forgotten entrances, because you can generally speaking stick fairly close to the script without anyone suddenly feeling lost.

Here’s a common one that often is mishandled: Something falls to the ground: an earring, a potato chip, a pencil. No one retrieves it, because (a) it’s not in the script and (b) they’re afraid of disrupting the play, because they have to move several feet out of position to retrieve the object. They might have to move on someone else’s speech, and they want to be polite to their fellow actors.

If you don’t retrieve it, the audience will obsess over it: “Are they going to pick it up?” “What if someone steps on it accidentally?” “Why aren’t they picking it up?

Why, indeed? Wouldn’t you pick it up if this was real life?

I rest my case.

In reality, moments like these are great opportunities to show that you really are “staying in the moment” and add a degree of verisimilitude to the scene. Don’t let them pass you by! Take the challenge!

I once played Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit. The “seance” scene requires a certain number of chairs, and one night, I realized in the middle of the scene that we were short one. Not a problem: I suggested to my host that we needed one more chair given how many people we were, and perhaps he’d be so kind as to fetch an extra from the dining room. I filled the gap when he went to fetch the chair with some plausible conversation, and the very practical problem was addressed without the audience being aware of any problem.

Need to pick up that earring? You can do so while still staying in character and listening to what’s going on in the scene. If it’s your line, that’s even better. Covering unusual moments while you are the one speaking gives you full control over the situation, and you can add dialogue as necessary to make it seamless and get yourself back into position.

But what about things that are material to the plot that go wrong, things over which you have no control? Missed sound and light cues, for instance?

The doorbell is supposed to ring, and it doesn’t? How about, “Did you hear something? It sounds like there’s someone outside.” Say this while being generally puzzled and concerned about why there would be someone at your door who isn’t ringing the bell, and the audience will never know the sound cue was missed. (These are adjectives, but the underlying verb might be something like “to worry about one’s security at home.”)

Does the phone ring too early? Not a problem, answer it, ask the party to hold, and finish the necessary lines before beginning the phone call section of the script. Does the phone not ring when it should? Call the other person yourself, or create dialogue or activity that will wake up the sound booth, if only by the fact that you’re doing something that isn’t in the script. Or, if you can, find a way to incorporate the information conveyed by the phone call (“By the way, I spoke to Joe earlier today, he said he’ll be here around 3:00, which is in ten minutes.”)

Of course, sometimes things just go wrong, and there is nothing to be done except to pretend that the mishap didn’t occur. Does the gun not go off? Just pretend it did and fall down dead. The audience knows we live in an imperfect world and that this is, after all, a play, not real life. It may deflate the drama a bit, but they’ll forgive you. As with the missed line issue — audiences appreciate the professional effort to deal with the unexpected.

Telephone Booths, Cat’s Paws, and Wanderlust, Part I

Posted on November 12, 2014 by J.

There are three bad onstage habits that actors are inclined to have, with regard to movement: Telephone Booth Syndrome, Cat’s Feet, and Wanderlust.

“Habits” is perhaps too hard-hitting a word. Actors aren’t aware they are doing any of these things until it’s brought to their attention. These seem to just be natural behaviors that many, and perhaps most, actors are inclined to exhibit until they learn how to NOT do them.

If they are such bad choices on stage, then why do actors do them? Don’t know for sure, but I’ve got some hypotheses: Fear. The inability to pay attention to too many concurrent activities (talking, listening, emoting, moving). Fear. A conviction that saying one’s lines is the primary, overriding concern. Fear.

Whatever the cause, I find that when I bring it to an actor’s attention, he will usually understand why it isn’t the best choice available to him and why it doesn’t reflect real life. However, the ease with which he can learn to overcome it and use movement effectively varies from person to person. Nevertheless, I believe that everyone can, because after all, it IS something we do quite naturally in real life.

Funny how difficult it seems to be to do on stage what we do so naturally the rest of the time, huh?

So what are these three habits, in brief?

The first is Telephone Booth Syndrome. For those of you too young to remember them, telephone booths were narrow, four-walled spaces designed for privacy for making a phone call from a public phone. (Yes, once upon a time we didn’t care to conduct personal business while walking down the street!) Even with one shoulder against a wall, it was impossible to fully extend one’s other arm.

Actors with Telephone Booth Syndrome act if they are similarly restricted. They are inclined to remain rooted to one spot (trapped in the confines of the booth), and the idea of using gestures which would violate the dimensions of their invisible booth is unthinkable. Their upper arms tend to remain in contact with their torso, while the lower arm does all the necessary pointing.

For these actors, holding their arms out to the side, parallel to the ground, in a gesture that is inclusive, encompassing the world and all its possibilities, is nearly impossible. It’s fascinating to me that while these actors will take direction and move from Point A to Point B when the director asks them to, asking them to exercise the freedom to fling their arms wide as a reflection of a line that says something about “the whole wide world” causes them to panic.

They try to oblige, but their elbows are still distinctly bent. They THINK they’re responding to the direction, but they aren’t, and it’s massively uncomfortable for some of them to go to full extension.

These are also they actors who usually need to be given all of their blocking by the director, because they are either uncomfortable creating their own or else don’t know how to, and they will perform the direction to the letter. Their emotions don’t drive their movement, it’s only the director’s wishes that does

But imagine, if you will, five actors standing on stage, each in their own little telephone booth. How dynamic or interesting is that to watch?

Telephone Booth Syndrome is perfectly understandable, because it is our “personal space”. By personal space, I mean the area around us that we prefer other people to not enter. You know the stranger you just met at a party who gets uncomfortably close to you, invading your personal space? Well, it seems that not only do we not like others to invade our personal space, we don’t really want to leave our space ourselves (at least, not when we’re on stage)!

But the rules are different on stage! Knocking down the personal space walls is essential. Actors need to feel the freedom to let their emotions run amuck.

Next up: Cat’s Paws and Wanderlust

When You Forget Your Lines

Posted on November 4, 2014 by J.

It happens to everyone at some point. No matter how well you know your lines, there will come a moment where you become unglued and can’t remember a thing about what is supposed to happen next. It will come in a spot you’ve never had trouble with in rehearsals or any performance.

So what do you do when the inevitable arrives?

Don’t panic.

I know, that sounds ridiculous. How can you not panic? The world is about to come to an end! You will be exposed as a fraud or worse, a fool! You will be the laughingstock of the county for years to come.

Believe me, it’s not that bad. But also believe this: If you don’t panic, the odds are that at least half the time, the audience will not have any idea that anyone has dropped a line. And the other half of the time, they will happily watch you deal with the moment professionally, relax when it is clear that you are back on track, and praise you afterwards for how well you handled that moment.

So okay, you’ve managed not to panic, or to at least limit that moment to a split second. Now what?

Move. Anywhere.

Physical motion on stage does not necessarily have to be attached to the spoken word. So moving does three things for you in this situation. One is that it distracts the audience. They assume that your motion is planned and is part of the play, so they are still hanging in with you, blissfully unaware that the train has jumped the rails and life as we know it is about to end.

The second benefit is that because you have created an activity (scrounging around in your purse or pocket for a piece of gum or a pen, looking for the earring you lost this morning, digging through the couch for change for the parking meter), you have bought yourself time to think about what your line must be, or what the next line you can remember is. And yes, it is entirely possible to create meaningless, occasional dialogue to add to your activity while still using the other part of your brain to search for the words you’ve forgotten.

The last benefit is that it immediately tells your fellow actors that you’re in trouble. They can now start figuring out what they can do to save the moment; can they paraphrase your line or otherwise give you a hint that will jog your memory, or can they just skip to the next beat without leaving out any essential information?

Years ago I did a one-woman show, and it DID NOT OCCUR TO ME that I might forget my lines and that there would be no one on stage to save me until the moment it actually happened. In the two second pause that ensued, I held my focus and scoured my brain for enlightenment, but none was forthcoming. Fortunately, the scene had plenty of physical activity in it, and so I just did more of what I’d been doing (trying on shoes and dresses) while talking to myself about how I looked in a way that was perfectly in character. And miracle of miracles, manna from heaven arrived after 20 to 30 seconds, and we were off to the races again and the audience was none the wiser.

That was, by far, the longest “gap” I’ve ever personally experienced in terms of forgetting a line. Since I had no one to help save me, it dragged on longer than such gaps ordinarily do. But because I kept moving and kept talking, I don’t think anyone in the audience realized anything had gone wrong.

I’ve seen actors who’ve forgotten their lines swivel their heads to the wings and look beseechingly at the stage manager for the words that have left them. This is probably the worst thing you can do. It not only lets the audience know that you’ve forgotten your lines in a way that is very jarring, it also means that you’ve got no intention of trying to fix the problem yourself. To an audience, that is both unprofessional and disrespectful, and they judge it harshly. They will sympathize and forgive if they see you muddle through a dropped line, but they are very critical of an actor who has given up the ghost.

The better you know both your character and the rest of the play (the other characters, the plot line, etc.), the easier it is to improvise believable “filler”, and having some experience with improvisation as a form of theater can make handling such moments much easier. You may find, however, that you just aren’t very good at thinking on your feet and improvising your way out of such calamities. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and as long as there is one actor on stage who can handle such moments, you can probably rely on them to bail you out.

But what if it’s a two person scene, and it’s your scene partner who suddenly goes up in her lines? Or the nature of the scene is that it is very difficult for the other actor to save you? (I’ve been in such scenes.) If you’re nervous about your own ability to cover the dropped line, then prepare some possible ways to cover such moments by preplanning things you can do and say to cover such moments. Hopefully you’ll never need them, but if you do, you’ll be glad you did!

Not Business As Usual

Posted on October 28, 2014 by J.

Plays are always about dramatic moments. The most dramatic moments possible.

I’ve said this in a variety of ways in other posts, but it bears repeating again and again.

The most dramatic moments possible.

One person’s life only contains a few stories dramatic enough to make a play out of them. Stories where there is so much at stake for me, where what I want is so difficult to get that it seems that I’ll never achieve it, and where the experience changes who I am in some important and fundamental way.

These three elements are the foundation of most traditional drama. Not only does it require dramatic import of this magnitude to make the evening interesting enough that we’ll leave the couch and go the theater, but it feeds the thing that makes theater meaningful in the first place. That is, it teaches us something about the human experience that we can learn in no other way.

Without that, I’d rather stay home and wash the dogs.

Not everyone’s coming-of-age story is dramatically interesting. Not every love affair is a boy meets girls/boy loses girl/boy gets girl story that keeps us riveted and hoping for happily ever after. Since most of us resist learning Life’s Big Lessons, most disputes we have in our lifetime will not leave us changed people.

To find your own dramatic stories (if you are in the first half of your life, you might need to look for the dramatic story of someone you are very close to), look for the experiences that have irrevocably changed who you are and how you view the world or your own situation. If you really changed on some deep level, it is likely that there was considerable struggle, both internal and external, that led to that change. And if there was struggle, it undoubtedly meant there was a lot at stake for you in it.

If you can find such a story in your life or in a close relative or friend’s life, then you are closer to understanding what makes for more dramatic choices as an actor.

Despite these dramatic essentials, however, most actors I work with will underplay what is going on in a scene. “Most” for the simple reason that most actors are “under-actors”, not “over-actors”. Under-actors can make molehills out of mountains with very little effort. Sort of like boiling a chicken until all of the flavor is out of the meat and into the broth, and then serving the breast for dinner and tossing the soup.

(Over-actors make the Appalachians into Mt. Everest. That’s not good, either, but it’s a different problem.)

Why do we do this?

Perhaps because we don’t like to feel our feelings. Downplaying them is the easiest way to avoid them. If we do it regularly in real life (“Oh, that’s all right.” “Bothered? I’m not bothered. Really.” “It doesn’t matter.”), then we’re apt to do it on stage as well.

Darn! We’re back to the old feeling our feelings problem!

Yup, it’ll keep coming up until you overcome it. Our Ego, which is the thing busily avoiding our feelings, will find every trick in the book to avoid them. We have to catch it in the act and remove its disguise.

So when you look at your character’s emotions, ask yourself if you’ve chosen a really strong emotion or not. If you look at her needs, ask if the need is overwhelming. Depending on who your character is, there may or may not be an earthshaking change in her by the end of the play, but if there is, you can work backwards to get to the emotions and the needs in the same way that you did when looking at the most dramatic story of your own life.

If you haven’t chosen the most dramatic reasons available to you given the context of the play as written by the playwright, then you are shortchanging both your own acting and the audience. So keep going back to the drawing board until you are sure you can’t improve the dramatic elements any more.

I’ll talk more about this when I write some posts on Storytelling and “What Would Lucy Do?”

The Triumverate of No-Nos: Unbelievability

Posted on October 21, 2014 by J.

“I don’t believe it” is what I say to actors when they aren’t properly connected to the material, their character, or the moment in which they find themselves. Much like the models in the photo above.

It’s a catchall phrase I use to describe everything that doesn’t fall into any other category. Yes, you aren’t believable when you anticipate what you’re going to get from your scene partner, but I’m talking about a different sort of believability.

When I use this phrase, it just means that the moment to which I refer isn’t anything I am mistaking for real life. It is artificial on some level.

I typically use this phrase to refer to a single speech or line that isn’t working. If an entire scene is unbelievable, that’s another matter. Then it’s time to revisit the given circumstances, the verbs, the character’s motivation, or some other large scale problem. No, in my parlance, “I don’t believe it” generally means that the actor has just withdrawn from the reality of the scene for a moment or two.

Usually he’s being superficial, relying on externals and line readings rather than connecting to what is going on inside of his character.

Even good actors are susceptible to this. We dig our way into our characters and get to those real moments over time. We are inclined to focus on the more difficult moments and let the easier ones slide, and sometimes we forget to go back and work on them. It takes a lot of energy to stay focused and connected to the material without abatement, so it’s easy to take a moment to “rest” and coast for a line or two.

I regularly vet my own work for such moments, listening to myself in rehearsals. “Does that really sound believable? How can I make it even more natural?” (A topic for another day.)

I use the phrase “I don’t believe it” when I direct, because I find it generally does the trick. I’m simply giving the actor feedback on how it looks from the audience. It is up to him to figure out why what he’s doing isn’t working. My comment sends him back to the drawing board, and the modifications he makes usually pull him further into the material. Maybe he makes it work in the first attempt, maybe he needs a few tries to get it to a stage where it IS believable, but a good, intelligent actor can figure it out on his own, once I’ve alerted him to the problem.

Surprisingly, even new actors respond very well to this approach.

The intention behind this comment is critical, however. If you’re a director who wants to employ this technique, please pay close attention to what follows!

“I don’t believe it” isn’t a criticism – that is, it isn’t a negative. I am not ridiculing what he’s doing in any way. On the contrary – I deliver it as a really supportive, respectful comment. It’s nothing personal; it’s factual. It just means “you aren’t there yet, keep trying.”

When I say it to an actor, the implication is that he can certainly get to his destination, he just hasn’t arrived yet. Sometimes an actor will respond, telling me what it is that he is trying to do, and I may say, “I think those are good choices. They just aren’t coming through in what you’re doing, that’s all.”

If an actor continues to have trouble, I will try to tell him why it isn’t believable. Depending on the actor, I may do this with the initial comment. I’ve worked with actors for whom the simple identification of “this moment works, this one doesn’t” is sufficient. But less trained actors may need to know why it isn’t working. “I don’t believe it, because I don’t think you’ve really heard what she said.” Etc.

It’s not just about saying the lines. If it’s not believable, it doesn’t work.

AACTFest 2015 Workshops

Posted on October 19, 2014 by J.

AACT stands for American Association of Community Theatre. This terrific national organization holds two biennial gatherings (AACTFest) on alternate years. In even years, it’s an international festival (this past June, in Florida), wherein amateur companies from all over the world are invited to bring their productions. In odd years, it’s national, with select companies performing (usually about a dozen plays are staged at each festival).

In addition, workshops are given each year, aimed at various types of artists. I am pleased and excited to announce that the AACT has selected me to give two of them at the 2015 Festival, which will be held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, from June 23 to June 28. There are many reasons to attend the festival outside of my two workshops, but if you do come to the Festival, I hope you’ll stop by one of my workshops and say hi!

Playing the Verbs:

The most-visited posts on my blog and the search terms used to get to them are about acting beats and how to play verbs. Beats and Verbs are rehearsal concepts that many community theater actors don’t know how to use. This workshop introduces the “how” in clear and simple terms, and gives actors a new way to think about their characters, one which lends greater dramatic impact and believability to their performances.

Great acting happens when you play the verbs, not the adjectives and adverbs. How do you move from playing “I’m angry”, “My character is a silly person”, and “She is making me impatient in this scene” to something that is verb-based and much more compelling to watch? We’ll examine how to choose the strongest verbs and then make the tricky leap to how to rehearse differently to take advantage of your great choices. This is a hands-on, practical workshop — come prepared to play!

Blocking: Creating a More Interesting Visual Presentation

Not every community theater director knows how to block a play to maximize dramatic impact and comedic effect and, even more importantly, to simply hold the audience’s attention. Blocking the play is a creative opportunity too many directors miss, but it’s not that hard. Blocking the play well is the single easiest and most impactful thing a director can do to improve the production. There are some basic guidelines any director can use to create a more interesting visual presentation, and I share them all in this workshop.

The easiest way to improve the quality of a production is through good, creative blocking. The stage directions in the script are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to blocking a play. All comedy is physical, and most dramatic moments usually are physical as well. We’ll discuss the difference between movement and activities; how to mine the script for hidden opportunities to add movement; how to heighten dramatic impact with your blocking; why blocking is not just for blocking rehearsals; and how to help your actors discover better performances through movement.

While the first workshop is primarily aimed at actors and the second at directors, the truth is that both artists can probably learn something from each of them. Directors who understand acting verbs can help actors to a better performance, and actors who understand the principles of blocking will find that it helps to unlock their own creativity, not to mention speeds the blocking process.

I am so honored to be given this opportunity. Stay tuned for more information about when my workshops will be held, as well as more information about AACTFest 2015!

Actor’s Etiquette: Speed

Posted on October 17, 2014 by J.

Football season is upon us. Success in college football does not guarantee success in the NFL. Why? Speed. The NFL game is faster. Why? The NFL has the crème de la crème. It’s spread out in college, but the quality of the players is more concentrated on the professional level. As a result, everything is faster and sharper.

Understand that speed, in acting, has nothing to do with pauses. Eliminating pauses does not contribute the kind of speed I’m talking about. Speed can shorten the pauses without taking away their power, but speed never means cutting them out entirely. It means not being self-indulgent about our “moments”. It means interrupting on time, not a beat too late. It means entering promptly. It means speaking more quickly than you might ordinarily.

Speed can be a reflection of high energy, but they are not identical and you can’t substitute one for the other. Speed means that the audience can feel the momentum of the piece. It’s like wanting to get a drink from the kitchen while you’re watching TV. Do you wait for the next commercial, or do you think you can get in and out of the kitchen without missing much? (In a world without Tivo, that is.)

Speed means that things are going quickly enough that you would indeed miss something if you went to the refrigerator.

Speed, Energy, and Volume ARE interrelated. If you don’t have energy, your volume will be down. Try to intentionally pump up your volume, you’ll automatically increase your energy. If you don’t have energy, you won’t have speed. Intentionally increase your speed (you may feel like you’re forcing it, but that can be okay), and energy will follow.

The Triumverate of No-Nos: Anticipation

Posted on October 14, 2014 by J.

There are three ways to violate the principle of Staying In The Moment: Anticipation, Telegraphing, and I Don’t Believe It.

One way out of the cumbersome transitions I talked about last time is to anticipate what is coming next. It’s not a good way out, but it’s one actors often take.

Anticipating comes in two forms. One is doing the cumbersome transition (the one that takes several seconds rather than a split second), but starting it early, so that the flow of the play isn’t interrupted.

The other way of anticipating is doing the split second reaction, but doing it during your partner’s line, but before the pertinent information is revealed.

For instance, in Alan Ayckbourn’s Table Manners, there is the following sequence of lines:

Sarah: Annie! You’re getting dreadfully coarse.

Annie: Oh, you’re just a prude.

Sarah: No, I’m not a prude.

Annie’s line is not only in direct response to Sarah’s first line, it is in response to the LAST word in the line, “coarse.” Similarly, Sarah’s second line is in direct response to the LAST word in Annie’s line, “prude”. Neither actress can react appropriately until her partner’s line has been completed. Yet it’s very easy for an actress playing Annie to begin to roll her eyes in the middle of Sarah’s line, and for the actress playing Sarah to begin to be affronted in the middle of Annie’s line.

When you do that, you are receiving mail that hasn’t been sent yet. You are anticipating the word you know is coming. You know the meaning of the whole sentence, because you’ve got the script. You, the actor, know what’s coming, but the character doesn’t. The character has to wait for the clarity that comes with the important words in each sentence, “coarse” and “prude”. Only then can she respond, because without them, there is nothing to respond to.

Imagine if Sarah only said, “Annie, you’re getting dreadfully . . .” and didn’t finish the sentence. Annie might say, “Dreadfully what?” Or she might say, “Oh, you’re just a prude”, having figured out what the missing word probably would have been (she knows Sarah fairly well, after all), but it would have taken a moment or two for her to figure out where Sarah was going with the line.

Similarly, if Annie had said, “Oh, you’re just . . .”, Sarah might have said, “I’m just what? What am I? Go on, say it. You can’t start a sentence like that and not finish it! What am I?” But it is unlikely that she would have figured out that Annie had intended to call her a prude.

In order to avoid the anticipation problem, you have to figure out exactly when your character receives whatever message your character receives that makes her do or say whatever she does or says next and not let it affect you until that moment. In the case above, it happens at the very end of the cue line.

Imagine the dog above, waiting for its master to come home. A dog with expectations will hold its position until the expectation is met. So should you wait for the key words that move you into the next part of the play.

But let’s say you have a lengthy speech, and halfway through it, you say something that really irritates me. Now, you’re one of those people who knows how to keep talking in such a way that it is difficult for someone to interrupt you, so I keep quiet until you’re finished. Or perhaps what you say is so upsetting that I need the rest of your speech to figure out how to respond to it. Or perhaps I try to interrupt you without success. Whatever choice I make, the source of the irritation – the thorn in my side – shows up in the middle of your speech, and that’s when it has to begin to affect me – not at the end of the speech.

These are two different issues. The first example is one of anticipation; the second would be its opposite – to fail to react at the appropriate moment, but rather to wait until it’s my turn to speak. Both are wrong, but they have entirely different causes. I bring up the second to emphasize the real lesson here, which is to let things affect you at the moment that they hit you – not before, and not after, but instead at the very moment they enter your character’s consciousness.

In case you’d like to see how the actresses handle the moment, here’s the start of Table Manners. The lines in question show up around the 6:30 mark, but if you watch it all, I think you’ll see how they wait to receive the input from the other before they react. Sometimes the response is instantaneous, but it is never early.

Actor’s Etiquette: Energy

Posted on October 10, 2014 by J.

Every show you do requires high energy. That’s obvious (I hope!) for a show like The 39 Steps or Noises Off. It’s less obvious for Waiting for Godot or Our Town. If you don’t bring your best energy to a performance, it will suffer. Low energy is contagious and will infect the rest of the cast. It will infect the audience, too.

The reverse is also true. An audience that arrives tired will not respond well and that will affect the performance, since actors and audience work together to create the experience. But you can’t do anything about what the audience brings. You can, however, be sure that you bring your best energy.

Good acting can be tiring – for you, not for the audience! When acting, we ought to be operating with a heightened awareness of what is going on, and that requires unrelenting attentiveness. Let your focus drop for a few seconds, and it takes longer than a few seconds to get it back. This kind of attentiveness has a palpable energy to it; it gives power to your performance and keeps the audience involved.

Life on stage is NOT ordinary, nor should you treat it as such in the name of “believability”. “Naturalness” on stage is not the same thing as “casual”. Even film acting, which requires you to be much “smaller” about what you do since the camera can get right in your face, needs to be supported by a strong and consistent “electrical” current (if you will).

How can you be sure to bring your best energy on stage? Alan Alda does about two minutes of some sort of aerobic exercise just before he goes on stage, and there is scientific evidence that this helps you to perform any physical activity (and acting should be very physical) better. For one thing, it engages both sides of your brain in synchronicity. For another, it gets your blood pumping and wakes up your body.

It’s difficult to bring energy on stage with you if you’ve just spent fifteen minutes sitting in your dressing room or the Green Room. If you’ve ever been to a performance that took five or ten minutes to get off the ground, low energy is probably the culprit. Better to warm up your engine off stage, before you meet the audience.

How can you best do this? Obviously, you don’t want to get yourself winded (unless that’s appropriate for your “moment before”.) Being in good shape physically will make it easier to engage in physical activity that will “wake you up” without leaving you breathless, but if you aren’t, use your own judgment. Dancing, shadow-boxing, and jumping jacks are some choices that can rev your engine in limited space.

It’s not just about what you bring on stage when you enter, however. You’ve got to retain that energy throughout the performance, and that requires vigilance, especially on the days that your fellow actors seem drained or you yourself are. I know there are times when I can’t seem to get my engine past 55 mph, metaphorically speaking, when I really need to be flying at 70 or 80 mph (for comedies in particular)!

When that happens, you have to keep pushing yourself, and remember what the experience is like for you when you DO have the right level of energy. By recollecting that and measuring tonight’s performance against it, you have something clear to drive toward – even if I can’t quite make it to 70, I can usually get myself above 60 through sheer will . . .

The matter of energy is tied in with speed, which I’ll talk about in the next Actor’s Etiquette post.

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