Category Archives: Script Analysis

Researching the Role

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Not everything in a script is going to be self-evident or otherwise within your knowledge base.  This means you have to do some research.

I am surprised by how many actors don’t do the research necessary for their roles!  They will go into opening night not understanding a word, a line, or a reference.  You need to understand the words and the world of the play, as well as what makes your character who she is.  And that means research.

libraryFortunately, the internet makes this work a lot easier than it used to be.  If you identify at the beginning of rehearsals what you aren’t sure about, you can answer most of your questions in short order, which will help guide how you use your rehearsal time.

So what sort of things should you look into when doing your research?

Word definitions.  This may sound obvious, but I see too many actors saying lines that they do NOT understand and making no attempt to learn what they mean.  If you can’t define a word in ten words or less, look it up.  Don’t assume you know what the word means because of the context in which it’s used.  Look it up so you’re sure you have an accurate understanding.

Sayings.  Sometimes you’ll come across a phrase or imagery that seems peculiar.  These are often common sayings, but being common doesn’t mean that everyone knows them, so don’t feel inadequate if you don’t.  If you do an internet search, you’ll probably find some etymology for it.  If nothing else, ask the rest of the cast.  Sometimes I’ve just been particularly dense about a line, while my fellow actors know exactly what it means and are happy to enlighten me.

Double entendres.  Sometimes words or phrases have two meanings (and the second one isn’t necessarily risqué!)  If a word or phrase can be interpreted two ways, it probably isn’t an accident that it’s in the play.  Consider what insight the second meaning might give you about the play or your character.

Names.  Sometimes the playwright chooses a name that, because of its meaning or its association with a fictional or historical character, sheds some light on the nature or experiences of the character you are playing.  It’s your job to make that connection, because if it exists, someone in the audience will, and they’ll know if something is missing from your characterization.

Place and Time.  If a play takes place in a city, state, or country you haven’t been in, you need to learn something about that locale.  If it happens in an era not your own, you need to learn what the social rules where then, and to understand what the politics and current events of that time were.  Don’t assume that your own experience translates to places and times you don’t know.  Any references to real-life places, people, or events should be explored as well.

Foreign Words.  Occasionally foreign languages appear in a script.  Sometimes the translation is provided, but sometimes it isn’t.  Be sure you know what the words mean and how to pronounce them correctly (or incorrectly, if that’s appropriate to your role).

Occupations and Illnesses.  Don’t assume that because your character is a teacher or a doctor that you know what that means to him.  The odds are that someone has blogged or written a book about his on-the-job experiences.  Teaching at a prestigious boarding school is different from working at an inner city school.  Working in the Emergency Room is different from being a Sports Orthopedic for the NFL.  Unless you share your character’s career, learning something about it will help you to understand both what attracted him to that field and what his daily experiences are like.  The same thing goes for illnesses.  Was your character once an anorexic?  Read up on both the disease and recovery.  Playing the lead in “Whose Life is It, Anyway?”  Study both the right-to-die arguments and what it is like to be a quadriplegic.

Historical Accuracy and Context.  If the play deals with a real historical events or real historical characters in fictional events, you need to do a LOT of research.  The more you read about the life of your character or the circumstances of the play, the better your performance is apt to be.  Believe me, the playwright has done extensive research, but it is impossible for her to include all the background information that informs her choices as a playwright into the text itself.  So crack the books!

Adaptations.  It should probably go without saying that if you are doing a play that is adapted from a book or has sprung on some level from a poem, you should read the source material.  It SHOULD go without saying.  But I’ll say it anyway.

See The Playwright’s Opinion here.

Playwrights are literary (and how this affects acting beats and performance)

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A good playwright doesn’t just know how to develop a plot, maximize conflict, and create interesting characters.  All these things help plays to be successful, but playwrights aren’t merely practical creatures.  They (the good ones, anyway) also know how to use literary devices to their best advantage on stage.

The kinds of literary devices I’m about to talk about help to focus the audience’s attention on what is important, as well as to make what is happening as clear as possible.

Here is the monologue from Agnes of God that Davina is working on, along with the Beat marks she is presently using.  They are slightly different than the ones she started with, because it became clear that the literary choices of the playwright help to determine the Beat divisions.agnes1

Dr.  Livingstone:  How dare you march into my office and tell me how to run my affairs – how dare you think that I’m in a position to be badgered or bullied or whatever you’re trying to do.  Who the hell do you think you are?  /  You walk in here expecting applause for the way you’ve treated this child.  /  She has a right to know!  That there is a world out there filled with people who don’t believe in God and who are not any worse off than you!  People who go through their entire lives without bending their knees once – to anybody!  And people who still fall in love, and make babies, and occasionally are very happy.  She has a right to know that.  /  But you, and your order, and your Church have kept her ignorant, because ignorance is next to virginity, right?  Poverty, chastity, and ignorance, that’s what you live by.

What are the literary devices John Peilmeier uses in this monologue? 

REPETITION.  Repetition means at least two of something.  It’s typically used to emphasize something, and Peilmeier uses it (forgive me) repeatedly in this monologue.  Two examples:  “how dare you” and “She has a right to know.”

GOOD THINGS COME IN THREES.  We talked about lists of threes in comedies, that three is the necessary number for a joke to be funny when it involves a list of some sort.  It doesn’t just apply to jokes, however.  When a writer wants to emphasize a point, he often builds to it by using a list of three.  Such lists can be used in a number of ways, but typically they escalate upwards emotionally, as in big, bigger, biggest.  (Choose to use them differently if you like, but be sure that you recognize that there are three related items which need to be delivered with some sort of variety in order to be effective.)

This monologue has a number of lists:

  • How dare you/how dare you/who the hell – forget that the third element doesn’t begin with “how dare you”, it is nevertheless the climax to this list of three.
  • Badgered/bullied/whatever you’re trying to do
  • People who/people who/people who
  • You/your order/your Church (and notice how each element is tied to the Mother Superior)
  • Ignorant/ignorance/ignorance
  • Poverty/chastity/ignorance (notice that “ignorance” is part of two separate lists)

FRAMING.  Framing is when the repetition begins and ends a thought.  “She has a right to know” is used to frame a list.  Just in case you forget where she started, why she made the list, Peilmeier reminds you by hammering it home with the closing frame.

A less obvious frame is in the last two sentences.  It is an implied frame, because it begins with “you, your order, and your Church” and ends with “that’s what you live by”, which is another way of saying the list that begins this section.  Just in case you forget that Dr. Livingstone is directly accusing the Mother Superior, the phrase “that’s what you live by” brings you back to where she started.

Peilmeier uses these devices to make sure you get his major points.  Words in a play can fly by, and you don’t know which words are the most important ones unless the actor and/or playwright help to underline them for you.  Peilmeier presents the actress with some great tools in this monologue; your job is to use them to their best advantage.  Don’t swallow any of the repeated words, and make sure your audience knows you are giving them a list.  The need to give them some variety in delivery will also help you explore the emotional underpinnings to your character at this moment.

With regard to choosing the beats when you find literary devices like this, make sure you include them in one beat.  Lists, frames, and repeated words typically belong in the same beat.

Why the Playwright’s Words Matter, Part II

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Second, lines with clear rhythm.  Tempo.

This is particularly important with verse plays (Shakespeare, Moliere), but applies to lyrical or poetic plays, too.  Change a word in Equus, which is very poetic, and you mess with the character, with the meaning of the play, with the rhythm (and therefore magic) of the piece.  Plays which weave a spell around the audience do so in large part because the writing permits it.  Change the writing, and you may break the spell.

Remember, I said that studies have shown that when the spell is broken, it takes up to five minutes to get an audience connected back to the play?  Changing the words can break the spell.  Do it at your peril.

Third, playwrights use literary techniques just the way novelists and poets do.Books

Literary devices like onomatopoeia.  Assonance.  Alliteration.  Parallelism.  Etc.

If a sentence has a staccato feel to it, that is probably intentional on the playwright’s part.  It may reflect a character’s jitteriness, for example.  A sentence with powerful, active words may be spoken by someone in anger, someone who expresses themselves very physically.  Change a word, and you may limit your ability, as an actor, to express a character’s emotions, because you’ll be disconnected from what the playwright actually wrote.

For instance, let’s say you have the line, “He blasted into the room,” or perhaps, “He burst into the room.”  Change the line to “He came into the room” or “He rushed into the room” or even “He pushed his way into the room”, and you’ve changed the feel of it.  The plosive “B” in the first two matches the feel of a door swinging hard against the wall as it is thrown open.

Playwrights are just as prone as novelists and poets to spend days agonizing over the choice of a single word.  I’ve seen actors change the way a line is worded because “it feels more comfortable.”  Because “I think this is how he’d say it.”  Because “this makes more sense to me.”  Quite frankly, this makes me want to scream just a little bit.  The actor has probably only worked with the script for a few weeks when he casually makes this decision.  Forget the fact that the playwright lived with the play for months, maybe years.  Forget that the playwright may have once written the line exactly as the actor is proposing, and changed it because he decided the word he replaced it with was a better choice.

Bottom Line:  If you think you know better than the playwright, it probably means you haven’t studied the script enough.

See Part I here.

Word Choice, Memorization, and Script Analysis, Part II

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Let’s examine a few related words to see what I mean:  cute, attractive, pretty, and beautiful.  And let’s do it with some of the cast of Glee.

glee-emma-pillsbury-290x400“Cute” is the pert girl with the dimples, a ready smile, and a bubbly personality.  She’s attractive, sometimes very attractive, but her features are probably not classic, and her beauty is as much a function of her effervescent personality as it is her physical appearance.  Think Jayma Mays (Emma Pillsbury).

glee brittany“Attractive” is a girl who is pleasant to look at, but who probably isn’t going to turn a lot of heads, or not for very long.  She’s probably got a feature which isn’t classic, but it doesn’t disturb the whole visage enough to make her unattractive.  Think Heather Morris (Brittany S. Pierce).

glee quinn“Pretty” is the stereotypical blonde cheerleader with the chiseled features.  Think Diana Agron (Quinn Fabray).

“Beautiful”?  Well, I’m not sure there are any real beauties on Glee.  No dogs, just no one who meets this high bar.  Let’s just say Giselle Bundchen.  Brooke Shields.  Cindy Crawford.

You’d never use the words “cute”, “attractive”, or “pretty” to describe these supermodels.  If you did, there’d be great confusion and a lot of misunderstandings.

Change a word in the script, and you can cause equal confusion without even realizing it.

I’ve had occasion, in writing these posts, to look for synonyms, and am surprised by how difficult it is, in the language that has more words than any other, to find good substitutes when I want to say something without using the same word I did in the previous sentence.  There aren’t many true synonyms which can be used interchangeably without altering the meaning of the sentence materially.

“Oh,” I hear you say, “that matters for a lot of lines, but not for many of the simple, throwaway lines.”  Okay.  Let’s look at a simple exclamation:  “Oh my god!”  Here are some logical alternatives:  “Oh my goodness!”  “Oh my lord!”  “Oh my gosh!”  “Oh Christ!”  “Oh lord!” and “Omigod!”

I’m not trying to get religious on anyone here, but I would suggest to you that seven different people would use each of these expressions in the same situation.  That even “Oh my god” and “Oh my lord”, while probably the two most similar phrases, nevertheless reflect a different relationship with their Maker.  That “Oh my god” and “Omigod”, while technically the same phrase despite a different pronunciation, nevertheless would come out of two very different mouths.

First, you have to respect these differences.  The playwright chose the words he chose for a reason.  Trust that, even if you don’t understand the reason initially.

Second, use these differences to help you understand your character better.  When we talk more about script analysis, you’ll see why this is useful.

See Part I here.  See Memorizing Your Lines Part I here.  See Memorizing Your Lines Part II here.  See Why the Playwright’s Words Matter Part I here.  See Why the Playwright’s Words Matter Part II here.

Word Choice, Memorization, and Script Analysis, Part I

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Word choice matters.

The playwright has limited means of conveying an entire world to the audience, and to you, the actor.  He has only words.  And he has a limited number of them, at that.  He cuts out lots of words en route to the final draft of a play, and so every word that he leaves in counts and often has to carry out several assignments at the same time.

Which words he chooses tell you everything you need to know about the play and the characters.  The words are your clues to put the puzzle of the play together.  Think of the pieces as Easter eggs.  eastereggIn an Easter egg hunt, some of them eggs are so obvious that they dare you to ignore them.  Some are tucked behind a vase, their noses sticking out.  And some are so hidden that you need to move something in order to find them.

These last clues in a play may not surface enough for you to see them until halfway through rehearsal, but they’re there, hidden in the text.  But if you’ve changed the playwright’s words in the course of memorizing your lines, you’ll never find them.

It’s easy to change lines.  Sometimes we paraphrase lines to muddle through them because we have a mental block about them, and it gets us to the rest of the scene.  Before you know it, we’ve convinced ourselves that that is, in fact, the way the line is written.

Sometimes we change lines because we, personally, would use a slightly different phrase, and so it seems more natural to us to use our own words.  We may not even realize we’ve changed them.  If someone brings it to our attention, we’ll probably argue with them and stare at the script in disbelief.

Sometimes we change lines because we can’t understand why the playwright wrote it as he did, and rather than figure out the answer to that question (which might have a profound influence on how we play the character), we change the line so that it fits in with our notion of the character.  This is akin to taking a jigsaw puzzle piece and forcing it into a place where it doesn’t belong or, even worse, shaving the side of it so it will fit.

And sometimes (horror of horrors), we just think that we, who are so new to the material, know better than the writer who created these characters and slaved over each word in the script for many months.

But word choice reveals character, and so when you change your character’s lines, you change your character.  And usually not for the better.

Next time, I’ll give you some specifics about the kind of damage changing the playwright’s words can do.  But in the meantime, do your best to memorize his words, and not yours.

See Part II here.  See Memorizing Your Lines Part I here.  See Memorizing Your Lines Part II here.  See Why the Playwright’s Words Matter Part I here.  See Why the Playwright’s Words Matter Part II here.

Physical Activities, Part III

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Before you choose your activity for a scene, it’s a good idea to examine all the possibilities.  Let’s say your character enters the house at 6:00, arriving home from his job at the bank.  He might change out of his suit, because he wants to be more comfortable.  He might unpack the groceries he picked up on his way home, because then they’re out of his way.  He might look through the mail, because he wants to see if there is anything important he needs to deal with.  He might pour a drink and sit down to finish the crossword puzzle he started on his morning commute, because he only has three more words to fill in and he likes to finish every puzzle he starts.  He might begin to prepare dinner, because he’s hungry or because it’s his night to cook.

Man Preparing a SaladThere are other alternatives, too, but you get the point.  Don’t worry so much at this early stage about what this particular character would do.  You just met this character, and quite frankly, you have no reason to be certain yet about his activity when he enters the scene unless the playwright has provided him with one.

So explore every possibility of what someone might do when he comes home from work, even the options that you are “sure” at this early stage don’t suit your character.  Thinking through and discarding the “wrong” options can sometimes lead you to the right one.

Whatever your banker does, he probably has a good idea of what he’s going to do when he gets home before he opens the door.  And unless something happens to stop him from doing it, that’s what he’s going to do.  He’s not going to make a big production out of it.  He’s just going to do it, as simply and naturally as possible.

When he walks in the door, he doesn’t yet realize that something dramatic happened while he was at work that is going to change his life.  He doesn’t know that his wife got the news that she is being transferred to a job 1,000 miles away.  That the rabbit died.  That his wife’s sister left her husband and has moved in with them.  Or that his son got in trouble at school for lifting a girl’s dress.

He’ll find all that out in the middle of chopping vegetables for the salad.  Maybe he finishes making the salad, maybe he doesn’t.  Maybe he tries to continue cooking, but finally gives up and makes a peanut butter sandwich (which he better not actually eat unless he has no lines for a page or two!)  But he’s got a viable activity to keep him busy while his world caves in!

See Part I here.  See Part II here.

Physical Activities, Part II

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Choosing an activity for a scene is a very practical matter.

Think about your real life.  It’s full of activity, and all of it is practical on some level.

You go to work, because you want to get paid, and you do whatever you need to do to get the job done that day.  You eat because you’re hungry or because you have a dinner date with someone.  You read the newspaper because you want to be informed.  You go shopping because a lightbulb burned out and you need a new one.  mailboxYou pick up the mail because you haven’t been to the post office in a week, because you have to buy stamps anyway so you can pay your electric bill, or because you’re waiting for a package and you hope it came in today.

What do these things have in common?  The word “because.”

In other words, you always have a reason for anything you do.

Your characters are driven to do things on stage for the same reason.  Their lives are not governed strictly by the dramatic events of the play.  The rest of their lives continues unabated, just as it does in ours.  If someone close to you is hospitalized, the grass doesn’t stop growing, the dogs don’t stop needing to take walks so they can pee, and the refrigerator doesn’t refill itself on its own.

Much of the activity that should be taking place on stage is NOT written in the script.  If it bears directly on the events of the play, it will.  For instance, if your character’s company is treating its employees unfairly and the employees decide to strike, your character may be making picket signs in the next scene, and the dialogue might refer to that.  The dialogue might not refer to it, but you might choose to make signs as your activity anyway, because it makes sense in the context of the play.  But if you chose to make dinner during the scene, that might work just fine, too.

Whatever you choose as your activity for a scene, it must make sense to the audience.  This doesn’t mean it can’t be unusual or unexpected.  But if your hardworking banker husband comes home from work and, without ditching his suit, starts to do ballet warmups using the back of the couch as a barre – that’s an unusual choice that the script better justify on some level.  If it seems entirely uncharacteristic, given what the playwright has written and how the actor chooses to play the role before and after working the barre, then a different choice that the audience will accept is in order.

See Part I here.  See Part III here.

Physical Activities, Part I

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The other kind of physical action you can use on stage is what is called “business”, but let’s stay away from the theatrical term for the moment, and call it an “activity” instead.

Every actor should have an activity in every scene, if possible.

Sometimes it isn’t.  If you are a guest in the house of someone you don’t know well, you may not be able to do anything other than sip your coffee.  Repairing your lipstick may not be appropriate for your well-mannered character.  If you’re having dinner in a restaurant, your activities will mostly be limited by what is on the table at any moment.  Fixing your contact will be distracting to the audience, who will worry that you, the actor, are in real pain.

But in most cases, actors should have an activity.  Guess why they call us actors?

toysWhile a change in physical location can be driven strictly by your emotions, it often is part of an activity.  If I’m picking up the kids’ toys because my mother-in-law is coming over, I’m moving around the living room, but it is in service of the activity of picking up the kids’ toys.

What happens as a result of choosing an activity, no matter how disconnected it may seem from the actual drama of the scene?

  • It makes what happens in the script seem more like real life.
  • Like a change in physical location, it adds visual interest to the audience.  The stage isn’t film, but post-MTV audiences like to watch motion while they listen.  Watching someone do something with purpose is much more interesting than watching someone sit around talking.  Some scripts have scenes that seem to be about people sitting around talking.  When you are cast in a play like that, you must put on your thinking cap and invent things to do.
  • What you choose for an activity says something about who your character is.

Chosen correctly, your activity can also underscore what happens dramatically in the scene.  For the moment, however, let’s leave that responsibility in the director’s lap.

But the grand prize of using an activity onstage?  It puts you in touch with your emotional life without you having to do anything intentionally.   This alone is worth the price of admission!

See Part II here.  See Part III here.

Essential Is Not the Same as Important

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In a good, tight script, every word is essential.  But essential is not the same as important.

Storytelling is about ebbs and flows, with a general upward trend in terms of tension, until you reach the climax.  It’s not a straight line to that climax.  It’s a very wavy line.

PlayStructureBWGood playwrights know this.  Group scenes are followed by intimate, two person scenes.  Raucous scenes by quiet ones.  Passionate confrontations by comic moments.

One reason for this is to give the audience time to rest.  A play that goes full tilt from start to finish will exhaust the audience by the end.  They want to be exhilarated, not exhausted.

Audiences also need time to absorb big emotions or meaning.  Remember, the audience has just met these characters and this situation.  There is a lot of new information packed into two hours, and they need time to process it during the play itself.  The ebbs and flows permit this.

The third reason is that change is simply more interesting than the status quo.  Audiences like unpredictability.  It holds their attention.

It’s fairly easy to see the big ebbs and flows of a play:  the dramatic scene, the quiet scene, etc.  But these ebbs and flows operate on a smaller level, too, within the scene (we call them “beats.”)  And they often operate within your character’s emotions within a scene (a scene that is just about you being “angry” is going to be boring), and within a single speech.  Even a three sentence speech can have this sort of movement.  Certainly the one-minute monologues we’ve been working with do.

When I talk about “important” lines, what I basically mean is one of four things:

  • A line with factual content that the audience must know to understand the play (e.g., exposition)
  • Plot development (George announcing their son’s death in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”)
  • Moments of powerful emotion for the actor.  These are what I call the “money moments”.  Plays are sprinkled with these moments – they don’t just appear in the climactic scene!
  • Punchlines.

So one of the things we’ll work with is how to play the “important” stuff, which is where your “wow” moments come!