Untrained actors act the adjectives and adverbs; trained actors act the verbs.

“Acting the verbs” means figuring out what your character wants and trying to get it.  This is really pretty simple, although it requires a large shift in how you look at a scene.

Instead of thinking of your character as being “needy”, think in terms of “I want you to love me.”  Instead of thinking of your character as being “bossy”, think in terms of “I want to make sure this party comes off perfectly, because I will feel embarrassed if it isn’t successful” or “because I need to control my world in order to feel safe” or “because if it is successful, I will get the job I want more than anything in the world.”

I hope you can see that the three options I’ve given for why your character might be bossy are very different, and will probably produce different results.  The sort of “bossy” you are will change, because what is driving it is different.  But if you just play “bossy”, you’re apt to go for the same kind of “bossy” no matter who your character is or why he is doing what he does.

And let’s be honest:  in your real life, do you ever decide to “be” bossy?  No, you decide you want to give the best party ever.  You decide that the people around you are incompetent or slow or uncreative, and they need you to direct them.  You have a strong attachment to your vision, and you want to see it achieved.  You may end up bossing people around and irritating them in the process, but it’s not like that’s what you’re striving to do.  You’re just trying to give a really good party.

EVERYTHING we do in our real lives is in service of getting something we want:  a quart of milk, an answer to a question, an experience, a job, love, pleasure, prestige, power, money.  No matter how trivial the goal is (I want to read a book I am enjoying; I want to snack on something to take off the edge before dinner; I want to straighten that picture on the wall because it’s driving me nuts), EVERYTHING we do is to get something we want.

It’s the same for your character.  EVERYTHING your character says or does is in service of getting something she wants.  It isn’t about feeling her emotions.  The emotions are simply a by-product of who you are, what you want, how you try to get it, and whether or not you are successful in getting it.

See Part I here.  See Part III here.  See Why Playing the Emotions Doesn’t Work here.  See Why Playing the Verbs is (Ultimately) Easier than Acting Emotions here.  See Choosing Verbs here.  See Big Verbs vs. Little Verbs here.  See How to Learn to Play the Verbs here.  See An Example of Why Verbs Make a Difference here.

All actors begin by acting the emotions of their characters.  Emotions draw us to the theater, so we think that is where we have to start.  I’ve talked about some of the reasons why this isn’t effective:  it is superficial, tends to lead to one-note performances, and often keeps us from finding the more interesting choices.

But the biggest reason why it doesn’t work is what my actress friend Sharon mentioned at dinner the other night.  Emotions are always IN motion.  They change in split seconds, flicker through you and mutate into another emotion so quickly and often so dramatically that they can’t be captured intentionally particularly well.  It is also impossible to consciously act two emotions at once, while we regularly feel multiple emotions concurrently.  Our conscious brain is the tortoise, while our subconscious is the hare.  Trying to act the emotions tends to iron out the wrinkles in a performance, and the wrinkles, quite honestly, are much more interesting than the Botox version you otherwise get.

At last week’s class, Nora asked if it is possible to act an emotion without actually feeling it.  There are actors who regularly do this, and unfortunately, there are professional actors among them.  But as Davina noted, the audience knows the difference between an actor who is actually feeling the emotion on some level and one who is pretending to do so.  Audiences are infallible lie detectors; they know when you’re faking it.

“Well, if I’m not supposed to play the emotions, what do I do?  My character is emotional, I can’t just ignore that!  If I do, how can I possibly feel the emotions so the audience sees them?”

Simple.  Understand enough about who your character is and where he is coming from, and then just try to get what you want and keep the conduit to your inner emotional life open.  If you do that, the emotions will not only take care of themselves, they will also show up in far more interesting ways than if you strive to be angry, resentful, disappointed, gleeful, etc.

Yes, the major emotions you have identified in your first read-through will probably end up being a part of the scene, but if you don’t focus on them but INSTEAD focus on getting what you want, all the subtleties of emotion that we regularly experience will come through as well.

This is acting distilled to its simplest components.  It’s good, sound theory, but it IS theoretical, not practical.  So next time, I’ll talk about how to translate it into something practical!