Category Archives: Directing

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.

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!