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

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cat pawCat’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.

More on this in a future post . . .

 

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

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10648110-got-etiquette-shirtThings 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.

 

Actor’s Etiquette: Working With Directors, Part II

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI have a good friend who did a lot of acting for many years before deciding he wanted to branch out into directing as well.  We became friends when he cast me in his first directorial effort, Murder at the Howard Johnson’s.  MHJ is a very funny, physical comedy.  All three actors in the play had considerable experience and Charlie, being new to directing, gave us a good bit of latitude.  It was a very collegial environment, and as he felt his way through the complexities of directing (it’s harder than you think), he was very open to our ideas.  There was a lot of “group think” — real ensemble work — and the final product was something of which I remain very proud.  (The photo in this post is from that production.)

Several years passed, and we met up on stage again for Blithe Spirit.  Charlie had two other productions under his director’s belt, and had considerably more confidence in what he was doing.  But he had also reached the stage where he thought the director needed to control everything in the experience.  He came to rehearsals with distinct and largely immutable ideas about what needed to happen and when.  There was little room for flexibility in the blocking he had created.  Gone was the collegial atmosphere; instead, the cast was busy trying to give him what he wanted, sometimes sacrificing what we felt was true to our character in the process.

Another couple of years, another show:  the ambitious Woman in Mind.  Shortly after Blithe Spirit, Charlie had read and taken to heart Marshall W. Mason’s book on directing, Creating Life on Stage:  A Director’s Approach to Working with Actors.  Gone was the autocratic director; in his place was a director concerned with giving space and assistance to his actors to create more organically-driven characters.

Charlie and I still disagree about whether or not the stage directions in a script are sacrosanct, and have agreed to disagree on this particular point.  Despite this, while Blithe Spirit was a difficult experience for me, given my own approach to acting, Woman in Mind was very rewarding.

Charlie’s trajectory as a director is not unusual.  That middle stage is probably unavoidable.  As with most things in life, it’s difficult to know where “balance” is until you go too far and find yourself out of balance.  A director with self-awareness and a desire to improve will move out of the middle phase, but I’m sure there are others who remain stuck in that position.

So what are you, as an actor, to do when you find yourself working with a director who is in this middle stage, who perceives his role as The Decider, and tells you what to do when?

First, understand that he is learning his job just as you are.  You go through stages as an actor where you aren’t working to your full potential, because you’re still learning your craft, so cut him the slack you’d like yourself.  He is doing the best he can, and doesn’t yet see that controlling everything doesn’t produce the best result.

Don’t challenge his authority too directly.  Control is very important to him; honor that while expressing your own opinions and needs.

Genuinely try to make what he asks work.  Only ask to do something differently if you can’t.  If you do this, he’ll both see your efforts and feel your pain.

Be clear about why something isn’t working for you without making the director sound stupid or wrong.

Don’t demand — instead, ask permission to change something.  “May I . . .?”  “Would it be a problem if . . .?”  “It would really help me if . . .”  “I’m struggling with . . . do you have any suggestions?”

In other words, you can’t change the director’s approach.  You’ve got to figure out how to work within it to produce the best result with the least stress.  Accept that you can’t work in precisely the way you might like to, but negotiate courteously for the things you really need to be comfortable.

Schedule Change

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While I’ve been able to post three times a week up until now, life has gotten appreciably busier and so I’m going to reduce that to twice a week:  the regular post on Tuesdays, and the Actor’s Etiquette post on Fridays.  As always, feel free to ask me to comment on a particular aspect of acting if I’m not getting around fast enough to whatever it is that is currently troubling you!

New Workshops for Actors and Directors

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I’ve reconfigured the Workshops page (formerly “Seminars”) to include a number of shorter workshops.

The Spacious Acting™ Workshop remains the broad overview of the most important aspects of acting, an intense way of being immersed in what acting really is.  It’s intention is to give you the experience of what you’re driving toward so that you can identify it in the future and work toward it in a more intentional and productive fashion.  Without that experience, you think you’re doing great work when you really aren’t, simply because you have nothing to compare it to.  Once you have that experience, you can move to a whole different plane.

However, it’s not for everyone.  For one thing, it requires three days (or two long ones).  For another, there are topics that can’t be properly covered in it.  So there are some shorter workshops that can improve your work.  Here they are, in brief:

Beats and Verbs: They sound simple, in concept.  They’re tough, in practice.  This workshop gives you a good grounding in them that will help you take ownership of the concepts and apply them in your work.

Connecting the Dots:  Script analysis is apparently one of the trickiest things for untrained actors, and I’ve found they don’t even realize what they’re missing.  If you aren’t naturally gifted in this art, you need someone to show you the way.  Most texts on the subject are too mechanical and don’t help you to understand how to put into practice what you discover about your character.  I do.

For Directors Only:  All actors are different, but they fall into easily identifable groups.  Understanding what group an actor is in tells you what he needs from you to produce his best work.  His learning style, how he processes information, and what makes him most creative is key to getting the best performance you can from him.  The odds are that you’ll have someone from each group in every play you stage.  You need to deal with each of them differently.  In addition, we’ll cover the most useful approaches you can take with actors of varying capabilities, no matter what group they fall into — including the neophyte actor!

Plugging in on Stage:  This is all about receiving from your scene partner and reacting only to what you get.  I don’t see nearly enough of this happening in community theater, even among experienced actors.  This is a completely experiential workshop.  We do it until you get it.

Creative Blocking:  Good blocking that keeps the audience interested, maximizes the fun, and improves the storytelling can be so hard to find.  Yet it’s the simplest way to make dramatic improvements in both the quality of the acting and the audience’s enjoyment of the production as a whole.  I show you how it’s done.  This one’s for both actors and directors.

Pre-Production Essentials for Directors:  Because most community theater directors get promoted from the acting ranks, they don’t always realize that there’s a ton of work that should be done before auditions.  This workshop helps you to understand how to improve your shows by preparing well.

Not all of the workshops’ detailed descriptions are posted yet, but they will be soon.  Keep checking!

 

 

 

 

 

The Director’s Posts

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxzzhmc5s9k

You may have noticed that I recently created a new category for Directing, which you can find over in the righthand column.  It’s a quick way of identifying the posts that will be most informative to directors.

Don’t get me wrong — most all of the posts are useful to directors.  You work with actors, after all; it’s good to understand what their needs and their process is!  Directing is a lot more than playing traffic cop.

Even if you act yourself, reading them may improve your understanding of what goes on for the actors who work for you and allow you to help them better.  We’re all different, you know, and what works for you as an actor may not be universally true for your cast.  Many actors know how to do what they do, but don’t know how to talk about it. (Meryl Streep famously avoids discussing her process, although I don’t know if that is because she wants to keep her conscious brain out of it as much as possible, or if she just isn’t particularly articulate that way.)

So if you have the leisure and interest, reading some of the posts that aren’t in the Directing category may be very useful to you.  If you don’t have the leisure, the posts I’ve put into the Directing category are the ones that speak on some level to what directors have to know to do their job well.  They are written from the actor’s viewpoint, obviously, but the connection for you as a director is clear, I think.

Sometime later this year, when the well on Actor’s Etiquette topics dries up, I’ll start writing posts specifically aimed at community theater directors.  Most of us graduate to directing for reasons that have little to do with a deep-seated need to communicate artistically through direction.  One of my college friends knew he wanted to become a director, and I was fascinated by this fact.  What was it, I wondered, that he was trying to express that directing filled?  How on earth did he know what to do or where to start?  I had no perspective on life at that young age and would have felt completely at sea as a director.  Mechanically, I could have done a passable job, I suppose, but it would not have been a creative act!

I got thrown into directing, almost literally, when another director bailed out and I was the only person available.  A couple of decades removed from my college years, I discovered that I now DID have something to say to the world, and my playwriting experience had given me a perspective on plays that I hadn’t had when I was simply immersed in creating a character.  I discovered that I had been paying close attention to what my directors had done in all the productions I’d been in, and I not only knew what to do as a result, but I was also pretty darned good at it.

So if you’re like me, and you find yourself directing because your theater needs you, or you’re getting too long in the tooth to get good roles any more, or you simply want to try something new — the Directing posts are there to help you figure out how to do this thing.  And if you’ve got specific questions about the process or problems you are facing before I get to writing the new posts, send me a line and I’ll write a post just for you!