In Scene 2, we have the contrast of the older, stern Sr. Aloysius and the younger, enthusiastic Sr. James.  It’s easy to like Sr. James and to frown upon Sr. Aloysius, who seems to be vetoing anything happy.  But let’s look again.

Sr. Aloysius is the principal of the school and has worked there for many years.  Sr. James is a new teacher.  We can fairly say, I think, that as a new teacher, she undoubtedly has things to learn.  Sr. Aloysius is taking the time, in this scene, to mentor her.  Her approach may seem a bit severe at times, but let’s assume that underneath the gruffness is a sincere desire to help Sr. James be a better teacher, so that the children may be better served.

If you disagree with Sr. Aloysius, what you are disagreeing with is what it means “to be a better teacher”, or “what will benefit the children”.  Those are things about which reasonable people can disagree.  But you need to understand how Sr. Aloysius defines these things and, more importantly, why.  What in her background has led her to believe these things?  Has she tried other ways and seen them fail?

What are the things that matter to Sr. Aloysius?  Let’s look at some of her lines:

“Much can be accomplished in sixty minutes.”

“Always the easy way out these days.  What does that teach?  An easy choice today can have its consequence tomorrow.”

“Penmanship is dying all across the country.”

“You favor History and risk swaying the children to value it over their other subjects.  I think this is a mistake.”

“I do not say this to aggrandize myself, but to illustrate the importance of paying attention.”

“What good’s a gift if it’s left in the box?”

“The best teachers do not perform, they cause the students to perform.”

“Good teachers are never content.”

“It is a society which requires constant educational, spiritual, and human vigilance.”

“God gave you a brain and a heart.  The heart is warm, but your wits must be cold.”

“They’re children.  They can talk to each other.  It’s more important they have a fierce moral guardian.  You stand at the door, Sister.  You are the gatekeeper.  If you are vigilant, they will not need to be.”

“I’m sorry I’m not more forthright, but I must be careful not to create something by saying it.”

Take these lines out of the dialogue and forget that Sr. Aloysius is the one saying them.  These are all lines that you can probably either agree with or else understand the thinking behind them.  You may think that an adult ought to be more than a fierce moral guardian to a child, but you can probably get on board with Sr. Aloysius’ view that adults should protect children from anything immoral.

Despite all of the things Sr. Aloysius says that we don’t care for, the play is sprinkled with lines that we can agree with, that show her to be a bit more human than we thought when we first read the play.

The interesting question about Sr. Aloysius is that she is absolutely well-meaning and in some ways absolutely right.  Yet she takes it to an edge that we find unpalatable – she is an extremist in what she believes.  Why?  How has she arrived at this point?  What in her history has brought her to such a rigid, black and white position?

Well, that’s the journey you go on in rehearsal.  Just remember that she, too, has a heart, and that her heart is warm as well.  She knows William London is on a bad path and that she can’t do much to alter it, and it pains her.  She worries that someone will hit Donald Muller because he is black, and that Linda Conte will have sex before she turns 14.  And while she asks Sr. James to help Sr. Veronica because the school can’t afford to lose a teacher, I suspect that she is also worried about Sr. Veronica’s physical well-being as well as her happiness.  Who wants to be shunted away to the old nun’s home?

So let’s take the idea that Sr. Aloysius is not an unredeemable person, but someone who sees her mission as protecting the young children in her care from all harm.

When we first meet her, in Scene 2, it is clear that she is a woman of strong and firm opinions on matters like teaching methods.  You may not agree with those methods, but you need to give thought to why they matter to her.  Why should a teacher showing enthusiasm for a subject be a bad thing for kids to experience?  Why should knowledge be delivered as bitter medicine?  What benefit is derived by this approach?  Because in Sr. Aloysius’ eyes, there is a benefit.  It’s not an arbitrary choice on her part, and it’s not because she’s generally mean.  She sincerely thinks this is best for the kids.

Her advice to Sr. James sounds like severe criticism, but from Sr. Aloysius’ point of view, she is simply trying to help her to be a better teacher.  Sr. Aloysius is an ISTJ in Myers-Briggs’ terminology – she is businesslike and fond of order and tradition.  Part of the attraction of the Catholic Church is that if you want rules and black and white, you can find it there (you can also find the opposite there, even in the 1960s, but if you are attracted by rules, you can certainly find them.)

So for Sr. Aloysius, there is comfort and security in regulations.  If she fears uncertainty – doubt – then her desperate clinging to her set of rules helps quell her fears.

What’s the number one diamond line for Sr. Aloysius?  The final line of the play:  “I have doubts!  I have such doubts!”

So we have a nun who means well and wants to do the best job she can as principal (which means protecting her charges to the utmost), but is scared to death of the grey area and enforces the “Rule of Law” at her school both to protect her charges and to protect herself from the terrifying unknown.

Count both the adjectives and the verbs in that last paragraph.  Notice how I haven’t mentioned words like severe, heartless, unfeeling, mean-spirited, vindictive, vengeful, harsh, etc.?  Instead, I’ve given you motivations that you can use to drive what you do.

The playwright has written lines that have all the severity and mean-spiritedness necessary.  You don’t have to work to add any of that negative emotion to the performance.  The words will take care of that.  Your job, actually, is to do the opposite – to temper the strong language of the play with an emotional life that makes sense and creates a three-dimensional human being instead of a stereotype.

But let’s go back to the script of Scene 2.  Sr. Aloysius calls art class a waste of time.  Play the emotion (“she’s disparaging the arts”) and you play into the stereotype.  But if you stop and think about how someone could justifiably consider the arts a waste of time (what would you replace them with, and what benefit would the students derive from the replacement?), you take just a little bit of negative energy out of that line.

William London, the unruly child in Sr. James’ class, appears to be Sr. Aloysius’ favorite whipping boy, and she seems to be unreasonable, at least at first.  But read page 15 again.  What if Sr. Aloysius’ assessment of William’s life is absolutely spot on?  Forget how she says it, just look at the facts.  Does she become just a little bit more understandable?

More next time . . .

A local theater is doing a production of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Doubt.  The audition notice described Sr. Aloysius, the older nun determined to rid her school of the priest she is convinced has molested a young boy (and played on Broadway by Cherry Jones and in the film by Meryl Streep) as an

Old School elementary principal, stern, suspicious and cynical.  She shows no weakness and discourages any and all signs of weakness.  Her nature is excessive. She is unsympathetic and rules with an iron fist, adults and students alike.  She strongly dislikes Father Flynn’s sense of compassion and his compassionate demeanor.  Think cold, heartless and 100% strong willed and mean spirited.  Her anger and guilt-inducing suspicious nature, drives her passion.

Pretty extreme description, no?  “No weakness”, “any and all signs”, “excessive”, “iron fist”, “cold” “heartless”, “100% strong willed and mean spirited”.  Not a lot of room in there for playing the opposites, which I hope you now understand, if you’ve read the rest of the blog, helps to create a nuanced, interesting, unpredictable, believable character.

As it turns out, the director attended parochial school during the 60s and 70s until graduating from high school, and the description he provided reflects his own experience with at least some of the nuns he encountered.  Which is Lesson Number One:

Be careful about bringing your own baggage to the role.  Be sure it is applicable.

I’ve heard actors say things like, “Well, I would never do that, so I don’t find it believable!”  (Yes, but your character does, so you need to wrap your head around that.)  About La Marquise de Merteuil from Les Liaisons Dangereuses:  “I just can’t like her, she’s evil.”  (If you’re going to play her, you better understand her pain and what drives her to do terrible things, and not just see “evil”.)

The play isn’t about you; it’s about your character.  Separate your personal beliefs and experiences from what is happening to your character.  Use your own experiences if they are aligned with the character, but be careful to not assume that some correlation implies complete correlation.

If you perceive your character in the way this director sees Sr. Aloysius – if you can step back and recognize that you are using some weighty, definitive, and extreme language to describe her – it’s a very big indication that you’ve got some personal issues that are clouding your judgment about the character.  You need to sort out what those are and open yourself to the possibility that your character isn’t a mirror image of whomever it was who harmed you in the past.  (Similarly, if you paint your character with rose-colored glasses, you need to look for some flaws and accept that they do exist.)

But let’s say you’ve never met a nun in your life nor had any cruel teachers, and yet your reaction to Sr. Aloysius is not unlike the director’s response.  What do you do?  How do you go about playing characters with no redeeming qualities?

Stay tuned . . .

Diamond lines are lines that come with baggage.  They reveal a character’s history, something that has shaped who they are.  They ask you to go on an archeological dig.

The fact that the playwright throws them into the script tells you that they are critical to understanding the character and what she does in this play.  If she was the homecoming queen and the playwright doesn’t mention it, then being the queen wasn’t a defining moment for her or, at least, its ramifications (how she felt about it, how others reacted to it) don’t impact what happens to her in this play.

However, if the playwright does let this fact drop, it means it matters.  Was it a defining moment for her?  Is it is past glory that she clings to or one she wants to shed?  Has it affected how the men in her life view her, and is that a good thing or a problem for her?  How strong is her sense of self?  Does she need public approbation to feel good about herself?

Diamond lines usually jump out at me, but I also comb through the script to look for them.  Sometimes they are subtle, and you may not realize until halfway through rehearsals that there is really more buried in that line than you gave it credit for.  This is normal, but think what an advantage you have if you recognize what the line has to offer earlier in rehearsals!  Objectively looking at lines to see what they might mean is a way of finding them early.

So once you find your diamonds, what do you do with them?

Let’s start with what you SHOULDN’T do:  “Decide” they mean X, and then play X.

For example, let’s take Bea’s line about apologizing to no one.  You could take that to mean that she doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks about anything she does and play that, but it’s a bit simplistic.  For instance, it assumes that she behaves that way in all situations, and that’s unlikely.  She’s too likable a character for that to be true.

That approach also may assume she’s a little “in your face” about what she does:  “Take me as I am or don’t take me, I’m not changing for anyone”.  This, too, might have some validity, but it’s an extreme position, and while I believe in amping up your stakes by going as far as you can with something, that’s a very different thing than defining your characters by taking their personality traits to extremes.  People are very complicated beings, full of contradictions.

So one place to start is by taking what it seems to say about Bea – that she doesn’t apologize – and imagine circumstances under which she would.  What makes her feel bad?  How does she feel about other people (because we apologize to people we care about and not often to those who drive us nuts)?

Then, let’s put the line in context.  She is speaking very specifically about her relationship with Jorgy.  This line tells me that she knows it’s an unorthodox relationship, she knows what a stir it caused in town, and she has lived with that stir for most of her life without once responding to questions or misconceptions or insults that sprang up as a result.

That’s a very difficult thing to do.  It tells me that Bea is made of steel.  (But again – where are the weak points in her steely frame?)  It also tells me something about how she feels about Jorgy.  You only can keep silent in the face of personal attack if you know, with every fiber of your being, that you are doing the absolutely right thing.  Bea loves Jorgy so deeply that she is willing to sacrifice everything for it.

Did she make the right choice in doing this?  Not for you, as the actor, to say.  Only for you to examine the reason for the choice and the impact of that choice.  What did she sacrifice in order to be with Jorgy on such unusual terms?  How did it impact her marriage?  Her relationship with her daughter?  With friends?  Co-workers?

Mostly what I do with diamond lines is try to internalize what they really mean, and not necessarily in a way that I can communicate verbally to you.  It’s a matter of understanding how they make me feel.  If Bea’s choice would not have been mine, they I have to spend considerable time getting to a real place of understanding why she made that choice.

What would I be willing to stand for over time without budging an inch?  How much of a conscious choice was this and how much was simply who Bea is?  Were there moments when she almost responded to someone and didn’t, held back at the last minute?  What did that feel like?  If Bea had chosen to respond, what would she have said?  Would what she would have said changed over the years, as she matured?  After Jorgy’s wife died?  After her own husband died?

You need to simply sit with diamond lines and let them work their magic on you.  They always have layers to them.  How much of what drives them is genetic, and how much environmental?

Revisit diamond lines over and over again.  In the shower.  While driving.  Waiting in the checkout line.  Keep pushing deeper into them, both intellectually and emotionally.  Sift through your character’s history and heart, brushing away the dirt that covers your diamond.  Discover all of the diamond’s facets, not just what first meets the eye.

To read Script Analysis:  Diamond Lines, Part 1, go here.

Now, I can make the opposite argument to the one I’ve been posing in the last four posts.  Let’s say that Jorgy and Bea’s relationship was physical from early on, and that they moved in together after Bea’s husband died.  Did they try to keep their affair quiet, or at some point did they stop caring what other people thought and carried on without apology?

They don’t strike me as people who would be that insensitive to their spouses, especially given the fact that they chose to not divorce.  So if they were sexually involved, it seems likely that they did their best to do it on the sly.

Even if they were very cautious about it, rumors were bound to start.  How Bea handled it is one of the defining things about her character.  “In a life filled with rumors and gossip and sideways glances,” she tells her daughter in the first act, “I apologized to no one.  Don’t expect it of me now.  You won’t get it.”

In fact, it doesn’t really matter which route you go in terms of their affair, this line still resonates effectively and says something important about Bea:  she does what she thinks is right and feels no need to explain herself or to pacify others.  This is also reflected in her second act scene with Garfinkle, when he asks her why she is offering him the $1 million trust fund that is her nest egg.  “That’s my affair.”

Alone, either line would say volumes about Bea.  Together, they pack an even more powerful punch.  When lines reflect the same character choices, pay attention.  The playwright is telling you something very important.

Let’s go back to the first four posts, where I argued that Bea and Jorgy aren’t living together.  I did this to explain why giving up the trust fund was such a sacrifice.  But is that the only way to ramp up the stakes for Bea?

Jorgy objects strenuously to “greenmail”, or paying Garfinkle to go away.  How would he feel if Bea gave away the money he invested to protect her?  Furious, undoubtedly, and it’s not unheard of for couples to split over something like this, which would be a matter of principle for each of them.  Why is she willing to risk his wrath?  Because she is afraid they’ll lose, that Jorgy has chosen a path that will be unsuccessful.  Even if they lose, Jorgy will be financially secure, and Bea may assume that he’ll forgive her and things will work out in the end, even if they go through a rough patch.  But no one looks forward to a rough patch with the one they adore, either.

And let’s face it:  $1 million is $1 million.  Even if Bea is confident that Jorgy will forgive and support her, it’s a lot of money to give away.  It’s financial independence, and as much as she loves him, I think she likes standing on her own two feet, too.

So why is she willing to give it up to ensure the plant remains theirs?  The answer is really embedded in the question.  She wants to keep the plant open – not for herself, and not for Jorgy, but for the 1,200 men who will be out of work if Garfinkle is successful in his bid to take over (and close down) the plant.

The script provides a nice clue to support this:  Bea sets up a retraining facility to help the displaced workers find other jobs.  It also offers a reason for her sorrow:  the men, used to working with their hands, are not qualified for anything other than McDonald’s or work as night watchmen.

So Bea’s “verb” in this scene is not really “to keep the plant open”, because that doesn’t have emotional impact, and stakes are always related to emotional impact.  Let’s rephrase it:  To save the jobs of the men working at the plant who have no other viable alternatives for employment.

Once you find the verb, you need to personalize it to make it have real impact.  So let’s create three men who are representative of the 1,200 men, all of whom Bea probably knows by name.  (Think that’s unrealistic?  Even if it is, it’s a good choice to make as an actor – that Bea knows each of them by name, how many kids they have, who has health problems, etc.)

One of the men is Frank, who has worked all his life at the plant and is five years from retirement.  He’s retire tomorrow if he could, to move to Florida to be near the grandkids, but he needs those extra five years.

Another is Joe, who has one kid in college and another who is a junior in high school.  He and his wife both work, but they are stretched thin when it comes to finding two nickels to rub together.  She’s had a series of health problems in the last three years, and that has impacted both her ability to work and added costs for her care.

The third is Mitch, who at 26 is a new homeowner with a baby on the way.  It’s been a difficult pregnancy, and his wife is restricted to bed much of the time.

Losing their jobs would create severe financial problems for each of them.  Bea can’t bear the thought of that, and is willing to give up her own security and peace at home in order to give it to the men.  This choice is supported by the fact that she sets up a job retraining facility at the end of the play.

So at the end of the day, I still can’t tell you, halfway through the run, exactly what choices Jorgy and Bea made about their relationship, but I don’t think it matters.  What matters is how I feel about him – he is my best friend, the love of my life, and the thing that has made life worth living.  The facts don’t really change any of the emotional choices I need to make in the play.