Tag Archives: Actor

Stage Movement, Part II

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There is something oddly unnatural about being onstage when it comes to movement.  Is it our awareness of the audience and our need to “cheat” to make certain things easier to see?  How do we address the audience’s need to see what happens while making our activities on stage look natural?

One thing I’ve learned as a golfer is that you need to break technique into the smallest pieces possible.  It’s the only way to get good at them.  Trying to do multiple things at once and get good at them simultaneously is nearly impossible.  Oh, heck, let’s just call it completely impossible.

That’s why when I give you an exercise, I ask you to only pay attention to one thing at a time.  When it comes to working on your physical life, I want you to worry less about the lines and the emotion and more about the physical.  I don’t care if your monologues aren’t as emotionally successful next week.  I care about whether or not you can walk and talk at the same time.

Let’s break the physical element into two pieces:  movement that involves changing location (walking, crossing your legs, sitting down) and movement that involves using your hands to do something (pack a suitcase, drink some coffee, peel a banana).  And let’s explore those two things separately.

Your assignment for next week is to do your monologue while changing location as much as possible.  You have the whole script to put the monologue into context now; use that for your emotional life, but disregard the constraints that the script places on you physically.   We’re not staging the play, so we don’t care if we do it “right”.  We’re using the monologue as a learning tool, that’s all.

walkingChoose surroundings that give you the greatest opportunity to move around.  If there isn’t an emotional impetus to move you, choose ANY activity, no matter how inane (like moving the cups) that will give you a reason to use as much of the stage as possible.  You don’t have to keep moving if you have an emotional reason to stay still.  Just don’t stay still after the moment has passed, and don’t be self-indulgent about those moments, even if that is the right choice emotionally.

We’re looking for balance between the physical and emotional, but err in favor of movement for the purpose of this exercise.  You can always scale back if you go overboard; but if you don’t go far enough, you’ll never get there.  (The golf analogy:  you have to get it to the hole to have a shot at it going in the hole.)

See Part I here.  See Part III here.

Stage Movement, Part I

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It’s difficult to walk and talk at the same time.

Don’t ask me why.  We do it all the time in real life.  But on stage?  You’d think we’ve never done it before.  God forbid you have to do anything more complicated than that.  I know actors who find it nearly impossible to do business that really requires their attention and talk at the same time.  The play comes to a screeching halt while they do the important bit of business required by the script.

Given that I read recently that once an audience gets jarred out of its reverie, it takes a good five minutes for them to get completely back into the show, this isn’t very helpful.

Granted, it’s easier for some people than it is for others, but EVERYONE needs to work at it.  Your physical life on stage must be as real as your emotional life for us to believe in you.  And yet making physical movement – even walking – look completely natural is harder than you probably realize.

pat-head-rub-bellyThis is partly because acting is sort of like rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time.  You’re trying to put three new things together, things that you’ve never done in this particular way:  words, emotions, and physical activity.  That’s like juggling.  The words and the activity are complicated enough, but now you try to add multi-layered emotions to the mix?  Holy $@%&#!!!!!!

So how do we do this?  The same way you get to Carnegie Hall.

Understand that it’s like (here comes the golf analogy, Charlie) learning to play golf.  Learning to separate an egg.  Learning to use your non-dominant hand for everyday chores.  You don’t do it particularly well the first time.  Or the second.  Or the third.  But persist in doing it over and over, and you get better at.  You start to figure out when the words need to take precedence, when the emotions move front and center, and when you need to move.  And (miracle of miracles) how to do all three at once.

If you pay attention to what you’re doing, that is.  Self-awareness, on some level, is essential to improvement.  It’s about letting both your left and right brain be active at the same time.  The right brain does the acting, the left brain observes and makes choices.

This is why you need your set taped from the first rehearsal, so you know what space you have to play with.  Why you need rehearsal furniture that closely approximate the dimensions, firmness, etc., of the set pieces you’ll actually use.  Why you need rehearsal props, especially for any complicated piece of business.  The more repetition you get with physical activity, the more it looks like a real human being is on stage, not some actor. . .

See Part II here.  See Part III here.

Words ≠ Communication

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The meaning of words is a very small part of how we communicate.

Albert Mehrabian, a UCLA psychology professor in the 1960s, posited that only 7% of what we communicate comes through the words themselves.  About 38% comes from other verbal clues (intonation, volume, etc.), and the rest from body language.  Obviously, language itself may be more important in some conversations than others.  If you don’t pay attention to the words in a math or science class, you may not pass the test!

However, ordinary conversation – what we use on stage – probably follows this breakdown, at least closely enough.  Whatever the numbers really are, we need to pay considerable attention to how we use our voices and our bodies if we are going to convey the story’s meaning most effectively.

In real life, we do this naturally.  Our emotions automatically result in paralinguistic choices (the verbal stuff not related to the meaning of the words) that convey our emotions.  And that which we have trouble expressing in words, we express through our bodies.  Again, without much thought about those choices.

I may not be able to find words that tell you just how much I care about you, but looking in your eyes and stroking your shoulder underscores the words, “I love you.”  If I’m having trouble getting you to understand something, I probably am not going to say, “Boy, am I frustrated that you are being so obtuse!”, but I might turn and walk away while throwing my hands up in the air, as if that will somehow signal the gods to send me the magic words I can’t find myself.

The two examples I’ve just given you are pretty common ways of expressing those emotions.  But they are hardly the only ones.soup  I might say “I love you” by putting a bowl of soup in front of you and sitting down to attentively watch you eat it.  I might deal with my frustration by taking a deep breath and looking down at the ground while I gather myself, and then force myself to speak very slowly and calmly to explain myself.

Who your character is helps to determine the choices you should make as an actor, although you’ll find that your characters will often surprise you with choices you thought were inappropriate.  The point of this post is that if you’re just going to trust the words to do the job for you, you’re throwing away opportunities to develop a richer characterization.

Most actors I work with understand that they need to use some verbal inflection, but don’t explore the full range of their voices and the meaning that can add.  And most don’t use physical movement to any real degree to convey meaning.  Movement onstage becomes practical:  I need to answer the phone, because my next lines are part of a phone conversation; I need to pick up the gift because I need to take it offstage with me when I exit; I need to sit on the couch because the script says so.

So we’re going to intentionally explore these tools in class, so that you can learn how to bring them to bear in the next play you do!

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!

The Actor’s Job – More Than You Think

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Acting is about action.  We forget this sometimes.  Playwrights can only provide the basic structure of the play:  the plot and the dialogue.  Don’t get me wrong – without the playwright, the actor has nothing to do, and the playwright’s contribution is paramount.  Thank goodness we have some good playwrights!

But without the actor, they are just words on a page.  To bring life to those words, we actors need to add not only the emotional life, but physical action.  Saying our character’s lines is actually third in the list of responsibilities.  After all, silent films were very successful for many years, and only the words that couldn’t be conveyed any other way ever showed up on the screencards.

Our job, whether we are in films or on stage, remains the same:  add the emotions and the action.  Hence, our logo:

21724617This is tougher than it sounds.  As both John and Nora have found, human beings are afraid of our emotions and distance ourselves from them as much as possible.  Actors, on the other hand, need to plunge into them.  That’s pretty terrifying.

That’s why we used the memory exercise.  It’s a way of introducing yourself to your own emotions and to make friends with them.  If you keep exploring your own feelings through distant, unimportant memories (because those are quite important enough, and much safer), you’ll become more comfortable with letting them show up on stage, too.

As for action – well, most actors focus on the words and resist moving.  I’m not quite sure why that is, but it’s pretty universal.  Only a minority of actors are inclined to move instinctively early in their careers.  If no one has encouraged you to explore stage action in any depth, you can do twenty shows and still be confining yourself to a space the size of a telephone booth.  (Remember those?)

But action is one of the most important and valuable tools an actor has.  Action is inextricably linked to your emotions, but if you’re not accustomed to using it, the exercises we’ve been doing – by creating “business” with your activity and learning to use the space available to you on stage by walking on your “unimportant” lines – are designed to draw your attention to the role both business and movement play in your acting.

We’ve made some arbitrary choices in using them – but going to the extremes is a way of focusing on what you otherwise avoid.  Once we get into actual scene work, you’ll find the link between action and emotion that make both easier to do.

The Actor: The Playwright’s Co-Creator

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Last week Paul identified the actor as a “co-creator” with the playwright.  I’d like to take that a step further and say that the playwright tells a story with words, while the actors tell that same story with emotions.  The actors illuminate the playwright’s story by attaching emotions to what are otherwise two-dimensional sentences, and thereby give real meaning to the play.  The job of the director is to edit the options the actors present him with so that the choices they make create the strongest, most interesting story possible.

In other words, it’s not just about saying the words.  Anyone can do that.

As long as you make choices that don’t violate the script’s text, the choices are valid and fairly represent what you have to bring to the work as a creative artist.  You and I will give entirely different performances as the same character simply because we each have our own unique perspective, and that perspective tends to guide our choices.

However, we also have to recognize that our perspective is just one of many billions of perspectives, and that our characters may not share them.  What we think we know about our character isn’t necessarily right.  We are inclined to make many decisions about our characters within the first few readings of the play, but those are always made within the context of our unique perspective.  When we do, we usually shut the door on the more interesting and creative choices.

I’ve lived with my husband for 19 years.  He continues to surprise me, no matter how well I think I know him.  How can I possibly think I can understand a character I just met, about whom I only have 70 pages of dialogue as clues, in less than a week?

That’s why I won’t tell you what play your monologue is from yet.  If I do, you’ll start making assumptions about your characters.  As long as you know nothing about the play – including your character’s name – it’s easier to be open-minded.  And so I can use this early time – I think you’ll start working with scenes from full plays that I will let you read in Week 5 – to demonstrate how many more interesting options you have when you suspend judgment, as well as to introduce ways of using space and time to unleash the power of your subconscious.  My guess is that none of you use your subconscious as much as you can, and that is where true creativity lies.

I hope these tools will prove to be very helpful when you start working on 5 minute scenes (standard length for scene study).  The rest of the tools I hope to share with you, I’ll introduce within the context of those scenes.

For those of you who were at tonight’s class (9/17), here’s the assignment for next week.  If you weren’t with us tonight, you can prepare the second part of the assignment below if you have the time, but you don’t have to prepare it, either.  If you only do the homework from the 9/10 class the next time you come, that’s just fine.

I realize that we didn’t do anything with your “memory” homework tonight, due to time.  We may get to them next week.  Or maybe not.  However, you’ll find that if you keep practicing with finding new memories, you’ll become more familiar with what it feels like to search for memories, the right words, things that are difficult to say, etc.  If you know what it feels like for YOU to search for them, you can transfer that experience to your character.  When the same sensations come up for you as the character searching for the details of a memory as come up for you when you do the exercise, you know you’ve hit paydirt.

So, it’s a two part assignment:

  1. Work on your monologue in light of the experiments we did with it in class.  Feel free to try as many different approaches as you can imagine, just to see what the effect is.  Remember, you’ve got no way of knowing what the “right” choice is, so just examine your options.  Try the options that seem to be completely wrong, and see if you find anything good in there.  Finally, choose an activity that supports whatever choices you do end up making, and do both at the same time.  Run it at least three times to see what happens depending on how much attention you give to your activity.  Bring the props for your activity with you to the next class.
  2. Identify the “important” lines in your monologue vs. the “unimportant” ones.  By “important”, I mean plot points, big emotional moments, when your character makes an unsignaled left turn, etc.  By unimportant, I mean the lines that if the audience doesn’t hear, it’ll be okay.  Do this with pencil initially, until you’re happy with your choices.  Then you can highlight them if you like.  This will give you a monologue that looks like a tiger standing on its head.
    Once you’ve made your choices, practice walking around the stage on your unimportant lines, and standing still on your important ones.  You’ll do this in class as well.

And then it’s on to an active monologue (not a memory monologue).  From there, we’ll progress to really clever two person scenes that will hopefully change how you listen on stage.  Which is probably the hardest acting technique issue there is!

A Few Exercises

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If you weren’t at tonight’s class (Sept. 10), disregard the following.  It will apply to you after you attend your first class session, but it is nothing you need to do before that.

If you don’t have time to prepare all three things, then prepare them in the order they appear.

1)      Prepare an activity.  Something simple, like peeling carrots.  Playing solitaire.  Shining your shoes.  Practice it at home at least three times.  This may seem silly, but trust me, it makes a difference.  Do not “write” lines to say.  Speech is not forbidden, but also should not be prepared beforehand.  It should be used only if it arises spontaneously (e.g., if you cut yourself with a knife, you might say “Ouch”, among other things.)  Do not create an imaginary scene partner; the activity is solitary.  The “setting” for the activity should be your home.  The “character” is the real you.  And the activity should last for about 2 minutes.  Bring whatever “props” you need to do your activity (carrots, a peeler, a dishtowel, a bowl, a garbage can or paper bag, a cutting board, etc.)  Do NOT mime any of your actions.  Do NOT use a cell phone, IPad, or any other form of technology as one of your props.  And avoid activities requiring fine motor skills.  It is very difficult to thread a needle on stage, no matter how young your eyes are.

2)      Memorize the monologue I gave you in class.  Resist the temptation to memorize “line readings” with it, but instead just memorize the words as words.  Yes, inflections and rhythm can be helpful in memorizing lines, but doing so limits your performance in ways that are very difficult to overcome.  You will know you’ve really memorized the monologue when you can say the words without stopping except to catch your breath.

Feel free to “think” about your character, but ONLY think about it.  Resist the temptation to “prepare” the monologue out loud in any way other than to memorize the lines.  Remember, while your monologue is from an actual play, you don’t know what that play is or anything about your character or the circumstances that surround your monologue, so you can’t make good “choices”, you can only make some intelligent guesses based on limited information which may or may not pan out.  Instead of making choices, simply explore ALL the possibilities.  For instance, what if your monologue is intended to be humorous?  What if it is intended to be dramatic?  What if you play it as if it is incredibly important?  What if you say it as something very off-hand?  What would be different about it, depending on which choices you might make?

Identify the possibilities, just don’t choose from among them.

Don’t feel like you have to do anything OTHER than memorize your lines.  You don’t.  But if you can’t stop yourself from doing more, then why not challenge yourself to find as many different possibilities as you can?

If yours is a longer monologue and you don’t have time to memorize it all, just memorize the portion that you can.  The length, quite honestly, is fairly arbitrary.

3)      Practice telling your “personal memory”, the one you used in class.  You don’t want it to last longer than 1 or 2 minutes.  Edit it to eliminate repetitions or extraneous information.  Stick to the critical points.  Tell it out loud at least six times, to real or imaginary people.  Feel free to “tell” it to family and friends; just don’t let them give you ANY feedback other than to answer the following question with one word:  “Did it feel to you like I was remembering it for the first time?”  Be prepared to tell it in class as if we have never heard you tell it before.  The idea is to make us believe that you never have told it to anyone before.  I don’t care if it is interesting or funny or has a point.  This isn’t a class on improv or playwriting.

As much as you can, put yourself back into the memory.  Take time to just THINK about it, REMEMBER everything you can about it, before you tell it again.  On your first retelling, describe your surroundings in as much detail as you can.  Colors, shapes, density.  Can you remember any sounds that might have been part of it?  The sound of a passing train, the whoosh of the wind through the trees, the high pitch of your brother’s whistle?  Can you remember what the apple felt like in your hand?  Was it a red delicious so big that your 8-year-old hand could barely hold it, or was it a rotten half-grown crab apple that easily fit in your hand?  Was it soft or hard, smooth, wet, slimy?  Could you smell what Mom was cooking?  Can you identify what she was cooking by smell, rather than simply remembering the menu?  And most importantly, can you remember how you FELT about the moment?  Did it make you happy, scared, ashamed, silly, resentful, etc.?

If you find staying silent for 30 seconds while you try to get in touch with these details difficult, I understand.  But all the more reason you should try to sit still and pay attention for at least 15 seconds.  Trust me (sorry, Troy!), that’s where the magic is.

After this first retelling, which can take as long as ten minutes if you like, you’ll have a much better sense of what is important and what can be edited out, and then you can start practicing the short version.

See if you can find at least ONE SENTENCE in your “personal memory” that you can get in touch with this level of detail.  Just ONE moment like this is sufficient to give any monologue real power.