Tag Archives: Community Theater

AACTFest 2015 Workshops

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AACT stands for American Association of Community Theatre.  This terrific national organization holds two biennial gatherings (AACTFest) on alternate years.  In even years, it’s an international festival (this past June, in Florida), wherein amateur companies from all over the world are invited to bring their productions.  In odd years, it’s national, with select companies performing (usually about a dozen plays are staged at each festival).

In addition, workshops are given each year, aimed at various types of artists.  I am pleased and excited to announce that the AACT has selected me to give two of them at the 2015 Festival, which will be held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, from June 23 to June 28.  There are many reasons to attend the festival outside of my two workshops, but if you do come to the Festival, I hope you’ll stop by one of my workshops and say hi!

Playing the Verbs:  

The most-visited posts on my blog and the search terms used to get to them are about acting beats and how to play verbs.  Beats and Verbs are rehearsal concepts that many community theater actors don’t know how to use.  This workshop introduces the “how” in clear and simple terms, and gives actors a new way to think about their characters, one which lends greater dramatic impact and believability to their performances.

Great acting happens when you play the verbs, not the adjectives and adverbs.  How do you move from playing “I’m angry”, “My character is a silly person”, and “She is making me impatient in this scene” to something that is verb-based and much more compelling to watch?  We’ll examine how to choose the strongest verbs and then make the tricky leap to how to rehearse differently to take advantage of your great choices.  This is a hands-on, practical workshop — come prepared to play!

Blocking:  Creating a More Interesting Visual Presentation

Not every community theater director knows how to block a play to maximize dramatic impact and comedic effect and, even more importantly, to simply hold the audience’s attention.  Blocking the play is a creative opportunity too many directors miss, but it’s not that hard.  Blocking the play well is the single easiest and most impactful thing a director can do to improve the production.  There are some basic guidelines any director can use to create a more interesting visual presentation, and I share them all in this workshop.

The easiest way to improve the quality of a production is through good, creative blocking.  The stage directions in the script are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to blocking a play.   All comedy is physical, and most dramatic moments usually are physical as well.  We’ll discuss the difference between movement and activities; how to mine the script for hidden opportunities to add movement; how to heighten dramatic impact with your blocking; why blocking is not just for blocking rehearsals; and how to help your actors discover better performances through movement.

While the first workshop is primarily aimed at actors and the second at directors, the truth is that both artists can probably learn something from each of them.  Directors who understand acting verbs can help actors to a better performance, and actors who understand the principles of blocking will find that it helps to unlock their own creativity, not to mention speeds the blocking process.

I am so honored to be given this opportunity.  Stay tuned for more information about when my workshops will be held, as well as more information about AACTFest 2015!

Actor’s Etiquette: Speed

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0958_MA_49_Set EtiquetteFootball season is upon us.  Success in college football does not guarantee success in the NFL.  Why?  Speed.  The NFL game is faster.  Why?  The NFL has the crème de la crème.  It’s spread out in college, but the quality of the players is more concentrated on the professional level.  As a result, everything is faster and sharper.

Understand that speed, in acting, has nothing to do with pauses.  Eliminating pauses does not contribute the kind of speed I’m talking about.  Speed can shorten the pauses without taking away their power, but speed never means cutting them out entirely.  It means not being self-indulgent about our “moments”.  It means interrupting on time, not a beat too late.  It means entering promptly.  It means speaking more quickly than you might ordinarily.

Speed can be a reflection of high energy, but they are not identical and you can’t substitute one for the other.  Speed means that the audience can feel the momentum of the piece.  It’s like wanting to get a drink from the kitchen while you’re watching TV.  Do you wait for the next commercial, or do you think  you can get in and out of the kitchen without missing much?  (In a world without Tivo, that is.)

Speed means that things are going quickly enough that you would indeed miss something if you went to the refrigerator.

Speed, Energy, and Volume ARE interrelated.  If you don’t have energy, your volume will be down.  Try to intentionally pump up your volume, you’ll automatically increase your energy.  If you don’t have energy, you won’t have speed.  Intentionally increase your speed (you may feel like you’re forcing it, but that can be okay), and energy will follow.

The Triumverate of No-Nos: Anticipation

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThere are three ways to violate the principle of Staying In The Moment:  Anticipation, Telegraphing, and I Don’t Believe It.

One way out of the cumbersome transitions I talked about last time is to anticipate what is coming next.  It’s not a good way out, but it’s one actors often take.

Anticipating comes in two forms.  One is doing the cumbersome transition (the one that takes several seconds rather than a split second), but starting it early, so that the flow of the play isn’t interrupted.

The other way of anticipating is doing the split second reaction, but doing it during your partner’s line, but before the pertinent information is revealed.

For instance, in Alan Ayckbourn’s Table Manners, there is the following sequence of lines:

        Sarah:  Annie!  You’re getting dreadfully coarse.

        Annie:  Oh, you’re just a prude.

        Sarah:  No, I’m not a prude.

Annie’s line is not only in direct response to Sarah’s first line, it is in response to the LAST word in the line, “coarse.”  Similarly, Sarah’s second line is in direct response to the LAST word in Annie’s line, “prude”.  Neither actress can react appropriately until her partner’s line has been completed.  Yet it’s very easy for an actress playing Annie to begin to roll her eyes in the middle of Sarah’s line, and for the actress playing Sarah to begin to be affronted in the middle of Annie’s line.

When you do that, you are receiving mail that hasn’t been sent yet.  You are anticipating the word you know is coming.  You know the meaning of the whole sentence, because you’ve got the script.  You, the actor, know what’s coming, but the character doesn’t.  The character has to wait for the clarity that comes with the important words in each sentence, “coarse” and “prude”.  Only then can she respond, because without them, there is nothing to respond to.

Imagine if Sarah only said, “Annie, you’re getting dreadfully . . .” and didn’t finish the sentence.  Annie might say, “Dreadfully what?”  Or she might say, “Oh, you’re just a prude”, having figured out what the missing word probably would have been (she knows Sarah fairly well, after all), but it would have taken a moment or two for her to figure out where Sarah was going with the line.

Similarly, if Annie had said, “Oh, you’re just . . .”, Sarah might have said, “I’m just what?  What am I?  Go on, say it.  You can’t start a sentence like that and not finish it!  What am I?”  But it is unlikely that she would have figured out that Annie had intended to call her a prude.

In order to avoid the anticipation problem, you have to figure out exactly when your character receives whatever message your character receives that makes her do or say whatever she does or says next and not let it affect you until that moment.  In the case above, it happens at the very end of the cue line.

Imagine the dog above, waiting for its master to come home.  A dog with expectations will hold its position until the expectation is met.  So should you wait for the key words that move you into the next part of the play.

But let’s say you have a lengthy speech, and halfway through it, you say something that really irritates me.  Now, you’re one of those people who knows how to keep talking in such a way that it is difficult for someone to interrupt you, so I keep quiet until you’re finished.  Or perhaps what you say is so upsetting that I need the rest of your speech to figure out how to respond to it.  Or perhaps I try to interrupt you without success.  Whatever choice I make, the source of the irritation – the thorn in my side – shows up in the middle of your speech, and that’s when it has to begin to affect me – not at the end of the speech.

These are two different issues.  The first example is one of anticipation; the second would be its opposite – to fail to react at the appropriate moment, but rather to wait until it’s my turn to speak.  Both are wrong, but they have entirely different causes.  I bring up the second to emphasize the real lesson here, which is to let things affect you at the moment that they hit you – not before, and not after, but instead at the very moment they enter your character’s consciousness.

In case you’d like to see how the actresses handle the moment, here’s the start of Table Manners.  The lines in question show up around the 6:30 mark, but if you watch it all, I think you’ll see how they wait to receive the input from the other before they react.  Sometimes the response is instantaneous, but it is never early.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOWelGRj7ts

 

 

Actor’s Etiquette: Energy

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etiquette_class_book2Every show you do requires high energy.  That’s obvious (I hope!) for a show like The 39 Steps or Noises Off.  It’s less obvious for Waiting for Godot or Our Town.  If you don’t bring your best energy to a performance, it will suffer.  Low energy is contagious and will infect the rest of the cast.  It will infect the audience, too.

The reverse is also true.  An audience that arrives tired will not respond well and that will affect the performance, since actors and audience work together to create the experience.  But you can’t do anything about what the audience brings.  You can, however, be sure that you bring your best energy.

Good acting can be tiring – for you, not for the audience!  When acting, we ought to be operating with a heightened awareness of what is going on, and that requires unrelenting attentiveness.  Let your focus drop for a few seconds, and it takes longer than a few seconds to get it back.  This kind of attentiveness has a palpable energy to it; it gives power to your performance and keeps the audience involved.

Life on stage is NOT ordinary, nor should you treat it as such in the name of “believability”.  “Naturalness” on stage is not the same thing as “casual”.  Even film acting, which requires you to be much “smaller” about what you do since the camera can get right in your face, needs to be supported by a strong and consistent “electrical” current (if you will).

high voltageHow can you be sure to bring your best energy on stage?  Alan Alda does about two minutes of some sort of aerobic exercise just before he goes on stage, and there is scientific evidence that this helps you to perform any physical activity (and acting should be very physical) better.  For one thing, it engages both sides of your brain in synchronicity.  For another, it gets your blood pumping and wakes up your body.

It’s difficult to bring energy on stage with you if you’ve just spent fifteen minutes sitting in your dressing room or the Green Room.  If you’ve ever been to a performance that took five or ten minutes to get off the ground, low energy is probably the culprit.  Better to warm up your engine off stage, before you meet the audience.

How can you best do this?  Obviously, you don’t want to get yourself winded (unless that’s appropriate for your “moment before”.)  Being in good shape physically will make it easier to engage in physical activity that will “wake you up” without leaving you breathless, but if you aren’t, use your own judgment.  Dancing, shadow-boxing, and jumping jacks are some choices that can rev your engine in limited space.

It’s not just about what you bring on stage when you enter, however.  You’ve got to retain that energy throughout the performance, and that requires vigilance, especially on the days that your fellow actors seem drained or you yourself are.  I know there are times when I can’t seem to get my engine past 55 mph, metaphorically speaking, when I really need to be flying at 70 or 80 mph (for comedies in particular)!

When that happens, you have to keep pushing yourself, and remember what the experience is like for you when you DO have the right level of energy.  By recollecting that and measuring tonight’s performance against it, you have something clear to drive toward – even if I can’t quite make it to 70, I can usually get myself above 60 through sheer will . . .

The matter of energy is tied in with speed, which I’ll talk about in the next Actor’s Etiquette post.

The Triumverate of No-Nos: Telegraphing

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morse_telegraph_keyTelegraphing is when we know what you’re doing or feeling before it is appropriate for us to know.  We know what’s coming next, it’s because you’ve sent out a signal ahead of time.  It’s a form of anticipation, but rather than anticipating your scene partner’s next line, you’re anticipating the play itself.  You’ve jumped into the next beat or one even further down the line.   You aren’t building toward anything naturally, because you’ve already arrived.

It’s when you and your boyfriend are having an argument, and you know that the scene is going to end with the two of you breaking up.  Instead of fighting to save the relationship, which is the action of the scene, you let the climax – when he storms out of the apartment – inform everything that comes before.  You’ve either stopped fighting for the relationship long before the end actually comes or else the nature of your fight is colored by the fact that you know the relationship is doomed to failure.

Not only does this eliminate the dramatic interest of the scene, but you’re cheating your character.  Your character doesn’t know the break-up is coming until the moment it actually happens.  Even if it seems to her that it’s moving in that direction, that the argument is escalating in a way that it hasn’t before, that things are being said that are hard to take back, the moment he says he’s leaving and not coming back should still hit you like a ton of bricks.  Reality, no matter how predictable, is nonetheless shocking in its event.

Spending a week at the bedside of someone who is dying doesn’t take away from the impact of the moment of his death.

When we say that we need to play the scene “moment by moment”, this is what we’re talking about.  It’s all about “staying in the moment”, but the phrase “moment by moment” reminds us to not get ahead of ourselves, to let the story unfold in a way that surprises not just the audience, but the characters we play as well.

If you’re human, you know just how unpredictable life is.  “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”  How many times have you rehearsed a difficult moment in your life – confronting someone who has been creating a problem for you – only to find that all the things you planned to say get thrown out when the person you’re talking to throws you a curve?

Perhaps what you should do is give some consideration to how your character thinks the scene is going to play out, and compare that expectation with the reality.  Where do differences exist?  If you can spot the differences, you can discover when your character is surprised or has to take another approach to get what she wants (new beat, new tactic, new verb).

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.

There is No Such Thing as a Transition on Stage

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transition-managementMany actors interpret the idea of “receiving” from another actor to mean that they actually have to “process” the information or emotion that they get before the can respond, or react, to it.  This misinterpretation has led to the development of the actor’s “transition”.  As in, “Can you pause just slightly before you say that last line, because it will be easier for me to make the transition?”

This is bogus.  People don’t make “transitions” from one emotion to another.  Actors shouldn’t either.

This is a good time to go back and re-read my post on “Why It is (Ultimately) Easier to Act Verbs than Emotions.”  But let me carry the comments in that post just a little bit further.

If you touch a pan that has just come out of the oven, you won’t need to “transition” before you yelp in pain.  If you get a phone call that tells you that your immediate family was just killed in a ten car pileup on the freeway, you won’t need to process anything before you begin to wail.  The winner of a beauty pageant doesn’t wait to hear her full name called before she looks astonished at her good fortune, she just hears “Miss Ari . . .” and she knows they mean her.

So the heavy-handed transitions that we sometimes see on stage, when the actor moves from happy to shocked to fury in the five seconds following the delivery of bad news, are never believable to an audience because they seem like what they are:  unnatural delayed reactions.

An actor who claims he needs a transition has plotted his emotions (“I’m happy to this line, then I get surprised when she says this, which makes me angry.”)  He isn’t connected to his own emotional life overlaid by the character’s life story and situation.  He’s playing externals.  And when you play externals, charting the “transition” from “happy” to “angry” takes more than the split second it takes in real life.  It takes a few seconds, because we’re not reacting to the events of the scene, nor are we reacting to what we are getting emotionally from the other characters.  We are painting by numbers.

These are the same actors who like to throw in a few extra words in a challenging moment, because those words give them the time they need to make their “transition.”

But if you play the verbs – that is, if you just try to get what you want, and if someone throws a roadblock in your way that makes you have to change how you’re trying to get what you want, and that roadblock gets you angry or frustrated because you think you’re being perfectly reasonable, or you have a brilliant new approach you’re sure will work that makes you proud or delighted, or you have to laugh at how ridiculous your “opponent” is being – well, that “transition” will happen naturally.  You won’t have to pre-plan it or force it.  It will just show up on its own, and it will be better than anything you could possibly have planned in advance.

If you are struggling with a moment in a scene, and it feels laborious to move from one emotion to another, so you temporarily forget this post and say to your director, “Gosh, I am having such a hard time making this transition!” – there is really only one cause and one solution.

The thing that is causing your difficulty is that you aren’t connected to your character and what he really wants – you’re floating on the surface, like oil on water.  In other words, you’re faking it on some level.  Stop faking it, get yourself in touch with what is really going on for you emotionally in this scene and go after what you want, and the transition will become effortless.

Why are you faking it?  Either because you haven’t yet learned how to connect yourself to your emotional life, or because whatever is going on with your character, emotionally speaking, is something that is making you very uncomfortable.  You’d rather not dig into it.  But digging is the only way to give the audience a moment worth watching.

Actor’s Etiquette: Deliberate Practice

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10648110-got-etiquette-shirtDeliberate Practice, done in solitude, creates elite performers, says research psychologist Anders Ericsson.  What does that mean to an actor, who mostly performs with at least one other person on stage?  How can we, as actors, use Deliberate Practice outside of the classroom?

The fact that athletes in team sports also often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice caught my attention, because it’s the most comparable situation to an actor’s.  Yes, a violinist in an orchestra is working on a “team”, but he can practice his part in solitude more effectively than an actor can.  How what he does blends with the rest of the orchestra is secondary to what he does alone.

In football, wide receivers are dependent on their quarterbacks to throw them the ball, but that doesn’t mean that they can only get better by working with their QB.  Jerry Rice’s off-season workouts are legendary; Cris Carter last caught a ball in the NFL in 2002, but he’s caught thousands of them off of automatic throwing machines, and can still catch them one-handed (either hand).  Both Rice and Carter did an extraordinary amount of Deliberate Practice.  Which is one reason why they are in the Hall of Fame.

Monologue work is an obvious choice.  They are incredibly difficult to do well, as I’ll discuss in some distant future.  We do not ordinarily talk to ourselves in the way characters talk to themselves.  When we talk to ourselves, we mumble, or half of it is verbal and half in our heads.  None of which is interesting to watch on stage.

Monologues delivered to the audience are also tough, because they tend to become speeches.  We don’t speak to audiences the way we speak to best friends, and yet that is often exactly what is required.  Learning how to achieve this sort of natural behavior in a very unnatural circumstance is difficult and takes a lot of practice.

If you can learn to do it, however, you’ll find there is a lot of transference to your group acting skills.  The one clue I’ll give you is that the primary question I ask myself as an actor these days is, “Did I just sound like a human being?”  Often, in monologues directed to the audience, there are particular lines that just sound unnatural, and I have to work hard to overcome that.

You can see why casting directors like monologues.  They separate the men from the boys, as it were.

Monologues can only do so much, however.  There are a lot more of them available now than there was when I was growing up.  In fact, I don’t think I did much in the way of monologues until I was a teenager looking to audition.  So what was my form of Deliberate Practice, growing up?

I’ve read a lot of plays.  I mean, A LOT of plays.  Wanting to act is something I was born with, and once I discovered that there were plays out there, I got my hands on every script I could find, largely through libraries when I was in school.  Once I branched out into community theater, I discovered that there were playscripts I could borrow from friends or perhaps find in used bookstores.  Once I had more discretionary  income, I started buying scripts.

I didn’t just read them.  I read them over and over.  I identified characters in them (not always female) that appealed to me, and analyzed them, tried to figure out what made them tick, practiced their lines, tried to make them sound as natural as possible, while still being interesting.  I spent as much time with them as many actors do with their characters in rehearsal.  Enough time that I could see the links between the line in the third act and something that happened in the first.

I read old plays and new plays, classics and predictable modern comedies.  I read bad plays and good plays.  I learned why the good ones were good and the bad ones bad.  I figured out what playwrights had done to give me good material, and what was missing when they hadn’t.  I thought about how I could help disguise their lack, and how I could dig further into the complex characters so that I could show all of their complexity.  I worked to go beyond the obvious and find original ways to present my characters while staying true to them.  I learned how to read the text and let it speak to me without laying my trite perceptions on it.

I played hundreds of characters in my bedroom.  My first readings were about showing off and enjoying whatever attracted me to the character.  But I got pretty serious after that, working on the character as if I was actually going to play it, and doing all the work I still do in rehearsals.

Over and over again.

My sense is that many of my students, even the more ones, often don’t read a lot of plays, much less do the rest of what I’ve just described.  That’s unfortunate, because I think studying scripts is a huge part of actor’s form of Deliberate Practice.  Yes, I was born with a certain instinctive ability to sense what is going on with a character, but the work that I’ve described has most definitely helped me to become the actor I am today.

As with anything you want to do well – there are no shortcuts to putting in the time.

Acting as Storytelling: It’s About Competition

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scoreboardSome people thrive on competition.  I know golfers who don’t want to play until they have a bet with another golfer.  The dollar amount of the bet is irrelevant, but there has to be some money on the line.

Me, I play against myself and the golf course.  I don’t enjoy competition for its own sake.  I don’t mind winning, but I don’t hate losing, either.  For me, it’s the process I enjoy, not the final outcome.

The characters we play on stage have to care about competition.  This isn’t a game for them; it’s their lives.  Whether a character wins or loses the job, the girl, the trial, his life (literally), it matters deeply.  This means that wins should be celebrated and losses mourned.

If you’ve been told you’re in the final three for the job you interviewed for, that’s a win!  If you get a “Thanks anyway, good luck with your career” letter, it’s a loss.

If she agrees to go out with you, that’s a win!  If he tells you that he’s dating her, it’s a loss.

If your attorney catches a prosecution witness in a lie, that’s a win!  If a witness testifying against you seems highly credible, that’s a loss.

These probably seem self-evident to you.  I hope you respond appropriately when they happen to your character, although I’m guessing you could throw yourself into it a little bit more (it’s the stakes problem, which I’ll talk about a little more some other time).  But do you also celebrate the little wins and losses that are scattered throughout the play?

The little digs you make at your rival for the girl’s affections that get under his skin?  His offhand references to things he knows about her that seem to convey an intimacy you don’t share with her?  The unexpected compliment from a co-worker?  Your mother’s subtle criticism of your cleaning habits?  The rich woman’s condescension when she hands you her credit card?  The young mother’s gratitude when you help her gather her dropped groceries?

Our lives – and our characters’ lives – are filled with tiny moments of grace and pain, and we feel the joys and disappointments related to them in the brief moments that they happen.  Sometimes they linger, but often they are as fleeting as a sparrow.

However, because plays are about dramatic moments in our lives when we are desperately trying to get our heart’s desire, any wins and losses, no matter how tiny, matter.  If they impact our ability to get what we want, they matter.  A lot.  This means that your character has to register them on some level.

Sometimes those will be big moments of exaltation or pain.  Sometimes they will be smaller ones we try to subdue for some reason.  Sometimes they will just be pinpricks that spur us on to keep pursuing what we want.  But we need to feel them, because – guess what? – they drive what happens in the next moment.  They influence what we do next.

I don’t want to bore you with the repetition, but this is one of the Big Keys of acting:  Everything we do is in response to something that happens.  Because the script is written for us, it’s easy to get complacent and just say the lines.  To really make your performance believable, however, you must make clear connections between what you are doing and what is happening to you, and one of the ways of doing this is by keeping track of the score – points you win, and points scored against you.  It not only heightens the drama, it also makes the experience more fun for the audience, because they’ll keep score, too.

Registering your wins and losses doesn’t mean exaggerated response a la Marcel Marceau (for those of you too young to remember him, he was a mime, and you can see him in the video below.)  If you decide, “This is where I should be surprised” or “When he says this, it angers me”, your reaction is apt to be too big.  It’s like hitting your audience with a hammer when a slight tap will do.  (Like mime, physical comedy often uses exaggerated responses, but most other actIng that you’ll do needs to be more realistic.)  Instead, leave yourself open to receive what your scene partner sends you in that moment and let it land on you and provoke a reaction without preplanning it.  That creates a moment so alive that you sweep the audience into your world!:

 

Actor’s Etiquette: How Do I Get Better?

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But I want to be great!  Shouldn’t director help me get there?

Let me circle back through the last two posts and revisit the issue of young (or old, or anywhere in between) actors learning their craft.

You don’t learn it on the job.  All right, you do, because if you are paying attention and working hard, every bit of practice you get is going to help you to be better than you were yesterday.  (Entirely possible to practice and not get better, as we’ve talked about and which I’ll touch on more down the road when I talk about overactors and underactors.)

But the rehearsal hall isn’t the primary place you will learn your craft.  I’ve written about this in the past, but it bears repeating.

A craft, according to Merriam-Webster, is something requiring special skill.  Now, craft originally referred to making something with your hands, like woodworkers, silversmiths, and potters.  Think of any artisan – it takes a lot of practice to get good at that skill.  Bricklayers make it look like the easiest thing in the world, but if you’ve ever tried to build a wall yourself, you’ll realize that theirs is an ease borne of laying (and relaying) thousands of bricks.

Move into the arts, and you will see similar repetition.  Painters don’t just have a vision they want to commit to canvas or paper – they need to learn how to use the brush, which one to use when, how to mix the colors, etc.  A violinist has to learn how to bow, how to pick, how to find the right place to hold the strings (violins have no frets), etc.  Watercolorists throw out a lot of paper while they learn to blend washes, and musicians play a lot of scales in practice, not just concertos with the orchestra.

In other words, they have a myriad of skills they must acquire in service of creating the final product.

The fact that we are human beings and know how to walk and talk doesn’t mean that we automatically know how to act on stage, although I think some people imagine it does.  Acting is a craft, too, and requires special attention simply because the most obvious “skills” it uses are walking and talking.

I’m reading Susan Cain’s book, Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and she talks about Anders Ericsson, a research psychologist who studies “how . . . extraordinary achievers get to be so great at what they do.”  Solo violinists, grandmaster chess players, elite athletes – they all spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice.

“In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement.  When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly.  Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful – they’re counterproductive.  They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them.”  [Quiet, p. 81.)

So what is Deliberate Practice for actors?

It’s not going to rehearsal.  In rehearsal, you are only focusing on getting this character in this play right – you aren’t identifying what you aren’t good at and trying to get better at it in a global sense.

Because acting is largely a group activity, we use technique and scene classes as a means of working on our skills and developing a craft, and I strongly recommend them to you, in whatever form you can find them.  Even working on scenes with a fellow actor with an eye to developing your skills is going to help, if classes are not available in your area.

So what is Deliberate Practice for an actor, done in solitude?  Stay tuned . . .