Tag Archives: Rehearsing

Verbs and Beats — Moonlight and Magnolias

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The Face-Off

The Face-Off

I’m posting an excerpt from my Beat/Verb List for “Moonlight and Magnolias”, by Ron Hutchinson.  It’s the only one I seem to have hung onto.  I directed this play, so I’ve included verbs for all of the characters in the beat.  My comments, for your benefit, are in red.

Beat 14 – “Fleming shows up” (Since they’ve been waiting for him, it’s more meaningful than saying “Fleming enters.”  Looking at it now, I wonder why I didn’t include the word “finally”!)

Major:          Fleming (to find out what Selznick wants and get the hell out of here) (As a director, I like to know who “owns” each beat.  I find the “Major” verb first, because that is the one I want to be sure the audience “gets”, and the character who deserves the most attention in the beat.  But if you’ve got a “Minor” verb in the beat, you still want to play it for all its worth.  It’s minor only in the grand scheme of things; not for your character.)
Minor:          Selznick (to tell Fleming what’s going on)
Minor:          Hecht (to fill in the missing pieces)
Minor:          Poppenghul (to do her job)

Beat 15 – “You fired the screenplay?” (This is a line from the play)

Major:          Selznick (to get Fleming on board)
Minor:          Fleming (to make sure he understands what’s going on) (I hate to use words like “make sure”, but I get lazy sometimes about finding a different way of expressing it.  I’m confident that I can play this choice with intensity, so I don’t worry about it.  But you might want to look for a more active choice.)
Minor:          Hecht (to fill in the missing pieces) (Your character’s verb might not change every beat.  Only one character’s verb MUST change.   If no one’s changes, you haven’t got a new beat.)

Beat 16 – “The Face-off” (This adds a physical element to the beat which I may or may not use in performance, but the sense of it should be in the beat when played.)

Major:          Hecht (to defend his abilities)
Minor:          Fleming (to convince Selznick it won’t work)
Minor:          Selznick (to keep the peace)

Beat 17 – “But I digress”

Major:          Hecht (to crack a joke)

Beat 18 – “The rest of the story”

Major:          Selznick (to tell the rest of GWTW)
Minor:          Fleming (to help tell the story)
Minor:          Hecht (to get the story beats)

Beat 19 – “Hecht Rebels, Part I” (Hecht rebels on several occasions throughout the play.  Originally, this was just called “Hecht Rebels” – until I came across the second occasion!)

Major:          Hecht (to convince Selznick he can’t make a movie of GWTW)
Minor:          Selznick (to convince Hecht that he’s wrong)
Minor:          Fleming (to keep things moving)

Beat 20 – “Pulling out the big guns” (This is a ratcheting up of Beat 19, and has an imagery that adds something for me, just as the “The Face-off” did.)

Major:          Hecht (to convince Selznick he’s crazy and will destroy himself)
Minor:          Selznick (to get Hecht to work)
Minor:          Fleming (to get Hecht to work)

Beat 21 – “How can any sane person make sense of it?” (This is NOT a line from the play, but it captures Hecht’s position in this beat.)

Major:          Hecht (to convince Selznick he can’t make a movie of GWTW)
Minor:          Selznick (to get Hecht to work)
Minor:          Fleming (to get Hecht to work)

Actor’s Etiquette: Oh, Do You Have a Line?

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etiquetteIf you’re sloppy with how you memorize lines, it’s very possible to find that you’re talking when someone else is supposed to be talking.  This is annoying on a number of levels.

I did a show once with an actor who decided to run two of his lines together, which meant that saying my line (which was only a single word:  “No!”) muddied things a bit.  He had an emotional reason for making this choice, even if it was a bit misplaced.  I ended up cutting my line out, because the way he was handling the scene just made it seem messy and as if someone (me, probably) had screwed up a line somewhere.

I had plenty of lines in the show, so losing a word was hardly a problem.  However, the lines were written as they were to produce a laugh, one we never got because of how the actor was playing the scene.  All the more amusing, really, since the actor in question considered himself to be a comic.  But I always felt badly about it, because it was the audience who lost out.  (And no, the director did nothing to fix the problem.  C’est la vie.)

Overlapping dialogue is fine, even when the playwright hasn’t written it to indicate overlapping.  It makes things more realistic, and sometimes helps to convey urgency or passion on some level.  It’s nothing that you want to do too frequently, because the other actors may start to feel that you are “all about you”, and not about the play.  Nor do you want to overlap more than a word or two.

You also want to be sure that you aren’t overlapping any important information or emotion.  Never step on another actor’s moment.  And never kill a laugh intentionally, as my scene partner did.  Audiences love to laugh; give them every opportunity!

Also, be careful in doing this when the line you’re overlapping belongs to someone who has a small part in the play.  If it is really necessary and appropriate, that’s one thing, but do remember that actors with small parts relish every word and moment they get on stage.  Let them have them!  If you’re the lead and they have twelve lines, you won’t endear yourself to them by stepping on one of them.

If you find yourself talking at the same time someone else is speaking, go back and check the script.  Make sure you’re handling your end properly and that you haven’t misunderstood the scene or memorized it incorrectly.  If the problem turns out to be your scene partner, have a word with your director in private.  With any luck, he’ll fix the matter, and if he doesn’t, do what I did in the above instance:  make your best judgment about what you can do that will best serve the play in this instance.

Why (and How) I Use Verbs

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verbs (1)I wasn’t introduced to verbs as a dramatic concept as an actress.  When I was learning to act, we talked about “motivations” and “objectives” without distilling it to the very simple idea that these multi-syllabic high concepts can be put into verbs.

No, I encountered verbs much later, in playwriting class.  It occurred to me then that they had use for actors, but I wasn’t acting at the time.  Another decade, probably, passed before the use of verbs infiltrated the acting community in a meaningful way.  (Like everything else, acting has its “fashions”.)

As an instinctive actress, talking about objectives was sufficient for me; I was playing verbs without having any idea that was what I was doing.  But in recent years, I have taken to sitting down with my script before rehearsals start, whether I am directing or acting, and doing some intentional verb work.

First, I break the scene into beats, which I mark with a pencil in case I want to change my mind later.

Then I give each beat a name that says something to me about what happens in that beat.  It’s an outline of the play, basically.  It’s my big picture feel for the play, and it helps me to get a stronger sense of the flow of the play, as well as to cement the structure in my head.  Knowing, generally speaking, what happens next is essential if you are going to help “save the day” when someone forgets his line.

It also can help me to spot what is humorous and what is not.  If I’m in a comedy, it helps me to clearly identify when the dramatic moment starts and ends, and vice versa if I’m in a drama.  In a drama, I’m always looking to find ways to lighten the piece, and clarifying which beats are humorous allows me to extend the humorous moment throughout the entire beat, rather than just using it on the punchline.

And then I go back to Beat One and identify my verbs, beat by beat.  It can be laborious work, if I have a large role.  But as instinctive as I am, I find it does a few things for me:

  • It helps me to get more specific about my verbs.  When a general verb shows up on my list (“to find out”), I know to go looking for a more interesting version (“to inquire”; “to demand to know”; “to cross-examine”; “to probe”; “to dig”).
  • It helps me to make distinctions between beats that have similar verbs.  If I have “to find out” on three different beats in the same scene, I know I need three different verbs for each, and I head for the thesaurus.
  • It helps me spot my own stereotypes.  We all have them, but it can be hard to see them ourselves.  It allows me to take a third-person position and evaluate my own choices with a certain amount of objectivity.  I’m not afraid to call my own choices “trite” when I do this.
  • It helps me to identify the areas of the script I’m apt to have difficulty with.  If I have trouble choosing a verb, I know I don’t understand that beat well enough.  I may not solve the riddle of this particular beat today, but it now has a red flag on it, and I know I need to give it special attention throughout rehearsals.
  • It helps me to see patterns.  If I have the same general verb several times in one scene, I know I’m probably dealing with something that needs to escalate.  I might notice the scene is framed by similar beats.  It also helps me to see patterns across the full play, e.g. a repetition or a reversal in the second act of something that happened in the first.
  • It helps me to know who is the aggressor in the scene, or if we change positions during it.  If I’m the weaker character, it might help me to identify the moment when I start to develop a spine.  It doesn’t just happen on the line when I explode in my own defense.  It has probably started several beats before that explosion, and I need to know when that is.
  • It helps me to identify things about my character that are revealed later in the play but which need to be foreshadowed in the first scenes.
  • I’ll usually notice who is the “star” of the beat, if there is one.  Even if I’m playing the lead and all the action of the play centers on me (e.g., Woman in Mind, Trudy Blue), it doesn’t mean the attention should always be on me.  It’s important to know when to defer the limelight to the other character.  Among other things, this will affect the blocking of the beat.

For me, this is pretty intense, conscious detective work, and it may easily take me four hours if I have a leading role, but I have a strong sense that its benefits are worth the time.  This is also the one thing I commit to writing when I act.  (I know actors who write formal and extensive biographies of their characters, but I’ve never found that useful for myself.)

Beyond this, I don’t do much with the verbs.  I trust that my subconscious has gotten the message and will do what needs to be done.  While you’re learning how to use verbs, you may need to play at least some them a little more consciously, while you’re getting the hang of it.  Don’t worry if you don’t manage to hit every single verb during the course of a single run-through.  It can be difficult to make all those switches effectively.  If you manage to get 25% of them the first time, that’s probably pretty good.  Over the course of several run-throughs, you’ll be able to hit the most important ones.  But don’t worry if you don’t intentionally play every single verb you’ve identified.  That’s normal.

I have a good memory, and I’ll probably remember the verbs in some haphazard fashion during rehearsals.  By that I mean that I’ll sense that a scene isn’t going as well as it should, that I’m being superficial or monotonous, and I’ll remember to think in terms of verbs.  (Because the beat divisions are marked in my script, they remind me on a semi-subliminal level of when things change on stage.)

If I’m really struggling with a section of the play a month into rehearsals, I’ll ask the director if we can run it a few times, and I’ll do some very conscious work with tools at this point.  It is likely that I’ll play with verbs a bit on at least one of the run-throughs, or perhaps several as I ratchet up the intensity of my choices.

An Example of Why Verbs Make a Difference

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wallflowerOne of my students is rehearsing a play that requires her character to be at a dance.  I happened to see a few minutes of rehearsal, and noticed that she kept looking to the floor, which is a choice I try to encourage actors to not use to excess.  Audiences like to see your eyes.

She explained that she was looking at the floor because she was waiting for someone to ask her to dance.  In other words, she had chosen to have her character be bashful and demure, and so refusing to make eye contact with any men, to put any pressure on them to ask her to dance, or to invite them to do so with her eyes seemed to be the way to go.

Except that it doesn’t work, and not only because the audience can’t see her eyes.

It doesn’t work, because bashful and demure are adjectives.

But wait! I hear you say.  She said she is waiting for someone to ask her to dance!  “Wait” is a verb!

It is.  But it’s a pretty dull verb to watch on stage.  As actors, you need to choose active verbs, and verbs that have some strong needs driving them.  There isn’t a lot of strong need behind the verb “to wait”.

The direction the actress is heading is fine.  Let’s see if we can translate what her instinct is telling her into something that is more active that will create more interest in the scene.

I think back to my junior high dances, and what it was like to wait for some boy to work up the courage to ask me to dance.  None of the girls wanted to be categorized as wallflowers; we all wanted to be dancing all night long, but this was back when it wouldn’t have occurred to us to ask a boy to dance.  So we waited.  But “waiting” wasn’t actually what we were doing.  We were praying someone would take us away from the wall, to prove to everyone else that we were desirable.  And to prove to ourselves that we were.

There was a lot of emotional energy coursing through us, and that’s a strong thing to bring on stage.  A desperate need to be wanted.  So instead of looking at the ground shyly (an adverb), she can be looking around for someone to ask her to dance.  Maybe smiling at someone who glances her way, issuing a shy invitation.  Or darting her eyes away when she’s afraid a handsome man noticed her staring at him, sure that he couldn’t be interested in her.

Let’s take it a little further.  What if the character doesn’t want just a dance – she wants a boyfriend?  She clearly doesn’t have one, or he’d be dancing with her.  So she’s standing at the wall, desperate to be taken away from it so that no one feels sorry for her, and desperate to have a boyfriend who will be a regular Saturday night date and keep her out of these situations.  Someone she can bring to parties and family dinners.

So now she’s scanning the crowd, not just looking for someone who might be interested in her, but also looking for someone she could care for.  Now she has a reason to be a bit braver in smiling at the men who really catch her eye, and looking away when the men who she doesn’t want to dance with look her way.

Let’s take it even a little bit further.  We want to ramp up what’s at stake for her as high as possible.  Never settle for something short of the peak.  Always push it up the mountain as high as you can.

What if she isn’t just looking for a boyfriend, but she’s looking for a husband?  Not just any husband.  Her dream man.  The man she will adore until the day she dies.  The man whose children she wants to bear.

What if our young lady is on a quest for nothing less than True Love?

Love is a powerful choice.  If you can, always, ALWAYS choose it.

What if our young lady has spent too many years alone, and can’t bear it anymore?  She’s tired of waiting for the right man; she wants him to enter her life NOW.  Maybe she needs something good to happen in her life, and she thinks the right man will bring about that change.  Maybe she is desperate to have a child, but isn’t willing to settle for a child by just any man.  He has to be the right one.

Suddenly, there’s a lot at stake for the young lady at the dance.  Suddenly she’s no longer just waiting for something to happen TO her, she is taking action herself.  She has come to the dance for the express purpose of finding her Knight in Shining Armor.  Everything is on the line for her at this dance, and so whatever she does, and whatever she says, is going to be driven by this need to find True Love.

To find True Love is the objective; the strategy is to meet him at the dance; the tactics may be to pray, to flirt, to invite, to smile, to encourage, to identify potential lovers, to avoid men she knows are wrong for her.  Etc.

wallflower 2Can you see how much stronger a choice this is than the choice to look at the ground because that’s what women might do in this situation?  Looking at the ground is an external action that is grounded in nothing specific.  Bashful and demure are general terms.  Until you can get at why this particular character is bashful and demure, you can’t do anything with it, and looking at the ground is going to appear to the audience as what it is – a superficial choice.

But take the motivation of wanting to find True Love and add to it an obstacle that is keeping her from finding it – her own insecurity, her own shyness and awkwardness in social situations, her own conviction that no man can love her that deeply because she doesn’t deserve that sort of love – and now you REALLY have something to work with.  Now, you can toggle throughout the scene between desperately wanting love and fearing you’ll never find it because you aren’t good enough.  Maybe you cast your eyes to the floor now and then, maybe you don’t.  But whatever you do, the audience will feel the power of both your need and fear.

THAT’S good acting.

Harnessing Your Subconscious: Using Tools to Build Layers

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LayersWhen you use a tool, you are putting down a layer of your character.  Tools need not be things you carry into your performance.  They usually aren’t.  I wouldn’t, for instance, suggest using the Open Door Reading tool in front of an audience.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a very useful way of exploring the character at certain points in rehearsals.  (I’ll talk about when to use these tools another time.)

This is a very different way of looking at rehearsals than you may be accustomed to.  Many actors I encounter in community theater see rehearsals as a means of reaching a finished performance.  Nailing down choices as soon as possible is the order of the day.

That’s natural.  We want to give a good performance, and we’d like to believe that it’s like putting together a barbecue grill.  You take the parts out of the box and lay them out, so you can be sure you have them all.  You follow the instructions, step by step.  And voilà, you have a barbecue grill that looks like the one in the store!

Acting isn’t like that.  You aren’t painting by numbers here.  You’re creating a characterization that is unique to you.  And every time you do a new play, you start from scratch.  You may develop skills to do this better and faster over time, but even when you become a technically proficient actor, you are still starting from scratch with a new play:  a character you know nothing about in a circumstance which is entirely new to you.

Acting is always a learning process.

Tools are ways to explore the character in all its diversity.  If used properly, they don’t require you to think excessively.  As with any new activity, you have to employ your conscious brain a bit more as you learn the technique, but the better you get at the technique, the less you’ll need to think about it. So please don’t look at the tools as handcuffs that will bind your creativity.  They actually free your creativity.

You don’t have to use all the tools I give you.  I suggest you try them with a certain amount of conscientiousness, simply so that you can understand what they are addressing and decide for yourself if they have anything to offer you.  You may not use them consistently over the course of your acting life; I don’t.  And you may find ways to achieve what they give you that are more effective for you as an individual.  However, doing them as I explain them and repeating them until you’re sure you understand them is a good way to understand the issues involved.

As Davina noted in class, it’s hard to speed up a scene when you’re still focusing on playing your verbs.  It’s hard to focus on playing your verbs when you are trying to receive emotional content from your partner.  It’s hard to do any of them when you are trying to remember your lines.

That’s okay.  That’s how it works.  Remember, your conscious brain doesn’t multi-task well enough to handle this, and in any case, trying to do them all at once means you don’t do any of them particularly well – at this early stage in rehearsals.  And by early stage, I’m talking about the first half of the rehearsal period.  Maybe even the first two-thirds.

“But I know this line should be said this way!”  No, you don’t.  You think you do.  But you’re forcing something on it.  Even if it IS the right choice, you shouldn’t force it.

If you are a very instinctive actor, as I am, it is easy to “know” early on what is right for your character, but the truth is you are only in the ballpark, not on base yet.  It is also true that you will not be correct 100% of the time.  Even if you have fabulous instincts, a good 10-20% of the time there is a much better choice out there waiting for you to discover it.  But if you stick with your “but I know this is right!” ego attitude, you’ll never discover it.

You can always come back to your “right” choice.  But if you’ve explored your other options, you’ll be sure it really is “right”!

To read Layering a Character, go here.

Harnessing Your Subconscious: Layering a Character

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Okay, back to the acting tools.  At long last.

The recipe for this yummy lasagne can be found at http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/lasagna/

The tools I am introducing you to are simply ways to input good, focused, intentional data into the computer that is your subconscious.  Practical ways of using the open/closed modes of creativity.  Your subconscious, brilliant synthesizer that it is, discards what doesn’t work and keeps what does.  You don’t have to tell it what to keep most of the time, not that it would really understand anyway.  It just knows what works in context.

Give it plenty of data, and it will know what works in the puzzle that is your character and what doesn’t.

But remember, it does understand frequency.  It equates frequency with desire, and it considers your desires to be more important than what works.  So if you do a scene the same way every time, it will accept your choice.  It will try to compensate as much as it can for any choices that don’t work, but it has limited abilities in this regard, just as it does with your golf swing.  Make a lousy golf swing, and your subconscious can’t make it perfect.  It will just help to give you better results than you would have gotten if your subconscious hadn’t interfered on your behalf.

So how do you run a scene over and over in rehearsals without encountering the frequency problem?

Simple.  You keep coming at the scene from different angles.  You intentionally avoid doing it the same way every time during the first half of the rehearsal period.

If you can successfully “stay in the moment” – which, as I’ve said elsewhere, is much harder to do than you probably imagine – then by definition, what you’re doing will always be different.  But “staying in the moment” in the first rehearsals isn’t enough.  Later, yes.  But early on?  No.

A really interesting, creative, complex characterization is composed of “layers”.  When we talk about people being complicated, we liken them to onions.  Every time you peel away another layer, you find some different and unexpected aspect to their character underneath.

lasagne 4As an actor, you build a character in reverse, by putting down layer after layer.  You’re taking an unfinished piece of furniture and doing some complex faux finish work.  You sand it, you prime it, you sand again, you paint, you wipe, you paint again, you distress it, etc.  But you put down those layers one at a time.  You examine different aspects of your character’s relationships, needs, worries, desires, etc., individually – with your conscious brain (aided by your subconscious) – but you let your subconscious put the layers together.

When you are examining the components of a given layer, you are free to ignore the other layers.  When you are able to do this, you are giving high quality, focused attention to whatever you’re working on.  Whatever you’re ignoring this time, you’ll pay attention to some other time!

To read Using Tools to Build Layers, go here.

 

 

How the Open/Closed Modes Work for Actors

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John Cleese talks about open and closed modes, which I’ve noted is what I’m talking about when I say “trial and error.”  (I haven’t been able to find the source for this terminology, if it was originated by someone other than Cleese.)  The modes are very useful in terms of understanding how trial and error works, especially for an actor.

While you don’t want to start rehearsals by saying, “I should do this here!”, it is perfectly okay to say, “Let me try doing this here.”  That’s an open mode decision.  You’re open to possibilities when you say “try.”  Failure or success is not the issue.  We’re just trying something.

Classical_Brainstorming_and_Double_BrainstormingOpen mode is about figuring out what to try.  Brainstorming.  Think of ad execs, sitting in a conference room, throwing around every idea they can think of, many of them stupid, while trying to get pencils to stick in the ceiling tiles.  Saturday Night Live writers toying with skit ideas until they find the ones with the most potential for this week’s show.

That’s what the cast and director should be doing at early rehearsals.  (You can also do some brainstorming on your own time, and bring your ideas of things to try into rehearsals.)

In closed mode, you take the idea you came up with in open mode and take them for a test drive.  (If you’re an SNL writer, this is when you sit down and turn the skit idea into a script.)  You give it the old college try, fully committing to that choice when you run the scene.  Then you go back to open mode, and say, “In what way did that work?  In what way did it not succeed?  What else can I try?”

Note that you haven’t said, “Yeah, I think that works.  Next?”  Instead, you’ve said, “Okay, I know what impact that has.  What else can I try?”  Now you go back to closed mode with the “what else”.  You try as many alternatives as you can think of, and each time you’ve completed the scene, or beat, or whatever, you go back to open mode and evaluate it for pros and cons.

You may not be able to try all the ideas you’ve got for a scene in a single rehearsal.  You have to try out your ideas within the context of how your director wants to use the time.  If you are very confused about your options and want to go through them all in one night, tell your director.  He may be able to accommodate you.  If not, you just try them out as you have opportunities to run the scene.  You’ve got plenty of time.

Once you’ve tried out all the ideas you can think of, you have good information on which to base a decision.  You can choose one of the alternatives, or you can say, “Well, this is the best one I’ve got so far, but it’s not as good as I’d like.  Maybe I’ll find something better down the road.  I don’t really have to choose yet, so I’m going to just put this on the back burner for a while and see if my subconscious can do anything with it.”

Even if you do choose one of your alternatives, keep an open mind.  Something better might pop up, even if you aren’t actively looking for it.  Just be open to it in case it does come knocking.

There is another sort of “openness” you need to maintain even in closed mode, and that is the openness related to staying in the moment.  It’s an ability to recognize when something new and unexpected has arrived, and make room for it and respond to it.  That particular gate needs to always be left open.

Can’t I Make Any Decisions?

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DECISIONS-DECISIONS1Of course you can, and you will.  There are three different ways decisions get made:

Sometimes conscious choices that have to be made.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t change them down the road if you realize there is a better alternative.  Blocking choices are an obvious example.  We’ve got to get you off stage somehow, so we explore the options we think are available and choose from among them.  We may revise it later, but we’ve got some place to start.

When it comes to comedic action, I do a lot of exploring in rehearsal and choose the funniest alternatives.  I once directed a play that had a young woman sneaking through the window of her own apartment in order to spy on her roommate.  We worked to find all the ways we could to make it difficult for her to do so and comic ways for her to overcome the difficulties.  The exploring happened over a number of rehearsals, and with each rehearsal, the bit got longer and deeper and funnier.  Explore, then choose.

These decisions often have to do with storytelling.

This is one of the times when the director is invaluable as a third eye:  Yes, that works.  No, that is too small for the audience to be able to read clearly.  What if we do this instead?  Or even better, what if we try . . .?  Yes, that’s good.  I like that.

It’s intentional, conscious decision-making, but it comes out of trying alternatives.  It’s for the actor to say, Yes, this is emotionally true and I can play it, or No, we need to find something better.  But we can choose something that is dramatically interesting, that tells the story as well as we think it can be told right now.

The second sort of decision is when you’re rehearsing and a moment happens and we recognize its goodness and say, “Eureka!” or “Thank God.”  Moments when we know that something has fallen into place the way it should.  Again, it doesn’t preclude the possibility that we can find a way to make it even better.  But we know we are moving in the right direction, and so we choose to stick with it, for now at least.

The third sort of decision is the one that just seems to make itself, over time.  This is your subconscious at work.  Just keep providing it with information and trust that it will do its job.  Most of your decisions will be made this way.

What if you find, three-quarters of the way through rehearsals, that there are decisions that it hasn’t made?  Now you can feel free to make them consciously, and spend the rest of your rehearsal time to really making them work.  They are decisions that have not been rushed to, that have considered everything you have learned about the character up to this point.  You aren’t forcing anything on to your role.  Rather, the role has revealed itself to you over time so that you can make the best choices possible.

To read How to Make Decisions About Your Character, go here.

Actor’s Etiquette: Being Creative in an Ensemble

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etiquette_thingsyouneedtobetoldI hope that my recent posts on creativity indicate that coming up with ideas and trying them out in rehearsal is a good thing and to be encouraged.

So how do you offer ideas if you aren’t supposed to do anything that another actor can interpret as you telling him what to do?  Everyone talks about “Ensemble Acting” as if it’s a good thing to do.  If I’m part of an ensemble, shouldn’t voicing my opinions about the play as a whole be acceptable?

Yes, and no.

First, ensemble acting primarily implies a certain equity among actors strictly in terms of their importance to the piece.  In ensemble acting, there is no obvious “starring role”, and this equity carries into the way the actors work together, too.  Actors accustomed to working together may be able to respectfully generate ideas in a brainstorming sort of way that offends no one, and if the ideas are offered up without any one idea being strongly advocated by an actor who isn’t the one enacting the idea, it’s all good.  But that’s the sort of thing that comes over time, typically in resident companies.

But here’s the truth about ideas. If they do involve you, just do your part of it and the rest will come.   If you throw something new and inventive to your partner, she’ll have the chance to respond to it in whatever way she likes, which may be better than your idea.  Or maybe she’ll find your suggestion on her own, simply because you have given her something good to work with.  That is all that is required most of the time.  Experiment as much as you like, but don’t demand a certain response to your own behavior.  Your own creativity encourages other people to follow you.

Sometimes an actor may be frustrated and be open to general help with his problem.  In that case, you can perhaps gently say, “May I offer an idea?  I don’t know if it’s any good, but . . .” or “I have a thought, but I don’t know if it will work.”  If you are invited to give your thoughts, you may, but do so in such a way that it puts them under no obligation to take your suggestion.  State it simply and leave it at that.  Don’t argue on its behalf, and take its rejection gracefully.

Ensemble work also means being generous to the other people in the cast.  But that’s another topic . . .

 

 

How to Make Decisions About Your Character

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chrysanthemumBefore I get into how to use trial and error effectively (and why it matters) in the first half of rehearsals, let me answer the questions that have probably flitted through your brain by now, if they haven’t taken up permanent residence:

“But I have to make choices eventually, don’t I?  Ultimately, even if I’m choosing what is ‘best’ rather than what is ‘right’, I have to determine what is ‘best’, right?  So how do I do that?  And when do I do it?  When is it safe to make choices without worrying that I am choosing the wrong ones?”

Truthfully, I’m not sure how many active decisions you need to make if you are working properly.  Try enough different things often enough, and those decisions will start to make themselves.

Let’s say you’re working on Scene 1.  You try it three or four different ways, and they each have their merits.  Should you weigh their merits, debate the pros and cons, and make a choice to use Option C?

Not yet.  No need to, yet.  You’re still in the early days of rehearsal.  There’s still a ton of things to learn about the character.

Characters don’t reveal themselves easily.  If you think they do, then you’ve probably chosen a stereotype.

No, characters reveal themselves over time, over the course of weeks, as you read and reread the play.  As you rehearse each scene again and again.  The more you review the play, either through study or performance, the more it will open itself to you, in the same way that a chrysanthemum moves from a tight bud to a fully open blossom with a hundred petals revealed to you.

As you work on each scene, trying a variety of approaches, a pattern will start to emerge.  You’ll start to see some consistencies in the character from scene to scene.  You’ll start to see how a character trait in one scene is more fully developed in a second scene.  How something that happens later in the play reveals something about your character in an early scene.  That something which was confusing to you is suddenly explained by a line you never took much notice of before.

By remaining open to possibilities for longer than you may be comfortable with (thank you, John Cleese), you will discover that the possibilities that don’t work will simply fall by the wayside.  It’s like letting the chaff blow away in the wind.  Give the wind enough time, it will reveal the wheat to you.  What you will be left with is a focused performance with both adequate consistency and surprise.

Decisions get made for you over time without you having to do much about it, if you’ve explored sufficiently.

To read Can’t I Make Any Decisions?, go here.