Choices in Acting

Acting can be difficult for many people, especially in the arts. Whenever people who are not performing regularly read a script first hand, they think that they should only say what the author puts on the page, take the direction and just get it over with. However, if you perform like that in a show, it would be boring as all hell because it's too much like who you are in real life. Yet it still happens. Why? Because the people who do this are too afraid to make choices in acting.

Choices are just like what happens in real life. You either choose to with your mom to get groceries or you stay home and finish your English assignment that's due the next day. Which is more important to you? If you care about family values and your nutritional health, you would go with your mom. However, if you cared more about doing well in school and not flunking, then you would choose to stay home. Well-thought out. Although, when this happens in performing, it can be as easy or as hard as you make it. The big problem is many amateur actors in rehearsal may think too much of the funniest thing in order to kiss-up to the director. The directors really don't want that. What they want is you to experiment on what you think is funny, not try to think of what they think is funny. Unless you've been hanging around with the director for awhile, you have no possible idea what their sense of humor is.

I hate how so many people are afraid of doing this. I feel as though when all of the attention is pointed on one person, that one person doesn't want to "mess up" in any way because they don't want to look like a fool to others. This can get pretty damn ironic because when people are comfortable and with their friends, they tend to act dumb or sarcastic in order to be funny. I really don't get this logic, if you can call it that.

There's this sense of being "right" when making a choice in acting. Some actors are so afraid of "doing the right thing" and going with the story that they freeze when trying to make a decision to deliver a line. The big part of making the decision about a line is it has to be spontaneous. You really should not think too much if you are fully immersed in a scene. You need to be completely focused on the scene in order for the decisions to be relevant to it. Lay it down and don't hesitate!!!

One of the most important things I've learned for acting was the lines are mostly words on a page used to drive the plot along. All you really need to think about is what happens in the scene. I say "mostly" because a lot of lines can be significant to the plot, so you don't want to steer the plot in a completely different direction.

I say that lines are mostly words on a page because I have seen actors choke up in rehearsal when doing a run-through because they where hanging on their lines. If one person forgot their lines, then the whole scene would fall apart. This is why all actors who are in the scene need to pay attention because if a person knows the lines well enough, he or she can save the show by improving a hint as to what the next line/idea is. This moves the plot along so that all the actors aren't frozen on stage.

We as directors want to make the situation where the actors are afraid to make choices as comfortable and as easy for us as possible. We want the actors to feel good about the choices that they make. Even if it's the wrong choice, making an actual choice when you weren't doing it in the first place and doing your lines as yourself is a big step. I say to make the situation easy for the director because we really do not want actors who tell us they "can't" do something. This makes our job a lot harder because One: You're stalling the scene that we need to work on and Two: You're impeding on the director's creativity. He or she only wants to know what you're capable of doing and if that works for the scene. If they want you to screech like a pterodactyl, you screech like a freakin' pterodactyl! Nobody really knows how they sound. People just thought about how the animal looked and made a decision based off of it. I'm serious.

Sincerely, the most direct way of making choices in acting is not being afraid of yourself. If you say you cannot do something such as an old man's voice, you are the one who is holding yourself back because you are afraid of the quality of it. Don't be. What you should be afraid of is how much you are doing and the intensity at which you are doing it. This is what directors are looking for. They want you to do as much as you can for them to pick out what they liked and then regulate how much you are doing. I feel that this process is what leads to orderly, yet non-stop fun, rehearsals and a performance where the actors are calm and collected.



This picture is from one of my favorite Spongebob Squarepants episodes, "Mermaid Man and Bernacle Boy V". The very start of the episode shows a long line outside the Krusty Krab with Mermaid Man at the front trying to decide what to order. The point of this picture is that Mermaid Man is struggling to make a choice because he is thinking too much about the outcome, as with many fear-stricken actors. If he had made his choice awhile ago (without the fear of the choice being something that he would not like), then there would not be such a long line outside the Krusty Krab. It doesn't even have to be the right choice. If he gets the kelp fries with his Krabby Patty and doesn't like them, then he just gets the Krabby Patty and Diet Dr. Kelp next time. The main point is he got an answer out. If any actor can learn to overcome their thinking because they would know exactly what is happening in the present time, then they can definitely make more interesting and entertaining choices in their acting.

My Directing Experience

Hello, out there, anybody who is reading this!! For a short introduction, this blog is for writing down anything related to my art/performance/writing. It will be updated every week until June as part of a project, but I really want to see where this goes.

So, this last week, a play that I had directed was performed in front of my friends in my STAC class. I was given the short one-act by my teacher to direct sometime back in February as part of a quarter project. The play is called Checkers by Dale Doerman. It is about this old married couple, Henry and Lillian, who are playing checkers and start to question their relationship. I have only seen it performed one other time, so I could not wait to show this to a new audience.

The process of directing a play was a little difficult at first. On the first day, we did a read through, then I started to block what would happen. I would say something or give notes, then one of the actors would say something and I would try and relate to myself to keep it going because I did not want to seem like a scary, domineering figure. I wanted to elaborately get the job done. I guess that it was partly my fault that we got a little behind in the first two or three rehearsals because I would be the one who was veering away from the goal when I was supposed to keep us in the right direction. There were also some other problems that my teacher fixed that I will mention later.

After a few rehearsals, things got better. The guy who was playing Henry caught onto the gruff Southern accent that I liked. The girl, however, was apprehensive at first. Well, it made sense because she was sick during the first couple of rehearsals, but one the first day that she was not sick, she still would not do it. We just paddled on through rehearsals and I used the voice recording technique to help them to memorize their lines easier. The voice recording technique is when you record yourself saying a section of the script (usually the whole scene, or in a one-act, beats) and you play the recording back whilst doing the blocking. After three to four times of doing the same scene in different ways, you start to realize that the lines are just words on a page and the way that you interpret the lines is key.

My teacher said that he wanted to come in to work on the directing process with us. I was surprised at what I saw. He worked a lot on the girl who was not getting the old woman accent right. He told her to do an impression of her grandmother and see where that gets her. Another run through, it came out a little bit better. He then asked them to step outside in the hall and demonstrated to them how to act like old people, with the main lesson being to have fun with it and not get so hung up on dialogue. It was so perfect and I felt like we were going to conquer this play.

During the last few rehearsals, I developed a better connection with my STAC acting friends. I brought a checkerboard from my house so that rehearsals can move closer to the actual production. I also was on both actor's cases when seeing if they had their costumes or not. I started talking notes during the three full run-throughs that we will get during the day (it was only three because we only had time to rehearse for about 45 minutes, which is time I can work with) and they really helped me see the patterns of what we were struggling with. It was a lot simpler to correct the blocking mistakes or any important lines that change the beats that were missed. By the way, for those of you who do not know, a beat is a line in a script that changes the subject of the conversation. For example, in Checkers, Henry is talking about his experiences in Paris, then he remembers that it is his turn. In a brief pause, Lillian asks him "What were the nurses like?". The beats are essential because it is a way of breaking the play (or a scene) down into sections for the actors to memorize.

One aspect of the play that I especially loved was the actors' decision during rehearsals to improvise a background story that establishes the setting that they are in in the play. It gave them a chance to play around with the characters more and have fun with what they can do with them.

Overall, I love directing. I will admit, I do need to work on keeping on task with things and keeping a semi-positive attitude, even if I have had a rough day because my actors will feed off of my emotions and we cannot have them getting a bad attitude all because of me. Nevertheless, in the end, I am so glad that I am able to make people laugh and speak with them through this astounding play. I hope that I am able to direct major productions in the performing arts career path that I want to take and see where I end up.

Lastly, there will be pictures that I will either find online or in a book/magazine that hopefully with tilt this post in a different dimension. Thank you very much:



Mike Nichols. The director of many famous plays and movies including The Graduate (1967), The Odd Couple (1964), and Spamalot (2005). He has the most Tony awards for Best Direction of a Play than any other director. Here, he is receiving his last Tony for Best Direction of a Play for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (2012).