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.