Show Biz Commodities

Guest Blogger: Bruce Miller, author of The Actor as Storyteller and the Roadmap to Success series. The following is an excerpt from his blog on EdTA’s website. Please visit it for the full post.

Nothing reinforces the fact that show business is a business and actors are sellable commodities like a New York student showcase. For it is there that our graduating students finally realize that their talent and training play second fiddle to their commercial prospects—at least in the eyes of an agent. This is unfair, of course, and maybe even reprehensible, but it is also a fact of show business life. The senior showcase mathematically demonstrates this cold reality because what the agents think collectively and individually is measurable. The measure is the number of interviews offered to each of our students from the agents and managers in attendance. And the correlation between who gets the most invitation and who is most talented—or for that matter, who nailed it at the showcase—is sketchy at best. Identifiable and sellable types trump all other considerations. If agents think they can sell you as product, they want you in their catalogue. Can you make them money? It’s that simple.

Several years ago as part of the preparation for the senior showcase, we began asking our students to define their type, and plan their material around that conceit. Our students resisted but eventually complied. They were grateful and more successful than our students had been previously. More recently, a faculty member who is still a part-time casting agent took over as director of the showcase. With the eyes of a New York agent, he has refined the typing we do. The students resist even more than before. And then thank him even more when the showcase results prove him right…

Keep reading this post on Bruce Miller’s blog!

The Actor as Storyteller is intended for serious beginning actors. It opens with an overview, explaining the differences between theater and its hybrid mediums, the part an actor plays in each of those mediums. It moves on to the acting craft itself, with a special emphasis on analysis and choice-making, introducing the concept of the actor as storyteller, then presents the specific tools an actor works with. Next, it details the process an actor can use to prepare for scene work and rehearsals, complete with a working plan for using the tools discussed. The book concludes with a discussion of mental preparation, suggestions for auditioning, a process for rehearsing a play, and an overview of the realities of show business.

Shakespeare’s Birthday

In celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, enjoy an excerpt from our brand new book, Shakespeare for American Actors and Directors, written by Aaron Frankel.

Language as Action

Granted all its other mighty powers, for the actor Shakespeare’s language defines the actions that reveal character. That will be the beacon of this book.

Two contrasting ways about how to read Shakespeare in performance have been described: “romantic” and “realistic.” The former is lyrical, rhapsodies of cadences, singing vowels; the latter is more straightforward, sound matching sense. Ever since Edwin Booth, whose 1890(!) recordings of passages from Othello and Hamlet still sound astonishingly modern, the American way is on the “realistic” side: Richard Mansfield, E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe, John Barrymore, Walter Hampden, Orson Welles, James Earl Jones, all followed Booth’s precedent.

Wherever between these contrasts your personal music falls, catch what you hear as the sound of the role and move your music to it. For Richard II, Orsino, or Juliet, say, more “romantic”; for Richard III, Lady Macbeth, or Kate the Shrew, more “realistic”; for Prince Hal, Iago, Portia, Rosalind, in between. Your tuning, what you hear.

There are startling freedoms within this range. Thus, in his time, Laurence Olivier picked up a cue about the excitable Hotspur (“his speech was thick”) and produced a stammer, his thoughts too fast for his tongue, stamping his foot sometimes to get the word out. Similarly, Orson Welles did Shylock with a Yiddish accent, an outsider among the Venetians, and abruptly the play took on fuller meaning. The actor’s courage, truth, then, now, always.

Shakespeare himself will cue us, sometimes obviously so: Dr. Caius’ accent in The Merry Wives of Windsor, or Princess Katharine’s and Alice’s in Henry V. More often there are broader implications, such as the high-minded, carefully spoken “second language” speech of Othello, an African Moor (another stranger in the midst), until it turns magnificently and natively savage at the end. Polonius and Malvolio are each differently pretentious and pompous, Malvolio turning even more affected on becoming a “lover.”

Shakespeare for American Actors and Directors

Fear grips many American actors and directors faced with the opportunity to perform Shakespeare live. The challenges of Elizabethan British speech patterns, the thought of using verse for hours, the debate over staging a period piece versus “updating” the Bard of Avon – all can cause psychogenic trauma on this side of the Atlantic.

Let Broadway legend Aaron Frankel show the way in Shakespeare for American Actors and Directors. This book views Shakespeare’s work through the lens of American performance, catering specifically to the learning sensibilities of American-bred talent. Its streamlined size and reader-friendly presentation make it a practical tool for actors and directors wishing to learn Bard-based performance tactics.

Aaron Frankel plunges readers into the meanings of scenes so they can envision the interplay of characters and step into a role to experiment with ways to convey those meanings. He provides scene examples through which to apply performance techniques.

To capture the spirit of the book in Frankel’s words, “What is totally current is that Shakespeare’s dramatic forte, which is the involvement of his characters with each other, and the core of American acting, which is actors affecting each other, make a perfect match.”

The Worst Is Not

Guest Blogger: Bruce Miller is the author of The Actor as Storyteller and the Roadmap to Success acting series from Limelight Editions. Visit his blog on EdTA for more acting insight.

‘And worse I may be yet. The worst is not
So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’
–Edgar in King Lear

When I last reported in on my adventure acting with my students, playing Gloucester in a production of King Lear, I was going down for the count. I couldn’t sleep, my anxiety level matched what I felt the first week of basic training, and the lines I had memorized for months were suddenly like the land of Brigadoon—not to be found on any known map of the region. To compensate, I was meditating every day for at least a half hour, and doubling up on my line study.

Somehow I was functioning in rehearsal, though, and my director didn’t seem have anything too terrible to say to me. My students were collegial and had no problem looking me in the eye. I couldn’t detect any significant change in their attitude toward me. When I would express my fear and concern to them about my abilities, they looked at me like I was fishing for compliments. I stopped sharing my feelings of panic, and started pretending that I was okay with it all…

Keep reading this article on Bruce’s blog on EdTA’s website!

The Actor as Storyteller is intended for serious beginning actors. It opens with an overview, explaining the differences between theater and its hybrid mediums, the part an actor plays in each of those mediums. It moves on to the acting craft itself, with a special emphasis on analysis and choice-making, introducing the concept of the actor as storyteller, then presents the specific tools an actor works with. Next, it details the process an actor can use to prepare for scene work and rehearsals, complete with a working plan for using the tools discussed. The book concludes with a discussion of mental preparation, suggestions for auditioning, a process for rehearsing a play, and an overview of the realities of show business.

Nothing Comes of Nothing

Guest Blogger: Bruce Miller is the author of The Actor as Storyteller and the Roadmap to Success acting series from Limelight Editions. Visit his blog on EdTA for more acting insight.

I am currently working on a play at the University of Miami. That’s not unusual. I am often involved in a production at this time of year. But the play is King Lear, and I’ve only done one other production of Shakespeare since I began teaching some twenty-six years ago.

In my last year as a secondary school drama teacher, I directed a production of the Scottish play. It was to be the first production in a new state of the art theatre, but the construction fell behind. Since the old theatre had already been demolished, we had to perform the play on a makeshift space that wasn’t quite ideal. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned the title of the play so fearlessly and so often. It was pretty stressful, but in the end the production turned out nicely.

Now, some eighteen years later, I’m doing Shakespeare again. But this time is very different. I’m not directing, you see. I’m acting. I have the role of Gloucester, the parallel plot role to Lear. I get to have my eyes poked out and be led around the stage in a bloody blindfold by my students. I have not acted in eight years, and I have no desire to do so. I was drafted, plain and simple. A professional actor was jobbed in to play Lear and he wanted a professional actor to do this parallel role, so the age differential between the patriarchs and college aged students would be consistent. When my chair asked me to step up, I felt I had to say yes because I had already turned down his offer to direct. I have never before acted with students, particularly my own.

Keep reading this article on Bruce’s blog on EdTA’s website!

The Actor as Storyteller is intended for serious beginning actors. It opens with an overview, explaining the differences between theater and its hybrid mediums, the part an actor plays in each of those mediums. It moves on to the acting craft itself, with a special emphasis on analysis and choice-making, introducing the concept of the actor as storyteller, then presents the specific tools an actor works with. Next, it details the process an actor can use to prepare for scene work and rehearsals, complete with a working plan for using the tools discussed. The book concludes with a discussion of mental preparation, suggestions for auditioning, a process for rehearsing a play, and an overview of the realities of show business.

Not So Miserables

Guest Blogger: Bruce Miller is the author of The Actor as Storyteller and the Roadmap to Success acting series from Limelight Editions. Visit his blog on EdTA for more acting insight.

The college audition season is almost upon us, and after seeing the movie version of Les Misérables, I can’t think of a better time to talk about acting and musical theatre. Whether you liked the film version of Les Miz or not, there can be little argument about where the filmmakers stood in terms of acting versus singing. There were countless articles and interviews (HBO, 60 Minutes, the New York Times, and All Things Considered) in which Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, or Russell Crowe talked about how they sang to piano accompaniment in an ear monitor so they could focus on their acting.  The results are obvious. Yes, far better tenors than Eddie Redmayne have tackled the role of Marius. And Russell Crowe’s singing as Javert leaves much to be desired. But both offered up more than a fair share of memorable acting moments. Anne Hathaway reportedly earns spontaneous applause in cineplexes all over the country after her extended close-up solo of “I Dreamed a Dream.”(I was clapping!) Then there’s Hugh Jackman. Though nowhere near the singer that the incomparable Colm Wilkinson was and is, he still managed to be profoundly moving even as he carried the entire film on his shoulders. In case you’ve been riding on the idea that singing is all you need for musical theatre, let the movie version of my favorite musical be your wake-up call.

Keep reading this article on Bruce’s blog on EdTA’s website!

The Actor as Storyteller is intended for serious beginning actors. It opens with an overview, explaining the differences between theater and its hybrid mediums, the part an actor plays in each of those mediums. It moves on to the acting craft itself, with a special emphasis on analysis and choice-making, introducing the concept of the actor as storyteller, then presents the specific tools an actor works with. Next, it details the process an actor can use to prepare for scene work and rehearsals, complete with a working plan for using the tools discussed. The book concludes with a discussion of mental preparation, suggestions for auditioning, a process for rehearsing a play, and an overview of the realities of show business.

Stephen Schwartz: A Creative Force at Age Sixty-Five

Guest Blogger: Carol de Giere is the author of Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz, from Godspell to Wicked. Today, we are celebrating Stephen Schwartz’s 65th birthday!

Stephen Schwartz 2008 – photograph by Erin Dorso

A small upright piano arrived at the home of Stan and Sheila Schwartz on Long Island when their son Stephen was seven years old. It wasn’t long before the boy started goofing off from his piano lessons so he could improvise new tunes. No one imaged his creative “noodling,” as he calls it, would become one of his strategies for writing songs for Broadway and Hollywood, including the megahit musical Wicked.

Now, at age sixty-five, Stephen Schwartz still centers much of his work around his pianos, including his two grand pianos at home in Connecticut and one in his New York City office/condo. While writing scores for musicals, he almost never writes notes on paper as a first step. And even though his lyrics have won awards, when he feels his way into a character’s psychology, he likes to keep his hands on the ivories. “It’s my belief that music has a certain internal emotional logic, and therefore it should rule the song,” he says.

Schwartz’s credits to date include numerous stage musicals, such as the Broadway hits Wicked, Pippin, The Magic Show and Godspell. His movie credit list is not too shabby either, including lyrics for Disney’s Enchanted, Pocahontas, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and songs for DreamWorks’ The Prince of Egypt.

As he marks his sixty-fifth birthday on March 6, 2013, even with his many achievements he still has no desire to retire. After all, one of his collaborators, Joseph Stein, with whom he worked on The Baker’s Wife and Rags, continued working up until his final days at age ninety-eight. Schwartz is currently penning lyrics for a DreamWorks animated feature as well as songs for a Broadway show about Houdini. (To keep up with his activities, subscribe to The Schwartz Scene newsletter.)

While the songwriter keeps busy writing new musicals, he also takes time to help up and coming composers, lyricists, and librettists through his role as Artistic Director for the ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop and as President of the Dramatists Guild.

When I was writing his biography, Defying Gravity (Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2008), I noticed that Stephen was especially good at talking about his creative process. I decided to include many of his perspectives and tips in a series of “Creativity Notes” so that other writers and fans could enjoy the insights.

For example, one of the challenges that every writer faces is deciding how to work with feedback while maintaining his or her vision for the piece. This is especially critical for success in collaborative arts like musical theatre. As Wicked developed, Schwartz and his collaborator, Winnie Holzman, found it challenging to sort through feedback when everybody around them had opinions. In my Creativity Note about this I included one of Stephen’s reflections about this process: “Ultimately, I think you have to take everything in and understand what in your show is communicating and what’s not—and then write what you think you would like to see, informed, of course, by what you have learned. My experience has taught me that when I write what truly moves, amuses, or interests me, it usually communicates with others.”

As many millions of owners of his cast albums will testify, what Stephen Schwartz writes seems to touch on their own life experience. That’s the magic of creativity at its best.

For more creativity ideas and stories about Schwartz’s creative career, read Defying Gravity and visit the book’s website.

Defying Gravity takes readers into the creative world of Broadway and film composer Stephen Schwartz, from writing Godspell‘s score at age 23 through the making of the megahit Wicked. For this first authorized biography, de Giere draws from 80 hours of interviews with Schwartz and over 100 interviews with his colleagues, friends, and family. Her sympathetic yet frank narrative reveals never-before-told stories and explores both Schwartz’s phenomenal hits and expensive flops. The book also includes a series of “Creativity Notes” with insights about artistic life, and more than 200 photographs and illustrations.

Comedy for Your Shakespeare Lessons

Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield are the authors of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Below is a Q&A Daniel and Jess did with StageNotes.net.

StageNotes: What were your favorite subjects in high school and why?

Daniel: Drama, Concert Choir, Yearbook, Art, English. The arts classes were great because we learned by DOING. Studying English gave me practical writing skills that I use every day. Touch Typing was probably one of the most helpful classes of my entire life.

Jess: English, European History, and P.E. (I was on the basketball team until my Junior year). I enjoyed Drama, but gave it up in favor of the Forensics (speech) team. Same idea of developing skills in performance, delivery, comic timing and the like, but more fun travel, days off from school; plus I knew I’d have a great role because I was choosing the material myself. And I wouldn’t have to deal with other pesky actors: I would play ALL the roles!

SN: How did you first become interested in Shakespeare?

Daniel: My 8th grade class read Romeo & Juliet aloud and I instantly loved the verse form of the dialogue. The rhythmic language appealed to me and I didn’t have any problem understanding it. When the BBC filmed all of Shakespeare’s plays in the late 1970’s I watched them all and thought, “Some of these plays are fantastic! (Others, not so much!)” While studying drama in London, I saw everything the Royal Shakespeare Company did. They were so adept at finding clever techniques to make the old plays feel new. Their modern-dress Taming of the Shrew with Jonathan Pryce blew my mind.

Jess: I’d only had the requisite curriculum in Shakespeare (R&J, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Henry IV Parts 1 and 2) and hadn’t been wowed by any of it. Then two actors from the Ashland Shakespeare Festival came to perform for our drama class. They did a couple of Shakespeare scenes (which ones, I don’t recall), but they also did a bit of the game of “Questions” from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which prompted me to buy a copy of the play immediately. As it happened, my English class was just starting Hamlet. I found the interplay between the two works exhilarating. So in a way, my entrée to Shakespeare has always been via the backdoor of parody and satire… and Tom Stoppard.

SN: You mention in the notes that the play was originally developed through improvisation and ad lib. Can you please explain how the play came to be?

Daniel grew up in Santa Rosa CA, just up the road from the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Marin County. He’d worked there as an actor in the late 1970’s. After drama school, he sent the Faire a proposal to produce a half-hour Hamlet – all Faire entertainment was scheduled in half-hour timeslots. There was a surprising lack of Shakespeare in their offerings so they gave the show a green light. Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet had proven that an abbreviated version of the Prince of Denmark’s tragic tale was both easy to follow and comical in its sheer brevity, so it seemed like a natural. Daniel’s script was originally just a reduction of the play with no jokes in it.

Two of the actors Daniel hired, Jess Winfield and Adam Long, were brilliant young comics. We were all strongly influenced by the antics of the Marx Brothers, Bugs Bunny, and Monty Python. Our Hamlet became a showcase of broad humor and personal interactions between the actors. This allowed the audience to enjoy the show on multiple levels: the cleverness of seeing the greatest play in the English language rudely compacted into an absurdly short skit; the delight of vaudeville-style slapstick adapted to a 16th-Century idiom; and the witty interplay of three charismatic guys struggling to get through the damn thing.

Keep reading this interview at StageNotes.net!

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s classic farce, two of its original writer/performers (Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield) have thoroughly revised the show to bring it up to date for 21st-century audiences, incorporating some of the funniest material from the numerous amateur and professional productions that have been performed around the world.

The cultural touchstone that is The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) was born when three inspired, charismatic comics, having honed their pass-the-hat act at Renaissance fairs, premiered their preposterous masterwork at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1987. It quickly became a worldwide phenomenon, earning the title of London’s second-longest-running comedy after a decade at the Criterion Theatre. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) is one of the world’s most frequently produced plays, and has been translated into several dozen languages.

Featured are all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, meant to be performed in 97 minutes, by three actors. Fast paced, witty, and physical, it’s full of laughter for Shakespeare lovers and haters alike.

Charles Grodin, an interview

 Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, Actor Charles Grodin joins Ed Robertson in this episode of TV Confidential. As you may have seen on Jimmy Fallon, Charles Grodin has a new DVD out called The Perils of Show Business. His real-life advice for would-be actors, screenwriters, directors, and entertainment business professionals is invaluable, and not without Grodin’s typical wry, straightforward humorous style. This episode has been reposted on Onstage and Backstage podcast with permission of TV Confidential.

>>>LISTEN HERE<<<

Charles Grodin has created a frank, no-nonsense, no-question-about-it, one-hour video that reveals his personal experience of working his way through the world of acting schools, agent representation, auditions, and the rest of the real-life world that makes up what’s called show business. Included is what to really expect from others who offer you acting lessons, writerly advice, and professional representation; and more important, what it all means for a person who wants to get into this line of work. One thing is for sure: Show business isn’t for the faint of heart. If you want to be successful, you not only have to really want it, you have to work endless hours, work extremely hard, and love it.

Bruce Miller: Broadway and Theater

Bruce Miller is the author of The Actor as Storyteller, The Scene Study Book, Acting Solo, and Actor’s Alchemy. StageNotes.net asks Bruce, “What made you first get interested in Broadway and theater?”

I’m a certified secondary English teacher and I taught for three years and during that time I did a community theater production. I was always a lead or director in the camp show as a kid. That was a safe venue to do theater and I always loved it. In my first teaching job, which was middle school, I got called on to direct the middle school production of Arsenic and Old Lace and I had no clue what I was doing. Apparently, I did it better than most. That was my first toe in the water.

I taught high school English for four years and I went back to graduate school for Journalism. I wanted to be a television journalist and in order for me to take the graduate class I needed, which was Journalistic camerawork, I needed a prerequisite. The undergraduate journalistic prerequisite was full so they told me to take an acting class. Because I was a little older, the guy who taught the most advanced BA undergraduate scene study class said “Come on in, you’re smart. Work with these guys.”  Without any previous training or classes, I went into the highest level scene study class and I was no worse than anybody else. Then I applied to grad school at the same school which was Temple University, they had a very good graduate program. I had no idea what I was doing and I didn’t get in.

I was so interested at this point that I went to find out what I would need to do in order to be good enough. I bumped into a woman who I had a graduate course with and she turned out to be the wife of the director of the acting conservatory and she spoke to her husband. Another long picaresque series of events-it seems like destiny in hindsight-I got into this program I didn’t deserve to be in. Within the three years of graduate school, I caught up, I guess, and I learned how to do some stuff.

When I left, the one big issue that everyone was talking about was my “technique” and my “toolkit.” Most of us didn’t really have a technique. Ironically, it was a really good acting program by reputation but none of us left with a solid background. It wasn’t until I was acting in NY and found some other teachers that I really learned to put together that thing called technique. Except for one really good teacher who had a tremendous influence on me, on all of us.

I dedicated my teaching career to making it [acting techniques] simple and clear. And so nothing I teach is original, other than maybe my definition of good acting, but everything else is just basic late Stanislavsky but articulated to the lowest common denominator and through repetition, it seems to work.

Keep reading this interview with Bruce Miller on StageNotes.net.

Acting can – and should – be more than guesswork and instinct. Actor’s Alchemy: Finding the Gold in the Script examines the relationship between the script and what an actor ultimately does on the stage or on screen. Here is a straightforward guide filled with useful information to help actors learn to use their scripts in a specific and analytical way to solve the problems of the scene and bring their elusive characters to life. In learning how to decipher the script, actors will be equipped to make the choices that lead to delivering a gold performance.

For Creative Writing Teachers: Sifting for Character

In this post, StageNotes.net makes suggestions of how to use Bruce Miller’s Actor’s Alchemy book in different kinds of classrooms, including creative writing, science, social studies, and psychology. StageNotes’ advice for Creative Writing teachers was “Have your students read Chapter 5 “Sifting for a Character” before they begin working on a play.” Here is an abbreviated version of one of Miller’s classroom exercise Roll Call. Pick up a copy of the book for the full instructions.

Character is most effectively and reliably displayed through a careful selection and execution of actions, not by magically inhabiting a character through some internal or emotional process. I use a particular exercise with my own beginning actors at the beginning of the semester to demonstrate the points I am making here. The game, called Character Roll Call, goes something like this.

I start by asking my students to answer, “Here,” when I call their name. I tell them to answer as themselves as though attendance were actually being taken. I ask the class to observe each other very carefully during the process and to make determinations about each class member based on what they see and hear. They may even take notes if they want to in order to better help them remember what they observed.

As a result of the group discussion, my class will usually conclude that any demonstration of character under the circumstances of the first round of the exercise was sketchy at best. They had too little time and too little opportunity to inhabit and communicate character.

In the second round of the exercise, I ask my students to think of a dominant personality characteristic they possess. It could be anything from shyness to egotism to a great sense of humor to sadness or cynicism. Once they have pinpointed this characteristic, I ask them to come up with a single physical action demonstrating this quality that they could believably execute when their name is called during the next round of attendance taking. The key here is twofold. First, they will have to come up with an action that actually suggests the quality, which, depending on the characteristic, could be difficult indeed. If they can’t come up with an action to represent the characteristic, I tell them to change the quality they are trying to communicate. The idea in acting is to always make choices that can be carried out successfully.

In this round of the game, my actors have a much larger body of work to discuss. Because everyone in the class had to make choices, chances are even if not every choice was absolutely clear, far more of them were interesting, because thought went into their selection. Further, more students willingly guessed at the personality characteristics suggested through the actions presented, because this time through they were more than random and spontaneous reactions of the moment. In other words, because of the specific choices of action, character emerged. And the point of all this is that the exercise is not unlike any scripted acting situation in which an actor has the obligation to be believable, serve the overall script, and do the things his or her character would do under the circumstances while forwarding their own storytelling responsibilities. Each of the actors in the exercise in round two were responsible for the following:

• executing actions that seemed real rather than acted

• executing actions that came naturally out of the situation

• saying “Here” in a way that was consistent with the actions being played and reflecting the ongoing progression in the scene

They also needed to accomplish the following:

• making and executing choices that led to a natural flow from one student to the next

• listening and reacting even when it wasn’t their turn to perform in the spotlight, and listening in a way consistent with who they are in real life, since they were playing the character of themselves

• making their time in the spotlight reflective of their personality trait without any extra mustard

• making their moments in real time and without commenting on their work

A central point of the ensemble element of this game is that an actor must maintain the action of his or her character even when not in principal focus.

In life, no one stops being who they are when they are not speaking, yet so often, beginning actors think they are acting only when they have lines. Childish, no? Each time you respond as a character, execute an action, carry out some business, or move toward or away from someone or something, you add to the audience’s perception of your character. In fact, the sum total of all the actions you execute create for the audience the illusion of character.

The audience will put together the kindness you show in one scene, the anger demonstrated in another, and the intelligence or whimsicality of other moments and mix all the pieces into a complex whole, just the way people do in life. If you come alive only for your spoken moments, you can never expect to be fully believed or to produce a fully realized character.

In the third round of Roll Call, I ask my students to take a moment and come up with a strong personality trait that they can translate into a physical action or series of actions. My actors are now free from the strictures of trying to portray themselves truthfully. They are now free to step outside of themselves and be more creative.

By the end of this sequence of exercises, my students are pretty well convinced that character can be created through a series of actions without the need to somehow completely transform themselves into the character being played. They also understand that successful acting usually results from careful analysis and planning rather than from simply relying on intuition and spontaneous brilliance. Of course, the acting process reserves a special place for those who can live in the moment and react, but most actors cannot afford to rely on that ability alone.

Read more tips for teachers on StageNotes.net.

About the Book

Acting can – and should – be more than guesswork and instinct. Actor’s Alchemy: Finding the Gold in The Script by Bruce Miller examines the relationship between the script and what an actor ultimately does on the stage or on screen. Here is a straightforward guide filled with useful information to help actors learn to use their scripts in a specific and analytical way to solve the problems of the scene and bring their elusive characters to life. In learning how to decipher the script, actors will be equipped to make the choices that lead to delivering a gold performance.