CHAPTER 21

LEARNING ABOUT ACTING

 

ACTING AND DOING

Drama is the artful presentation of fictional characters, their conflicts, and their struggles, and its themes are derived from human truths made visible because of pressures in real life. Conventional education, stressing the intellectual, is a woeful preparation because it suggests that you become competent by learning something theoretically, and then demonstrate what you know.

Life is not lived in this way. You don't learn about breaking your leg before going to the hospital to have it set. You don't learn the theory of falling in or out of love before doing it, nor do you have the luxury of preparing for many of life's surprises before having them thrust upon you. The fact is that we are almost never mentally, intellectually, or emotionally prepared for the left-handers that life throws us. We learn how to handle them by handling them, and somehow we get by.

Interesting, truthful acting cannot be studied up like a chemistry exam, and then carried out to the satisfaction of an audience. It's something you must do because it requires imagination, intuition, and the quick reflexes we use in any tight spot. Nothing in formal education prepares us to rely on these more intuitive resources, which are going to be vital not just in acting, but in filmmaking in general. Making films even at the highest levels of sophistication is itself an improvisational activity, so there are many parallels with acting.

Actors must practice handling unforeseen situations where they find out about their abilities and learn to trust their instincts. Directors must have some firsthand knowledge of these things, and playing improv games is a delightful way of discovering basic principles. It later allows you to approach trained actors from a respectful and informed perspective.

Solving any dramatic problem requires generating a range of possible solutions. Usually we can recognize what is truthful, but we seldom know how to get there more directly. Filmmaking involves making repeated attempts to produce some effect until our inbuilt capacity recognizes what is authentic and says, “Ah, yes, that's it!”

Even if you don't expect to do these actor's exercises, read this chapter carefully because there is a wealth of information embedded in the exercises and the discussion topics that go with them.

WHY IMPROVISATION IS VALUABLE

The improv exercises in this chapter are skill-building games. Treat them as educational fun, but be serious-minded enough to take risks and pump the collective adrenaline. They are valuable because:

• There are only a few major principles, but they take repetition and courage to absorb.
• Players are fully in the moment. The nature of improvisation precludes thinking ahead, and for some this will be a scary experience. However, when actors are not present in the moment, their acting invariably suffers.
• Players develop communion (a useful Stanislavski term for actors listening and watching other characters so they react to what the others actually do or imply).
• The players develop adaptation (the ability to adjust in a lifelike way to unforeseen obstacles as they arise).
• All actors in a scene must remain active and never become passive so that someone else must take the initiative.
• The group generates its own dramatic vocabulary so that learning is memorably embedded in shared experience.
• Solving problems takes failures. Everything can go wonderfully wrong in a game, but people learn without humiliation.
• Like jazz, everyone knows when a piece is “cooking.”
• Safe successes are not really successes at all.
• Courageous failures are successes.
• Successful improvs have a natural ending.
• Improv is not limited and can be made to span most of the territory of drama.
• Improv games used during production can refresh the cast or help them to problem-solve.

WHAT AN ACTOR LEARNS FROM IMPROV WORK

Once it has been written, drama becomes the director's and actors' responsibility. A really good actor can take a poorly written part in a poorly directed movie and still produce a character full of life and depth. As an aspiring actor, however inexperienced you are, you can expect to learn the following from improv games:

• What it's like to be watched
• How to enjoy being silly and that finding the courage to do this is the key to tackling larger things
• How improv lowers the stress of self-consciousness
• The need to let go of hiding and self-preservation, which prevent actors from exploring their characters' emotions in public'which is what acting is all about
• That each character must act on the other or the passive actor cedes control to the more active
• Taking control is as much the product of insecurity as relinquishing it
• Common hang-ups and situations that actors get into
• That each character must adapt to the obstacles and problems the other presents (adaptation)
• If a player takes refuge in preconceptions he will manipulate the other by “play-writing” (See Chapter 20: Playwriting)
• Anybody can be equal to the unexpected when relaxed enough for his or her imagination to work freely
• Improvs, like scripted scenes, often get stuck on the same few crucial elements, but actors can learn what's needed to unstick the piece and make it develop
• Actors can experience being inside their characters and simultaneously conscious of the dramatic problems that only they can solve
• That a group can rapidly and enjoyably discover each other's abilities and temperaments
• That playing together helps dissipate the competitiveness that comes from insecurity
• That actors can see when and why drama gets blocked
• How very difficult acting is, especially if you must also hit chalk marks at particular points in a scene
• What an actor feels like under different kinds of directors
• What an actor hopes for and what he or she fears
• What trust or distrust from other actors feels like
• How incidences of failure are a valid part of your development
• What qualities and approaches might best solve particular acting problems
• What the director can do to unlock situations that are blocked or going in wrong directions
• That even without any preparation you can find the resources to handle almost any situation
• What rejection feels like
• How good it feels after hard work and taking risks to get a round of applause

WHAT A DIRECTOR LEARNS WHEN ACTORS IMPROVISE

For a directing instructor or a student director using improv to tackle cast or interpretational problems, improv is something of a Pandora's Box when you first use it. But it is such a powerful and useful tool that you should definitely get experience.

A director must know how to ask for different versions of something while in search of what works, what fits. That goes for every creative stage'writing, art direction, rehearsal, camerawork, lighting, acting during the production, blocking (the placement of camera and actors in relation to each other), and editing afterward. Every aspect of making film drama involves experimenting and generating a range of options and solutions.

Good directors know a lot about acting and about each actor in their cast. They learn to sense when an individual isn't living up to potential and move to actively eliminate the blockages. As a director of improvisations, you can expect to find out:

• How good you are at giving feedback to the cast, and what you need to improve
• How to earn the trust of actors and crew
• What it feels like when an actor doesn't trust your judgment or challenges you
• How each actor responds to different kinds of communication
• How much actors depend on your feedback in their work
• How actors either accept or avoid responsibility in a scene
• How to change a passive actor into an active one
• How to get an interior monologue going inside an actor who isn't generating any interior life for his or her character
• How divisive personalities function and what you can do to avoid being controlled by one
• How each actor has habits and patterns that limit him or her
• What a director can do when actors think they cannot surpass a limit
• How it feels to take someone over a threshold of fear and how good you both feel
• The overload you feel when trying to monitor multiple characters and lines of development
• How guilty you feel when actors give their all and you don't like what you see

Directors can learn to spot any problem from experience gained using improv. They also learn that anyone can act'anyone at all'once the fears subside and the armor is laid down. When you have done some acting yourself, directing other people becomes a matter of diligently and empathically spotting the right keys to unlock each individual's potential.

In a class or shooting situation, there is always an audience of sorts. Each person in the ensemble will need to support and appreciate the others, particularly when it involves pushing limits. Onlookers must be absolutely still and silent, yet contribute every iota of their attention in support of the players. This is really the essence of crew etiquette.

Because discovering and maintaining spontaneity are so important, the first 20 exercises are improvisational. Many involve experimenting with vulnerability and will be familiar to anyone with an actor's training.

ANALYZING BEATS AND DRAMATIC UNITS

Throughout the upcoming exercises, the director will search for beats'those special moments of flux or dramatic change. The director's and actors' major responsibility is to completely understand an improvisation or a text in terms of the main character, where he or she is changing, and why. If you need to refresh you knowledge, refer to the section in Chapter 1, Beats, the Key to Understanding Drama.

THE JOURNAL

If you are part of a directing class, keep a journal. In it describe honestly your thoughts, observations, and feelings about assignments and peers. Periodically the instructor can collect these and report any trends or significant observations to the class. No confidences or names are ever disclosed without the writer's prior permission.

The journal functions as a safety valve, a channel for feedback that allows the instructor to be fully aware of common insecurities and personal triumphs. Through it the instructor gets to know everyone on his or her own terms and can write confidential replies.

NOT ALL ACTING IS A DUET

The following acting exercises suggest that acting only takes place between two people. Many times an actor will either be alone or in a large group and sustaining many interactions, but to allow for all this would produce unreadable English, so I have treated the duet as if it were the standard.

IMPROVISATION EXERCISES

WHAT THEY ARE

Sometimes these exercises incorporate a degree of premeditated structure, and sometimes the actor has virtually no guidelines beforehand. Some exercises will be referred to later in the book because they make useful tools when actors get hung up during rehearsal or shooting.

ACTORS, MAKE YOUR AUDIENCE SEE

Using no props, see your surroundings and the things you handle with such conviction that the audience is able to see them, too. When the actor sees, the audience sees, believes, and is captivated.

MIX IT UP

Be sure to change partners from exercise to exercise so you work with people you do not know. Wear loose, comfortable clothing that you don't mind getting dirty. Try occasionally to play people whose characters, ages, and circumstances are well removed from your own.

STAY FOCUSED

The biggest challenge is to achieve and maintain focus, that is, to:

• Think your character's thoughts
• See your character's mental images
• Experience your character's feelings
• See and hear the other characters and react to what they are giving you, here and now

Improvisation constantly faces the actor with surprises, so you are repeatedly flushed out of your hiding places. Through improv you can learn to trust your instincts, discover the supportiveness of other cast members, and gain confidence that dealing with the unexpected need not cause you to lose focus and fall out of character.

THE DIRECTOR'S ROLE

To direct an improv seems like a contradiction in terms. Most of these exercises need nothing beyond an assurance that the actors understand and keep to the ground rules for the exercise and feedback afterward. The more advanced exercises, however, will benefit from having a director select and coordinate cast ideas and take spot decisions so the piece can start without delay.

Remember, the director is really the surrogate for an audience. All exercises will benefit, after each performance, from directorial feedback so the cast can tackle specific problems in subsequent versions.

DURATION OF SKETCHES

Either the instructor can call, “Cut!” or, as confidence develops, audience members give a show of hands when a piece runs its course. This way actors get used to satisfying audience demands and directors learn to make independent judgments rather than relying on their instructor.

ASSESSMENT AND DISCUSSION

During an exercise, look for the combination of spontaneity and intensity that comes when actors are fully accepting the demands of a role. Reward courage with a round of applause at the end of the piece. After each exercise, brief and concentrated discussion is valuable, but the audience should speak about what was communicated and avoid making valuations like good and bad. During feedback:

• Avoid all theorizing. When discussion becomes academic it drains away the momentum.
• Stick to the specifics of what happened.
• Say what particularly struck you (impact).
• Describe what stages the piece went through (its structure).
• Say not only what happened, but what it made you feel at each stage (what it delivered).
• Listen attentively to feedback and as either actor or director, aim never to argue or justify what you did. In all your work, you aim to learn what you are doing from your audience.

EXERCISE 21-1: SEE OR BE SEEN

Purpose: Exploring the idea of focus.

Activity: Half the class is in the audience and remains seated. The other half, the performers, stand in a row facing the audience and looking above them into space. Audience members should carefully study the faces and body language of the performers.

• The instructor tells the performers to empty their minds and concentrate on simply being themselves.
• After a minute or two, the instructor tells the performers to mentally visualize a room they know well and everything in it.
• After another minute or two, the instructor tells the audience and performers to switch roles and repeats steps 1 and 2 with the other half of the class.

Discussion:	Address these questions to the following groups.
Performers:	How did it feel to focus on being yourself?
Audience:	How did the performers' feelings show in their behavior and appearance?
Both:	What did you see when the performers switched to visualizing?
Performers:	What kinds of work can an actor legitimately undertake to avoid feeling self-conscious?

This exercise shows everyone how disturbing it is to have someone watch you when your mind is unoccupied. You fantasize how stupid and ungainly the watcher thinks you must be. This is the curse of being self-conscious. It results in mental and even physical discomfort and is utterly disabling to actors. Having or making mental work helps occupy the judge we all carry within, and lets you become relaxed and normal again. Actors always need mental and physical work!

EXERCISE 21-2: DOMESTIC APPLIANCE

Purpose: To become in spirit something you are not.

Activity: First, study a domestic appliance in its full range of action. Announce in class what you have been assigned to do, then give a full impersonation using your whole body and vocalized sound effects. Try to convey the appliance's spirit as well as its shape, actions, and sounds. The class should choose someone to be the instructor, who breaks the ice by going first (more than once I have been asked to be a flushing toilet). It is quite normal to feel foolish and painfully self-conscious. Use what you learned from Exercise 21-1 to maintain focus.

Examples that can be assigned:

Coffee percolator	Overfilled garbage bag removed
Toilet flushing	Cold car engine that will not start
Electric can opener	Tomato sauce pouring
Rubber plunger opening drain	Dripping faucet
Washing machine changing cycles	Upright vacuum cleaner
Toothbrush at work	Electric toaster
Nutcracker	Rusty door lock
Honey pouring	Steam iron
Coffee grinder	Photocopier
Corkscrew	Blender with lumps
Garbage disposal unit	Clock radio coming on

Discussion:

1. When and why was the actor self-conscious?
2. Where in his or her body could you locate tension from self-consciousness?
3. Did he or she get into focus, and if so, how?
4. Which part of the impersonation made you see the real thing?

EXERCISE 21-3: FLYING BLIND

Purpose: Exploring trust and dependency.

Activity: The rehearsal space is made into a disordered jumble of obstacles. Divide into pairs. One person is blindfolded and turned several times to disorient him or her. He now walks as fast as he dares with his partner not touching him but whispering instructions on which way to move. A variation is for the seeing partner to guide through touch. After a few minutes, switch roles on the instructor's command.

Discussion:

1. Actor: What were your feelings and sensations, being so utterly dependent on another person?
2. Instructor/Audience: What did the body language differences tell you about different people's reactions to dependency?

EXERCISE 21-4: “TIMBER!”

Purpose: Exploring trust, equal partnership, and tactile defensiveness.

Activity: Using pairs (same sex or different), one person is a piece of timber, and the other must try to balance the timber upright. You can use any part of your body except your hands to catch and steady the falling timber. After a few minutes, swap roles on command.

Discussion:

1. What are your thoughts and feelings, being in bodily contact with someone you do not know well?
2. How free and true to gravity was the timber? (How much did he or she protect the two of you by making it easier?)
3. How willing was the timber to trust you to catch him or her? To fall backward and stay rigid?
4. Was one partner tending to control the situation?

Actors must be able to make physical contact and even play love scenes with people they may neither know nor find attractive. In any acting situation, each must share control equally, being ready to “catch” a partner or be caught, yet neither taking more than momentary initiative. Neither should fall into a habitually dominant or a submissive acting relationship. When things are working right, both actors are sensitive to each other, actively creating, conscious of the unique nuance of the moment, and able to work from it. This confidence comes from the relaxation that goes with having trust in your partners and in the audience's approving reaction.

EXERCISE 21-5: MIRROR IMAGES

Purpose: Close observation and moment-to-moment adaptation without anticipating.

Activity: You arrive in front of the bathroom mirror, coming close to its surface, and go through your morning routine. Your partner is your image in the mirror, doing everything you do as you do it, inverted as a mirror image inverts. Swap roles after a few minutes.

Discussion:

1. How successful was the mirror at replicating the actions?
2. How difficult did the mirror find it to neither anticipate nor lag?
3. Did the person stay in character?
4. How frank and complete was the person's routine? Who took risks and was therefore self-revealing?
5. What analogous situations is an actor likely to face?

EXERCISE 21-6: WHO, WHAT, WHEN, AND WHERE?

Purpose: Immediate character and situation development without props.

Activity: Instructor designates an actor, then asks successive people to supply a who, what, when, and where. The actor then carries out some appropriate action, in character, for a minute or two. The instructor calls “Cut!” when the action is long enough or if development levels off. The class reports what it saw happening and what was communicated. The actor then says briefly what he or she intended. Example:

Who [is present]?	Mary Jo Sorensen, 35
Where [is she]?	In an airport lounge
When [is this]?	Christmas Eve, late at night
What [is happening]?	Waiting for her parents. She must tell them she has lost her job.

Our designated actress thinks a moment, then slips into character. She sits moodily, tearing up a Styrofoam coffee cup, looking sidelong with fatigue and distaste at some people nearby. From another direction she notices evidence of some change and stands apprehensively, straightening her skirt.

Discussion:

1. What seemed to be going on inside the character?
2. What was convincing, and what were false notes?
3. What intentions did not come across as natural?
4. Did the actor carry out all of the assignment?
5. Did he or she remember to interact with the environment?
6. Was there a significant change or development?

Typical discussion: On balance the class believed that Mary Jo had not told her parents about the change in her employment, and they liked her action with the Styrofoam cup, which most “saw” in her hands. They also liked her irritability, but were unclear as to what was its source. One person thought it was because of cigar smoke, another thought it was carousers the worse for drink. However, most felt that the change of awareness was imposed and that the actor lost focus at that moment.

The actress said she had believed in her character while she had the cup in her hands, but then had imagined a man with a loud voice but had been unable to see his image. In confusion she had decided to make her parents appear at the arrival gate, but this image, too, refused to materialize because she had forced it.

EXERCISE 21-7: SOLO, NO WORDS

Note: From this exercise onward, a piece can be ended when, by raising their hands, the majority of the audience signifies that dramatic development has well passed its peak.

Purpose: Use unremarkable, everyday action to communicate something of the inner thoughts and feelings of a character whose life is quite unlike that of the actor.

Activity: From an action (the what) and using no props, invent a who, where, and when to sustain your character sketch for 3 minutes. Avoid storytelling or high drama of any kind. An actor must be able to carry out everyday actions and make them interesting to watch. Try any or all of these:

• Alone in someone's house (whose?) where you explore: (a) the refrigerator, (b) the bathroom, (c) someone else's bedroom that you have been given
• Finding a box of your childhood toys you haven't seen for many years
• Unwrapping a long-awaited parcel
• Waiting in the dentist's office
• Making a grocery list
• Trying on a new coat
• Taking medicine
• Caring for a pet
• Taking a bike out after the winter
• Cleaning out the attic
• Wrapping a gift
• Cleaning shoes
• Looking out the window
• Waiting for a phone call
• Dividing up the laundry
• Watching a sport
• Overhearing an interesting conversation in a store

Discussion:

1. In a particular performance, what was interesting, and what did it make you see?
2. When did the player break focus?
3. Why?

EXERCISE 21-8: DUO, NO WORDS

Purpose: To communicate through interaction something of the inner thoughts and feelings of two characters using an everyday action that involves some element of conflict.

Activity: From an action (the what) and using no props, invent a who, where, and when to sustain your character sketch. Avoid storytelling or high drama of any kind and use action and minimal dialogue. Try these:

• Mending a car
• Making a double bed
• Buying a magazine
• Pulling a sliver out of a finger
• Carrying a heavy garbage can
• Washing the best dishes after a special meal
• Washing a child's hair
• Photographing a model
• Putting up a tent
• Playing pinball
• Maneuvering heavy furniture through a doorway
• Waiting in a doorway for a heavy rainstorm to ease
• Writing out a speeding ticket after the talking is done
• Watching a TV program: one likes it, the other does not
• A stranger in a plane who is falling asleep against you

Discussion: Did the actors create:

1. Two distinct character identities (who)?
2. A believable and recognizable environment—country, area, city, place, or room—and use it (where)?
3. A distinctive period and time of day (when)?
4. A believable tension?
5. A situation in which speech was not called for?
6. An interaction in which neither was controlling the movement of the sketch?
7. Was there communion and adaptation?

EXERCISE 21-9: GIBBERISH

Purpose: To use the voice as an expressive instrument and to compel the actors to use their bodies and voice quality as tools of communication. Too often, once actors have lines to speak they cease to act with the whole body. This exercise stimulates speech but de-emphasizes verbal meaning in favor of underlying intention.

Activity: Using the examples in Exercise 21-8, carry out an activity with a conflict, using gibberish as the characters' language.

Discussion: As in Exercise 21-8.

1. How did the actors handle the gibberish conversations?
2. Did they become natural?

EXERCISE 21-10: SOLO, WITH WORDS

Purpose: To create a character, employing the usual who, where, when, and what, and using both actions and speech.

Activity: In creating your character, remember to develop him or her through actions. Do not sit still and rely on a monologue. Here are some suggestions:

• A difficult phone conversation (phone has a long cord)
• Reconstructing a painful conversation
• Writing the opening remarks of an important speech
• Rehearsing in front of the bathroom mirror for a traffic court appearance
• Planning a dinner party
• Getting ready to tell someone about a betrayal or infidelity
• Working up to approaching your boss for a raise
• Rehearsing the way you will evict a rich, peppery relative who came to visit and has long overstayed
• Explaining to your new employer why you must start a new job in a gorilla costume
• Imagining different approaches to someone who attracts you deeply but whom you hold in awe
• Your head is stuck between the railings enclosing a war memorial. Someone has gone to call the fire department, and you are trying to figure out an explanation.
• It is Judgment Day, and you are rehearsing an explanation of your sins to a recording angel.
• You are preparing to audition for the role of “Talk Show Host with a Difference.”
• A practical joke has misfired, and you must explain to the irate victim.

Discussion: Did the actor:

1. Create a believable character?
2. Keep up a developing action?
3. Make the situation develop?
4. Make you see all the physical objects and surroundings?

EXERCISE 21-11: DUO, WITH WORDS

Purpose: To maintain conversation and a developing action at the same time.

Activity: Each of these sketches requires both a conversation and accompanying physical action, which should be purposeful. Do not take it too fast, and do not feel you have to be talking all the time. Examples to try:

• Eating a meal and discussing a prearranged topic
• Demonstrating a kitchen appliance to a family member
• Cleaning the car, discussing something
• Getting a large piece of furniture through an awkward doorway
• Discussing your son's or daughter's rotten grades
• Asking for some money that you are owed
• Buying something embarrassing from a pharmacist
• Rearranging a room
• Showing someone they have not done a good job of work
• Teaching a friend to drive
• Discussing a change in hairdo
• Teaching someone a dance step
• Meeting someone you had hoped to avoid
• A confession you would rather not hear

Discussion: Did they:

1. Keep both the topic and the actions going?
2. Keep the physical world they created consistent?
3. Listen to and work off each other?
4. Share the initiative equally?
5. Allow the piece to develop spontaneously?
6. Develop interesting characters?

EXERCISE 21-12: MAKE YOUR OWN CHARACTER

Purpose: To place the actor, as a character, in the hands of the audience.

Activity: Go before the class, in costume, as a character based on someone you know or have met who made a powerful impression on you. The class asks you probing questions about yourself. You answer in character.

Each character should be onstage for about 10 minutes, and two or three performances per session is the maximum, as the interaction can be very intense.

Discussion: This, honestly undertaken, can be really magical, a powerful exercise in portrayal that tells much about the actor's values and influences. There may be little need for discussion if the exercise goes well. Play it by ear.

EXERCISE 21-13: ENSEMBLE SITUATIONS

Purpose: To engage the whole group in a collective creation.

Activity: These are situations in which individual characters contribute to a whole. The where and when will need to be agreed on beforehand. The aim is to keep up your character while contributing to the development of the piece. You might want to reuse a character developed earlier, perhaps the one from Exercise 21-12. Sample situations follow:

• A tug of war
• Dealing with an obstreperous drunk
• Someone is hurt in the street
• Surprise party
• A person faints in a crowded train
• Bus driver stops bus because passenger will not pay
• Unpopular coach berates a team
• Party interrupted by protesting neighbor
• Busy hotel kitchen with waiters and waitresses coming and going
• Airline with badly delayed flight dealing with irate passengers
• Exercise class in an institution for severely disturbed people
• Policeman tries to arrest person at demonstration; crowd argues
• Subway train stops in tunnel due to power cut
• Someone arrives with news that may have serious consequences

Discussion:

1. How many subordinate actions were going on during the main action?
2. Did everyone stay in character? (The temptation is to lose focus unless you are important.)
3. How did the piece develop?
4. What compromises did people make to sustain the whole?

EXERCISE 21-14: DEVELOPING AN EMOTION

Purpose: Actors are asked to improvise a scene that culminates in a given emotion in one or more of the characters.

Activity: This exercise should not be attempted until the class has developed considerable rapport and experience. The players must invent characters and a situation, then develop it to the point where the specified emotion is reached. The class can stop the sketch when the emotion is reached or if the piece is not going anywhere. Emotions one character might feel include:

Discussion: This is a tricky demand because it asks that actors build to a known conclusion, and this tempts them mightily to escape by manipulating the situation. All the prior criteria apply, but important considerations here are:

1. Was the interaction credible?
2. Did it arrive at the specified emotion?
3. If not, why not?
4. Was the development even or uneven?
5. Was the initiative shared equally?

This exercise will highlight the cardinal weakness of improvisation: an unevenness of inspiration that produces an inconsistent pace of development. The symptoms are lengthy periods when the actors are circling a problem, unable to break through or, alternatively, forcing their way through by decision instead of using the characters' process. This happens from frustration or panic at making the audience wait. A sign of confidence in both players and company (audience) is that the players do not short-circuit the process in pursuing the goal, and the audience remains supportive.

EXERCISE 21-15: BRIDGING EMOTIONS

Purpose: To make a credible change from one emotion to another.

Activity: Same as Exercise 21-14 except the players start in the middle of one emotion and find their way to the next. Start with two emotions, and then, if you want to make it truly challenging, specify three.

Discussion: Same as Exercise 21-14.

EXERCISE 21-16: SURFING THE CHANNELS

Purpose: To involve a group in immediate and unpremeditated invention.

Activity: Divide the class into players and audience. The audience is watching a TV program that leads to one of the following generic situations. The players are TV actors who must instantly become a program showing the chosen situation. When the situation is running out of steam, an audience member may seize the remote control and change the channel, announcing what the new program is. The players must now develop the same situation in the new program format, until someone changes the channel again. After a while, students swap roles. Here the accent is on experiencing the same situation and probably the same emotions through very different characters, and feeding into different but set expectations in the audience. Suggested situations:

Discussion:

1. How inventive were the players?
2. How authentic were the situations to actual TV programs?
3. How quickly were they able to make the change?
4. How equally were roles distributed?
5. Did some actors fall into controlling or passive roles?

EXERCISE 21-17: VIDEO CONVENTION

Purpose: Same as Exercise 21-16.

Activity: Same ideas as Exercise 21-16, except the situation is a huge video dealer's convention offering unsold video programs at big discounts. The audience is composed of potential buyers at a stand where everything imaginable on video is on sale:

• Do-it-yourself kitchen rehab
• Car tune-up
• Nature films
• Social documentaries
• Comedies
• Tragedies
• Slasher films
• Soft-core porn films for all sexual orientations
• Biology lessons
• Sales motivation
• Music videos
• Teen romances
• Farces
• Beauty procedures for those over 50

When the audience decides to see a new sample, an audience member calls out the title of the new video.

Discussion: Similar to Exercise 21-16. Accent is on spontaneity and speed of adaptation. Because these are videos that have not sold, they probably are obscure or third rate and full of genre clichés. Did the cast contribute equally?

EXERCISE 21-18: BLIND DATE

Purpose: To work with interior monologue.

Activity: A man and a woman have been set up by friends on a blind date. They meet in a bar and discuss how to spend the evening together. Character A has several conflicting personality traits, each spoken by a class member who sits behind him. As the conversation between the two slowly proceeds, each of the voices chimes in, speaking its biased reaction or tendentious thought. Character A must take time and listen to these interior voices, react realistically to these “thoughts,” and act upon the most appropriate in his next words or action. Character B disregards everything except what Character A says or does. Character A may initially get a chorus of “inner voices,” or there may initially be none. The voices may overlap and argue with each other. Character A should take all the time needed to assess and react to them, while remaining in character. The personality traits (with a voice for each) could include any four of:

The need to be liked	Fear of being manipulated
Fear of rejection	Worry about expense
The need to be unique	Guilt (feeling bad about something you've done)
The need to be normal	Shame (feeling bad about who you are)
The need to make a conquest	Pride

Discussion: This exercise is a lot of fun and demands tremendous concentration from all concerned. It is a key to understanding that an actor who keeps his character's interior voices going will never lose focus and will consistently bring a richness of ambiguity to each moment of the part. Remember, the real action of any part is interior action, which goes on behind the character's outward words and physical actions.

1. How did Character A handle all the input?
2. What were his or her most noticeable influences?
3. Where did Character A break character?
4. Did Character B provide a good foil?
5. What were the most interesting and convincing interior actions?

Once more: Now Characters A and B go through their scene again, but this time Character A internalizes the interior voices by imagining them. Often the scene will be strikingly rich in implications and shows what real inner conflict brings to an actor's work.

EXERCISE 21-19: INNER CONFLICT

Purpose: To portray a character's contradictory tensions but never directly reveal them.

Activity: An actor is designated to play an intelligent person who wishes to be correctly understood. The character can be modeled upon someone prominent in the news. In this exercise, inspired by Richard Nixon and his “I am not a crook” speech, the character has gone through life denying certain aspects of his or her character, so sometimes “puts a good face on things” and rationalizes what he or she cannot change. The character begins with the sentence, “Because I think you may have the wrong idea about me, I'm going to tell you what most people don't know.” After he or she has spoken for a while, the audience can help by asking questions. The actor must portray his or her character's conflicts by denial, which must flow from the character's rationale about what can or cannot be admitted in public.

Discussion:

1. When was the character sincere?
2. When suppressing the truth?
3. How did you know?
4. When was the actor's performance believable?
5. When did it look contrived?
6. What was interesting, what was less so?

EXERCISE 21-20: THROWN TOGETHER

Purpose: To bring together two characters in a common activity that each is using to gain emotional satisfaction from the other. The exercise seeks to explore the idea that in real life we almost never express what weighs on our minds; instead we recreate our own unsolved issues through the situation at hand and use them to seek satisfaction, occasionally with success.

Activity: Take two of the least compatible characters developed in Exercise 21-12 or 21-19 and put them together in a credible work situation. Within the bounds of ordinary, decent, civilized behavior, each follows his or her usual agenda in relating to other people. The actors should take the time to keep up an interior (and silent) monologue. No issues are ever named; their needs and reactions must be expressed through the work they are doing together. Whether they get along or whether they find mutual accommodation should not be predetermined.

Discussion:

1. Did each character develop?
2. Did each find a way to play out his or her issues through their work?
3. Did each choose a credible path?
4. Did they stay in focus and in character?
5. Did they find a believable way of cooperating?
6. Did you believe the outcome?
7. Did one “win”?
8. Did either or both find satisfaction? Neither?
9. What was the obligatory moment in the scene?
10. What made it the obligatory moment?

Again: Have the two actors play the scene again, this time adding their thoughts out loud in an undertone. Then play the scene as before, with silent, interior monologues.

Discussion: Did having to improvise thoughts change or improve the scene? Can you see using this method to solve a problem in a scripted scene?