Last Thursday evening, I participated in the reading of a new play at the Young Playwrights, Inc., Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, New York City -- and I was paid!! It's the first time I've been paid for acting services directly rendered.
It was also my first reading -- however, I've seen readings of plays, so I knew, sort of, how to participate in one. Nevertheless, leaving as little to chance as possible, I saw Deborah, my acting coach, to go over the scenes I was in. I was minor supporting character -- not too large, but large enough.
Basically, a reading is a well prepared cold reading that you do with other actors. There's a couple of "tricks," at least for me. It's critical that I understand what's really going on with the character without making ANY assumptions. Everything is based in the text, but often that's hard for me to get: the mistake I make is assuming too much, or trying to do to much, trying to make more of it than what's really there. If that's done too much, you wind up with a definite character, but it's not the character the playwright intended, nor will the character support the scenes they're in as fully as they should. So the second trick is to first approach the text as clean as I can -- this is one of the major goals of the work I'm doing at Word Of Mouth Studios (techniques based on the work of Patsy Rodenburg).
I was quite nervous before we started, but I remembered what I had learned from all the readings I had watched, and I applied everything I had been learning in Word of Mouth Studios -- and apparently it all paid off: I got this kind e-mail a few days later from one of the playwrights in the audience:
It was great meeting you the other night. Again, I really thought you did a wonderful job with the Mitch character--especially amazing for a (relatively) cold reading!
. . . oh yeah, I did mention I also got paid? I think you should always do a good job, especially if you're getting paid! :)
There is an article in Backstage, Marathon Man, about actor Michael Sheen, that reinforces and extends some the insights into acting I've been having lately:
. . . "there are two paths you can go down with acting," he says. "One is where you're quite obviously acting. The other is where you're trying to hide all the acting. And what they get is the character and story. And you have to kind of make a decision inside yourself as an actor what it is you want to serve, because you can't serve two masters. You can either serve yourself or you serve the story. If you serve the story, it's going to go unnoticed. That's what I wanted to try and achieve myself."
[When] Sheen began acting — he attended the National Youth Theatre of Wales at 16 and then trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art — he thought acting was just about learning the lines and finding the best way to say them. "Then you realize to ask the questions: First, what does the playwright want in this scene? Why is this scene here? How does it serve the story?" he continues. "Then you start looking into the motivation of the character and what the character wants and all the obstacles that are stopping them. And if you concentrate on that, what comes out of your mouth and how it comes out might be exactly the same every night, but it will always seem fresh. Because it's not about how you say the lines, it's about what is behind the lines."
All this is quite clear to me, and this second part, understanding what's going on the scene, is clearly something I need to get much better at (how, I'm not exactly sure, but I'm determined to get better at "getting it," getting what's going on the scene) -- but then he continues with something I don't understand at all:
Sheen says he learned to look for the hidden meaning in any script. "There's the story and then there's the secret story," he elaborates. "It's the one that doesn't get spoken but it gets communicated underneath somehow. And that is an accumulate effect for an audience as well. And that's the exciting story; that's when there's some kind of relationship between the audience and the actors that is kind of invisible and unspoken. That's the kind of thing that excites an actor, when you have this sort of invisible bond between each other. And that's what's hard and great about acting and keeps it fresh and exciting."
. . . interesting . . .
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You have seen me many times although you may not know my name. I am a working actor in Hollywood and have performed in many films and network television. This blog chronicles my struggles and adventures from novice to professional actor, I do not reveal my real name as the journey is what is relevant and not celebrity.
http://www.rebelactor.blogspot.com
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Thank you very much for the pointer to your blog. I'll include it on my home page. I too like to stay anonymous (not because I'm famous -- far from it :), but becase as my "acting" is not about me personally, I didn't want my blog to be about me personally -- it is all about the journey, about where one is going . . .
- Cheers,
Christopher
Posted by Paul Limber | June 26, 2007 12:15 AM
Posted on June 26, 2007 00:15