The Secret Of Theatrical Space

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
~Aristotle

I've started working with Deborah Carlson Word of Mouth @ A/C Studios:

Technique Will Hold You ... "Joan's Voices" Closes

Deborah Carlson is one of the few New York City actors that teaches an approach grounded in the work of Patsy Rodenburg.

While not anti-method, this approach foregrounds the importance of the text and trains one in a physical technique of breathe and voice/body.

Rather than try to abstractly discuss this type of approach to acting, I'm simply going to record my class notes, in the hopes that this will accelerate my grounding in this technique.

Most of my focus so far has been on monologues, how to rehearse them, how to perform them. Here are some answers to questions I had about monologues:

Capacity Exercises:

When breathing out on an "S" and "Z" (from The Actor Speaks, p. 47), smile and keep the upper palette up.

Monologue Work:

Gabe ("Dinner With Friends"). Clumping my way through it, falling off the end of each line (going down). Goal: Think my way through it, but 'hold it up.' Exercise -- intone each "thought," and then speak the thought, and then speak the entire piece. Don't punch or empathize certain words -- concentrate on being clear to Tom: make the meaning clear.

Do the Journey Of The Walk (from The Actor Speaks, p. 197) , and do the monologue again.

Notes on how to work a scene:

• Read through it thought by thought -- note how I feel, but don't try to figure out how the character must be feeling or how they might be saying something. Concentrate only on what they objectively say. Understand the thoughts and communicate them -- then and only then will the feelings follow, and I won't know how I'll feel until I'm actually feeling in the moment.
• Listen, answer, top my partner -- take the energy and throw it back, with more energy if necessary.

Acting is NOT about saying something -- it's about discovering something.

Notes on voice and acting:

• Thoughts go to the end of a phase, sentence or group of sentences -- "hold the thought" -- see The Actor Speaks, p.46-7, 55, 170, 173, 176, 193-7, 202-3.
• A GREAT way to discover how I emotionally connect is to build up the line on Voice breathing one word at a time ("Breathing The Text" from The Actor Speaks, p. 170). Often the piece, sections of it, will become more clear to me.
• If I can hear myself breathe, the palette is not lifted and I'm sitting on my voice. Always up, over, and out.
• Don't wait for thoughts and feelings before I speak -- thoughts and feelings come with breathe.

Acting: A Serious Discipline and a Craft

Notes on doing monologues:

With all monologues, you "think" yourself into consciousness, you "figure it all out" as you go along. Most -- if not all -- monologues are "insight" based.

Train myself to be "on" the text (see The Actor Speaks, exercise 51, p.176): communicate only with eyes and breath -- no extraneous movements of my head and body: just breath, move nothing else.

Notes on Vanya:

After Elena leaves, his monologue -- don't play the end: he doesn't feel like a fool until he says it.: Be exactly where Vanya is, and that's IN the words, ON the line I'm speaking, and NO WHERE ELSE. My full attention needs to be on where he is right now, NOT on where he's going. Train myself to always work this way.

Most characters, especially Chekhov's, are usually "unhappy," i.e., they're striving for what they're convinced will make them happy, and the mistake I'm making is to put a negative spin on everything they say, i.e., assuming the characters feel unhappy or negative or upset when speaking just about anything. In Vanya's monologue, thinking about Elena, remembering when they meet, imagining how things could have been -- that gives Vanya great pleasure (and he's drunk too) until he realizes what a fool he's been. All stories have a natural arc -- find them.

New Training/Lessons:

• Placing the voice: (see The Actor Speaks, exercise 17, p.75): speak "1," "2," "3," . . . "10" alternating between the top and bottom of my vocal range (using just enough breath -- see The Actor Speaks, exercise 21, p.79), and then find my middle/natural voice/tone -- it is from there that I should always speak.
• Building more breath support: Sigh from the top of my range to about half way down (to my eyes, my middle/natural voice/tone) and then intone a speech: use lips, full breath, and go slow. When I start the sigh, train myself to be immediately on voice, i.e., no empty breath before a sound.
• Find the high palette: (see The Actor Speaks, exercise 17, p.75). "ooo" into "ah," full breath, easy, slow, place the vibration. Intake should be silent if my palette is up.

Soliloquy notes:

All soliloquies are to someone who listens and "gets it." Communicate clearly the thoughts to that person, and I'm half way there, the most important part of the way.

A rough night tonight on the coast of Wales near Barkloughly castle: more notes on how to approach learning a monologue, avoiding fundamental acting errors, and removing specific obstacles.

I ran across a great article in Backstage that reaffirms the training approach we're taking at Word Of Mouth Studios.

Betsy Aidem (She recently received an Obie Award for sustained excellence of performance) has this to say about how she learned to approach plays -- and how it helped her to move forward:
Not surprisingly, Aidem cites an acting teacher, not a buzz-creating role, as her career turning point: Zina Jasper. She studied with Stella Adler and Harold Clurman and knows how to understand what a playwright is trying to say, Aidem says. She has a lightning-rod ability to connect what's on the page to the heart. Up until I started working with Zina, my experience of a play was totally subjective.

I thinks there's two goals, at least for me: 1) understanding what the playwright is REALLY trying to say and 2) connecting that to my heart. On this second point, it's the distinction of "knowing" what's going on a scene and actually "living/doing" that. Often it seems I "get it" (or at least think I do), but the "doing" it doesn't automatically follow. It's like what Morpheus tell Neo in the first Matrix movie: "There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path."

This is exactly the strength of Deborah's approach: how to read, and how to connect. If I'm not working towards those two goals, I might get lost in that subjective place Aidem talks about.

How to Rise the Stakes

A couple of weeks ago, I had a cold reading audition. It went well (though ultimately I didn't get cast).

I thought I would try to get more out of my audition experience by taking the opportunity to do an audition "post-mortem" at Word of Mouth @ A/C Studios. I wrote Deborah the follow email:

Hey Deborah,
       Tomorrow, could we take 10-15 to do a post-mortem of an audition I just did. The sides where from a play (attached), just pages 43-44, and I was Donny. Basically, Donny is a pedophile (another one! :), and the short scene is about Donny trying to convince his wife Ellen to stay home (the real reason being he's afraid of what he might do with his daughter if let alone with her).
       I read the scene once, and then the director said he wanted me to read it again but "raise the stakes." He explained the context of the scene to me, i.e., the real reason why Donny is trying to convince Ellen to stay home, but I already understood this. So, my instincts told me that the director wanted to see a "guilty" Donny, or basically, play/show the "subtext" somehow. I could have been wrong, but that's how I interpreted his direction.
      My next instinct was NOT to do that, i.e., I choose NOT to "indicate" or "show" the subtext, but then I found myself not sure what to do other than what I had just done, but just breathe deeper, slow down, etc. Anyway, my question is -- what should I have done with that direction? Were my instincts correct? I wanted to do a bit of post-mortem, 10-15min or so, and get your advice. Thanks Deborah.

- Cheers,
Christopher

Deborah wrote back:

We’ll talk about what the director meant. You were right to not be obvious or indicate the subtext but I’ll explain what he was talking about . . .

Work at Deborah Carlson's Word of Mouth @ A/C Studios is starting to pay off.

As part of my plan to earn my living (or a good part of it anyway) by acting, I auditioned for Ray, one of the talent agents at Actor's Reps Of New York & Lost Angeles, Inc. Because I'm non-union, they'll cast me mostly in background/extras parts (in my book however, that still a paid ACTING job), and with a little luck, maybe some under 5's, which would be great!! Actor's Rep gets a 10% commission of any work they book for me.

Anyway, Actor's Reps require a cold reading, a monologue. It's really an audition to see how you handle text, how you cold read. For a non-union person like me, they really just want to meet me to make sure I'm not (too) crasy -- nevertheless, I took the reading seriously. After the reading, he said "who ever you're studying with -- keep studying with that person. That was a good reading."

That was a great compliment because I'm sure the very short 30sec monologue is something he's heard 1000s of times -- and he's been in the business for 32 years!

Actor's Reps deal with both union and non-union talent. Their their main objective is to help the "start up" actor.