FEB
6

Helping Kids Make Emotions Look Real

By Flip Kobler 

Flip Kobler began his performing career as an actor before morphing into a writer.  Flip and his wife, Cindy Marcus, have written for Disney and now run Showdown Stage Company and Showdown Theater Academy in Valencia, California.  Pioneer Drama Service is pleased to offer several plays and musicals by this dynamic duo. 

We all have nightmares that become real.  My recurring one is a script that requires a young grief-stricken character to cry on cue.  Or laugh uncontrollably.  Or any other extreme emotion young actors have to portray without looking or feeling like total dweebs.  Ahhhhhhh!

Fear not!  At Showdown, the theatre for teens that we own and run, we’ve discovered a few ways to play emotions convincingly, even for the most novice actor.  Ready?

Play to their strengths. Ever face this?  The script says Bobby has to sob hysterically, but the actor just isn’t a sobber?  Rather than try to force a square peg into a round hole, sometimes it’s better to find a different hole.  Is there another way to play that emotion?  Grief, for example, doesn’t always manifest as tears.  It sometimes comes out as rage, isolation, depression.  If your actor can’t cry, can he play anger?  Bookcase toppling, wall punching fury portrays grief just as well.  Take a look at Hume Cronyn’s amazing outburst in Batteries Not Included.

Quick story:  In our play Ghost of a Chance I played a man terrified of dying who faces “the light” of heaven.  How could I portray the majesty, the awe, the glory of seeing heaven?  The director (my wife Cindy) and I tried everything, but I just looked like a doofus-maximus up there.  Until finally Cindy told me to try laughing.  So I looked into the giant light and burst into a belly laugh.  A huge guffaw that grew from my toes.  It worked!  The audience felt my relief, my joy, my surprise.  We simply changed heaven from a place of splendor, glory and singing angels to a realm without fear.  You could hear sniffles and gasps from the crowd.  Since I wasn’t able to play awestruck wonder, I played into my comic strengths.

Sometimes attacking a difficult emotion from another angle works best.

This is also true of the ever-dreaded “on stage kiss.”  Ufda.  Some young actors just can’t get past the awkwardness of a kiss.  I remember my first real-life kiss was onstage in Star Spangled Girl.  I kissed the actress and was told I was a horrible kisser.  Bam!  Scarred for life.

Avoidance. As a writer I always want the script performed as written, but as a director and educator, I know that can’t always happen.  So is there a way around it?  A kiss on the cheek?  Eskimo kisses?  (These work well ’cause they’re so darn cute the audience thinks it’s a choice rather than a cheap substitute.)  How about turning the actor’s back to the audience, hiding the actual smooch?

In Jekyll’s Hydes our heroes are supposed to kiss at the end of the show.  However, the actress playing Poole was highly allergic to peanuts, and of course our Henry was addicted to Paydays and Reese’s.  Couldn’t get him to stop eating peanuts, and I wasn’t about to risk anaphylaxis on her.  So we opted for a hug.  A cuddle where they looked dreamily into each other’s eyes as the lights faded.  It worked just as well.

So I encourage an end run around an emotion if you have to.  But there are other ways.

Emotional diving. Our philosophy at Showdown is, “How can you be someone else if you don’t know who you are?”  And “How can you portray an emotion if you’ve never felt it?”  So we do a lot of circle work.

Everybody sits on the floor in a circle.  We usually start with a simple question.  Something like, “I wish....”  Then kids walk to the center of the circle and finish the sentence.  It usually starts easy with things like, “I wish we could have mac and cheese for dinner.”  Or “I wish school was only three days a week.”  But nine times out of ten it eventually morphs to things like, “I wish my dad hadn’t left.”  Or “I wish my brother was still alive.”

Now this is not therapy!  This isn’t Freud 101.  But we’ve discovered that young artists are hungry for a safe haven to express their emotions.  ALL their emotions, without being ridiculed.  As educators it can be a fine line to walk, and a lot of grey area.  But if we stay focused on acting, getting actors in touch with their emotions in a nontoxic way, then they have more tools to use in their craft.

So often we end up coaching kids with something like, “Remember how it felt when your dad left?  That’s what this character is feeling right now.  Tap into your own memories and put them on this character.”  It’s basic acting, substituting a real-life emotion for the staged one, but most young actors don’t know how to do it.

A safe, loving environment where emotions aren’t judged yet become part of a toolbox is an amazing, life-changing thing for students.  It’s up to you as an educator and/or director to decide how deep and far you want to go.

Hopefully, with these strategies, you can avoid any nightmares without having to steer clear of a show with intense drama or emotion.  These strategies — changing the emotion to fit the strength of the actor, doing an end run around the emotion, and emotional diving to tap into real life emotions — are just a couple of ideas that I hope will help with those extreme onstage emotional challenges.  You can always email me if you have questions or just want to say “yo.”

Until next time, get out there and break some legs.