MAR
21

Teaching Your Actors to Be Originals

By Christina Hamlett 

Former actress and director Christina Hamlett is an award-winning author whose credits to date include 48 books, 266 stage plays and squillions of articles on the performing arts.  www.authorhamlett.com 

Some of the best acting advice I think I ever heard was at musical theatre tryouts many years ago.  A young woman around my age had chosen “People” from Funny Girl as her audition piece.  With eyes closed, body swaying and wistfully twisting her hands, there’s no question who she was trying to channel.  So much so that the director stopped her in mid-lyric to ask, “Why are you singing it like that?”

She defended her song-styling with the reply, “It’s the way Barbra did it in the movie.”

“And why do you think that’s the right way?”  he challenged her.

She was flummoxed by this and cited Streisand’s depiction of Fanny Brice as a box office success.  “Why shouldn’t I copy her?”

Without missing a beat he told her that once upon a time not even Streisand sounded like Streisand.  “It took years of training and discipline to hone her craft and develop a unique voice all her own.  As should you.”

Too often actors fall into the habit of parroting what they have observed in the performances of others rather than doing a deep dive and finding fresh interpretations of the roles in which they have been cast.  Movie adaptations of stage musicals (or vice versa) such as Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hairspray, Annie, The Lion King, Les Miserables, and Sound of Music can force impressionable actors into copycat versions which, by comparison, are almost always cringeworthy.  At the other end of the spectrum are directors who focus so much attention on the memorization of lines that the result is little more than a flat-line delivery devoid of authentic emotion.

The following are a few fun exercises to get your actors primed in rehearsal to see the show — and their characters — from unexpectedly different angles.

Quiet on the set

What if the play you’re producing had a cast of mimes?  Put your actors through their paces by having them do selected scenes without any spoken words.  How much can be conveyed relying only on body language, facial expressions and the timing of actions/reactions?

But what are they really saying?

Subtext is a crucial element in any type of performance art.  Yes, we know what the dialogue tells us about relationships, but what does it communicate indirectly about the players’ true feelings and intentions?  Subtext reflects a character’s fear of expressing oneself openly through such techniques as changing the subject, answering questions with more questions, getting physical, masking sensitive emotions through humor or sarcasm, etc.  Without reciting any actual lines from the play, have your actors speak only in subtext to one another.  This is a useful device to test their understanding of what’s really going on beneath the surface.

Speed-speak

Prior to rehearsal, I used to gather my cast in an informal circle and have them run lines as quickly as they could.  If anyone faltered, we began again from the beginning.  This definitely put everyone at the top of their game.

That’s my cue

Again standing in an informal circle, have an actor say a line — any line in the script — which is someone else’s cue to respond.  Go around the circle, with each actor starting with one of their lines.  Since no one knows what line will be coming up next, they need to stay on their toes.

One line, 10 different ways

Choose any short line from the play.  Each actor — regardless of his or her role — needs to deliver that line with a different emotion and word emphasis than has been used previously; i.e., sad, angry, happy, hysterical, cynical, bragging, etc.  A variation on this involves quirky parentheticals (aka wrylies) which playwrights often insert to suggest how a line should be spoken.  In my work as a script consultant, I have seen no shortage of weirdness and have saved some of the best for this exercise.  It makes a fun theatre game to see how your actors would interpret the following stage directions:

• sniffling furtively
• laughing satirically
• smiling aggressively
• whistling angrily
• glaring impassively
• chuckling wistfully
• shouting hesitantly
• smiling soberly
• staring wildly
• yawning cavernously

Brits for the day

I have yet to meet an actor of any age who doesn’t enjoy laying on a snappy British accent.  Spend part of rehearsal in which everyone does this.  For variation, try southern genteel, country western, or even cartoon characters.

Trading places

If you’ve employed the wisdom of instructing your actors to learn their fellow players’ lines and blocking in case of an unforeseen emergency, rehearsal is a great time to put what they have learned to the test.  Run scenes in which your understudy/alternates get to play the lead roles.  Although there may be some stumbles and fumbled lines, they might also bring a perspective which you or the actor actually playing the role hadn’t considered.

All soaped up

Two of the common denominators of television soap operas are:  (1) everyone speaks slowly and with perfect diction, and (2) crucial bits of information are often reiterated just to make sure audiences don’t miss anything.  For this exercise, turn your practice scenes into soap operas.  Deliveries should be over-the-top dramatic, stylized, and contain at least one line (no matter how silly) which is repeated for emphasis.

Do I hear a song?

Whether they have musical talents or not, put your actors through a rehearsal in which they must sing every line.  Allow them the freedom to either use an existing melody or just make something up that’s spontaneous.  Laughs are sure to ensue...  and isn’t having fun what this entire creative process is about?