OCT
19

Teaching Actors Variety

By Jon Jory 

Jon Jory is the author of five plays with Pioneer Drama Service. 

I always tell my acting students that behind them on the wall is the word VARIETY in three-foot-high letters.  Imaginary as it is, I often relate to it.  Over my forty years of directing, I have come to believe that lack of variety is one of the bigger problems actors face.  I like most performances for the first ten minutes, but then repetition — physical, vocal, and mental — begins to swamp the performance like floodwater topping a levee.

I have developed a good many class exercises to help the actor add variety to their performance, and I’d like to share one of them with you here.  The first thing necessary is for the actor to realize that constantly respecting the period at the end of the sentence is the beginning of the problem.  English teachers despair when they hear this, but we really don’t want the performance going this way:  sentence, pause, sentence, pause, sentence, pause, ad infinitum.  It rivals the sound of waves hitting the shore in its sleep-promoting qualities.  We find ourselves in a rhythmic hell that doesn’t even reflect how actual spoken language sounds.  To teach actors how to make the written words of the script sound like natural speech, I use the following exercise:

1. Write a simple speech with five sentences on the white board.  I do a different one for each class.  (Relax, we’re not talking literature here.)
   
   Example:  “I don’t want to hear about it.  We talk, talk, talk this relationship to death.  It’s crazy making.  You never tell me anything, you just ask questions.  I beg of you to please, please, please, give me a break!”


2. The students come into class, they see the speech and I give them five minutes to learn it.  That way the dog doesn’t eat anyone’s homework.  The other advantage is that everyone will do the same speech so the interest remains high while they listen to others because they’ll want to compare them to their performance.


3. When it’s time for them to perform, I write on the whiteboard three numbers that add up to five, such as 1‑3‑1.  These numbers indicate how many sentences the actor will say before inserting a one beat pause.  The final number will always come after the last sentence, after which I instruct the actor to fill the final pause and then storm off stage.
   
   To clarify, I’m providing the road map for where the breaks in language should go.  Students are to ignore pausing at periods and instead pause based on where these numbers instruct them to do so.  “Won’t that make some sentences sound like run-on sentences?”  you ask.  Yes, it will, which is exactly how people naturally talk.  That’s the point.


4. After each actor plays the speech, I provide feedback on the pacing with comments like, “The second pause was too long,” “Don’t take interior pauses in the sentences,” “Don’t take longer than a one-beat pause,” “You didn’t fill the one-beat pause with thought,” etc.


5. After everyone is done, we applaud each other, then I erase the three numbers and write three more.  Let’s try 2-1-2.  Everyone does it.  Then I write 2-2-1 or 3-1-1, and off we go for a final round.  Note:  everyone is enjoying this because everyone is acting and the waits are short.


6. After our final round, we spend 10 minutes or so discussing the exercise.  We talk about whether there was a real thought process between the numbers and how the different combinations affected the performance.  Then I point to the wall where the imaginary VARIETY is written and say, “Let’s give variety a hand!”


7. Either at this point or during the next class meeting, I write another five-sentence piece on the board.  This time I add new elements to the exercise, such as, “Let’s all do 2-2-1 but add one interior pause of two beats to one of the sentences.”
   
   For instance, going back to the original five sentences, let’s consider the line, “You just ask questions.”  While students are doing 2-2-1, I ask them to take a two-beat pause after the word “just” in the sentence:  “...you just — beat, beat — ask questions.”  You’ll find that many students don’t want to take a full two beats because they don’t know how to fill a pause with thought.  To the actor having this problem I might suggest, “When you finish saying ‘just,’ think the following thought:  ‘You are so annoying.’ Now do it again.”

This exercise acquaints the actor with using the run-on sentence rather than taking a pause after every period.  It makes them see the value of variety to create more natural speech rhythm in the act of performing text.