Saturday, February 27, 2010

A New Way of Rehearsing

For a lot of people, rehearsals serve as a means to set things in stone. You are given a monologue, or a scene, or a play, and you rehearse for hours and hours, memorizing lines, the blocking, the delivery of the lines, your reactions to the other actors' delivery of their lines, etc. For the past however many years it is that I have been taking theatre classes, this is precisely what I have used my rehearsal time for. To smooth everything out, so that when show time came around, there would be no surprises. Everything would go exactly as planned. Little did I know that I was doing myself a huge disservice.

For our "mid-term exam", the students in my acting class have been paired up into groups of two to perform a duet scene. So for the past few weeks, we have been going through specific phases. What I mean by this, is that my professor didn’t simply give us a scene and say, “Here are your scenes. They are due on this date,” and then leave us to our own devices like so many acting teachers do. No, instead, he has been gradually guiding us through the rehearsal process.

The first day he gave my scene partner and I our scene, he set up a time for us to meet with him privately outside of class. During these fifteen minutes the three of us had together, he had us sit in front of each other, knee to knee, and engage in a variation on Meisner’s word repetition exercise. As we had only been assigned our scene a few days before, we were not expected to have our lines memorized. So the exercise was this: sit in front of each other, and stare into each other’s eyes. Make contact. Connect with one another. Then, when it is your turn to say a line, look down at your script, read it over to yourself a few times until you know it, and then look up, connect with your scene partner, and recite the line, never taking your eyes off of them. Do not rush. This is not a performance. This is simply to have you guys connect. Do not preoccupy yourself with emotion or "acting". Just connect and say your line. Whenever you speak your line, look into your partner’s eyes. Do not lose the connection. If you are not the one speaking, do not look away. Look at your partner, and listen.

This is much harder than it sounds. After we did this for about fifteen minutes, a very long fifteen minutes, our professor asked us how that felt. I was honest and said that I wasn’t getting anything out of it. I was so intent on not putting any emphasis on the words, and on doing the exercise right, that I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was saying, and was even less attentive when my partner was speaking to me. My professor said that that was perfectly fine. That the purpose of this exercise is to make you are aware of this disconnect we oftentimes have when acting. Staying in the present moment is a challenge, and this exercise makes it all the more apparent.

So our next step, was to memorize only the first page of our scene, rehearse it, and then perform it in class. My scene partner and I decided that this first rehearsal should be a time to experiment. So that is exactly what we did. We both had our first page memorized, so when we got together to rehearse, all we did was run the scene multiple times, but each time we would approach the scene differently. We would come in with a different set of choices. I would be expecting different things from her each time we ran the scene, or I would be nervous, or excited, or confident, or unsure. And she would do the same. Every time we did the scene, we would each enter the scene as a slightly different variation of our character. And we would never tell each other what choices we were making for ourselves, so that if one time she came in and was extremely physical, it was a surprise, and if she came in another time and was extremely distant, it was an even bigger surprise. This was a way of rehearsing I had never taken part in, but it provided instant gratification for me. We were experimenting, and playing around, constantly surprising each other in the middle of the scene, which is always a good thing.

Our assignment was to perform the first page of our scene twice in class, one right after the other, and each time we had to enter with a different set of choices. So that is exactly what we did, and it produced two very different scenes. Afterwards, our professor mentioned some specific behavioral observations he had made. Our positioning on the bed was different in both scenes, our use of props changed, our proximity to one another. But when he asked us what the choices were that we had made, he pointed out a flaw.

The scene is from Kenneth Lonergan's This is Our Youth, and it deals with this guy named Warren (me) and this girl named Jessica (my scene partner) who just finished sleeping together for the first time last night. Warren has returned to his friend’s apartment where he is staying, and is awaiting Jessica's arrival, who he is supposed to be having brunch with today. When she does arrive, it is to cancel their date. Apparently she is having second thoughts about what happened the night before, and regrets having rushed into something with someone that she barely knows. So when my professor asked, “What choices did you make Ruben?” I said that I was playing around with how much of his excitement Warren was willing to show. I just finished having sex with this beautiful girl, and I am on top of the world, but maybe I don’t want her to know that. So the first time we did the scene I chose to make Warren a bit more reserved. He pretended that he didn’t care about her, and that it wasn’t a big deal that they weren’t going to be able to go out. The second time we did it, I decided to make Warren want to let his excitement shine. I ran up to her as soon as she entered, and I put my arms around her, and I pulled her towards the bed, so that when she said we couldn’t go on a date, it naturally led to me getting angry.

This is the flaw my professor observed with those choices: the questions I was asking myself had nothing to do with her. An actor’s choices should always revolve around what they want from the other person in the scene. You must need something specific from them. If your goal is to get something from the other person, then you will stop at nothing to get it. You will utilize all the tactics at your disposal to try and acquire whatever it is that you are after. So he gave us a moment, and asked us to do the scene one more time.

This time I told myself, "You want to take her to brunch. But before, you just want to kiss her. You want her to come in through that door, and sit down next to you on this bed, and you’re gonna take her hand, and she’s gonna lay her head on your shoulder, and you’re gonna kiss her. Last night was a dream come true for you, and you want every day and night to be like that." That was my new choice. So when she walked in, I was delighted. She sat down, and we talked. I was being so nice to her, so calm, and understanding. So what if we can’t have brunch today? We can go some other time, it’s no big deal. Nothing was going to ruin this for me. We can reschedule our date. But then, she stood up, and walked away towards the door, and something that had never happened before rushed through my body. I was shocked, and hurt, and surprised, and dumbfounded. Every time we had done the scene, she had always stood up and walked away at that moment, but for some reason, this time, I had actually expected her to stay with me. So when she left, it was genuinely a surprise for me.

To be shocked and surprised on stage is a beautiful thing. The trick to achieving this is to expect the unexpected. If the actor knows that the play turns out one way, then the character must expect it to turn out another way. This is the essence of conflict. If this rule of thumb is followed, then genuine emotion will not be far behind.

I'm really looking forward to the next step in this scene project. I am being introduced to a whole new way of approaching the rehearsal process, and I can't wait to make more discoveries.

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