Of course the pencil Gwendolyn is wielding as a weapon was only for rehearsal. In the play, it's a pen.
I feel like we all know good or bad acting when we see it, but have you ever tried it? I've been
watching people do it for as long as I can remember and it turns out there's a lot going on that I never knew about.
And I'm not going to try to tell you what it is that's going on because fuck if I know. I just know something is.
I've watched my
castmates play scenes dozens of times now, and some of them have played some of those scenes differently every single time. They keep finding ways to deliver a single line, for example, that I never would have dreamed of, and that are better than the last time they did it. Funnier or more affecting. Or sometimes it isn't better, but then the next time they do it another way and it's better than it ever was before.
I never realized how close acting is to literary criticism or analysis. It's an easy spoof of actors to dramatically say "What's my motivation?" but actors and directors really do examine the text to try to figure out why characters are doing what they do or saying what they say. And the reason behind it might affect how they play it. It's literally reading between the lines.
There's one point where one of my characters does something funny. It's not in Wilde's script but we added it in when some joking around at rehearsal led someone to suggest it. It was funny, so I kept doing it. I figured I was doing it because it was funny.
And then at one rehearsal the
director, Lily Vance, asked me why I thought my character was doing that thing.
What's my motivation!
I thought: Because it's funny? But I had learned enough by then to know that answer won't do unless you're Roger Rabbit.
I had been thinking about my
character's internal life, which was why I was playing him the way I was. I'd made up a backstory for him. There's lots of other ways you could play him, based on other little stories you could make up. So I talked about what I thought the guy was thinking, and why that would make him do the funny thing he does.
She said "Yeah, OK. Good." Just funny wasn't enough. It had to
make sense.
So that's what I've learned so far. Acting isn't just pretending to be someone else, imitating how they might do and say things. Maybe it can be that, I don't know. But it can also be trying to understand who the character is first, why they do the things they do.
It's not harder than I thought it would be because I thought it would be really hard, which it is. But it's kind of more stimulating than I thought it would be. It's a little like sitting around the cafe in college having deep discussions about literature with your very smart friends.
I never did that but maybe you did. I should have. It's
fun.
If you come to one of the shows, see if you can guess what the funny thing is that I had to justify. Tickets.
I might have more to say after I've actually, you know, acted in a show rather than just rehearsing.
I've learned a tiny little bit about something, and that puts me in grave danger of thinking I know a lot about it. I'll be careful.
