Dear Reader,
I neglected to send an update last month. The reason: I was on set for three weeks producing my first feature film. Inevitably, there were many weeks of prep involved, and once the project wrapped, I fell into a deep coma. Just kidding… mostly.
Next month, I will write about the experience of producing a feature film. But for today, it’s all about acting.
In the quest to become the best director I can possibly be, I realized I needed to take acting classes. Why? Because directors need to know how to bring the most excellent performance out of their actors to tell the story.
Actors safeguard the human experience. They give their very selves to the story and the character they take on. It’s vulnerable and challenging work, and I felt I could not ask actors to step into this without being willing to take the plunge myself. If I’m going to give notes on performance, I ought to know what I’m talking about, and I ought to be able to speak in a way that makes sense to actors and their craft.
After searching for acting classes in Los Angeles for several months, this past September I enrolled at The Beverly Hills Playhouse. Over the first five months, I acted on stage eleven times, working on scenes from seven different plays. The BHP teaching method is based on the scene study because their philosophy (same as mine) is that acting skills grow through repetition. Every time you break down a script, learn your lines, find the beats, develop a character, block out your scene movements, and own your physical presence on the stage, you get better. You find the areas you struggle with, and you work on them.
One night, one of our teachers said that if we all kept meeting and putting on scenes, even with no teacher present to give notes, we would improve. Maybe not as quickly, but over time we would get better because repetition reaps a natural reward of improvement. That’s why the professional actors at BHP view the school as their gym; a place to consistently work on their acting craft and stay sharp. This is vital in a profession where you are only called on to perform during auditions and the happy seasons of booked work.
The BHP curriculum was developed over decades, and upon paying my first tuition, I was given a set of books: Acting Class by Milton Katselas and The Oasis of Insanity by Allen Barton, who is the current owner of the school and teaches the advanced class. Reading these books felt like stepping into a whole new country of artistry and craft. The notes teachers give to students after a scene performance are encapsulated in these two books, though, of course, there is a chasm of difference between reading the theory and putting it into practice.
While it’s only been a few months studying at BHP, there are a few categories that have deepened and expanded my approach to acting, directing, and even writing.
Importance of the Text:
I confess, with a background in writing, I didn’t see the choices the actors were making. From my point of view: it’s all there on the page. Actors aren’t making choices; they’re literally following a script.
Before this class, I had studied Shakespeare and a handful of other plays, but never with the mindset of an actress. It turns out there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into conveying the story.
An excellent performance starts with script analysis. Tone: whose story are we in? What are the beats? The ebbs and flows? If actors keep everything at a high evaluation (emotional energy and physicality) the audience will start to tune out. What are the emotional movements? Where is the news in the scene? Drive the emotional energy towards it. As my teacher explained; if it’s not compelling, if something doesn’t happen, it would have been cut from the script in an earlier draft. It's our job, as actors, to go to the bomb in the scene and let it explode. That’s what audiences are paying money for.
And then, of course, there’s line memorization. For my first scene (Dinner with Friends by Donald Margulies), this is what I was most nervous about. I played Karen in a 12-minute scene where her friendship ends with Beth. Guys, 12 minutes is a long time. It’s a lot of pages. Like with anything, repetition is key. On the day, I remembered my lines, thank goodness. Unfortunately, my main feedback was that I was so focused on the lines that I wasn’t living in the character. We didn’t let the scene breathe. It was just line, line, line, line. It’s the end of a friendship! There should be silences. I was supposed to get emotional at the end, but I’m not really a cry-on-command kind of gal.
My scene partner and I went back to rehearsing, and I learned that once the lines are deeply in you, something magical happens. You start to inhabit the character. You find the moments where you’re hurt, or creatively hiding. You play with how to deliver the line. You withhold the line. In the long silence, you say more, give more to the scene, than when you speak. You remember to breathe, and then… the emotion comes.
Constructing a Character:
Now, knowing this trick, for the next scene, I got straight to work memorizing the lines. I played the therapist in Beyond Therapy by Christopher Durang. It’s nuts. Truly. The elevation has to go through the roof. In rehearsal, there’s a vital period of playing, experimenting, and finding the character. How does she talk? What are her mannerisms?
I put on a voice for this character and a fellow student pointed it out, letting me know it was restricting my voice. I so appreciated this, I dropped the voice, and remarkably, the character was even funnier when I just did my regular voice and didn’t put on anything. This paid immediate dividends in rehearsals I directed when I told my actor; “I want your real voice… Slow down... Go into your chest… Fully enunciate... Drive to the end of the sentence... Throw it away… Elevate it...” I now had the language, I knew what to look for, and I knew what I could ask for from my performer.
Once you know what a character wants, what they’re afraid of, and what needs to happen in the scene, it flavors how you deliver lines and portray physicality. The actor shifts their body to fit the character, making intentional choices on posture, how he or she walks, and all mannerisms. It’s important to stay loose and relaxed, with no tension in your body, even in scenes that have a lot of tension, because then your instrument (your body) can fully experience the emotions that come through the scene.
In my next scene, Potus by Selina Fillinger, my teacher pointed out my slouching, my not truly owning the stage. “You’re tall. Own it. You have good stage presence.” The point being that if I was going flop about, it had to be an intentional character choice. (Humiliating? Yes, but that’s why we go to acting school: so someone will tell us in front a crowd of people, “Stand up straight!”)
Acting vs. Being
I thought the job of an actor taking on a role was to fit themselves inside their character. To hide themselves, to stop being themselves. But night after night, watching scene after scene go up on the stage, I noticed a trend. The most compelling performances weren’t the ones where actors tried to hide behind a character, like putting on a mask, but those in which the casting already fit, and then the actor or actress removed the mask and allowed us to see them, the part of them that fit within the character.
Acting is not about hiding yourself. Acting is about being raw. It’s about allowing yourself to be seen by others.
With Pouts, I played Jean, press secretary to the President of the United States. The play is a farce, and it’s hysterical to read. Scene one starts off with a bang, and it just gets funnier from there. So that’s what I played: the comedy of it. Unfortunately, even though my scene partner and I had the class in stitches throughout our performance, the feedback from my teacher was that he didn’t believe me. That I was playing the comedy rather than allowing the text to be funny on its own. I needed to “play it for keeps,” which meant I — Jean — believing my situation. Taking it seriously. So we worked on the scene again, a lot, and put it up again. I took it seriously, or at least, I thought I did. The result: “I still don’t believe you.”
This has been the biggest challenge for me entering acting. I finally realized, my sixth time on the stage, that I was performing, for the audience. But that comes across to the audience, they can see that. Truly excellent actors are not ‘performing,’ they are ‘being.’ Meaning they believe the situation. They are the characters in the situation, and all else falls away. There is no mask to hide behind; they are unveiling themselves, leaning into who they are if they truly were this person in this moment.
I argue that this only happens when you yourself have forgotten about everything else and are fully present in the moment, believing yourself. Go for broke. This requires a tremendous amount of courage, courage to let yourself be seen. To allow people to make judgments or decisions about you and your performance, and not care. Let go. Because you can’t be fully invested in a character AND worrying about what other people think of you. You have to be willing to stand straight, fully extend your arms, and give yourself to the character, the scene, and the craft.
Importance Casting:
In a chat with one of my teachers, he asked what I was learning from BHP as a director. After all the performances I witnessed, I realized the person you cast for a role is vital. Being a master of your craft is the baseline, the starting point. Then, as a director, it’s my job to find the human being thing brings the right essence to the character.
We all have an essence: the flavor, tone, and rhythm of our inner selves. We cannot contort or control our inner essence. It’s a result of our personality and the honing and refining which the experiences of life have built, chipped away, engraved, and refined in us. Acting is a matter of allowing your essence to inhabit a character. Casting is a matter of finding the person with the essence that not only fills the character on the page but brings it into three-dimension and color with unique life. You cannot ever remove yourself from yourself, and so an actor’s greatest skill set is to know themselves, their instrument, and know how to play it to the tune of the character on the page. This comes from experimenting, playing with the scene, with the character, leaning into who you are in this context, and having the bravery to allow yourself to be seen.
I am a competitive person, sweet on the outside, steel on the inside. So when my teacher said of my performance in Potus, “I still don’t believe you,” I thought, “Oh yeah? Watch me.”
My next role was the Doctor in Agnes of God, by John Pielmeier. Now understanding the key of not hiding and finding the parts of myself that fit the Doctor, I leaned into it. I had a four-minute monologue at the top of the scene, so I ate those words, engrained them on my brain, and started playing: “How does she feel at this line? Where is she hiding from the audience? Oh, she’s angry here… I’m gonna get angry.” There are certain parts of myself I hide from the world. We all do it, controlling what we choose to share with the world and guiding how people perceive us. I finally realized that this is the place to give vent to your emotions. Paint the stage with them. Expand into them.
Taking the stage again in my fourth scene, I went in loose, accepting that some part of me, the real me, was on display and owning that as my greatest strength. I leaned into the emotions, staying fully present in the moment, forgetting about the audience. They are not important right now. This is my world, and they just get to look in for a short period of time. The scene finished. My notes?
“Monologue. Really really good.”
Ha! Nailed it. Driving home that night, thinking over what I did, I finally realized, giving myself over to the emotions, I had fun… Like, A LOT of fun, just owning it. Just being. Surrendering to the emotions. It’s called a playhouse for a reason.
After that came Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck, No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, and Chapter Two by Niel Simon. This month it’s Women of Manhattan by John Patrick Shanley, and many more to come!
Adventure Awaits,
S. C. Durbois Newsletter
1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.
3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.
4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.
👏👏👏👏👏❤️