SOME EPIC ACTING GUIDLINES

READING FROM SCRIPT HOLDS UP THE ACTING.  TRY TO MASTER LINES AND CUES AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

1.                  YOUR AIM: is that your audience knows in advance WHAT will happen in a scene and therefore can concentrate on HOW it happens.

2.                  Try not to transform into your role, but try to demonstrate your character that is often theatrically stereotypical or representational.

3.                  Whenever you are directed, step in and out of your character, to comment on an action, and directly address the audience.

4.                  In Epic theater comedy, music, slides, and movie clips will be used to distance our audiences from emotional or serious events happening on stage.

5.                  Try to find socially based gestures in a stylized manner that communicates the type of your character with the audience.

6.                  Strongest theatrical effects of your acting are when you’re able to play your character through the juxtaposition of inconsistent attitudes.

7.                  The main aim is that you should not impersonate, but narrate actions of your character, as if quoting facial gesture and movement.  “The Epic style of acting is acting in quotation marks.”  Moreover, you must remain free to comment on what you are showing.

8.                  As the audience is not to be allowed to identify with character, so, too, you are not to identify with the character.

9.                  As the Epic play does not desire to put the audience into a dream, just so you must keep yourself free from this state: you must be relaxed, not letting muscles be tense. Even if playing someone who is possessed, you must not appear possessed.

10.              You must always be in control of your emotions. You must never close your door to any joy or sorrow. These feelings are necessary to your work because your first thought is to remain human. This is one important element but it must be complemented by implied comment on your character's actions. You must show how these are wise or foolish and express, say, pity or disdain.

11.              You must be aware of the presence of the audience, and do not wrap up in yourself and oblivious of audience.

12.              There is to be nothing improvised in your delivery: your performance should be the “delivery of a finished product”.

13.              An Epic play does not portray human nature in the individual, but human relations. The story is the sequence of events that is the social experiment, allowing the interplay of social forces, from which the play's lesson emerges.

14.              I want you to make the audience understand that what they are looking at on stage is nothing more than a re-telling of events. I want our audience to look at your performance of the characters with critical detachment.

15.              This play insisting that it’s ending is in the hands of the audience members. Four Boxes is not neatly concluded and no moral is ever presented. The audience members need to figure all of that out for them.

16.              To stop audiences becoming emotionally involved in the action or with your characters we’ll utilize “alienation effect” using the following:

• Scene-by-scene summary of the action.
• Visual images such as projections of slides which summarize background history and stage events
• Helpful props
• Open stage with visible stage machinery
• Sound effects, live and recorded music that punctuate the action

DEVELOPING YOUR CHARACTER

• Who is your character?
• Who are your character’s friends? Enemies?
• Who is your character in terms of social, political, economical, and educational influences?
• What your character wants in this scene? In this play?
• What are your character’s emotional variations during the scene? The play?
• What she wants, and how strong is that desire? What will your character do to achieve her goals? What will your character do to overcome barriers in the path of that goal?
• Where is the action of the scene? Play? Where has she been before play starts? Where is she going when play ends?
• When does the play take place?
• Why did the playwright put her in the scene? In the play? Why is she unhappy? Happy? Why is she cruel? Why must your character take action in this scene?
• How does your character move when she is happy? Unhappy? Angry? Scared? Observative?
• How does your character react when she encounters an obstacle?

LONG SPEECHES:  Break  long speech into thought units.  Find changes of topic, shifts of emphasis, and new attitudes.  Separate each unit, and read each differently, playing emotion and subtext in each thought unit.  Later on we will create blocking at each shift to play the transitions.

CHARACTER CANNOT BE MADE.  CHARACTER MUST BE FOUND.

1.                  Character exists for the sake of the action, not the reverse.

2.                  Characters in plays-as well as people in life-do not act without motive.

3.                  If the source of character is action, then the place to look for character is in the action.

4.                  The action of a play is the struggle to reach the climax.

5.                  Poor acting is a product of insufficient concern for motive.

6.                  Motive exists in the absence of achieving a goal.  When a goal is achieved, motive dies.

7.                  Characters create each other out of the clash.

8.                  The fundamental cause of conflict is opposing motives.

9.                  Movement and blocking are patterns, given their proper significance when the actor concentrates on action.

10.              Movement is the actor’s main means of expression.  An actor’s on-stage movement must express understanding of the character’s feeling about the lines.

11.              Each movement must have an object-a thing or person-and that object must be clear to the audience.

12.              A well-paced scene varies the volume and rate of speeches, pauses and silences, physical movements, and gestures

13.                  Don’t rush.  Silence is interesting.

14.                  You walk to pass the time.

15.                  You walk to calm your nerves.

16.                  You stand still to listen

17.                  You stand still to think.

18.                  You sit down to plan your day.

19.                  You sit down because you’re exhausted.