Actors Alchemy: Finding the Gold in the Script (Roadmap to Success)
Contents:
The measure is the number of interviews offered to each of our students from the agents and managers in attendance. And the correlation between who gets the most invitation and who is most talented—or for that matter, who nailed it at the showcase—is sketchy at best. Identifiable and sellable types trump all other considerations. If agents think they can sell you as product, they want you in their catalogue. Can you make them money? Several years ago as part of the preparation for the senior showcase, we began asking our students to define their type, and plan their material around that conceit.
Our students resisted but eventually complied. They were grateful and more successful than our students had been previously.
- So You Call Yourself A Christian.
- Onstage & Backstage.
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More recently, a faculty member who is still a part-time casting agent took over as director of the showcase. With the eyes of a New York agent, he has refined the typing we do. The students resist even more than before. And then thank him even more when the showcase results prove him right…. It opens with an overview, explaining the differences between theater and its hybrid mediums, the part an actor plays in each of those mediums.
(Book). An actor's script is both a gold mine, and the map to discovering it: if properly read, a script will reveal its riches to you. Unfortunately, most actors never. Editorial Reviews. About the Author. Bruce Miller is an associate professor and the Director of Acting Programs at the University of Miami, where he teaches.
It moves on to the acting craft itself, with a special emphasis on analysis and choice-making, introducing the concept of the actor as storyteller, then presents the specific tools an actor works with. Next, it details the process an actor can use to prepare for scene work and rehearsals, complete with a working plan for using the tools discussed. The book concludes with a discussion of mental preparation, suggestions for auditioning, a process for rehearsing a play, and an overview of the realities of show business.
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To compensate, I was meditating every day for at least a half hour, and doubling up on my line study. My students were collegial and had no problem looking me in the eye. When I would express my fear and concern to them about my abilities, they looked at me like I was fishing for compliments.
I stopped sharing my feelings of panic, and started pretending that I was okay with it all…. I am currently working on a play at the University of Miami. I am often involved in a production at this time of year. In my last year as a secondary school drama teacher, I directed a production of the Scottish play. It was to be the first production in a new state of the art theatre, but the construction fell behind.
It was pretty stressful, but in the end the production turned out nicely. But this time is very different. I have the role of Gloucester, the parallel plot role to Lear. I get to have my eyes poked out and be led around the stage in a bloody blindfold by my students.
I have not acted in eight years, and I have no desire to do so. I was drafted, plain and simple. A professional actor was jobbed in to play Lear and he wanted a professional actor to do this parallel role, so the age differential between the patriarchs and college aged students would be consistent.
General Reference
When my chair asked me to step up, I felt I had to say yes because I had already turned down his offer to direct. I have never before acted with students, particularly my own. Visit his blog on EdTA for more acting insight. The results are obvious. Yes, far better tenors than Eddie Redmayne have tackled the role of Marius. But both offered up more than a fair share of memorable acting moments.
Though nowhere near the singer that the incomparable Colm Wilkinson was and is, he still managed to be profoundly moving even as he carried the entire film on his shoulders.
a blog by Hal Leonard Performing Arts Publishing Group
I was always a lead or director in the camp show as a kid. That was a safe venue to do theater and I always loved it. Apparently, I did it better than most. That was my first toe in the water. I taught high school English for four years and I went back to graduate school for Journalism. I wanted to be a television journalist and in order for me to take the graduate class I needed, which was Journalistic camerawork, I needed a prerequisite. The undergraduate journalistic prerequisite was full so they told me to take an acting class.
Work with these guys. Then I applied to grad school at the same school which was Temple University, they had a very good graduate program. I was so interested at this point that I went to find out what I would need to do in order to be good enough. I bumped into a woman who I had a graduate course with and she turned out to be the wife of the director of the acting conservatory and she spoke to her husband. Within the three years of graduate school, I caught up, I guess, and I learned how to do some stuff. Ironically, it was a really good acting program by reputation but none of us left with a solid background.
Except for one really good teacher who had a tremendous influence on me, on all of us. I dedicated my teaching career to making it [acting techniques] simple and clear. And so nothing I teach is original, other than maybe my definition of good acting, but everything else is just basic late Stanislavsky but articulated to the lowest common denominator and through repetition, it seems to work.
Keep reading this interview with Bruce Miller on StageNotes. Acting can — and should — be more than guesswork and instinct. Here is a straightforward guide filled with useful information to help actors learn to use their scripts in a specific and analytical way to solve the problems of the scene and bring their elusive characters to life.
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- The Legend of the Scarlet Ravine and other Tales to Chill your Bones.
- RIZEN: Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse;
- The Death of Doctor Gilmores Wife?
- See a Problem?.
- General Reference.
- !
In learning how to decipher the script, actors will be equipped to make the choices that lead to delivering a gold performance. In this post , StageNotes. Pick up a copy of the book for the full instructions. Character is most effectively and reliably displayed through a careful selection and execution of actions, not by magically inhabiting a character through some internal or emotional process. I use a particular exercise with my own beginning actors at the beginning of the semester to demonstrate the points I am making here.
The game, called Character Roll Call, goes something like this.
Actor's Alchemy: Finding the Gold in the Script
I tell them to answer as themselves as though attendance were actually being taken. I ask the class to observe each other very carefully during the process and to make determinations about each class member based on what they see and hear. They may even take notes if they want to in order to better help them remember what they observed. As a result of the group discussion, my class will usually conclude that any demonstration of character under the circumstances of the first round of the exercise was sketchy at best. They had too little time and too little opportunity to inhabit and communicate character.
In the second round of the exercise, I ask my students to think of a dominant personality characteristic they possess. It could be anything from shyness to egotism to a great sense of humor to sadness or cynicism. Once they have pinpointed this characteristic, I ask them to come up with a single physical action demonstrating this quality that they could believably execute when their name is called during the next round of attendance taking.
The key here is twofold. First, they will have to come up with an action that actually suggests the quality, which, depending on the characteristic, could be difficult indeed. The idea in acting is to always make choices that can be carried out successfully. In this round of the game, my actors have a much larger body of work to discuss. Because everyone in the class had to make choices, chances are even if not every choice was absolutely clear, far more of them were interesting, because thought went into their selection.
Further, more students willingly guessed at the personality characteristics suggested through the actions presented, because this time through they were more than random and spontaneous reactions of the moment. In other words, because of the specific choices of action, character emerged. And the point of all this is that the exercise is not unlike any scripted acting situation in which an actor has the obligation to be believable, serve the overall script, and do the things his or her character would do under the circumstances while forwarding their own storytelling responsibilities.
Each of the actors in the exercise in round two were responsible for the following:. A central point of the ensemble element of this game is that an actor must maintain the action of his or her character even when not in principal focus. In life, no one stops being who they are when they are not speaking, yet so often, beginning actors think they are acting only when they have lines. In fact, the sum total of all the actions you execute create for the audience the illusion of character.
The audience will put together the kindness you show in one scene, the anger demonstrated in another, and the intelligence or whimsicality of other moments and mix all the pieces into a complex whole, just the way people do in life. If you come alive only for your spoken moments, you can never expect to be fully believed or to produce a fully realized character. In the third round of Roll Call, I ask my students to take a moment and come up with a strong personality trait that they can translate into a physical action or series of actions.
My actors are now free from the strictures of trying to portray themselves truthfully. They are now free to step outside of themselves and be more creative. By the end of this sequence of exercises, my students are pretty well convinced that character can be created through a series of actions without the need to somehow completely transform themselves into the character being played.
They also understand that successful acting usually results from careful analysis and planning rather than from simply relying on intuition and spontaneous brilliance. Of course, the acting process reserves a special place for those who can live in the moment and react, but most actors cannot afford to rely on that ability alone. Read more tips for teachers on StageNotes. They did a very nice feature story about it. The process was not always easy. Insuring that our guest artist realized his vision took its toll with our budget, personnel, and facility, but ultimately our designers came through.
And during the bumps in process everyone kept smiling and chugging along. Our student actors probably had the bumpiest ride of all. They had to endure a host of script and blocking changes throughout the process that must have made many of them want to scream to the heavens. In the end, our audiences loved the show and so did all the actors who performed in it. But there is an important lesson our students learned in this little success story. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Actor's Alchemy by Bruce Miller. Finding the Gold in the Script by Bruce Miller.
An actor's script is both a gold mine, and the map to discovering it: Unfortunately, most actors never learn to efficiently read the map, or master how to convert what they find in a script into playable gold. Because this aspect of the acting process is seldom taught in a simple and tangible way in the Book. Because this aspect of the acting process is seldom taught in a simple and tangible way in the classroom or studio. Acting can and should be more than guesswork and instinct. Finding the Gold in Your Script examines the relationship between the script and what an actor ultimately does on the stage or on screen.
Here is a straightforward guide filled with useful information to help actors learn to use their scripts in a specific and analytical way to solve the problems of the scene and bring their elusive characters to life. In learning how to decipher the script, actors will be equipped to make the choices that lead to delivering a gold performance. Paperback , pages.
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