Rehearsal #3: Acting Your Beats

Last night in rehearsal we talked a lot about what playwrights we might get form the audience as suggestions and worked on acting.

At Un-Scripted, we typically do a lot of work with protagonists. Most often we strive to identify a show’s protagonist in the first three scenes and then the rest of the show revolves around that person. This is especially true of the musicals we have done.

However, plays aren’t really like that. Plays often don’t have a strong central character whom every scene revolves around. Each scene, and even each beat within a scene might have its own protagonist.

First we went over some of the elements that can make a person the protagonist or allow them to deflect in on to someone else.

1. The protagonist is usually on stage. If you’re the protagonist, you should stay on stage. If you want the other person to be the protagonist, you can leave.
2. Protagonists talk about themselves, revealing their feelings to the audience. They say “me” and “I” a lot. To not be the protagonist simply say “you” a lot and talk about the other person. (WARNING: as with anything there are exceptions to all these rules, as Karen discovered last night. In a scene her character started telling another character how she was about to break down because of her crazy husband, but because she was using it as a tactic to illicit a response from the other character, not simply as a revelation, she was throwing the protagonist role on to the other character.)
3. Protagonists are the most normal and relatable person on stage. If you want to be the protagonist, be slightly more normal than the other people on stage. If you don’t want to be, be weirder.
4. Be changed. Protagonists are changed by what’s happening to them. If you’re not the protagonist, don’t be changed.
5. Protagonists respond to new information, but rarely supply it.

Then we played a game where played 3 person scenes and tried to bounce the protagonist around each character throughout the scene. We chose to do this in the style of Neil Simon for the practice. The result was scene that could have been straight out of a play and didn’t seem improvised at all.

All this made me think: I should be in a scripted play. Suddenly acting seemed so much easier. Just figure out who’s the protagonist of the beat and act in a such a way that makes them the protagonist. Since the script will have taken care of numbers 1, 2, and 5 above, simply act broader and weirder than the protagonist in those moments and don’t let your character be changed. If the protagonist is you in a beat, act more normal than everyone else and be changed. How easy is that?