The biggest question I got asked regarding The Humans was, “What’s up with the ending?” Speculations ranged from “Erik had a heart attack and died” to “it was the aliens from the comic book.” And while I do think that the ending is open to interpretation, and I would never label any interpretation as “wrong,”… Continue reading The Humans: What the Ending Means to Me
Last night I attended the season auditions for American Lives Theatre. I have not auditioned for anything in quite some time, probably since my audition for the Meisner class last fall. The audition consisted of sides provided ahead of time. I had read the scripts for the two plays I was interested in, and had… Continue reading Audition Failure
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the words and the circumstances that are given by a playwright can be interpreted so differently by different actors and directors, and how each interpretation has it’s own validity. If we think of the playwright’s contributions as a strong, white light, then the actors and directors are prisms.… Continue reading The Prism
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this specialobservance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. ~Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2 An interesting question came up on one of the many theater forums on Facebook recently. The poster said that they were a new director, and needed help coaching one of their actors on how to cry onstage. They said that the actor was wonderful and nuanced in… Continue reading Playing Emotion
OK, I’m not really going to attempt to quantify what “good acting” is. I’m not even sure I am qualified to do so. What prompted this was the confluence of a couple of things. First, there is a video going around of Uta Hagen stating that “if the acting is visible, it’s bad acting.” Next,… Continue reading What is Good Acting?
On Sunday, April 14, we held what I hope to be the first of many future Scene Nights, featuring scenes presented by my Spring 2024 Scene Work class. Storefront Theatre of Indianapolis was kind enough to allow us to use their space for this free event. I was unsure what kind of turnout we would… Continue reading Scene Night!
I had the opportunity to take part in a Master Class on playing Chekov with Dmitry Krymov, former professor at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts and the Head of the Experimental Theatre Project of the Union Theatre of Europe, and founder of Krymov Lab in New York. We were told that the class was… Continue reading Chekov
I’ve now been teaching acting classes for a couple of years, and am in the middle of my fourth offering. I have to say, I really enjoy the process of watching my students latch on to concepts that we work on and begin to apply them, sometimes consciously, and sometimes unconsciously. To see the “Aha!”… Continue reading Thoughts on Teaching