How To Create A Character | Rehearse Slow, Throw Nothing Away

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An actress friend of mine, Sandra Croft, who’s also a teacher who owns and runs Empowered Auditions for young actors, 8 and up, retold a short story on facebook about going over with with some of her younger students Stella Adler’s admonishment to NOT throw the words away but rather than make them bold, confident, clear, and full of meaning.

Stella Knew.

In past posts, to improve my own rehearsal technique and habits, I written a lot about how acting is fundamentally physical and how our use of the text, how it goes through us, is a good measure of how physically connected and grounded we are in the rehearsal room. See:

A terrific demonstration of Stella’s principle is this video of Patsy admonishing a student not to rush through the text. It’s enlightening (and why so much Shakespeare in the city can suck): listen to the first actress who starts the scene. You can actually follow and understand her — what you’re really following and understanding is Shakespeare’s character; we See and Hear the character, not the actor.

Then listen to the second actress. Right off the bat, she’s “acting,” and it’s hard to understand and follow her. Imagine sitting through that for 2 and half hours.

Patsy tells her to slow the hell down. You can either be IN the words, physically grounded in them, or you can just spew them out. The former is giving the words life; the latter is bad acting. The root is breath. After the actress slows down, it’s like night and day: you see and hear the character and you understand what she’s talking about, what she needs, and the story unfolds for us, easily, naturally, without any effort on our part, like children read a bed time story.

As the line are memorized, the pace will pick up, but, ideally, the actors will stay as physical, grounded, present, and connected as we see them here: