Students in Williston’s Acting and Theatre I class have been hard at work since day one mastering the elements of acting. Using techniques developed by the great Stella Adler and Uta Hagen, students learned about the imaginary circumstances, character objectives, and the other building blocks of creating a role. They applied these skills to a monologue…now they have the chance to work on those techniques with a partner.
One of the objectives of Acting and Theatre I is to examine the connection between plays and the time in which they were written. Each scene was chosen with that idea in mind. Some students are doing scenes from post-modern plays (The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and Members of Tectonic Theater Project) others from American Realism (Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge). Through these plays we get a glimpse of the time in which the pieces were written and gain a deeper understanding of history. Students are learning that playwrights often take stories that are invisible to mainstream America and make them visible to society for the first time. In order to do that effectively, as the father of modern acting Stanislavsky discovered, actors must endow their characters with as much truth as they can. This is where acting technique comes into play.
Students were excited to start these scenes- all trimester they’ve been waiting for the moment when they can play off each other and unearth that invisible truth. So how does one do this exactly? The secret is…listening. We’re working on a few ways to build what I like to call the “listening muscle.” Using exercises devised by two legends of acting, Sanford Meisner and Michael Chekhov, students practice listening to their scene partners and responding truthfully (as opposed to responding with something clever or an idea they planned ahead of time on their own). It takes more work than one would imagine, Meisner’s repetition exercise asks actors to repeat the last line their scene partner just said before responding with their own, but it’s well worth it. The results of this hard work will be evident in the final presentation of scenes during assessment week and I can hardly wait.
