Acting journal update

I've been doing a lot of new monologues recently for my Adler acting lessons, and for my own memory I need to write some things down.

A couple weeks ago we worked on the actions: To reveal, to declare, and to dream. In other words, exposing intimacy. Acting coach C reminded me that every action we choose to perform must further the conflict of the plot. There is always a forward motion. In so doing, I must be careful not to 'act the past'. I performed Kitty Duval from The Time of Your Life, which I hadn't read before. It's a very whimsical and yet truthful piece about life after the Great Depression, and how people survived. In this monologue Kitty recounts her past in a dreamlike state. I was given the note to not act the past, because in terms of 'dreaming', Kitty is dreaming her past like it's happening now. If I were to put my current opinion of past events into the monologue, it is no longer dreaming.

Acting coach C and I also talked a lot about how people go to the theatre to see conflict resolved. They want to watch people fight the battles and demons they don't necessarily allow themselves to confront. It's a good reminder that all theatre is action, and that without this action we are not telling a story.

This past week I learned about Big Ideas.  Big ideas are such things as: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, hypocrisy vs. integrity.  These are universal battles that everyone can relate to in some facet. Some scenes are not just about the people and situation they find them self in. They are about ideas, universal ideas that audiences everywhere can connect with. If we, as actors, never reach the big ideas in a scene and focus instead on the personal battle a character is going through (playing the emotion, as they say) then often an audience has not understood and we have not done our job. Big ideas, in my case this week, were used to remove emotion and stop me from making a scene too personal. The scene was no longer about how my character felt about her mother, but instead about how she felt about her values and the way they clashed with her mother's. I've definitely used similar tactics, but I'd never had it explained in quite this way. I found it very useful.

In other news, I bought my acting instructor's book: The Actor's Script, and I'm loving it so far. It's a good breakdown of the way to approach a script, with some Stella Adler thrown in.