When Is This Taking Place?
"Emotional release by itself, no matter how 'real,' 'honest,' etc. the emotion may be, is never enough to create a character... such release has no artistic form."
—Richard Hornby
If you woke up in the hospital with amnesia, some of the questions your doctor would ask you are: "Do you know what year it is? Do you know today's date?" Everyone whose faculties are intact has a sense of placement in time. Busy people might occasionally mistake a Tuesday for a Wednesday, or accidentally date a check September 15 instead of September 16. But it is unlikely that they would mistake the month, the year, the decade, the century, or the millennium. People know the season, too: knowing if it is spring, summer, autumn, or winter. If employed, they can distinguish between a weekend and a weekday (or in some cases, a work day and a day off). Unless they are underground or trapped in a room without windows, they usually know if it is night or day.
All these ways of keeping track of time are knowledge your character embodies, and evidence you need to collect before you can begin crafting your audition. For the purpose of a given role and to bring a script to life, you may benefit from determining:
Time of day/night.
Day of the week.
Season.
Year.
Date of an event.
Time of Day
Contrast the experience of being in a graveyard at two in the afternoon and two in the morning. If you know from the script that your scene is at 2 a.m., this may hold an acting clue for you. Auditioning for a film or TV project, such as Twilight, True Blood, or The Vampire Diaries, you could make an educated guess that it is relevant to the plot that your scene takes place in the nighttime. Time paired with location can be a very revealing detail when dealing with subjects such as vampirism. For you see, vampires, werewolves, and spooks only come out at night. Might you be predator or prey, vampire or victim?
Or let's say that the sides you've been given are for a scene in a romantic comedy, like the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle, which stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The final scene is a rendezvous at the top of the Empire State Building at closing time. Ryan's character, Annie, almost misses this appointment. Racing across town to get there before the man of her dreams leaves adds tremendous urgency to the action. In a plot twist, she arrives too late and is disappointed. They meet only because Hanks' character, Sam, returns to retrieve his daughter's lost teddy bear, which Annie has found on the floor of the observation deck. Off they walk, hand in hand. Time often adds urgency.
What about 3 p.m., the time of day when kids need to get picked up from school? How might this be relevant to your character's experience? If the character breakdown tells you that you're reading for the role of a stay-at-home mom, this could matter a great deal. It might also be significant to a schoolteacher or principal whose day with students is ending. What if the scene you're reading is between a teacher and a student meeting at 3:30? Might this scene be about mentorship, advice, discipline, an illicit affair?
If the writer gives you the time, you can be sure there is a meaningful reason.
Day of the Week
In acting, all knowledge is experiential. For a nine-to-five office worker, Monday morning—representing the beginning of the workweek—is a much different experience than Friday afternoon—the end of the workweek. If the screenwriter gives the day to you, it is probably going to factor into the plot. Make note of it. When you're crafting, you'll make a choice about its meaning and how to play it. If your character has a line like, "I hate Mondays" or "Thank God it's Friday!" you won't have far to go to find the feeling.
You not only need to know the day of the week or the time of day, as an actor you also need to understand what happens on that day or at that time. In the HBO television series In Treatment, starring Gabriel Byrne as a psychologist (Paul) struggling to confront issues in his own life in parallel to the lives of his patients, every episode is stamped at the beginning with a name, the day of the week, and the time of day. The final episode of each week in his life takes place on Friday at five o'clock. This is a session he has with his own therapist, Gina. For him, that day and time is highly significant. It's the session in which he exposes his feelings, rather than holding them back. If you were reading sides for a scene as Paul, you would need to know what this means to him.
What about Saturday night for a single person versus a married person with teenage kids living at home? Is the scene you are preparing for your audition related to looking for love, going on a date, or waiting for your kid to come home from a party? In the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, written by Norman Wexler, John Travolta stars as Tony Manero, an uneducated store clerk from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, for whom the highlight of his life is the one night a week he dances at the local discotheque. That one night, he goes from being nobody to being the king of the world. The difference between who Tony is being on Saturday and who is he being on every other day is central to every choice this character makes, and evokes his central struggle of wanting more out of life.
So ask yourself, what day does this scene take place? It is actable if you know what it means to your character.
Season
In spring, the Earth turns green again. The snow melts. The ground thaws. The sap rises. Tree leaves grow. Flowers begin to bloom. The birds and the bees procreate. And the human heart turns to love. School lets out. Graduations and marriage ceremonies take place. Baseball training camps open. Depending on who your character is, the season could have a variety of meanings. It might be intimately related to the plot, such as it was in 2007 film Into the Wild, written and directed by Sean Penn, based on a true story. Lead character, Christopher (played by Emile Hirsch), has crossed a river in Alaska to isolate himself in nature. When he runs out of food and attempts to cross back, he discovers that the water in the river has risen from the spring runoff. In the moment of his discovery of being trapped, he is devastated. Ultimately, he dies from eating a poisonous root.
Summertime is hot and sweaty. It's the season when most people take a vacation and kids go to sleep-away camp. The light of day lasts longer and people go outdoors—or they hide from the heat in front of an air conditioner. There are softball games and tennis matches to play, and backyard barbecues to attend. Baseball season is in full swing. Think of all the baseball movies you have ever seen: The Rookie, The Natural, Eight Men Out, The Bad News Bears, Major League, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, and A League of Their Own, among others. At the beginning of the summer—near the start of the baseball season—you might have one kind of scene in such a film, whereas toward the end of summer—when the season is winding down and playoffs are coming up—you might have another. Activities your character engages in, and how your character experiences them, could have everything to do with the season of the year.
Season can dictate appearance. Autumn is a season of transition. The leaves are changing colors and there is great beauty in the environment, and the air is getting colder. The clothes that people wear are warmer. No more shorts and tank tops. On colder days, they wear coats and long sleeves, gloves and hats. Warmer days, which are known in North America as "Indian summer," elevate people's spirits and give them one last chance to frolic outdoors before the hibernation of winter sets in. In the 2010 independent film Please Give, Oliver Platt and Catherine Keener play a husband and wife who run a used furniture business in Manhattan. Going to see the autumn leaves serves as a metaphor for the capacity to enjoy life and hold an optimistic view. The couple is waiting for their mean-spirited next-door neighbor to die, so they can take over the grumpy old lady's apartment. In one scene, a row of people is standing on a hilltop looking at a magnificent view; the joke is that the old lady is looking the opposite way and misses the beauty. The fact that it was autumn helped to define an important aspect of the character of the elderly woman, and contrast it with the character of her sweet-natured granddaughter, who is trying very hard to please her and help her have a positive end-of-life experience.
Winter. Watch the 1997 movie The Ice Storm, directed by Ang Lee. Set during Thanksgiving week 1973, it depicts an entire subculture of white, middle-class, suburban Americans amidst the political malaise of the Watergate scandal and the changing social and sexual roles of that era by focusing on the activities of one dysfunctional family in New Canaan, Connecticut, on one evening. On this particular night, there is a dangerous storm, which affects each of them literally and also is a metaphor for the period. As in Into the Wild, the havoc wreaked by the storm causes several major plot twists: Paul, the son of the Hood family, gets stuck on a train coming home from Manhattan; a power line broken by a fallen tree limb electrocutes Mikey, the eldest son of the Carver family.
Also think of the road-trip buddy movies that begin with people who can't get a flight out of an airport. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with John Candy and Steve Martin is one such film where the weather forces an unlikely pair to rely on each other. Because winter is the season of Christmas, Hanukah, and New Year's Eve, winter has cultural and religious significance that could factor into the scenes you might be called to audition for. When you see winter in your sides, your job will be to deduce its relevance to the actions of your character. Read the lines to confirm any intuitive guesses that you make.
Year
Historical dramas are perhaps the most obvious example of projects in which the year matters. Director Martin Scorsese has made many such films: Raging Bull, a biopic about Jake LaMotta, a champion boxer in the 1940s; The Last Temptation of Christ, set in the biblical era; The Age of Innocence, a costume drama set in the 1870s; and Gangs of New York, set in 1862. There are also television series, like Rome, which are set in places of historical relevance. When a project for which you are auditioning is set in a period earlier than our own—and for us, this means any year preceding the last ten years—you can be sure that the era has clues for who your character is being. Every period in history has its own social customs, values, and mores. As an actor, you need to figure out what these are. In Part Two, we'll look at crafting behavior that is appropriate to different historical eras.
Granted, today we look back at Saturday Night Fever as a film revealing the culture of the 1970's disco era. But don't forget that at the time it was made, it was current. If you had auditioned for it, you would not have had to adapt your behavior to the year, only for the subculture of the disco or Brooklyn. The Ice Storm, by contrast, looked backwards from its own year, which makes it a period film and a commentary to contemporary viewers on what we can learn from it. How did men and women interact then? What was it like growing up then? What were the concerns of the people in that place at that time? As an actor, you'll take the clues of the era that you find in the script and craft from them in ways that humanize them. Don't get too intellectual and heady about it; you just need to know how it informs body language, speech, and values.
Costume can help you find your period adjustment when you are performing, but I would not advise walking into an audition room wearing full period dress. I had a student who went to an audition for Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which is set in Colonial America. Someone else who was there did the "cobra head," a 1990's gesture. That was a dead giveaway that the actress was not connected to the era of the play.
Generally, the social dictates for a leading character in a historical era are the main source of that character's conflict. For instance, a woman who wants freedom in an era where women are subservient to their male relatives has a desire that is in direct conflict with the customs of her time. Roots was a mini-series about the lives of a black family in America descended from an African man forced into slavery, which demonstrated their immense challenges in life up through different decades. If you were auditioning for a project like this, you would want to know everything about the decade of your scene.
Being gay and wanting to live openly and have full civil rights was the central theme of Milk, which was set in the 1970s. Some of the characters were gay activists in San Francisco. Others were not. They were politicians, news reporters, and anti-gay rights activists. If you are auditioning for a character that is not the lead, your character may be there, in the scene, to serve as opposition to the lead actor or to reveal something about the customs of the period. What does the year have to do with who you are to be?
Finally, some projects—especially science fiction projects—will be set in the future. Determining the common references and customs of this speculative period is something that a good screenwriter will provide. Look for those clues. If earlier episodes of a TV series are available to you, study them to see if you can determine an underlying set of principles of behavior to which you must adhere. Hopefully, the character breakdown will also give you insight into the values and customs of the people of this future. Don't make it up; use the script for guidance. When you get to the step of crafting from the sides of your audition, you will find ways to personalize the lines. We'll explore how to do so in Part Two. For now, keep looking for clues to what your character knows, as the camera sees knowledge.
Date of an Event
The scene from CSI: NY that we looked at in the previous two chapters is a good example of how the time of occurrence of an event can be meaningful to a character, and also be central to the plot. When an event is mentioned in a script it is a fact worth noting and worth understanding in detail. A future event is something your character knows and anticipates. A past event is something your character knows from memory. In this case, we know that the murder being investigated took place at an aid station at the New York Marathon. It occurred "yesterday" for Sharon, Stella, and Mac. Because this is a real annual event, your research should include knowing as much as possible about it.
As a contemporary actor you have invaluable resources available to you: YouTube, Google, Bing, Wikipedia, streaming news reports, libraries full of books, and websites of event-related organizations, like The New York Road Runners Club, which hosts the Marathon every year. You can go online and view pictures of the Marathon from years past. See if you can get some ideas about the weather and the people. What do people wear at this event? How do they behave? When does it start? When does it end? How does the "aid station" mentioned in your sides function? What is it like to volunteer at the Marathon? These are things your character absolutely knows, which would be parts of the answer to the question: When does this scene take place?
Everyone can remember important events from his or her life (birth of a child, graduation, marriage, divorce, being fired, getting hired, or the death of a loved one). So the answer to when is this script taking place, might be: "On the day before my wedding," "The morning after a drunken one-night stand," or "Three minutes after waking up from a coma." People also remember highly significant social and political events that took place in their lifetimes, as would your character—events like the 1929 stock market crash, the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the first moon landing in 1969, the Challenger Disaster in 1986, and the 9/11 attacks in 2001. If a script references any kind of event, your job is to deduce what your character knows about it—as much as that which the character does not know about it.
When Was the Script Written?
Most sides have a date printed at the top of the first page. The date on the script is a small, but important clue. In the case of the CSI: NY script, the date printed on the sides is 6/30/06. This is not the same thing as the air date. It is the date the script was finished being written. And it means that nothing you act from the sides can have taken place after June 30, 2006. Make no reference in your work to things that happen later than that date.
Once you have identified all of the parts of "when" in the script, you will have choices to make about how to act the role. If the scene takes place in the past, you will have to find the way the people then behaved, carried themselves, or experienced life because of living in that time in the place or subculture of which they are a part.
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