CHAPTER 26

Session Sixteen

In this session: • Imagery exercise • Falling behind • Actor questions • Finding the images in text • Intentions and actions • Active and passive choices • Next assignment

Coach: While we conclude the imagery exercise, let’s add a new dimension. While the next actor is listening for images, and raising her hand and holding it to firmly grasp the image, everyone else lie on their back and also listen for the images. Let’s see if you see images similar to what Bridgett sees, and how that affects your concentration as a listener. This is just for fun. I have no idea what it might lead to. I’ve never tried this before. But every time I do this Shakespeare workshop, I like to try one or two new things to find new exercises. Okay, let’s do the last one. (The next actor, Bridgett, does the imagery exercise, with everyone else working along with her. We discuss the changes in the monologue after she has found the images. Then we discuss the involvement of the other actors.)

Emily: Probably what I saw wasn’t what she saw. We can’t really know what she sees.

Amber: The listener will probably never have the exact same image as the actor.

Alex: It doesn’t matter. We see some of what the actor is seeing and we know she is seeing something. We don’t see the world she’s in.

Coach: How much do you want to get into that world?

Emily: I don’t know. It’s so much easier lying down than when you stand up.

Coach: Isn’t that the point of rehearsal? To find what you can get out of the material, including the other characters, then work on making it all believable?

Bride: To me, the second time she did the monologue I wanted to know what she was seeing, which made me concentrate on every word. The first time it was all more general.

Coach: What about when you’re still reading a line incorrectly? I heard three or four in that last speech. What’s that telling us?

Bridgett: I haven’t worked enough on it. I will before next time.

Coach: You’re assuming that we can follow you, but that doesn’t put you in command of the language.

Bridgett: I can tell I’m doing that.

Coach: What about the rest of you? Did you get anything from listening for her images?

Alex: It’s interesting in itself, but it just sort of informs me that she’s going to find an image at that spot.

Amber: I kind of like to be surprised by her images, and when I’m already connected to the image it seemed to take something away.

Coach: That surprises me, but no doubt that is what you experienced. For me, when I see and hear professional actors perform one of the plays I know really well, I’m always delighted when they handle an idea or an image or a character in a different but honest way.

Amber: I don’t think that’s the same as lying here and listening specifically for images.

Bride: But if I were directing this play, it would be amazing to do the imagery exercise with the entire play. I would see what all the actors would be looking for, and might be able to help them.

Coach: You’re right, of course. Oh, well, it was worth a try. So what do these images have to do with directing Shakespeare?

Bride: From a directing point of view, I liked hearing the concentration, even though the tempo was very slow. That can be fixed later.

Coach: Yes. We don’t ever want to force tempo—except perhaps in farce. The tempo will happen, and you can encourage the actor to think faster. She will automatically pick it up.

Amber: Good images are helpful for staging purposes—like pictures. I might not use them, but they are there to consider.

Coach: This is kind of tacky, but it’s also funny. I have a basic rule for directing Shakespeare and keeping the action moving—and it’s a sexual analogy. It’s, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop! Let’s take ten!

Coach: (After the break.) A couple of you are having problems. You continue to rush, and you don’t seem to concentrate. Can you tell us what the problem is—what you’re feeling when you do your monologue?

Bridgett: I guess this isn’t my gig.

Coach: What do you mean?

Bridgett: Doing Shakespeare. I don’t think I can be any good at it.

Coach: Is doing Shakespeare any harder than anything else?

Bridgett: There are more words to learn and deal with.

Maggie: You really have to prepare to do it. In another play I’m working on, we had it memorized in two days. The words were so simple, and there was no structure, in the sense that you mean it—oh, I know there was structure, but it seemed so much easier.

Alicia: You can’t be lazy and expect to do this material. Like you said, it exposes you.

Alex: There’s something good, though. The structure, especially in the verse, makes it very easy to memorize—at least for me. And the breaking it down, the analysis, gives me a confidence I don’t always have with other plays.

Kristin: When you do it well it seems so real.

Coach: Which is the actor’s job, right? Make it real for the audience. So the idea of preparation is probably very important.

Jerrod: I sometimes feel overwhelmed.

Coach: How can you get past that?

Jerrod: I have to be willing to put a lot more hours into it.

Coach: That’s probably true. Now that you’ve all seen the kinds of skills it takes just to read this language—read it so that others can understand both you and the language—it does appear that the larger the role you get in a Shakespearean play, the more hours it will take to prepare. If you’re not interested in doing that, or haven’t the time, best to stick to the smaller roles and do them well.

Let’s all sit around the table. (We do.) Please turn to the imagery chapter of the book, page 70 and the next page. Shakespeare’s characters need images to express themselves. We don’t write this way anymore. Some authors use images, but it doesn’t seem that the characters need those images; they could as easily make their point in another way. Perhaps in some Tennessee Williams we can find some of Shakespeare’s type of imagery. But look at Juliet’s speech—a thirteen-year-old girl—and she uses nine images in seven lines. (We read through the “Gallop apace” speech and discuss the images.)

And look at Chorus describe the King’s departure in the Henry V speech. Look at the images in those few lines. You can all see those images—the ships, the sails, the boys climbing the rigging, the prow of the ship breaking the waves, etc. Now, that can all be very lovely—and passive. How do you make it active? Imagery will temp you to be sentimental or reflective. Reflective would be natural, and it would probably be passive, wouldn’t it? And what about lyricism? But you can’t play lyricism on top of lyricism. The language may be lyrical already, so you have to find something else. If you don’t, it’s as boring as watching an actor play a villain by using only the villainous characteristics—villainy on top of villainy. But if the character is already a villain, you don’t need to play that. If you do, you’re completely one-dimensional.

If the passage is lyrical, that quality has to be there automatically, and you have to be playing something far more active. I wonder what that could be?

Maggie: Your action.

Coach: Yes, now we have to return to playing our action. You have to drive the language, not lay back on it. And you drive it to reach your intention. Sentimentality, reflection, and surface attitudes like villainy are almost always in the way of driving your language to get to your objective, unless you elect to use one of them for a specific reason. Let’s take the first four lines of a monologue and read them as you have been reading them, then we’ll check for clarity of intention. (Amber reads her first lines.)

Kate:         Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

Even such a woman oweth to her husband;

And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,

And not obedient to his honest will,

What is she but a foul contending rebel

And graceless traitor to her loving lord?

Coach: That’s very lovely and very passive. What is your intention? (She struggles to explain it.) What do you really want?

I am so often surprised when reaching this point of the workshop. Defining intention and playing the action are at the core of realistic actor training, along with finding the motivations and using the subtext. These actors have all had considerable actor training and many are very active in productions. Because of their experience, I always assume the actors can state intentions and define and play actions, and usually discover that they can’t articulate their intentions at all.

Amber: She’s playing the game, going along with what her husband wants her to do.

Coach: Intentions aren’t reflective or sentimental ideas—intentions are active pursuits, achieved through actions. What is the real action in this speech?

Amber: To please her husband.

Coach: That’s a long-term intention, but it’s not an action. What’s a physical action you need to achieve here?

Amber: Berate these two women.

Coach: That’s an action. And what do you hope to achieve by berating them?

Amber: I keep going back to pleasing the husband.

Coach: Sentimentality. Don’t you want these two women to respond to exactly what you tell them to do? Wouldn’t that be the first step in winning your husband’s approval? He’s waiting for you to bring out the other two wives, which you’ve done. Now he wants you to teach them what’s what.

Amber: She wants to achieve a good marriage.

Coach: Yes, so what are your actions to get to that objective?

Amber: To get these two women to do what I tell them to do.

Coach: How will you measure that?

Amber: They either do or they don’t.

Coach: So what is your intention?

Amber: To make these women do exactly what I want.

Coach: And if they don’t, you’re going to pull out their hair! So what is your action?

Amber: To make them do it!

Coach: So let’s go through the speech without you giving those women a choice. You need to be firm, right? And don’t dawdle, because that lets them walk away. You can’t allow them to walk away. If you do that, you’re not being active. You have to kick their butts if they don’t do what you want—they must not dare to walk away. (Amber reads the lines again.)

You’re suggesting that they do what you want. You’re not insistent. And you’re not using some of the wonderful words—like “foul,” and “graceless,” and “traitor.” And the other two men are standing by your husband with their hands out, ready to win the “one hundred crowns” bet. You can’t “suggest” or drag it out. (She reads the lines again, this time with more insistence and more quickly, not allowing the other two women to ignore her. It’s much improved because Amber is playing her simple action of making the women do what she wants them to do.)

As soon as you can define your intention and play the actions that get you to it, you immediately gain strength and believability. But actors have such trouble defining their intentions and isolating their actions. Amber, you’ve got it now, and I look forward to hearing the entire speech.

Amber: Well, I feel more secure with the speech, and I understand the intention and actions thing, but I’m unclear about sentimentality. What makes it sentimental?

Coach: In the lines above, suggesting rather than insisting is sentimental. The sentimental is based on an attitude and emotion, rather than an action. It’s the “nice” approach to an action, “nice” at all costs. But it’s rarely active. It’s reflective—and it’s the assumption that what you want is clear, even without you going after it. Let’s take the line “I am ashamed that women are so simple / To offer war where they should kneel for peace.” If you read the line based on an emotion—for example, nostalgic—it would be a very “nice” line, but that would not support your intention and your action is sentimental, rather than active. Does that make sense? (They say it does.) Now, let’s do the speech again, and this time add two people to play the wives. (Kristin and Emily become the wives.) The wives should ignore you if you allow them to. And you should handle them in whatever way you need, including physically, to achieve your goals. (We try this various times, and the struggle with the other two women helps Amber clarify her actions. She also develops much more physical strength—which she needs to control the indifferent women—and a stronger walk. She also uses her height to her advantage.)

This, again, is a rehearsal exercise. In performance you may or may not physically handle the two wives—that’s to be determined in rehearsal. But using the wives here has helped Amber define her action, and play it. Now she could play the action with various intensities, depending on choices in rehearsal.

Remember, achieving your intention is measured in the other person. You win or lose based on what they do when you’ve completed your action. If the two women do what Kate wants, then she’s achieved her intention. If they don’t, she hasn’t.

Let’s read a few lines and illustrate different pits we can fall into if we’re not playing our actions. Somebody read four lines very sentimentally. (Alex reads Prince Hal sentimentally and we get a lot of laughs.) Now reflectively. (Bride reads Lady Macbeth reflectively and we all pretend to fall asleep.) We could keep going, but you can see how easy it is to resort to attitudes, and when you do that, the language just dies. Play your actions!

Bride: Hard!

Coach: Yes. But you’re all capable.

(We then work with the intentions of Emily’s Viola speech and Bride’s Lady Macbeth. I try to give thirty to forty minutes to clarifying intentions in each speech. We’ll get to the others next time.) Remember, rehearse this material out loud, not to yourself. It needs the vocal energy. So now, at this point in your work, you know the speeches, so forget about learning lines and all the other skills, which will come automatically, and start concentrating on your intention. Drive your words to reach your intention. Look at some examples on video. Now that you know what to look for, watch some really fine actors handle the language, and a character, and watch how the character needs the language to reach the intention.

We’re into character, right? You’ve got the language—you know what it’s doing—so who is it that is saying these words, and why does he or she need them? That’s your character. Now that you have the language, your character won’t stumble over it—which would ruin your character and immediately make her phony.

I’m anxious to start running the monologues and discussing the characters who speak them. But first, we’ll do the intention work that we did today with all of the other speeches. We’ll want to know your exact intention—why you’re saying these specific words. And I’ll be asking you to read the speeches with different intentions, even though they might be totally wrong, so you can feel how the language serves you and is never in your way. These words will allow you to play an action and to reach a goal, regardless of what the goal is. I’ll prove that to you.

We’ll define all intentions next time—be prepared with yours—and then record the monologues with your intentions played, then again with a new intention given to you. The words will get you there, as you’ll hear. See you next time.