Sept 4 Class Review

[Andrew]

SHAKESPEARE WORKSHOP # 5 Review
Text & Character

For those who missed last week's workshop, here's a little review.
I've actually simplified things a little bit from what we did in the
class, but this is the jist of it:

AFTER marking your stress words (see example below), you need to
figure out OBJECTIVES, INTENTIONS, and ACTIONS.

Let's assume that we're talking about a scene with two characters, Mr.
A, and Ms. B., and that the scene is as follows"

Mr. A.: Why hello, Ms. B. How are you today?

Ms. B: Quite well, thank you, Mr. A. And yourself?

Mr. A: Had a touch of the Myxomatosis last week, but I'm feeling much
better now, thank you.

Ms. B: I'm sad to hear that., Mr. A. But I thought only rabbits got
that disease?

Mr. A.: Yes, Ms. B. It's a mystery.

Ms B: Indeed, indeed.

Mr A.: Well, goodbye.

Ms B: Yes, goodbye.



OBJECTIVES: For each scene, your character has an objective, which
should be phrased as "I want...". This objective should be as big an
imaginative as possible. For instance "I want to be understood." is a
poor objective, whereas "I want to be loved" is a better one, because
it gets to the root of why you want to be understood. However, it's
still not specific enough for a scene. You need to have something
that you can try to get by the end of the scene. So, a better
objective might be, let's say for Mr. A, "I want Ms. B to give up her
boyfriend and love me and me only." Okay, great... that's much more
specific, but how will you as Mr. A know that you've acheived (or,
more likely, failed to acheive) your objective? What could Ms. B do
to communicate to you that she loves you?
(Let's assume, fo rthe sake of this exercise, that Ms. B has no lines
to this effect.)
Well, maybe Ms. B could rip off her engagement ring and throw it away.
So, that's probably the best way to phrase your objective: "I want Ms.
B to rip off her engagement ring and throw it away!"
It's specific, and moreover, it's something you can picture while
you're playing the scene.

Now remember, Ms. B will have her own objective, and that objective
may be (in fact, probably is) in some kind of opposition to yours. "I
want Mr. A to punch himself repeatedly in the left eye." might be an
example. So acheiving your objective may be nigh impossible... but you
need to fight for it as hard as you can.

INTENTIONS: So, now you've got your objective, and you know you have
to fight for it. How will you fight for it? Well, first you will
start by creating intentions. An intention is what you want to do to
somebody in order to accomplish your scene objective.

For instance, we know that Mr. A's objective is to make Ms. B
literally throw away her engagement ring. So in your first line as
Mr. A ("Why hello, Ms. B."), perhaps you decide you need to impress
Ms. B. That's your intention. It should fit into a sentence with
your objective: I want Ms. B to rip off her engagement ring and throw
it away, so I need to impress her.

Sounds easy, right? It is, except that you need to come up with one
of these intentions for each beat of the scene.

BEATS: Eh? What's this? You never said anything before about beats,
Andrew! Yes, yes, that's true, but there was really no point
mentioning them before, because I needed to tell you about intentions
in order to properly explain beats.

A beat is a division of a scene into manageable, playable chunks. We
start a new beat every time you change your intention.

So why change intention? Wouldn't that make an actor's work easier?
Yes, it would, but it wouldn't make for a very interesting or
intelligent character.

Let's take the example at hand: You, playing Mr A. decide you need to
impress Ms. B. So you try it, but it doesn't work (she's not
impressed). Quickly, you decide that a better approach is to charm
Ms. B. And that's a new beat.

Of course, this can work just as well if you succeed with your
intention. For instance, if you were successful and Ms. B was
impressed by you, then you might think "ah ha! I've got her now!" and
immediately decide on the new intention of to woo her. Also a new
beat.

ACTIONS: Great, so we've got our objective and our intentions, but how
do we play them? That's where actions come in. They complete that
sentence we started with the Objective and continued with the
intention:

I want Ms. B to rip off her engagement ring and throw it away, so I
need to impress her by [action].


Let's look at Mr A's first line:

Why hello, Ms. B. How are you today?

Let's say that we decided to change intentions after the first
sentence. So our breakdown would look like this (with intentions
underneath):

Beat #1 || Beat #2
Why hello, Ms. B. || How are you today?
to impress || to charm

So, now we need actions. Like what? Well, how can you, as Mr. A,
impress Ms. B? This is where you've really got to either prepare
well, or be able to think on your feet.

To impress someone, you can puff yourself up to make you look bigger,
or otherwise preen. You can pull a big wad of cash out of your pocket
and count it. You can turn your body just so, so that she can see the
designer label on your jeans. The list is endless. As an actor, you
need to pick something and do it. If you're not good at thinking on
your feet, then think up a few beforehand and write them down on your
script. Each time you run the scene, try something new.

How about to charm? There are many ways to charm someone; try
thinking of some yourself.


Okay, so that's last week in a nutshell. I'll be posting the homework
soon.

Cheers,

Andrew