No Small Parts

Seriously. There aren't any.

I remember a lesson from the summers when I went to a theater day camp during my vacations. We went to see a show at another children's theater--I don't remember what the show was, I think it was based on a Tomie dePaola book. The only thing I remember about it--and what we all agreed was our favorite part later--was the girl who played the goat. She had zero lines and her character was not important to the plot. Our camp counselors asked us why we all liked her so much, and why she was so interesting to watch.

It was because she was having fun. She was fun for us to watch because she was clearly having a great time playing her role.

Another good example is a production of Twelfth Night which I designed for my theater company this past summer. The character Fabian is usually kind of a throwaway role--he shows up halfway through the show which no introduction, everyone just acts like he's always been there. He helps out some other characters in their scheming, but that's about it. The director gave the role to Tracey, who played the role as a man. She's a great comic and Shakespearean actress, but he didn't have a female role that she fit in that show.

Well, she completely owned it as Fabian. She took a nondescript character, and turned it into a comic foil so funny, she consistently got spontaneous mid-scene applause. She's also the only person I know who can ad-lib Shakespeare successfully.

So now I find myself doing a Shakespeare play, and while I'm on stage a lot, there's not a lot of information about my character in the script, and I don't have a lot of dialogue. So I did the most important thing any actor can when creating a role- I made up a backstory for myself. A lot of it was based on the experiments we did with Laban Movement Theory; I discovered what kind of movement felt right for my character, and then came up with a reason why he might act that way (we're women playing male characters).

Thanks to my background development, I now have a character who has specific motivations and relationships that inform how she reacts to what's going on onstage, which gives me something to do even when I don't have lines. The best thing is, even though I completely made up this character's personality, my director is being completely supportive. He's even finding opportunities in the scene for my character to have more specific reactions. And as a result I'm having a lot of fun playing him.

Playing with Laban Theory

I'm starting rehearsal on a new play (which I'm in), and after two days of just reading through the script, we did a night of movement. We did some stretching, and vocal and physical warm-ups, and playing some games to get us working together as a group.

For me, the most interesting part was the time we spent on Laban Movement Theory. You've probably dabbled with a bit of this if you've ever taken an acting class--walk in a circle, notice what part of your body you lead with, try leading with something else, etc. I've done this as an exercise plenty of times to develop a walk or movement style for a character, but never gone much further than that.

What we did in rehearsal yesterday was a little more in-depth, exploring four different contrasting ways of moving:
Direct vs. Indirect
Sudden vs. Sustained
Light vs. Heavy
Free vs. Restrained

I seriously wish I could've had a tape recorder in my head, because I noticed so many interesting things that I wanted to remember for later. When we were playing with indirect movement through space, I noticed if I was charging through the center of the room, and then suddenly changed direction, that seemed like a character who was very inconstant. Using indirect, restrained movement at the edge of the space, I felt more like a character who was very hesitant and unsure. It was enlightening to notice my personal emotional response to movement; when we were playing with restrained movement, I curled into a ball in the middle of the room; and it felt very exposed and scary.

For the character in this play, I thought about what kind of movement felt natural to me, versus how I thought my character would move. My ideas thus far had been that he is suspicious and conniving, masculine, and aggressive (this is a cast of women who are mostly playing male characters, but not actually "as men"). The kind of movement that felt right for him was a confident, swaggery walk, and I often found myself prowling the edge of the space, then picking a destination and charging straight across to it. In one exercise, we were asked to think about how we relate to people who are moving the same way we were, versus those who weren't. I found myself keeping and eye on people moving similarly (either as rivals or possible cohorts), while people who were using lighter, freer movement irritated me ("who are these frolicking idiots? Get out of my way").

This gives me some new ideas about how to play my character, who may not be so fleshed-out in the script, but who I can bring detail and specificity to. I have new tools to use in how to bring him to life. And now the cast has a common language that the director can use so the cast will understand what he's asking for.

I'm also pleasantly achy from a yoga warm-up we did; I think I'll need to incorporate that into my daily routine so I don't run myself down.