The Character Is Not You

What do you actually do with an interesting character choice? In this episode, Milton and the class explore an actress’s approach to Annie in Misery: the idea that she is “priest-like.” Taking time to investigate the nature of that choice leads to behavior, attitudes, and impulses the actress can use—and to the powerful possibility, “I speak for God.” The discussion moves from finding an actable choice to exploring its many colors. How many different ways can someone express absolute certainty? How might they guide, discipline, or persuade? Milton encourages actors to slow down, look beyond the first idea, and discover the possibilities within it. The point is to find something that affects you and gives you something to play.

What can actors learn from Gustavo Dudamel? After hearing him conduct Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic, Milton explores what made the performance extraordinary: Dudamel’s personal connection to the music, the way he included the orchestra, and how that connection reached the audience. That same expanding circle is essential to acting. This week’s discussion looks at connecting to the idea of a play, building a relationship with your partner, and letting the audience in. Along the way, Milton discusses Talking Out, shopping for choices, and why being truthful is only a beginning. Through practice—and through expanding our knowledge, imagination, and experience—we develop more to bring to the work.

What happens when an actor really looks at the person they’re speaking to? This week, I use Edgar Degas’s painting L’Absinthe to help the class build a relationship with a partner. We begin with what we notice about the woman in the painting, then explore how those observations can become a personal attitude toward her—and an impulse to speak. One actor’s response takes us somewhere unexpected. Along the way, we talk about giving ourselves room to explore, letting the partner affect us, and finding the difference between describing a relationship and experiencing one.

This week’s episode is a little different. Using the opening monologue from Jack Heifner’s A Wide Place in the Road, Milton invites the class into the kind of conversation actors might have at the first rehearsal of a play. Rather than beginning with the character, the dialogue, or how to deliver the monologue, the class begins with a larger question: What is the play about? The discussion moves from a small East Texas town where nothing seems to change to questions of comfort, stagnation, the fear of leaving, and the tragedy of unlived lives. It is an exploration of how actors can look beyond the words on the page to discover the ideas underneath them—and how those ideas begin to give the words meaning.

Recorded while working with an actress in a class in Paris, this episode explores one of the most common problems in acting: actors don’t start acting until they start talking. Beginning with the discovery that a character is impulsive, we explore how to turn analysis into experience—imagining the character’s behavior outside the play, creating specific circumstances, and beginning to live as the character before the first line is spoken. Because the scene doesn’t begin when you start talking. It begins before you speak.