Putting It Together

08/04/20 • 10 min

This week, Milton talks about how building different moments in your characters past reveals new information about them, and the importance of knowing exactly what that information is. We must ask the question: What does this moment I’m building tell me about my character? Your answer will clarify a new dimension of this human being. Then, we must integrate every character-discovery, so that you have a process where each piece builds on the next, or in the words of Stephen Sondheim: “the art of making art is putting it together, bit by bit.”

Previous Episode

Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

As we approach a play and begin letting the facts simmer in our imagination, we can begin to ask questions, as though we are interviewing our character. There are no right or wrong questions and no two actors will ask the same ones. Your own personal exploration becomes part of your signature on the role. But here’s the rub: we cannot answer these questions based on our own limited personal experience, or from the cliches we have absorbed from film and television. We need to do research. What does that look like? Watching interviews and documentaries, or even better: talking to real people who share your character’s attributes and circumstances. The joy of research is that it opens us up to worlds beyond our own where we can shop for choices that feed us and help us build a 3-dimensional human.

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Finding What's Actable

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As we continue making discoveries about all the dimensions that make up a character, we always want to look for what is actable or doable. For example, if your character is compulsive, the challenge is to translate that into something doable. One way to get there is by asking ourselves: what is the nature of being compulsive? And eventually we might come up with the need “to create order around me.” If our character is in a circumstance that is shocking, it’s important to go deeper and ask: what is the nature of shock? Maybe we pull away or lash out. Whatever action we come up with, we want it to feed us emotionally. If we fail to go deeper and instead play “compulsive” or “shocking,” we will end up playing a cliche. To oversimplify it: we must figure out what we’re doing, and then we must do it.