Monthly Archives: September 2015

This title just isn’t giving me the glam factor – but I love this topic!

One of the challenges that young actors face in character study is to distinguish between that which is set in the script (given circumstances) and that which is created by the environment, response to the moment at hand, and conjecture at what is likely. Sometimes the actors have trouble separating the givens from the “likelies.” To assist them, I have asked them to work in both pen and pencil.

Pen is reserved for the given circumstances. It is indelible. It does not change. It is locked down. Once written it cannot be taken back. Pencil is designed for the likely. You can erase the pencil information. You can shade the pencil from light to dark depending on the pressure you give the pencil. Pen can always go over the pencil once you find that it is actually not a variable, but pencil does very little to distort the writing of the ink underneath it. Read more →

In this increasingly political time of year, all eyes are on the Presidential Election and the assembly of power around this office. Markets are having a tough time around the world. China and Greece are loosing a financial foothold each and every day. Scandal after scandal fills the newspaper. Who will be President? Who? Who?

My mind is not usually circling around these ideas. At this time of year, I am actually spending more time finding the right grouping of monologues to send our best seniors out into the world of college auditions. Global calamity or the overused monologue??? Tough.

But, in the midst of my search I FOUND AN ANSWER – – not a musing – – but a bonafide, honest to God, ANSWER. For a teacher who claims, in a potentially arrogant way, that I only deal with questions I have found an answer – – and an answer not to just any old question – – but I found the answer to the question, “Who is the most powerful person in the world?”!!!

Wait, more precedes the answer. Read more →

A challenge I pose in my theatre classes early in the year is to guess at why live theatre still exists. In a day and time of movies, television, Netflix, YouTube, 3K, 4K, Retina, and Ultra HD, how can poor little theatre survive? Movies were to have killed live theatre. Television was to kill movies that were to kill theatre in a big, bad bloodbath of entertainment. How in the world has theatre survived and some would say thrived cornered in by so much technology? Read more →

This past week, Company (my audition-only acting class) has been working on an Authentic Self Project. Many BFA acting programs around the country have a similar program, although they may call it a variety of names. Basically, it is a project for the college freshman class that gives them a blank canvas with very little structure and the simply requirement to share their “authentic self” with the class. I gave my class a similar challenge as their first assignment. Read more →

A truth of all auditions is that there will be lines and lines of people. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and obviously you have forgotten the sack lunch and with the faculty parking lot locked (as if the problem is keeping kids OUT of school) so Subway ain’t in the picture. Things got to get moving.  Momma is hungry!

The sure fire test that I use to help move the number of students auditioning to a reasonable callback is to have them present either their prepared material or the cold reading – – and while they audition, I watch their chest. Read more →