Breaking a Leg

My friends and colleagues from Little Spoon Theatre in Sydney have the preview of their show ‘Where’s My Money’ by John Patrick Shanley this evening. I have been intermittently assisting them with their work, sticking my oar in and they have very graciously accepted my intrusion into their rehearsals.

In lieu of a Good Luck card, I wish to offer them a few points of further advice, and the very best wishes for this evening’s performance.

Remember your job is not to carry or convey meaning, your job is to speak Shanley’s lines simply enough that you may use them to do something to the other actors.  What and how you do it makes your performance.  You cannot make the lines mean something to the other actors, or an audience.  Work from what the other actor is doing.

The mistake so many actors make is to try to bring the meaning of the words alive. They do this animatedly and highly successfully, but it deprives the audience of witnessing real human interaction in favour of a cheap party trick of funny voices and faces aimed at concealing one truth – we are not engaged with one another, we are faking our interaction and we hope you will indulge us while we do it.

What you say carries only 7% to the audience.  What you do speaks for 93% of what the audience receives.  Actions speak louder than words.  Your performance is in the real-world interaction you have with each other underneath the words.

Actors that try to convey meaning by how they do something inevitably end up creating a paint-by-numbers performance, that winks at an audience, awkwardly and self-consciously marking points of significance to an audience that is smart enough to figure it out for themselves.

Remember to speak up and cheat out, an audience cannot engage with what they cannot see or hear.

And make it all flow slickly, a slick production can hide a multitude of sins.

Break a leg dear Spoons, it’s been a pleasure…

COACH