The Essential Action

The Essential Action is a vital part of the scene analysis tools for Practical Aesthetics. When you understand how to build a good essential action for yourself and you can glean them from the script, you will be one step closer to making acting simpler and more fun.

So what is an Essential Action? Something like Stanislavski’s ‘task’ - it has the quality of something that needs to be achieved. It is like boiling down the essence of what the character is trying to achieve from the other character in the scene. It is an active task, with a quality of a goal or objective about it, and according to the original PAW members and the current Atlantic Acting School teachers, it has 9 criteria:

1) It must be Physically Capable of Being Done (the character’s aim is tangible, so must yours be)

2) It must be specific (Stanislavski used to say that generality is the enemy of all art, so get specific)

3) It must have its test in the other person (takes the focus off you and makes you much more interesting)

4) It must have a physical cap (a sign that you have achieved the essential action transformed into a physical essence)

5) It must not be manipulative (don’t try to control the other actor. Influence yes, but not control)

6) It must not presume a physical or emotional state in self or other (getting someone to stop crying… presumes…)

7) It must not be an errand (Send a message – that’s an errand. To get someone to do my bidding, now that’s an Essential Action)

8) It must be in line with the playwright’s intentions (as close as possible – you never know their internal intentions, but those of the play)

9) It should be fun (this is important, but not ha ha fun, something that engages your sense of play)

They usually start with the words ‘to get someone to….’ Some practitioners exchange the ‘someone’ for a more relationship specific word, and some remove it all together, so ‘to get someone to share their terrible secret’ can become ‘to get a loved one to share their terrible secret’ or simply ‘share your terrible secret’. I like the relationship context, it helps you to find an analogous connection to it through an As If.

The Essential Action offers the actor a way of taking the essence of what the character is doing and turning it into something that he or she can do too.

So you read the scene and you reckon the character’s essential action is ‘ to bring someone down a peg or two’. It’s a lovely fun thing to do in a scene and it fully engages the actor in the psychophysical task of trying to get their scene partner to ‘down a peg or two’.  By offering the actor a way of coming into line with the character, we create the illusion of character. The actor always has something to do on stage, the essential action gives them that something to do, they move beyond the words, they move beyond the printed scene into a relationship that triangulates the playwright’s words, the actions of themselves and their scene partner and the imagination of the audience. When all these work together, when you begin working off the other actor, using your essential action and the words of the playwright, you enter flow and so do the audience.

To you, the best

Mark