Given Circumstances

New Year’s Eve is a great time for reflection. I’ve been reading a recent addition to my library, a book by Irina and Igor Levin, entitled: “Working on the Play and the Role – The Stanislavsky Method for Analyzing the Characters in a Drama” – love that crazy long title!

I’m fascinated by how people teach Stanislavski’s system and have spent much of my life comparing and contrasting their different approaches.

I am reminded how essential a firm understanding of the given circumstances can be to our early work with the script.

It’s easy to launch into an analysis of the character’s action without a firm understanding of the given circumstances and the central conflict of the scene.

Even in my own classes, where we encourage students to create a strong analysis as a starting point, they often think solely from their own character’s position.

I would encourage all students to start from an understanding of the given circumstances for BOTH characters because that’s where the conflict central to the scene is found. The greater understanding of the whole scene’s conflict, the easier it is to make your personal analysis of the scene.

So first fully describe the circumstances the characters find themselves in and from that, attempt to find the conflict of the scene. Usually in a dialogue, you will find there is a dominant leading character with a stronger leading objective and the other character is responding to this leading action. This is not always the case, but worth a thought.

Our interaction with the other actor(s) on stage or screen first depends upon our full understanding of the given circumstances, the central conflict of the scene and a practicable analysis that leads to the action of the scene, the stuff of the actor’s doing, the acting.

Happy New Year 2011!