Story for Actors
As an actor, you are one of the elements of dramatic storytelling. You help to embody a character for the benefit of an audience in telling the playwright’s story. For this reason, it would help if you knew something about story.
Story is a part of our humanity, we see it on the cave paintings at Lascaux and in Xbox Games, Novels, Blogs, Fanzines, Shakespeare, and the oral traditions before, during and after the invention of the printing press. Story is a part of us, we enjoy regaling others with our tales, and sometimes we add flourishes and bend the truth here and there to make it seem more exciting, or as we might say a drama.
Storytelling is traditionally made of THREE parts. Beginning, Middle and End. And we understand story on a deep level, for we have a story that has these three parts too, from our birth to our death.
A well-written script will follow some basic rules of storytelling and that is that however the story is told, it will more often than not feature a beginning, middle and a end.
Story begins with an inciting incident, something gets the story going. Red Riding Hood’s tale is fairly boring until she is sent to Grandmother’s House. It is this ‘being sent on an errand’ that incites the entire story. Without it, the story doesn’t exist.
The Protagonist, in this case it is Red Riding Hood, is then sent on a dramatic journey and she becomes The Hero. One could easily argue that her first meeting with the wolf is also an inciting incident, but it is infact simply a conflict, something that temporarily hinders her on her way to her goal. A story continues by building the difficult of the conflicts, if you like barriers that are raised, the Wolf becomes increasingly sly and increasingly tries to eat her. As the conflict builds, there is more and more at stake for both the Protagonist and the Antagonist (Mr Wolf). As the stakes rise, the dramatic tension increases as we place ourselves in the shoes of the Hero under immense pressure.
At some point, all of this tension reaches a crisis point. At the crisis point, it is live or die, do or die, go or stay. This can simply be about whether the character, Red Riding Hood escapes the Wolf (and in some versions) or he is killed by the local Woodchopper. Or the Sheriff kills the shark, Daniel defeats the Bully or Bob Ford kills Jesse. This invokes the highest point of dramatic tension, when the tension cannot build any further and this is the climax of the story. At this point, the story comes to a resolution, the point at which the cause of all the conflict has now dissipated and the Hero has either won or lost. When the resolution comes, the audience knows it’s time to go home.
Understanding the mechanics of story can help you to understand more about the job of the actor, the professional storyteller.