"The Actor In You" by Robert Benedetti

• The study of acting can be a process of self-exploration that can expand your spiritual, psychological, and physical potentials.
• Every good actor strives to create a performance that is entertaining.
• True entertainment provides a memorable experience which will stay with us after the performance is over and may even change us.
• The good actor strives to be not only entertaining, but also skillful and truthful.
• What makes actors special is not so much what they do, but the special way in which they do it.
• Though great skill is required, the actor’s skill should never draw attention to itself in the sense of “showing off” or trying to get the audience’s attention in inappropriate ways.
• A good actor strives to create a performance that is truthful.
• Good actors strive to be believable.
• A truly good performance must also contribute to the particular story being told.
• We will call this the dramatic function of the role.
• Being part of the living community that is a theater audience, and watching the live performer, has an immediacy that film performances cannot duplicate.
• All good actors, whether on stage or screen, strive to create characters who fulfill the dramatic function for which they were created, and to do so in an entertaining, skillful, truthful, and believable way.
• Whatever your need, if it is urgent enough, you do something about it. You act in order to achieve some objective that you hope will satisfy your need.
• Immediate and urgent needs cause actions in the pursuit of objectives within given circumstances.
• This view of acting as “doing,” rather than “showing” or “telling about,” is the single most important and profound concept in the contemporary view of the actor’s art.
• Everything an actor does in a performance has to be justified by the character’s internal need.
• Need causes an action directed toward an objective.
• The power of this approach is that your attention as an actor, in rehearsal and performance, is focused on the character’s objective.
• The more important the objective, the stronger the action and complete the focus.
• People reveal a great deal about themselves when they are fully committed to an important action.
• When people are fully in action, they are pouring all their energy and awareness into what they are doing, and have none left over for deception or self-consciousness.
• Being in actions makes you more alive, authentic, believable, and compelling.
• Acting is doing, not showing or telling.
• Need causes an action directed toward an objective.
• Action is felt even before it has shown itself in external activity; it lives even in the potential for doing.
• External action acquires inner meaning.
• Avoid thinking of “inner” and “outer” action as being in any way separate. Imagine instead a single flow of action that has both an inner phase and an outer phase.
• A scene in a play or screenplay depends on energy flowing from character to character as each one reacts and acts to the other.  Therefore we often say that acting is reacting.
• It is the flow of action and reaction between the characters that moves a scene.  You and your partners must be good at receiving and sending energy.
• When energy is passed from one person to another, we call it an interaction.
• Action has both an internal and external form.  If action consists only of external activity unconnected to an inner energy, it will seem hollow and lifeless; if it is only an inner intensity; without skillful outer expression, it will seem vague and self-indulgent.
• A scene lives because of the energy flowing from character to character as they interact through the flow of action and reaction, which moves the scene forward and eventually creates the unfolding of the entire story.
• Finding the right emotion is a process that takes some time. The emotion is the result of the process, not its starting point.
• Action produces emotion, not the other way around.
• In the same way that emotion arises from action, character emerges from action as well.
• One of your most important skills as an actor will be to allow your I to flow fully and freely into the new me of the role and its world.
• Magic If: “If I were in the situation of the character, and if I wanted what the character wants, what would I do?”
• Action produces emotion and character, not the other way around.
• If you live in the world of the character, and if you need what the character needs, and if you do the things the character does to satisfy those needs, you naturally start to modify your thoughts, feelings, behaviour, and even your body and voice; a new me begins to form --- that new version of yourself which will be your special way of playing the role.
• The actor’s job is to fulfill the dramatic purpose of the role in a believable, skillful, and truthful way.
• Acting is being driven by an urgent and immediate need to commit an action to achieve an objective that will fulfill that need.  All external actions on stage need to be justified by the inner process of need that causes the external action.
• Action naturally produces emotion and character, not the other way around. You start with the doing and evolve toward the inner life that justifies it.
• The Magic If allows your “I” to flow naturally into the new “me” of the created character. If you live in the world of the character and if you need what the character needs and if you do the things that the character does to try to satisfy those needs, you naturally start to experience the life of the character and to modify your behavior and though.  This is the same process of give-and-take that develops your personality in real life.
• The first and most important step toward this creative state is relaxation, which naturally leads to greater openness and responsiveness.
• Performing arouses anxiety.  It interferes with your ability to react; it “freezes” you and reduces your creativity.
• It is common to see student actors make the mistake of trying too hard. This excessive effort makes them self-aware, obscures their own experience of their work, and reduces their control.
• Acting is mostly a matter of letting go.
• The first step in letting go is to relax.
• The kind of relaxation you want is a state in which you are most ready to react to the slightest stimulus.
• The best description of the relaxed actor’s state is what meditators call restful alertness.
• The ability to relax can be learned.
• Like any skill, relaxation must be developed over a period of time and maintained once achieved.
• In addition to learning to relax, you must also develop wholeness. Good acting requires that all the parts of your body, your voice, and your mind work together in an integrated way.
• Developing your sense of physical center will help you to develop a psychological and spiritual centeredness as well.
• Tension is the greatest enemy of the creative state, so the first step toward a creative state is to relax.
• Besides being relaxed, you also need to be whole, because good acting requires that all the parts of your body, your voice, and your mind work together in an integrated way.
• Whenever we try to do something, to achieve some objective -- whenever we act -- we send energy flowing out from our centers into the world in the form of sound, speech, gesture, or movement. Usually, our action provokes a reaction from someone, and we receive the new energy of this reaction through seeing, hearing, or touching. This new energy flows into us and touches our center, which in turn elicits a further reaction from us, and so on.
• You experience your center in specific relationship to gravity, and you move and sound within that relationship. The way you experience gravity, like your breathing, is a fundamental expression of your relationship to your world.
• When an actor moves on stage, he or she is moving for a definite purpose; that movement is an action, driven by some objective that is usually in relation to the other characters.
• You will find that when you are in action, you will naturally feel impulses to move appropriately to your action, and these impulses generate what we call the blocking of the scene; blocking is the physical expression of the action of the scene expressed in changing spatial relationships.
• Notice also that when you are not moving, you are grounded and still.
• Learn to stand still, and yet be ready to move. When you do move, make your movements economical and purposeful, clearly shaped with a beginning, middle, and end.
• Your breath constantly reflects your relationship to your world.
• You experience your center in specific relationships to gravity, and you move and sound within that relationship, so the way you experience gravity, like your breathing, is also a fundamental expression of your relationship to your world.
• Stage movement is a physical expression of action.
• Ideal teamwork is achieved only when five conditions have been met:
• When each member is genuinely committed to being a member of the team
• When each member supports the work of the others
• When there is trust and mutual respect within the team
• When all agree to maintain free and open communication
• When the efforts of all are in alignment toward the common purpose
• Commitment, support, trust, respect, communication, and alignment: these are the cornerstones of teamwork, and they all require that you keep your attention on the job at hand and park your ego at the rehearsal room door.
• Action is the means whereby your character pursues an objective in order to satisfy a need.
• Actors always work in a group situation. The success of the process depends on the ability of everyone to work together toward the common goal of bringing the material to life.
• Focus your full awareness on what your character is trying to achieve at any given moment.
• Public solitude is the ability to experience yourself as though you were in private, even though you are in public.
• People who are fully inaction are automatically in public solitude.
• The two levels of consciousness, then, are that of the character pursuing his or her objective and that of the actor observing and adjusting the performance for the sake of the spectators or the camera.
• Acting students commonly do too much on stage. This excessive behavior is called indicating. You are indicating when you are showing the audience something about the characters instead of simply doing what the character does.
• The essence of good acting, then, is to do what the character does, completely and with the precise qualities required as if for the first time and without adding anything superfluous.
• The most important quality of mind a good actor can possess is one that will most determine long-term growth and effectiveness: discipline.
• Patience and a sense of striving together, being willing to accept the momentary failure for the sake of the long-term success -- these are the attitudes you must nurture.
• When you are totally focused on your dramatic task, you lose self-consciousness and undue awareness of the audience.  Stanislavski called this public solitude.
• Beginning actors often do too much; instead of simply doing what the characters do, they think they need to show the audience how the characters feel or what kind of people they are.
• An actor’s long-term growth depends most on discipline, regular systematic effort rooted in self-respect, and the willingness to risk short-term failure for the sake of long-term success.
• The actor must learn to let go of premeditations and physical tension and enter into the state of purposeful relaxation which can be called restful alertness.
• Teamwork is best achieved when everyone is committed, supportive, trustful and respectful, open, and aligned toward the common purpose.
• Your focus on your objective allows you to become so engrossed in your action that you achieve public solitude and reduce self-consciousness, while your childlike ability for dual consciousness allows your awareness to be simultaneously on your character's objective and on your artistic concerns as an actor.
• The actual performance will be discovered only gradually throughout your rehearsal process, when you will begin to experience the give-and-take of the living event that will grow between you and your fellow workers.
• Whatever the source of your scene, however, it is very important that you read the entire play or script from which the scene comes so you and your partner have all the necessary information about your characters and their functions.
• The words your character speaks have two kinds of meaning: their literal dictionary meanings, called denotation, and their implied emotional values, called connotation.
• Denotation is not a static thing; there may be several possible definitions for a word, and the meaning of words in popular usage sometimes changes quickly. You must be sure that the meaning you take for granted today is not a distortion of the playwright’s original intention.
• While denotation refers to the literal meaning of words, connotation is defined as “suggestive or associative implication of a term beyond its literal, explicit sense.” The connotation of words can reveal the attitudes and feelings of a character.
• You must consider the meanings of the words when the play was written, and what feelings they express when used by this kind of character in this situation.
• One very good way to be sure you have examined the meanings of your lines is to paraphrase them, restate them in your own words, as if you were doing a translation of the original.
• The rhythm of speech refers to its tempo (fast or slow), its underlying “beat” (regular or irregular, heavy or light), and the variations of tempo and beat that provide emphasis on certain words or other elements of the speech and therefore contribute to meaning.
• Rhythm is highly expressive of personality.
• Both tone and rhythm are tied to your emotional state by the muscles that produce speech.
• The fundamental rhythm is established by the flow of accented and unaccented syllables; we call this the syllabic cadence.
• The next level of rhythm is the breath cadence, and this is of special importance to the actor.
• Playwrights manipulate breath cadences to guide the actor into a pattern of breathing, and the rhythm of breath is a primary factor in emotion.
• The dialog itself as the characters speak in turn has a rhythm. Each speech usually contains a central idea and functions in a way similar to paragraphs in prose, and the alternation of the speeches creates the dialogue cadence.
• Here is a summary of these cadences or levels of rhythm:
• syllabic cadence
• breath cadence
• dialogue cadence
• Tone and rhythm give our speech color and individual flavor, and make it fully human.
• While denotation refers to the literal meaning of words, connotation can reveal the attitudes and feelings of a character.  You must consider the meanings of the words when the play was written, and what feelings they express when used by this kind of character in this situation.
• Conflict literally means “to strike together,” so any situation in which two forces are opposed creates a sense of drama.
• Our definition of a dramatic event is a conflict in which the stakes are high and the outcome is in doubt and builds toward a climax.
• In a well-constructed play, the sequence of events (the plot) moves forward as suspense builds; we begin to wonder “How will this come out?” When the conflict is just on the verge of being resolved, suspense is at its peak. This moment of greatest suspense, as the outcome hangs in the balance, is called a crisis (a “turning point”).  The function of everything that happens, before the crisis is to lead toward it with rising energy, while everything after the crisis flows naturally from it with a falling sense of resolution.
• This is the fundamental shape of all dramatic events: a rising conflict, a crisis, and a resolution.
• One way to define the crisis of a play is “that moment after which the outcome of the play is inevitable” or “the last moment at which the play might have a different ending.”
• The crisis can be identified by thinking backward from the end of the scene, looking for the moment in which the outcome of the scene most hangs in the balance, the moment when the outcome of the scene is determined.
• A dramatic event has a conflict in which the stakes are high and the outcome is in doubt and builds toward a climax. The moment when the outcome hangs in the balance is called the crisis (“turning point”). Everything before the crisis leads toward it with rising energy, and everything after it flows from it with falling energy.
• Your character was created to do a specific job within the scheme of the play as a whole. We call this the dramatic function of the character and understanding this function will inspire and guide your work in rehearsal.
• There are two main ways that characters may serve the story: by advancing the plot through their actions, and by contributing to the meaning of the play through the values which they and their actions express.
• The writer has given your character certain traits that make his or her actions seem “natural” to them. These are called function traits because they permit the character to believably fulfill his or her dramatic function within the story.
• A performance must therefore include traits which “round out” the character and make us recognize him or her as a real and specific human being who is in some way “like” us or people we know or know about: we call these recognition traits.
• You learn all you can about the character from the evidence within the text itself. You consider the character's age, physical traits, the kind of culture and historical period he or she comes from, his or her social and economic class, educational background, and the nature of the character’s family life. If this information is not supplied by the text, it may be useful for you to invent some of it for yourself, through you must be careful to do this in a manner that supports and extends the character's function and qualities as determined by the author.
• The specific qualities of the character’s world are called the given circumstances.  These “givens” fall into three categories: who, where, and when.
• Because personality is formed and influenced by our interactions with those around us, your character can be fully understood only by examining the relationship between him or her and all the other characters, whether they are physically present in your scene or not.
• The general relationship provides basic considerations that make a relationship similar to others of its kind, whereas the specific relationship reveals what is unique to this particular case.
• Where the play happens has two main aspects: the physical and the social. The physical environment has a tremendous influence on the action. The social environment is also of great importance.
• When a scene is happening is important in terms of the time of day and season.
• The historical period of a play, with all its implications of manners, values, and beliefs, is another important aspect of the “when.”
• Here is a list of the givens:
• Who
• General relationship
• Specific relationship
• Where
• Physical environment
• Social environment
• When
• Time of day
• Season
• Historical period
• Each of these given circumstances must be evaluated as to its relative importance; don’t waste thought and energy on aspects of the character’s world that do not contribute to the action and meaning of the play.
• If the givens of the play are foreign to you, some research will be required.
• When possible, actually experiencing the most important givens can be a great help in rehearsing a scene.
• Remember: it is not your job to show the audience anything about the character’s world. Your job is simply to live in that world and let it affect you.
• Your character was created to do a specific job within the play; we called this his or her dramatic function. Every aspect of your performance must contribute to this function.  There are two main ways your character may serve the story: by advancing the plot, and by contributing to the meaning of the play. Your character has been given certain function traits so he or she can believably fulfill his or her purpose within the story. A performance must also include traits which round out the character and make us recognize him or her as a real and specific human being; we call these recognition traits. The character was created in relationship to other characters and within a particular world. These given circumstances (who, where, and when) are essential to a proper understanding and experience of the character.
• The true life of the character will be found only by working with your fellow actors and director through trial and error and the accumulation of experience in rehearsal.
• First, you will put yourself into the character’s world, his or her given circumstances, and experience them for yourself. In the characters circumstances, you begin to experience the character’s needs for yourself, perhaps recognizing similar needs from your own life. You then begin to experience the objectives the character chooses in hope of satisfying those needs. These objectives motivate you to say and do the things the character says and does -- his or her actions. As you begin to experience your character’s world, needs, choices, objectives, and actions, you will find that emotion and the character’s personality will begin to form in you, naturally and automatically.
• As your acting skills develop, you may be able to work more efficiently and effectively, but there are no shortcuts. No amount of posturing, false voice, or trumped-up emotion can substitute for this natural process of transformation.
• Like your own behavior in everyday life, your character’s behavior is driven by needs.
• Need leads to a strategic choice of action directed toward an objective.
• Beat objectives are strategies driven by scene objectives, which, in turn, are driven by the super objective.
• The need causes each character to form an objective, which is then pursued through a strategic action directed toward the other character.
• If you can engage your own energy in your character’s actions within the scripted world, and make that world and those actions real for yourself, even if they are unfamiliar, you will find yourself naturally transformed toward a new state of being.
• The broader your emotion memory, the richer your material for inner creativeness.
• There are several techniques by which stored memories may be recalled. One of the easiest of these techniques is visualization. This involves relaxing deeply and imagining yourself in the character’s world, with all its sights, sounds, smells, physical sensations, and so on.
• Another technique that may be useful in certain situations involves making a mental substitution of some situation or some person from your own life for the situation or characters in the scene.
• Action is a response to a need; need leads to a choice of strategic action, chosen in relation to the given circumstances, directed toward an objective that will, it is hoped, satisfy the need. The need is internal, but the objective is external.
• Your job is not to show the audience what the need is (indicating) but rather to experience that character’s needs as if they were your own. You do this by personalizing the character's needs, putting yourself in his or her place and making the character’s needs and experiences your own.
• One of the most important aspects of your job is to discover the inner process of thought that lies behind these external actions.
• A dramatist can only imply the character’s thought through the character's words and actions. Beginning with those words and actions, you have to recreate the mental process that produce them. This is what Stanislavski called justifying the outer action by connecting to it an inner process. This will be the greatest creative and personal contribution you will make to your performance, and it will be the foundation of all the other work you do on the role.
• Reaction turns into action, forming the flow of action -- reaction -- action -- reaction that moves the story forward.
• The inner thought process of each character is designed to produce the proper effect on each link of the flow of reaction -- action.
• A stimulus arouses you and generates an attitude, which generates a consideration of alternatives, leading to a strategic choice of an action directed toward an objective.
• The process of inner action begins with real hearing and seeing.
• Beware of indicating your attitude; simply allow yourself to react in that way as if for the first time.
• Remember: acting is not so much doing things as it is allowing yourself to be made to do them. Again, acting is reacting!
• As in real life, dramatic characters often act out of habit or impulse; in such cases, the stimulus leads directly to external action without conscious thought.
• We commonly call this unconscious behavior habit.
• When approaching a part, it is extremely useful to identify the habitual aspects of your character’s behavior as soon as possible. You will want to strive to recreate the character's habits in yourself.
• You have to forget what you are going to discover, then let yourself find it anew.
• If an action is not automatic or spontaneous, then a conscious process of thought begins.  The first step is to consider various things you might do. During this deliberation, one course of action is chosen and others are rejected.
• It may be useful to create the alternative choices that your character rejects.
• Before the choice, energy is moving into you; after the choice, energy is moving out of you.
• Choice is the point at which reaction turns into action.
• If you can experience all the factors influencing your character’s most significant choices, you will be in touch with everything needed to create the character’s mind.
• Here is a good general rule: whatever your character doesn’t need to think about needs to be automatic or spontaneous for you as well; whatever your character does need to think about, you must think through each and every time you perform the scene.
• Giving words to the internal thought process in this way is called the inner monologue.
• Break the process into three basic steps: the stimulus, need, and attitude forms the first step, which is called arousal; the consideration of alternatives and the choice of a strategic action is the second step, which constitutes the choice; finally, the external activity directed toward your objective is the action. So your inner process can be summarized by three words: arousal, choice, and action.
• The greatest creative and personal contribution you will make to your performance is to discover the inner process of thought that lies behind your character’s external actions; this is called justifying the action.
• Choice is the point at which reaction turns into action and from choice comes an action directed toward an objective.
• Your focus on this single objective at the moment of action will overcome self-consciousness and give you power and control.
• An objective needs to be singular because you need to focus your energy on one thing rather than diffuse it by trying to do several things at once.
• The most useful objective is in the present, something you want right now.
• Finally, an objective must be personally important to you.
• Objectives work on three levels: immediate objectives are steps toward the scene objective, and the scene objective is a step toward the character’s life goal, which we call his of her super objective.
• Since your energy must continually flow outward into the scene in order to keep the story moving, you want to define your actions in the most “playable” (that is active) way possible.  First, you use a simple verb phrase in a transitive form, that is, a verb that involves a doing directed toward someone else.
• Strive instead for a doing in which your energy flows toward an external object.
• Next, you select a verb that carries a sense of the particular strategy chosen by your character to achieve the objective.
• While you are learning to act, it may help you to form such a complete verbal description of your objectives and actions.
• You must accept this surface activity as your immediate action: do not attempt to bring the subtext to the surface of the scene by indicating it. Doing so will destroy the reality of the scene.
• There is always at least one alternative available to a character in any situation, and that is the choice to not act -- to suppress or delay action.
• When a character chooses to suppress an impulse, that unresolved energy is reflected back into that character and builds up to become a source of increasing dynamic tension.
• The choice to not act is a strong and playable action. To play a “not doing,” simply identify what the character wants to do but doesn’t. Let yourself feel the need to act strongly and feel also the effort required to suppress the action.
• The best way to achieve connectedness is to think of your objective as being in the other character, something specific you need from that person. The best objective, then, is a change you want to bring about in the other character.
• The best focus of awareness for an actor is the character’s objective (what he or she wants) from which flows the character's action (what he or she does to try to get it).
• Dramatic characters will pursue actions until they either succeed or fail. If their actions succeed and they achieve their objectives, they move on to new objectives and actions; if they decide their actions are not working, they will try different strategies and form new actions.
• A good story is structured on several levels of action: individual interactions make up beats, beats make up scenes, and the scenes form the overall shape of the rising and falling action of the entire story, giving unity to the whole.
• You will have an objective on each level: in each beat you have a beat objective; the beat objectives lead toward your scene objective; and your scene objective can be seen as springing from a deep, overall objective that is your character’s super objective.
• Your sense of your character’s super objective is the result of your experience of the role, not a prerequisite for it; but it may be useful to form a general idea of the super objective early on, knowing that it may change as your work progresses.
• Identifying your character’s through-line of action as being driven by his or her superobjective can help you to better understand each of your specific objectives, connecting each to the character’s deepest needs and desires.
• Remember the idea of dual consciousness: what you know as the actor is not the same thing as what your character knows.
• Again, avoid the temptation to indicate. It is never your aim to explain your superobjective to the audience. Your job is to create experience, not to explain behavior.
• When a character changes objective or action, it causes a change in the flow of the scene; we call each of these moments a beat change.
• There are four basic types of stage configurations: proscenium, thrust, arena, and environmental.
• The traditional proscenium stage features an arch through which the audience sees the action.
• The thrust stage (so called because it “thrusts” into the midst of the audience) features the same stage/audience relationship as the Classical and Elizabethan theaters and places the actor into close proximity with the audience, but also limits the use of scenery.
• The arena and other types of full-round or three-quarter round stages stand at the opposite extreme from proscenium stages.  Here the audience surrounds the stage, so it is important for the actors not to stand too close to one another because they will block one another from audience view.
• While most stages are of the three basic types previously described, we sometimes create special environments for specific productions, some of which may entirely eliminate the separation of stage and audience.
• Moving away from the audience is called going “upstage,” and moving toward the audience is going “downstage.” To stand “level” with another actor is for both of you to stand perpendicular (in profile) to the audience.
• Lateral directions are determined by the actors’ view as they face the audience. Thus “stage right” is the same as the audience’s left; “downstage right” means toward the audience and to the actor’s right.
• Turns are described as being either “in” (toward the center of the stage, whichever side of the stage you are on) or “out” (again, away from center).
• Crossing (that is, moving from one point to another) may be in a straight line, or in a slight arc so that you end facing more in profile to the audience.
• Blocking is the way in which the characters move in relation to one another and within the space determined by the designer and director of the play.
• Your main responsibility is to justify your stage movement so that it grows out of an inner need and express your relationship with the other characters in the scene.
• One important element of good pace is cueing, the way one character begins to speak after another has finished.
• What you do in performance should feel spontaneous, “as if for the first time,” no matter how many times you have done it before. To achieve this spontaneity, you must keep your awareness on your objective rather than on the mechanics of your external action.
• Notice that spontaneity does not mean that your performance is erratic or changeable: during the rehearsal process you gradually refine your external action until it becomes dependable, consistent, stageworthy, and automatic.
• Since emotion arises from action, you need only do what your character does and think the thoughts involved in the action; the performance itself will then give you the emotion.
• The display of emotion for its own sake is never our true purpose.
• Strong emotion will interfere with your craftsmanship.
• Emotions are unreliable when it comes to generating a performance that must be done repeatedly and on schedule.
• The most important discoveries are made during the actual rehearsal process as you explore your role with your fellow actors under the guidance of your director.
• As an actor, you have special power over others. You might not take acting as seriously as that, but it is true.
• However you find it, your sense of purpose is what will give you courage and power as an actor.
• It is this drive to be at service through your art that will finally overcome the self-consciousness of your ego and carry you beyond yourself, giving you a transcendent purpose from which comes dignity, fulfillment, and ongoing artistic vitality.