Tips For Stage Acting!

Before we take a look at the process of working on a play, here are some key things to remember about performing in a theatre. 

Your use of your voice is critical. As a rule of thumb, you need to be heard by the back row at all. If someone in the audience can’t hear you, the experience will be entirely lost on them. Theatres come in all different shapes and sizes and present all kinds of acoustic challenges. A good voice warm-up will give your voice the resonance and tone to reach the back row easily without you having to push it. You can find more detailed information on voice warm-ups here:

Physicality

Likewise, the back row needs to be able to read your body, face, and physical expression as clearly as your voice, so your performance might need to be a little, dare we say, bigger than what you might produce on camera. Listen to your director here, they are the audience’s ‘eye’ and will help you manage how big your performance should be. Generally, you’ll need to be engaging your entire body even in your smallest actions and committing physically to every choice you make.

Focus

According to the best acting coach in Los Angeles, One key thing to remember is not to divert attention away from your fellow actor when the focus ought to be on them. This is known as ‘upstaging’ and is generally frowned upon and disrespectful to the other actors. An example of this might be doing something comical while another actor is speaking. In theatre, we can’t dictate where an audience looks, as can be done on film. It’s up to the actors on stage to help guide where the audience should be looking. If you’re providing a distraction, they might miss crucial information. A good way to help the audience follow along is to put your focus into wherever they should be looking (unless it’s you!). That is, look at what or whom they should be looking at. That way, if they happen to look over at you, they’ll be silently directed to look back to where you are looking.

There are loads of other things we could cover, but a lot of these you will discover in the rehearsal room. So let’s move on to the text.

Approaching the Text

Different directors will have different approaches to text – some may opt to spend up to week or more of rehearsal sitting down with the text and combing through it, others may bypass that process entirely and start working on the floor, scene one, day one. For your own practice as an actor, it’s good to develop your own script analysis habits to cultivate a thorough understanding of any text you are working on. This is a huge topic on its own merit, but here are a couple of our best tips to get you started. These can all be achieved prior to rehearsals beginning.

Read the play

I mean, you knew that right? Great. Now read it again. It’s never a waste of your time to read through a text a second, third, or tenth time. You will always uncover something new, make new connections between ideas, unearth new possibilities for your performance. While you do so, look out for any extra information that could help build your character. What are other characters saying about them? What do the stage directions say?

Syntax

Make note of all your character’s punctuation – the writer has chosen specific punctuation for every line and it’s your job to understand why – it’s a clue into your character’s psychology at any given moment. We love talking about punctuation in the theatre, it’s just as important as the words it gives structure to. Does your character use a lot of ellipses and dashes? What does that tell you about how they think? Perhaps they speak in short, clipped sentences. What makes a person speak like that? The answers are up to you, but they must always come from the punctuation.

Crack out the dictionary

It’s likely your character speaks in ways that you don’t and uses words you normally wouldn’t. Even if you think you know exactly what everything means, it doesn’t hurt to clarify. On that note, Google is your friend, and it’s worth looking up any references that you aren’t familiar with. This all helps to build a richer understanding of your character and the world they are in.

If you want to know more about acting please visit SFS Theatre Today. The Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre offers online acting classes in Los Angeles by premiere acting teachers.