Stages of Imagination

Stages of Imagination
David Sloan was born and raised in
southern California. He graduated
from Harvard College in 1971, then
Working Dramatically
completed a Waldorf teacher training with Adolescents
in 1975 after attending Emerson
College in Sussex, England. At
Emerson he also met his wife-to-be,
Christine, and developed his lifelong
passion for Shakespeare’s work.
After working in a school for
troubled adolescents, David began
teaching English and drama at the
Green Meadow Waldorf School in
Chestnut Ridge, New York, in 1979.
Except for a year in Boulder, Colo-
rado, helping to launch a high school
at the Shining Mountain Waldorf

David Sloan
School, David has been at Green
Meadow ever since. David and
Christine have four children; two
attend college, and two are still
students at Green Meadow. David’s
other publications include articles in
Renewal, Peridot, and The
Anthroposophical Newsletter, a booklet
entitled Computers in Education, a
chapter in More Lifeways, and as-
sorted poems.
AWSNA Publications

Published by by
David Sloan
The Association of Waldorf
Schools of North America
38 Main Street
Chatham, NY 12037

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

STAGES OF IMAGINATION
WORKING DRAMATICALLY
WITH ADOLESCENTS

by

David Sloan

1
Published by:
The Association of Waldorf Schools
of North America
38 Main Street
Chatham, NY 12037

Title: Stages of Imagination

Working Dramatically with Adolescents

Author: David Sloan

Editor: David Mitchell

Proofreaders: Nancy Jane, Judy Grumstrup-Scott

© 2001 by AWSNA

ISBN #1-888365-33-1
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has had a very long incubation period,

during twenty five years of involvement with drama and
teenagers. Along the way, several people have served as
beacons, even as inspirations: Francis Edmunds, founder
of Emerson College—the international Waldorf teacher
training center I attended in the 70’s—whose profound love
of Shakespeare kindled my own; Peter Menaker, a gifted
speech artist, actor and colleague who died at age 30 in
1981, and whose passing left the rest of us lesser lights
wondering what might have been; Roswitha Spence, mas-
ter costumer, puppeteer and friend to literally thousands
of far-flung Emerson graduates; Ted Pugh, founder of the
Actors’ Ensemble, who generously spent countless hours
over a decade introducing me to Michael Chekhov’s work
and to how it might be employed with adolescents; David
Petit, whose sense for integrating music and choreography
into every play added new theatrical dimensions to my
work with teenagers; John Wulsin, fellow director, co-pro-
ducer of nearly 30 plays over the past 15 years, and a huge
part of the “we” referred to throughout the book; along
with other such gifted colleagues as costumers Jill Wolfe
and Chris Marlow, musicians Karen Tallman and Bill
Pernice, choreographer Stephen Kotansky, technical wizards

3
David Johnson and Louis de Louise; my parents, who first
encouraged me to write a book on the transformative power
of the arts; and my wife Christine, whose own theatrical
background and two “higher senses”—her sense of humor
and common sense—have been a constant source of sup-
port.
For their editorial assistance in preparing this book,
I am indebted to Anna Blau, Kay Hoffman, David Mitchell,
and, most especially, Martha Francis. Their keen-eyed sug-
gestions helped to clear the cobwebs.

– David Sloan
November 2000

4
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

Chapter I: Assaults on the Soul . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Chapter II: Finding Meaning in the Roots of Drama . . . . 13

Chapter III: Seeing the Whole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

PART TWO: INCARNATING A PLAY

Chapter IV: The First Phase: Freeing the Physical . . . . . . 33

Chapter V: Blocking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Chapter VI: Grounding the Character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Chapter VII: Playing for Timing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

Chapter VIII: Charging the Atmosphere. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Chapter IX: Finding Each Other—Ensemble Playing . . . 97

Chapter X: On a Highwire Without a Net:

Other Improvisational Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . 109

5
 PART THREE: PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF MOUNTING
A PRODUCTION

Chapter XI: Finding the Right Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Chapter XII: Cut to the Quick—

Even Shakespeare Needed an Editor . . . . 133

Chapter XIII: Casting the Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Chapter XIV: The Production Schedule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

Chapter XV: Tangling Tongues to Strengthen Speech . . 154

Chapter XVI: Technical Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Chapter XVII: A Sample Production Sequence . . . . . . . 179

Chapter XVIII: Plays That Have Worked . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

Index of Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

6
 PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

Chapter I

Assaults on the Soul

Young people today need drama more than ever.

They are growing up in a virtual wasteland for the soul, in
an age where electronic simulation has all but supplanted
direct and vital experience. As our children shuffle from
computer to television to movie screens, a number of un-
healthy effects surface ever more insistently:

— Young people rely less and less upon their own

inner resources. It is no surprise that when larger-than-
life, colorful outer images are provided for them, children
latch onto ready-made pictures instead of creating their
own. Indeed, once exposed to these pictures, children can
never really escape from these overpowering movie-gen-
erated images, which literally dictate what children picture
for decades when they are asked to describe a Pocahontas or
Moses or some other Disney-created caricature. As their
reliance on external pictures deepens, their own imagina-
tive capacities begin to shrivel.

— Children spend less and less time relating to

other human beings face-to-face. A couple of clicks on the

7
mouse or pushed buttons on the remote can offer a uni-
verse of solitary entertainment and diversion. Interacting
with a machine is more convenient, and certainly less frus-
trating, than having to dicker with playmates to resolve
the inevitable disagreements that arise. The computer does
what you want; never has instant gratification been more
possible, nor more potentially damaging.

— Young people are losing their sense of what is

real and what is not, what is true and what is not. As the
younger generation grows up on a steady diet of simulated
games and movies and shows, the line between illusion
and reality blurs significantly. Sitcoms are not real, but the
shows filming cops in action are, right? When the news
broadcasts another nightmarish outbreak of violence, and
captures on film guns spitting bullets and explosions pul-
verizing whole buildings, is it real or not? Is a docudrama
about the life of John F. Kennedy, Joan of Arc, or Oscar
Wilde true, or has it been “embroidered” to add color or
controversy? Swimming in the murky waters of simulated
uncertainties, young people can no longer trust their per-
ceptions. Worse, they can grow up without moral bear-
ings, adrift in a relativistic universe that offers only “what’s
true for you.”

From As You Like It –

10th grade production

8
Drama as an Antidote
Drama work is also based on a kind of illusion, but
one of the premises of this book is that the make-believe
world of drama can offer a potent antidote to the soul-sap-
ping tendencies of our age. First and foremost, it requires
activating one’s imagination. Despite the damage that ar-
tificially induced images can cause, young people still re-
tain a deep reservoir of imaginative powers. They are not
yet so far removed from the fertile years of childhood when
creative play was a way of life, when a backyard boulder
could become a pirate ship, a stick could transform into a
sorcerer’s wand, and a climbing tree into a fortress tower
instantaneously. While they never again experience quite
the same un-self-conscious delight and imaginative nimble-
ness as those early years, young people can reawaken such
slumbering or benumbed impulses with surprising ease
through drama.
Drama is also inherently collaborative, the most
social of all arts. At the elementary or high school level,
mounting a dramatic production demands the ingenuity
and artistic efforts of dozens of people. Because all activi-
ties, offstage and on, must support a seamless vision of a
theatrical totality, the process requires constant interaction
between actors and directors and among the actors them-
selves. In our productions, the actors undertake almost all
technical work, so they simply cannot work in isolation. If
they try to, they learn quickly that it does not work. Two
students in charge of sets for The Skin of Our Teeth went off
on their own to build flats. Not only did they come back
with set pieces that bore little relation to the overall scheme
of the play, but they had also constructed them so large
that the students could not fit the flats through the door of
the theater! Needless to say, the smaller-scale, rebuilt sets
were the result of clearer communication and cooperation.
Working on a play in this way becomes not just an
artistic endeavor but a social training in community building

9
as well. The overbearing, upstaging “star” who also wants
to direct every scene and needs a healthy dose of humility,
the timid actor with a small role who needs to recognize
and appreciate her essential contribution to the whole, the
bitterest of rivals in real life who must learn to put aside
their animosity onstage and act like lifelong friends—all
must face their weaknesses in the crucible of the theater.
All must learn the value of submerging their own personal
wishes and vanities, of working with others to create a
meaningful theatrical experience.
Finally, there are the truths that can be discovered
through the illusion of drama. Yet another premise of this
book is that drama has the revelatory possibilities of po-
etry, which Ralph Waldo Emerson claims “comes closer to
vital truth than history.” But how can truth arise out of
illusion?
Consider two different scenes that depend upon
simulation. In the first, a young boy sits alone, in front of a
computer, the pale light generated by the flickering images
playing over his face. He is oblivious to the world outside
his room, to the gathering clouds, to the rising wind, to his
own dog barking because the dog has knocked over the
water bowl. The boy’s whole world has contracted into
this screen; he sits there mesmerized, concentrating on the
attacking warships, zeroes in on the video enemy, and with
a clatter of keys, blasts another weapon-toting alien into
cyber oblivion.
Now consider a girl onstage in a small theater, play-
ing the part of Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
She sits on a stool, sips an imaginary strawberry ice cream
soda on an imaginary counter in an imaginary soda shop.
She sits next to George, her somewhat bumbling but ear-
nest nextdoor neighbor who is about to become her sweet-
heart. He says,
Listen, Emily I think that once you’ve found a
person you’re very fond of . . . .

10
 I mean a person who’s fond of you, too . . .
Well, I think that’s just as important as col-
lege is, and even more so. That’s what I think.

Emily replies, I think it’s awfully important,

too.

George: Emily . . .

Emily: Y-Yes, George?

George: Emily, if I do improve and make a big

change . . . would you be . . . I mean . . .
could you be . . .

Emily: I . . . am now; I always have been.

(p. 94)

Like the boy sitting before the computer, this pair is

also mesmerized, but by each other; they are moony-eyed
and transported by the moment. They find themselves
magnetically drawn together. They lean towards one an-
other, their lips almost brushing, when George bails out
and, to cover his desire and embarrassment, blurts out, “So
I guess this is an important talk we’ve been having.” They
both turn away in awe, transformed by the enormity of
their mutual disclosures. Emily says simply, “Yes . . . yes.”
The video game may entertain, but it demands
very little of the boy at the computer besides his reflexes.
By contrast, the Our Town scene requires of audience and
actors alike so much more of what is the core of being
human. Nearly everything in the scene is left to the imagi-
nation. The stage is bare except for two stools—no glitzy
special effects, perhaps not even any mood-setting music.
The two actors, as well as the audience, must rely upon
their own resources to make the scene real. Yet somehow, if

11
the actors are skilled, the girl and boy playing Emily and
George can create an indelible impression, a “true” moment,
recognizable to any person who remembers the first flush
of young love.
The vitalizing power of imagination, the collabo-
rative nature of the theater, the striving to portray truth
onstage—these aspects of dramatic work can all counter-
act the adverse effects of an age that seems to value the
digital over the human and the simulated over the actual.
The whole process of taking some words on a page and
turning them into living language, into colorful characters,
into moments of real illumination, is akin to artistic alchemy.
At its core, drama is an incarnating experience, just as the
gradual unfolding of individuality in childhood and ado-
lescence is an incarnating process. If, as teachers and par-
ents, it is our highest task to help our students and chil-
dren become themselves in the fullest and healthiest pos-
sible manner, drama can be one of our most dynamic means
of assisting with this unfolding.

12
 Chapter II

Finding Meaning in
the Roots of Drama
Young people want to act for myriad reasons. In
their search for themselves, most teenagers act much of the
time anyway, trying on a new persona today, inventing a
new walk, a new hairstyle or a new laugh for themselves
tomorrow; they pose in front of mirrors and in front of their
friends; they fashion an image that either completely cloaks
or brashly reveals their inner selves. Drama simply legiti-
mizes this exploration. They love becoming someone else,
escaping, however temporarily, the adolescent angst that
plagues so many of them. They love the intensity of work-
ing in the charged atmosphere of a play production. Many
young actors discover the deep pleasure and power of
moving an audience to laughter or tears. And, of course,
they revel in the recognition they receive when the play
ends. However, herein lies one of the inherent pitfalls for
actors of all ages. Too often students are lured into a play
by the promise of becoming a star, of turning into a kind of
instant celebrity, an experience which they hope will cata-
pult them towards Broadway or Hollywood.
My colleagues and I share a different approach; at
every stage in our work, we stress ensemble playing over
any star system, and substance over superficial effect. We
want our students to understand that drama has always
had its roots in far deeper soil than most of us realize. One

13
of the first courses we introduce to high school students is
The Story of Drama, sometimes also entitled Comedy and Trag-
edy. Exploring the Greek wellsprings of formal Western
theater, students begin to recognize that drama was not
originally mere spectacle or entertainment. On the contrary,
the theater arose directly out of the loftiest spiritual aspira-
tions of the Greek people. In addition to the better-known
academies established to educate young boys in subjects
from geometry to gymnastics, more occult mystery schools
also existed in Greece, dedicated to preserving and impart-
ing the wisdom of the gods. Two gods represented nearly
diametrically opposite approaches to this search for divine
wisdom. Apollo, god of light, reason, healing, and mod-
eration, inspired a school whose disciples looked out into
nature to find enlightenment. By observing as dispassion-
ately as possible the seasons, the motions of the heavens,
the cycles in nature, they apprehended those eternal laws
that were the window into spiritual realities. The
Apollonians’ credo might be summed up in the phrase:
“Nothing in excess.”
The other mystery center owed its methods to
Dionysus, whose name meant the “god within,” who was
the god not only of the vine but also of passion, inspira-
tion, and dreams. His devotees looked not out into nature
but inward into human nature—they plumbed their own
inner depths to find divine wisdom. Their leading watch-
word, later made famous by Socrates, was “Know thyself.”
Followers of Dionysus would honor his life and death by
drinking to excess, engaging in frenzied, orgiastic dances,
and sacrificing goats, whose blood and flesh they often con-
sumed. (Except for the animal sacrifice, high schoolers have
wryly noted certain parallels between their own weekend
social gatherings and these Dionysian rites).
These ritual celebrations evolved into festivals with
performers and audiences. At a certain point, the narratives
sung by large choruses took a revolutionary leap when one

14
of the performers stepped out of the chorus and began to
speak as an individual actor, or hypocrite. Traditionally, this
moment is said to have occurred in 534 B.C., and Thespis is
credited with the inspiration of creating the first dialogue
with the chorus. Within a generation, Aeschylus had added
a second actor, reduced the chorus, and ushered in the
Golden Age of Greek drama, later elaborated by Sophocles
and Euripides. It is interesting to note that at the perfor-
mance of one of Aeschylus’ plays, the priests in attendance
became so convinced that Aeschylus had revealed some
closely guarded mystery wisdom, that they threatened to
kill him on the spot. Only after a desperate Aeschylus ran
for refuge to the altar of Dionysus and persuaded the priests
that he was neither an initiate nor an intentional betrayer
of the mysteries did he escape with his life. Such an epi-
sode certainly underscores how closely intertwined early
drama and spiritual seeking were.
Aristotle pointed to yet another parallel. In his
Poetics, he wrote that the goal of any worthy tragedy was
to arouse eleos and phobos in the audience, that is, compas-
sion and awe, to achieve a catharsis of those emotions. In-
terestingly, in the Dionysian school, the great danger of too
much inward looking was that you could suffer from self-
indulgent egotism and become a slave to your passions. In
the Apollonian school, the danger was that by directing all
your attention to the outer world, you might be overcome
by a great fear that you would lose a sense of yourself stand-
ing before the vastness of the universe. If the Dionysian
neophytes could balance their selfish desires and passions
with a greater awareness of others, they might develop
eleos—com-passion. And if the Apollonian novices managed
to transform the fear of losing themselves into a “fear-less
beholding,” they might experience the phobos, or awe, to
which Aristotle referred.
Looked at in this light, every performance of a trag-
edy was a kind of “mini-initiation,” both for actors and

15
audience, providing them with a powerful cathartic expe-
rience designed to help them find a kind of soul equilib-
rium. The features of this experience seem remarkably simi-
lar to the preconditions for admission into the mystery
schools, which required a purification of one’s baser emo-
tions prior to any serious spiritual advancement. Perhaps
drama in ancient Greece possessed a far more sacred as-
pect than most people imagine.

Looking for Lawfulness

Once introduced to this background, our young
actors may appreciate the loftier intentions to which drama
can still aspire. We may be twenty-five centuries removed
from our theatrical roots, but drama still exerts an almost
primal fascination for theater and movie lovers the world
over. We want to be moved, to feel deeply, to be reminded
of some long-forgotten truth, or to discover some new truth
through the enacted story. Our aim, in all the drama work
we do with young people, is to infuse every exercise, every
rehearsal, every performance with as much meaning as
possible.
At the same time, we try never to forget that drama
is playing, that for teenagers acting can be a form of self-
discovery, as well as the successor to the imaginative play
of childhood. That is why so much of our play preparation
involves games and improvisational exercises designed to
heighten our students’ sheer delight in employing their
imaginations. Following is a description of the approach
to working dramatically with teenagers that my colleagues
and I have developed over the past two decades. We have
borrowed heavily from the invaluable resources of Viola
Spolin, Peter Bridgmont, Keith Johnstone, and many oth-
ers, but most of all, from Michael Chekhov, who, in turn,
based his methods on Rudolf Steiner’s insights into the
human being. Just after World War I, Steiner designed an
educational model founded upon the idea that every child

16
is a spiritual being whose primary capacities of thinking,
feeling, and willing unfold developmentally. Steiner indi-
cated that at every stage of growth, this threefold nature
needs to be nourished by age-appropriate material.

From Much Ado About Nothing – 10th grade production

Waldorf schools have arisen in response to this

need for a schooling that would primarily cultivate the will
in the pre-school years, the feeling life during the elemen-
tary grades, and the new conceptual thinking that emerges
at puberty during the high school years. However, because
of the interweaving character of these three primary forces
in every human being in every stage of life, one could say
that Waldorf education was holistic long before it became
a fashionable idea in educational circles. One of the great
tragedies of mainstream education today is the tendency

17
to see students as the recipients of intellectual training only.
The result has been a “head-heavy” curriculum that gives
short shrift to the all-important feeling realm that both nour-
ishes and is nourished by artistic activities—dancing, sing-
ing, painting, sculpting, writing poetry, and of course, act-
ing.
What has always appealed to me about Steiner’s
approach to education is his resolute insistence that our
lives do not transpire randomly, in some haphazard, helter-
skelter fashion. Rather, just as there is an immutable order
to the laws governing nature, so there is a lawfulness to
human development. Furthermore, the Waldorf curricu-
lum is another expression of that lawfulness, if indeed at
every stage of human growth, it really does respond to the
needs of each incarnating child.
For some reason, the sensible sequence and order
of the Waldorf curriculum eluded us when we began our
dramatic work many years ago. In the midst of a play pro-
duction, in particular, we directed our charges as if we were
unseasoned sailors caught in a surprise squall, shouting in
vain to be heard above the storm, lurching around the deck
looking for secure footing, groping blindly to chart a course
through the murk. It always seemed like a small miracle
that the boat did not capsize and that the play (usually)
survived the chaos and the commotion.
After a number of such experiences—observing the
tension and strain in the cast, the occasionally berserk be-
havior of the directors, the way the production encroached
upon the rest of the school day, the mounting pressure on
everyone as the performance dates neared—we began to
wonder if all this chaos was the healthiest way of prepar-
ing for a play. Couldn’t we find a way of working with
drama that might eliminate some of the tension-producing
chaos, that instead might proceed according to the same
kind of “lawfulness” as other aspects of the Waldorf cur-
riculum?

18
 Years of bungling and failed experiments have
eventually led to the ideas described in this book. It is less
a fixed system than an evolving approach to working dra-
matically with young people. Our approach is based upon
two premises:

1) Teenagers might become better actors and more

socially aware individuals by experiencing age-appropri-
ate, sequential dramatic exercises.
2) One might use a “developmental” approach to
an entire production.

To many people who have worked in the theater,

this latter suggestion might seem like a patently obvious
statement. You cannot jump into dress rehearsals before
the costumes are designed and sewn, nor can you ask stu-
dents to deepen their portrayals before introducing the
characters to the actors in some way. You cannot refine the
timing of entrances and exits before blocking the play. But
beyond the self-evident, commonly understood stages of a
production, we have developed a series of warm-ups, ex-
ercises and rehearsal methods that we believe encourage
the organic metamorphosis of any play. Furthermore, this
approach has helped in our striving after a balance between
journey and destination. We teachers/directors should
never lose sight of the performance as a worthy, ultimate
goal, but we also want the process to help young actors
find new dimensions in themselves. At the same time, we
hope that the dramatic experience strengthens the all-im-
portant social fabric so critical to community building in
our time.

19
 Chapter III

Seeing the Whole

Working with young actors during a production
requires that four theatrical challenges be surmounted:

1) Blocking—designing and “ensouling” a physical

space that is both visually interesting and sup
ports the characters’ interactions;
2) Timing—refining the timing to such a degree that,
despite varying tempos from scene to scene, a
cohesive, seamless quality to the action onstage
results;
3) Atmosphere—devising appropriate “atmo-
spheres” that permeate and intensify every scene,
providing an invisible, unifying substance that
charges the entire play;
4) Characterization—creating believable characters
whose conflicts, failings, dreams, and triumphs
touch the audience.

None of these critical undertakings should be at-

tempted before everyone involved first understands, then
envisions, the totality of the play. In preparation for our
productions, we spend some weeks with our students care-
fully reading through the text of the play aloud. We try to
identify central themes and movements of the play. On a
practical level, one of the great preliminary challenges of

20
any production is to translate an overarching vision of the
play into an artistic, visually arresting poster. Students
work long hours trying to design some central image that
somehow captures the essence of the play. For Twelfth Night,
one student used black and white to great effect by creat-
ing interlocking, silhouetted mirror images to represent
the theme of twins in the play. Another student drew an
old jalopy overloaded with people, pots, and bedding as
the centerpiece of a Grapes of Wrath poster.
This activity of trying to comprehend the totality
of a play is not simply an intellectual exercise; it also has
applications far beyond the practical. Michael Chekhov
advised actors to “fly over” the whole of a play in their
imaginations, so that they carried onstage at the beginning
of the first scene a picture of the last moments of the final
scene. Why? Acting is as much a way of conveying invis-
ibilities—unexpressed intentions, dimly felt urges, secret
desires—as it is of expressing the tangible and concrete. If
thoughts can be considered realities, then possessing such
an all-encompassing vision of the play may actually help
bring coherence and unity to a performance.
It is a sign of the complex, fragmented times we
live in that fewer and fewer people seem interested in or
capable of seeing the totality of a situation. In their natu-
rally self-absorbed and preoccupied way, teenagers are es-
pecially prone to missing “the big picture.” We work hard
at helping our students appreciate the design, the move-
ment, the underlying aims of the play. Such an approach
gives young actors practice in acquiring that broader per-
spective so lacking in modern life.
Only when our young actors have begun to see
the play as a colorful and living tapestry do we begin to
incorporate the other key elements required of a successful
production that were mentioned above: blocking, charac-
terization, timing, and atmosphere. But in what order
should they be tackled? Attempting to work with all
aspects of staging simultaneously had previously yielded

21
only chaos and way too much pressure. For some clear
direction, we decided to return to the very basis of Waldorf
education, that is, Steiner’s understanding of the growing
human being. It seemed to us that a play’s incarnation
might parallel in some fruitful ways the incarnation pro-
cess of the very students we were directing.

Conquering Gravity
During the first two or three years of life, children
primarily come to know the world spatially. Even infants
will flail their limbs in a seemingly random fashion, before
they discover they can flip themselves over and raise them-
selves up on their arms in preparation for crawling. Chil-
dren may develop at somewhat different tempos, but the
phases they pass through provide a common time sequence
for us all. Some children begin crawling at six months, some
later, but nearly all will crawl before they stand, and stand
before they take those first miraculous steps, and walk be-
fore they talk. Their whole existence seems dedicated to
conquering gravity and exploring the physical space sur-
rounding them. They are in constant movement when they
are awake, learning the textures and shapes of things, and
albeit more slowly, the distances between them. I will never
forget the sight of my then two-year-old son, now nearly
two decades ago, standing before the sliding glass door in
the kitchen one crisp winter evening, mesmerized by the
silver splendor of the full moon. After a long moment, he
stretched his arm up and out toward the moon, trying to
scoop it up in his fingers. Undaunted by his first failure,
he tried again before dropping his arm and being content
to admire the moon from afar. Such moments, and count-
less others, teach us about our spatial limitations as well as
our possibilities.
Taking our cue from this seemingly inherent hu-
man desire to orient ourselves in space first and foremost,
we ground virtually all of our drama work by beginning
with movement and gesture exercises. Shakespeare was

22
speaking of poets when he wrote that they “give to airy
nothing a local habitation and a name,” but he could just
as easily have been referring to directors. In terms of a
play, the blocking—the rough skeleton of entrances and ex-
its, general playing areas, the spatial relationships of char-
acters—provides a similar anchor for young actors. They
may not know who they are yet, but they begin to get com-
fortable with where they are.
Yet the who cannot be ignored; after all, bringing
characters to life is the foundation of all drama. Simply
shifting students around the stage without their having any
sense of how their characters move is like trying to play
chess without understanding the directional possibilities
of the pieces. So early on, our young actors become ac-
quainted with their characters’ gestures, their gaits, their
physical idiosyncracies. Later, as students get to know their
characters, they will dig into interior spaces—fears, wishes,
motives, the why of character development—which will
add depth and dimension to their portrayals. Indeed, this
is one of our actors’ most significant challenges. They will
need to focus their energies on character development from
the very beginning to the very end of any production.
(Chapter IX, entitled “Finding Each Other: Ensemble Play-
ing” explores this element in more detail.)

The Pulse of the Play

Only after the actors develop a strong sense of the
space of the play and of their characters’ movement through
that space do we attempt to refine the element of time, or
timing. It is far more difficult than the blocking to orches-
trate, as any director of a farce will confirm, and it can only
really be precisely calibrated once the physical “map” of
the play has been designed. On the great space/time con-
tinuum that circumscribes our lives, we conquer space long
before we make any sense of time. Tell a five-year old that
she should come in for supper in ten minutes; if you don’t
intervene, she may well continue blowing dandelion fluff

23
into the wind until dark. Or tell her that there are only
three more hours in the car until we reach grandma’s house,
and see how many times in the next hour she asks, “Are
we there yet?” At around age six or seven, children begin
to acquire some bodily grasp of time, mainly through rhyth-
mic games—playing hopscotch, jumping rope, skipping—
which is soon followed by a more conscious relationship
to time. Third graders in the Waldorf school learn to tell
time; nine-year-olds also begin to see the larger sweep of
time, looking back on their younger years with comments
such as, “When I was a kid, I sure was cute.” They may
also begin to look to the future with real longing or even
apprehension. The first faint recognition of their own mor-
tality can whisper to them at this time.
This same visceral understanding of time that chil-
dren possess becomes a tool in the theater for exploring a
character’s tempo. Does he move through the world drag-
ging his heels or bouncing along at double time? Does she
have the mercurial metabolism of a sparrow or the slug-
gish digestion of an ox? Does she breathe slowly and se-
curely or shallowly and anxiously? Does he speak ponder-
ously or with a “machine gun tongue”?
This question of breathing can be expanded to con-
sider how a particular scene, or even how the entire play,
“breathes.” Shakespeare, of course, is the master of vary-
ing the pace within his plays. The inspired insertion of the
gravedigger’s black humor just before the climactic final
scene of Hamlet allows the audience a much needed “exha-
lation.” If a play is well paced, it can actually deepen the
collective breathing of an audience. Conversely, a poorly
timed production—one in which breathless actors rush
through lines in scenes that careen into one another like
bumper cars—can almost suffocate an audience, leaving
actors and spectators alike feeling cramped and unsatis-
fied.
So the time structure of a play can imprint itself as
surely as the space in which it is enacted. In fact, one might

24
say that the rhythms within a play sculpt the space within
a play. Who can remain unaffected by the compelling pace
of the “Get thee to a nunnery” scene between Hamlet and
Ophelia? It begins deliberately, with an almost tender greet-
ing; then, fueled by Hamlet’s suspicion that Ophelia is
“bait” dangled by her father to determine the source of
Hamlet’s “madness,” the scene lurches out of control. It
accelerates with all the speed and unforeseeable force of a
train derailment, as Hamlet’s whirling words leave Ophelia
crushed and bewildered. Such variations of tempo can
leave the audience with an afterimage as palpable as the
tracks left on asphalt by squealing, smoking tires.

Charging the Atmosphere

In any absorbing dramatic piece, actors create an
atmosphere onstage, permeating the scene with a kind of
electrical charge that augments the mood. Before they are
teenagers, children have less ability to understand or to
implement this idea of suffusing the air around them. That
is one reason most early elementary school productions,
no matter how artfully staged, lack depth and dimension.
This capacity to really charge the atmosphere only comes
with the onset of adolescence. The miraculous transforma-
tion from child to teenager is not just another small step up
a smooth marble staircase. The two stages of life resemble
one another in the way a candle flame resembles a forest
fire. Looking at a contented, clear-eyed, well-proportioned
ten-year old, who could foresee the dramatic outer and the
turbulent inner changes that would make that same child
nearly unrecognizable four or five years later? Much is
made of adolescents’ becoming sexually mature, of their
biological ability to conceive children, even though they
are just out of childhood themselves. But what of their
newfound capacity to conceive abstract ideas, to think more
conceptually than ever before? And what about the rich
and strange new interior world they begin to plumb? Chil-
dren seem content to skim along the surface of the water;

25
adolescents long to dive beneath the surface and discover
a wondrous world below, full of shadowy shapes, dark
caverns, darting color.
As teenagers begin to experience the deepening of
their own burgeoning inner lives and the accompanying,
unpredictable storms of their mood swings, they also ac-
quire the possibility of recreating those storms onstage.
Many years ago I directed seventh graders in a production
of The Miracle Worker. It had been a difficult class to teach,
a mob of rude and unruly hooligans at their worst, a spir-
ited but resistant group even at their best. Tackling a play
with the emotional resonance of The Miracle Worker was
extremely risky, but somehow they managed to harness
their otherwise seething energies. The two girls who por-
trayed Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan were particularly
gifted, as was evidenced best in the dining room scene
where the young girl playing Helen acted like the spoiled
child of darkness she had been brought up to be—groping
her way around the table during the meal, using her fin-
gers to help herself to anyone’s plateful of food, discarding
what she did not want on the floor. When Annie could no
longer bear to sit another moment witnessing this display
of unbridled crudeness, she insisted that the rest of the fam-
ily leave the room so that she might begin to teach Helen
some basic dining etiquette. What ensued is one of the
greatest battles of will ever conceived for the stage. Annie
threw down the gauntlet by physically picking up Helen,
pushing her down in a chair, pressing a napkin in her lap,
and forcing her to eat with a fork. Defiant to the end, Helen
kicked, bit, and flailed away, trying in vain to escape this
determined, strong-armed stranger.
The irony of such a seemingly violent scene is that
it can only be played by actors who have a great deal of
self-control. The two young girls in these roles had to pre-
cisely calibrate their movements to avoid seriously injur-
ing each other. At the same time, they had the challenge of

26
expressing all the rage and single-minded tenacity they
could summon. To help them in this regard, they worked
on saturating the scene with an atmosphere of bristling ten-
sion. Although they were only thirteen at the time, these
two young teenagers relied on their own quickening imagi-
nations and newfound emotional depths to create a scene
of passionate intensity.

Getting Some Size

Twenty years ago, a dear actor friend of mine once
heard me complaining about some trifling problem. He
chided me for being so self-absorbed, declared that it was
beneath me to get enmeshed in such pettiness, and exhorted
me to “get some size.” I have forgotten what the problem
was, but I have never forgotten his advice; indeed, I regu-
larly pass his wise counsel on to my young players. We
enlarge our characters and get some size for ourselves when
we extend our awareness beyond our own self-imposed
limits to the possibilities that arise in interaction with oth-
ers.
Earlier, I mentioned character-building as the most
central and ongoing challenge of any production. During
each of the other stages—orienting the players in space,
developing a sense of tempo, and creating an objective
mood—actors strive to become convincing characters. As
in real life, however, this incarnation process may be the
most difficult undertaking of all, for it comes closest to the
core of what it means to be human. People search for this
mysterious “self” all their lives; some expect to find it walk-
ing well-lit avenues; others plunge down forbidding, un-
marked trails. How can teenagers, who are not fully ego
beings yet, hope to discover the essential self of the charac-
ters they must play?
They find it in the same way female authors de-
scribe male characters so insightfully, the way younger play-
wrights enter so knowingly into the psyche of the old. They

27
use their powers of observation and, above all, their bound-
less capacities of imagination. Surely Walt Whitman
touched upon a universal truth when he proclaimed in his
Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” (p. 74)
We all contain male and female: the long-suffering and the
robust, the faint-hearted and the bold, the bumbling and
the graceful. They simply need to be recognized and liber-
ated. The imagination unlocks all doors, makes accessible
all remote and uncharted regions of the soul.
We use dozens of different imaginative exercises
to help our young actors become acquainted with these
many sides of themselves. Some involve closed-eye visu-
alization as the basis of character-building. We ask stu-
dents literally to put their characters on, as they would pull
a nightgown down over their heads. They picture the way
their characters stand or sit in a particular scene, the way
they speak a line in that stance, the gestures they employ.
With their eyes still closed, the students outwardly strike
their character’s pose, then come to life, simultaneously
speaking their lines aloud to the accompaniment of the
gestures they have visualized. They work improvisation-
ally with their characters as six-year-olds, as ninety-six-year
olds; they compose love letters to their characters’ sweet-
hearts, and they speak at their own funerals.

An Alternative Method
This imaginative approach to developing char-
acter offers students an alternative to the most influential
current acting technique, popularly known as “the
Method.” One of the Method’s primary tenets is that ac-
tors can rely on their own reservoir of feelings to uncover
the requisite emotion they might need to play a particular
scene. If they need to express anger onstage, they find some
situation in their past when a parent or friend provoked
rage in them. Once the feeling is identified and reawakened,
the actors learn ways of harnessing and transferring this

28
emotional recall to the present acting moment. This ap-
proach sounds appealing, because actors need look no fur-
ther than their own personal experiences to stoke the fires
of their craft. In the twentieth century some of the world’s
greatest performers have used the Method to create an of-
ten imitated realistic style.
But is this technique appropriate for teenagers? I
have my doubts on several grounds. I wonder if adoles-
cents have developed the necessary objectivity to be able
to distinguish between the real emotion experienced in the
past and the “reheated” feeling now employed for artistic
purposes. It is a hard enough distinction even for adults
who are accomplished performers. I heard about an actress
who played Lady Macbeth with a touring company. Over
the course of several weeks she had to play this demand-
ing role—one of the most ruthless and malevolent females
ever seen on the stage—eight times a week. Halfway
through the tour, she had to be replaced because she had
used the Method to such an extent that she could no longer
separate her self from that of Lady Macbeth; she became
possessed in a way. The dark and depraved side of herself,
which she uncovered to play the role, took complete con-
trol of her private, as well as her professional, life. The
actress could no longer escape her own creation.
To avoid such entanglements, the imaginative ap-
proach described above is less invasive and offers a built-
in safeguard. Any role that can be put on as externally as
one puts on a costume can also be taken off just as easily. I
am always amazed that our students can be very much
themselves as they get into costume and makeup just min-
utes before a performance, then go onstage and become a
raging Leontes in A Winter’s Tale or an irrepressibly loony
Madwoman of Chaillot with astonishing conviction. A
moment after the final curtain, they are excited, distracted,
and back-to-abnormal teenagers, thinking more about the
cast party than about the play they just performed. Such

29
an approach gives young people the possibility of shed-
ding their characters and retaining an invaluable kind of
freedom in the process.
Another concern I have about employing the
Method with teenagers is that instead of helping them
healthily meet the world, it drives them ever more deeply
into themselves. It is all too easy for any adolescent, not to
mention an aspiring actor, to get stuck in his or her own
subjective rut. By their very nature, adolescents tend to see
the world through the filter of their own subjectivity. In-
deed, Rudolf Steiner’s great exhortation to teachers of ado-
lescents was to help lead them from their own subjectivity
to the objectivity of the wider world. Even without the
Method, teenage actors tend to focus on their roles, their
scenes, without giving much thought to that critical inter-
action between characters, where the drama really occurs.
During the latter part of a production, we use exer-
cises that encourage our students to break out of the nar-
rower confines of their own roles, to widen their world by
“embracing” all the other characters in the play. They ex-
change lines, props, even entire roles in rehearsal. They
shadow each other onstage, provide physical and verbal
mirrors for one another in warm-ups. By constantly hav-
ing to enter into the experience of the other, students de-
velop a heightened awareness that takes them beyond
themselves. In this respect, drama offers a creative vehicle
for meeting one of the great challenges of our time—recog-
nizing and cultivating a sense for the uniqueness of oth-
ers. What is community building if not a means of honor-
ing the individuality in every other person without losing
our own sense of self?

The Final Ingredient—Add Audience and Stir

What director has not had the experience of charg-
ing frantically around for several weeks trying to whip a
production into readiness, only to lament three days before

30
the performance that, “If only I had another week, this play
might not be a disaster waiting to happen!” We never have
enough time. At a certain point, usually less than five min-
utes before opening curtain, the director may find a quiet
corner and say a little silent prayer. He prays that some
interested, guiding spirits might help keep the duct-taped
set from collapsing; he implores them to keep the back of
the leading lady’s dress closed with a bent bobby pin be-
cause no one could find a single safety pin in the entire
costume room; he humbly asks that the terrified student
playing the messenger, who has never once spoken his five
measly lines correctly, finally gets them right.
Then, more times than not, prayers are answered.
The set does not even wobble, the dress remains intact, the
messenger not only remembers his lines, he speaks with
the perfect blend of authority and deference. Moreover,
the actor playing Captain Cat in Under Milkwood suddenly
sounds exactly like the old sea salt the director envisioned
from the start. The characters are more animated than ever
before. Characters who never acknowledged each other’s
presence really listen to one another. They fill pauses with
real feeling. Some of the players incorporate inventive ges-
tures that were never rehearsed. What is happening? It is
as if a kind of grace has descended upon the stage.
When the final ingredient—the audience—is added
to a play, magic occurs. It is impossible to prepare young
actors for that electrifying feeling of opening night, when
the atmosphere that the actors have been trying to fill with
one emotion or another is suddenly pulsing with anticipa-
tion. Through some unexplainable alchemy, the audience
helps the players to breathe new and unexpected vitality
into lines that had been rehearsed dully dozens of times
before. When this happens, it is as if the play assumes an
existence independent of the director’s efforts. For males
involved in the theater, this experience is as close as they
will ever get to giving birth; for females, it may be a

31
preview of actual labor pains. This is the moment that di-
rectors hope for, more than the applause after the final cur-
tain or the kudos of the parents or even the gratitude of the
young actors, who more clearly than ever now see the fruits
of all their labors. Every such birth of a play confirms over
and over that there are indeed guiding spirits. Our audi-
ence may be far larger than we imagine.

From Much Ado About Nothing – 10th grade production

32
 PART TWO

“INCARNATING” A PLAY

Chapter IV

THE FIRST PHASE: FREEING THE PHYSICAL

If we follow in a theatrical sequence the previously

described phases of human development, the first stage of
production will correspond to that early period of life when
children get to know the world spatially. Phase one of our
play productions emphasizes the physical orientation of
the actors. This orientation can work on three levels:

1) Initially, as warm-ups and games that help to

stretch and loosen participants’ physical or-
ganism

2) As an avenue for arranging the larger spatial

relationships of the play, also known as block-
ing

3) As a method of exploring the physicality of their

specific characters

Warm-ups
Actors need to tune their instrument as diligently
as do professional musicians and singers. In the case of
students, such exercises provide more than an opportunity
to limber up; they act as a transition from whatever activ-
ity our students have just completed to the drama at hand.

33
If our young actors drag themselves into class as if all the
blood has been drained from their bodies, we turn to exer-
cises that wake them up. Conversely, if students come
bouncing in like bowling pins, other warm-ups can focus
their energy, help slow them down, even dissipate some of
the inner tension they often carry.
Warm-ups activities should be used at the begin-
ning of classes or rehearsals. Because of chronic time con-
straints, the temptation to forego such exercises and leap-
frog into the middle of rehearsal is often overwhelming.
However, taking such a shortcut would be tantamount to
eating a potato raw. Our students could probably swallow
it without it killing them, but later on they might complain
of indigestion. Warm-ups and games help young actors to
prepare for the short run—the rehearsal at hand—and for
the long run as well, by introducing some of the basic skills
underlying dramatic work—concentration, adaptability, pe-
ripheral awareness, presence of mind, playfulness.
Most of the exercises described below are best done
in a circle. It is the form that best reinforces the ensemble
idea; everyone is in the same relationship to each other and
equidistant from a center. There is no front or rear, no place
to hide, no obvious leader or follower. What happens
within a circle has a binding, unifying quality, as several of
the exercises underscore.

Exercise 1: YES
One person begins by making eye contact with
someone across the circle and gazes at the other individual
until the person receiving the gaze says, “Yes.” The first
person then crosses toward the second person’s spot in the
circle. However, as the first person moves, the second per-
son must link eyes with a third person, who, in turn, must
say, “Yes.” Then the second person moves towards the
third’s place, while the third person makes eye contact with
a fourth, and so on. This exercise should begin slowly. Once
the group becomes accomplished at the sequence, it can be

34
played silently, with people simply nodding their heads
instead of saying “Yes.” This is an excellent focusing, calm-
ing activity.

Exercise 2: BALL TOSS

Have one person in the circle hold a bean bag or
tennis ball. This person again makes eye contact with some-
one else, then calls out that person’s name before tossing
the ball, underhanded and very deliberately, to the recipient.
The idea here is to underscore the importance of the tosser
making real contact with the recipient of the toss. On a
simple but metaphorical level, this activity parallels the
give-and-take so essential to dynamic theater.
A more challenging variation of this exercise is to
have two balls being tossed around the circle simulta-
neously. Another is to turn the circle of people into a “walk-
ing wheel,” whereby the tosser attempts to throw to a mov-
ing target.

The next few warm-ups involve passing something

around the circumference of the circle, sometimes for the
sake of speed, sometimes for precision.

Exercise 3: PULSE
Everyone in the circle holds hands. Someone be-
gins by squeezing the hand of the person next to her, who
follows suit by squeezing the hand of his neighbor. The
objective is to pass the pulse around the circle as rapidly as
possible. Two variations: 1) Try passing the pulse with
eyes closed. It will probably travel faster! 2) With ad-
vanced groups, try passing a pulse both clockwise and
counterclockwise simultaneously, but be forewarned—it
gets very confusing.

Exercise 4: PASS A STRETCH

One person in the circle performs some stretching
or limbering movement— for example, rolling the neck,

35
bending at the waist and touching toes. The person to the
left or right then does the same stretch and adds another.
The next player reproduces the first two and adds a third.
The object here is not only to loosen up, but to be so obser-
vant that each person imitates the preceding movements
as precisely as possible.

Exercise 5: PASS A FACE

Someone begins by making a ridiculous face, with
or without the help of fingers to distort one’s features. Then
the student turns to a neighbor and holds the expression
while the neighbor mirrors the face as accurately as pos-
sible and then passes it along. This is also a good exercise
in self-control, because the whole idea of passing around
some absurd facial expression is sure to elicit laughter.

Exercise 6: PASS A SOUND

This is one of many vocal warm-ups that aid ac-
tors in loosening up their mouths, throats, and breathing,
all critical tools of the trade. Start by uttering a consonant
or vowel, turning toward the person next to you as you
vocalize a “Shhhhhhhh” or a “K” or an “Aaaaaaah,” expel-
ling as much breath as possible in the process. In quick
succession the sound is passed from one player to another.
You can alter the sound from consonant to vowel or vice
versa when it completes the circle. You can also send one
sound in one direction and another in the opposite direction.

Exercise 7: SINGING TO THE BLIND

Another vocal warm-up, which also requires inten-
sified listening capacities, begins by pairing people up. One
person volunteers to be blind, simply by closing her eyes.
The other participant stands behind his partner and begins
to sing or hum some tune. It can be anything, from some
recognizable piece with lyrics to some purely improvised
humming. Whatever the singer chooses, he then moves

36
slowly backwards or sideways, but always close enough
for his partner to hear. As sailors were drawn inexorably
towards the haunting sounds of the legendary sirens’ in
Homer’s Odyssey, so the blind participant follows her
partner’s singing. However, not wishing to cause the ship-
wreck awaiting the Greeks, the singer must protect his blind
partner from crashing into any other students by leading
her safely around a room full of other moving pairs.

Exercise 8: PASS A CLAP

As with other movements around the circle, this
begins with one person clapping once and having each
successive person follow with a single clap as rapidly as
possible, creating an “applause wave.”

Exercise 9: PASSING HOPS

Imagine this time that a mouse is scuttling under
everyone’s feet in the circle. One person starts the motion
by hopping on one foot, then the other, in quick succes-
sion. The next person does the same, to make way for the
invisible, racing rodent. Anticipation is the key to this ex-
ercise.

Exercise 10: PASS AN IMAGINARY OBJECT

This is really a miming exercise, which calls for
vivid visualization and the precision of a surgeon. Begin
by creating out of thin air, with your hands, some familiar
object—say, an umbrella. You must fashion the umbrella
very deliberately, from the curved wooden handle to the
button that opens the top. Creating such objects involves
intense concentration and commitment; they will only be
as real as one’s imagination conceives them and one’s hands
coax them into being. Even imaginary objects need to have
weight, texture, clear boundaries, dimension, even color!
Once the umbrella is “visible,“ hand it to the per-
son next to you, who acknowledges it, perhaps by shaking

37
rain off it before collapsing it. Then beginning with the
umbrella, the student transforms it into another object. He
uses magic hands to elongate or crush or hollow out a new
article out of the old. After reshaping the umbrella into,
say, a yo-yo, he does a trick or two and passes it on to the
next person.
For a hyperactive class, this is a remarkably ab-
sorbing, settling activity. Students will delight each other
with their imaginative creations and ingenious transforma-
tions. Where else can mops turn into frogs and rakes into
suitcases except in the dextrous hands of inventive young
people?

Exercise 11: CLENCH AND UNCLENCH

We do this exercise standing, but it might be even
more effective if students are lying on their backs. Begin
with the toes; have participants tighten all the muscles in
their feet for a count of perhaps five, hold their breath as
well, and then release it. Move up to the calves—clench
for a few seconds, hold breath, then release. Do the same
for each major muscle group as you move up the body, with
particular attention to the shoulders and neck. This can be
an effective way to settle a rambunctious class or to end a
tension-filled rehearsal.

Exercise 12: FINDING ONE’S BALANCE

Students should stand as upright as possible, with
their feet together, and fix their gaze on a distant point.
Have them shift their weight as far forward as they can
without moving their feet or losing their balance. They
should hold this forward position for several seconds. Then
have them lean back as far as they can, again without los-
ing their balance. Finally, lead them back to a balanced
midpoint between the two extremes. Here they can appre-
ciate the stability that comes of establishing an equilibrium.

38
 Exercise 13: BECOMING A MAST
Another relaxation exercise is to have participants
close their eyes and imagine that their bodies are masts on
a ship. Have them place their feet together and, without
bending at the waist, sway back and forth to the move-
ment of the waters gently rocking the ship. The waters
could also become stormier, which would have the conse-
quence of forcing the masts to roll and reel more vigor-
ously, even to the very verge of their balance points.

Exercise 14: HAND WRESTLING

For this exercise, students should pair up, without
regard for relative height or weight, and face each other.
Have them place their palms, fingers up, against their part-
ners’. Then, in silence, each pair should have a “conversa-
tion” with their hands by pushing into one another, creat-
ing some resistance and, simultaneously, exploring the
space between them. First one person should take the ini-
tiative and lead, then the other. Then, neither student should
take the initiative—rather, together the pair tries to “sense”
which direction their hands want to move, without impos-
ing anyone’s will. Finally, and this is a very difficult next
step, you might ask students to do this exercise without
touching palms at all, but rather mirroring each other’s
movement. (See MIRRORS, Exercise 26.)
Students need to be forewarned that this is not a
competition or one of those games designed to see who
can knock the other off balance. Rather, the intention here
is to develop a sensitivity to the unspoken impulses that
can weave between actors if they “listen” attentively
enough with their palms.

Exercise 15: DYING A THOUSAND DEATHS

Ask each student to imagine a melodramatic, silly,
or ingenious way to die. Then have each one enact his or
her demise, either simultaneously or, far more preferably,

39
in succession. Some memorable mimed deaths have in-
cluded: swallowing a toothbrush; parachute failure lead-
ing to a “pancake” end; getting flattened by the barbells
one actor had lifted above his head; electrocution induced
by picking up a downed power line. Have them act out
agonizingly long death-throes, during which someone
feigned being stabbed and, not unlike Pyramus’ absurdly
prolonged expiration in the play within the play in A Mid-
summer Night’s Dream, they flop around like a fish on the
floor for several minutes, appearing to die a number of
times before resuscitating long enough to moan and con-
vulse yet again.

Exercise 16: CIRCLE MIRROR

One participant makes a random movement (do not
let anyone think too long before moving), with an accom-
panying vocal expression. Someone might flap his arms as
he bounces on the balls of his feet and shouts
“Wheeeeeeop!” As soon as he completes the gesture, the
entire circle in unison mimics the movement and sound as
precisely as possible.

Games
Games are rarely played solely for their diversion-
ary value. Each of the following games demands partici-
pation that helps cultivate fundamental dramatic capaci-
ties. What are those basic skills? Most games require
heightened social awareness, an intensified sensitivity to
what’s happening outside oneself; others necessitate quick
thinking and lightning reflexes, presence of mind, grace
under pressure; still others ask students to develop an in-
ner flexibility. Such games really become a training to en-
hance the inner mobility actors must rely on to respond to
any unexpected current during a performance.

40
 Exercise 17: GOTCHA
One person stands in the middle of the circle and
calls out someone’s name. The person whose name is called
must instantly drop to the floor, while the person on either
side turns and points to the other, saying “Gotcha.” Slow
reflexes are a liability here. If the original person whose
name is called does not duck quickly enough to avoid be-
ing in the line of fire of one of his neighbors, then he be-
comes “it” and replaces the player in the middle. If he ducks
quickly enough, then the slower of the two neighbors point-
ing and calling out “gotcha” will go into the middle. The
player who was in the middle takes the place on the circle
of the person who replaces him or her. This game is won-
derful for a group needing to familiarize itself quickly with
its members’ names. Even for a group well known to one
another, the exercise stimulates alertness, energy, and tre-
mendous concentration.

Exercise 18: ZIP/ZAP/ZOP

Like GOTCHA, this game requires the reflexes and
the peripheral awareness of a hummingbird. All the mem-
bers of the circle press their flat palms together and hold
them, fingers pointing up, in front of their chests. One
player starts by pointing her “hand sandwich,” fingers first,
at someone across the circle, saying, “Zip.” The person be-
ing pointed at must then either aim directly back at the
first player or at another person on the circle and say, “Zap.”
Without missing a beat, the third person must either re-
turn the aim to the Zapper or to yet another player, saying
“Zop.” The idea here is to make sure that the “Zip, Zap,
Zop, Zip, Zap, Zop” sequence is followed in order and with
increasing speed as the students become proficient at the
game. Any member of the circle who either fails to respond
to being someone’s target, or who says one of the “Z” words
out of order, is out of the game and must become a active
spectator. The idea here is to increase the speed of the ex-
change until it is a rapid-fire showdown between two or
three survivors.
41
 Exercise 19: CHANGING PARTNERS
A large space is most desirable for this very active
game. Participants stand in pairs, arms linked, around the
circle. A chaser is designated, as well as a chasee, who tries
to avoid being tagged by the chaser. The chasee can find a
safe harbor by linking arms with any person standing in a
pair. Once this occurs, however, the person on the other
side of the newly formed trio must release to become the
chaser, and the chaser abruptly becomes the chasee. This is
a frenetic game, full of mad pursuit and sudden reversals.
No physical activity is better for demanding the presence
of mind needed to instantaneously shift from pursuer to
pursued.

Exercise 20: SOURCE OF THE MOTION

Viola Spolin included this among hundreds of dy-
namic exercises in her definitive book Improvisation for the
Theater. Students sit in a circle, except for one volunteer
who leaves the room while a leader is selected. This leader
begins some rhythmic movement—tapping, clapping, nod-
ding, or the like—which everyone else imitates as exactly
as possible. Then the volunteer re-enters the room, goes to
the center of the circle, and attempts to identify the source
of the motion. All the while, a crafty leader will slightly
alter the movement; the other participants will immediately
adapt to the change, without looking directly at the leader,
of course. If the volunteer correctly guesses who started
the motion, the person who was the source now becomes
the next volunteer to leave the room.

Exercise 21: STREETS AND ALLEYS, or CAT AND

MOUSE
Students stand in a number of straight rows, at least
four to six, comprising of four to six people each. Rows
should be equidistant from one another, no more than an
arms’ length apart. Participants create “streets” by joining
hands with students in front of and behind them. They

42
create “alleys” by dropping hands with their street part-
ners and joining hands now with students standing in rows
to the left and right of them. Two other students have been
held out of the row formation; one becomes the cat, the
other, the mouse. The cat begins at one end of a street, the
mouse at the other. The cat will, of course, chase the mouse
and attempt to catch it by tagging it. However, students
will instantly switch from street to alley formation when
the teacher calls out, “Switch!” What was a clear avenue
for the cat suddenly becomes a stone wall, created by stu-
dents’ bodies. The cat cannot go over or under any such
walls, but must instead follow only the open streets and
alleys created by the students’ shifting arm positions. The
teacher should call switches often and unpredictably.

Exercise 22: HA-HA AND HEE-HEE

Arrange the group so they are sitting in circle, with
you among them. Have in your hands two common ob-
jects, such as a pen and a tennis ball or a book and a fork,
and designate one as a “ha-ha,” the other one a “hee-hee.”
(You could call them anything you like—I’ve most recently
used two nonsense words—a “spobo” and a “peelee”.)
Then turn to the person on your left, hand over one of the
items, and say, “I give to you a ha-ha.” Since everyone in
the circle suddenly has no memory, the person asks, “A
what?” To which you reiterate, “A ha-ha.” Then that per-
son turns to the next participant and says, “I give to you a
ha-ha.” The third person, in turn, asks “A what?” Now the
second person has already forgotten what the object is called
and must turn back to you to ask again, “A what?” Again,
you reply, “A ha-ha.” The second person then turns back
the third person and passes along the information, “A ha-
ha.” After the object has passed through several people’s
hands, the communication begins to echo and re-echo
around the circle: “I give to you a ha-ha.” “A what?” “A
what?” “A what?” “A what?” “A what?” “A ha-ha.” “A
ha-ha.” “A ha-ha.” “A ha-ha.” “A ha-ha.”

43
 As confusing as this may sound, the real confusion
begins when you pass the other object in the other direc-
tion. Now there is a “ha-ha” moving clockwise, and a “hee-
hee” proceeding counter-clockwise around the circle. What
happens when these “ha-ha” and “hee-hee” chains meet
and must pass each other? With “A what?” “A what?”
coming from both directions and needing to be passed on
to neighbors on both sides, the potential for pandemonium
is enormous. However, many groups manage to success-
fully pass both items around the circle and back to the
teacher, albeit not without a number of false starts, dead
ends, and a great deal of laughter.

Exercise 23: HAGOO

This game comes from the now-classic New Games
book first published over twenty years ago, which spawned
a whole generation of creative, noncompetitive activities.
This one is perfectly suited for teenagers who need to de-
velop self-control onstage. One of the most undermining
situations that can occur at this theatrical level is when an
actor drops out of character and smiles at an inappropriate
moment. Hagoo helps to counter this tendency in young,
inexperienced actors. Participants divide into two lines,
facing each other, far enough apart to create an aisle. Then
one person slowly begins to walk down the aisle, looking
at everyone she passes, left and right. The aim of the people
forming the aisle is to make the walker laugh. They may
make ridiculous faces, speak in cartoon voices, tell a joke,
catcall, mime some characteristic gesture or phrase of the
walker, fling a (tasteful) insult, anything short of physically
touching the walker. No tickling, pushing, poking, or in-
timidating allowed! If the person passes through the aisle
without cracking a smile, she is congratulated and takes
her place at the end of the line. If she fails, it is back to the
beginning for another go-round. Then another student at
the head of the line attempts to be a stalwart stoneface as
he walks the gauntlet.

44
 Exercise 24: BALL FREEZE
As in the warm-up BALL TOSS (Exercise 2), both
the tosser and intended receiver in this exercise must
heighten their awareness of each other, or they may liter-
ally and figuratively drop the ball. Both must focus on what
passes between them—in this case, the ball—for a success-
ful “communication.”
A much more challenging version of the ball toss
is to set people in motion around the room. Instead of
walking in a circle, students go wherever they like. How-
ever, everyone’s focus must be on the person with the ball.
The instant the ball is caught, everyone freezes until the
person in possession of the ball decides to move again. A
still more intensified version of this exercise is to transform
the ball into the world’s most precious and fragile object.
Now when the tosser throws the ball, everyone darts to-
ward the intended receiver, surrounds him, and becomes a
human cushion, to prevent a bobbled toss from hitting the
floor. Again, the instant the ball is caught, everyone freezes.
This game does wonders for teaching attentiveness
to that all-important central focus of any theatrical moment.
It also requires the tosser to become ever more aware of his
or her body language. It is all too easy to suddenly and
unpredictably toss the ball to an unsuspecting receiver. The
real challenge of the game is to develop a strong sense of
intentionality, so that one’s fellow actors can begin to “read”
with confidence one’s movements.

45
 Chapter V

Blocking
The term blocking does not describe the process of
developing a spatial map of the play; it implies a series of
rigid, cumbersome, unalterable decisions. Indeed, it can
be a tedious, dispiriting activity. Some directors meticu-
lously chart in advance, on paper, every cross, every ges-
ture their actors should make in every scene. Then they
shift the students around the stage like chess pieces. The
result can be deadly, with young actors moving rather me-
chanically along prescribed paths onstage without a clue
about what impels their characters to do so.
This initial blocking work can be much more fluid
and dynamic. Of course, directors need to envision the
general movements within and between scenes. But the
director who thinks he can precisely map out the play’s
blocking, in its unalterable totality, even before the first re-
hearsal, is probably kidding himself. Entrances and exits
have to change as set pieces appear. Crossings left and right,
up and downstage, should evolve more out of characters’
deepening interactions than out of some abstract scheme.
In fact, deliberately making minor changes in the blocking
periodically may actually keep the actors fresh and flex-
ible.
Taking a show on the road makes such changes
inevitable. Several years ago our sophomore class decided

46
to share their production of The Merry Wives of Windsor with
a number of schools in the Northeast. The first school we
visited had a most unwelcoming, awkward space at one
end of a small gymnasium. Unlike our own modified arena
stage, with exits leading out through the audience that sur-
rounds half the stage, this stage was very deep, half as wide,
and cut off completely from the audience. Needless to say,
we had to alter virtually our entire blocking in one after-
noon rehearsal. After our five-hour bus ride, I knew that
probably half of what we had changed would be utterly
forgotten by supper. Yet that evening’s performance was
one of the cast’s most animated. It was both nerve-wrack-
ing and breathtaking to witness the students improvise their
movements on the stage and adjust to each other’s inge-
nious staging. In one scene, a confused actor entered from
the left, exactly opposite the direction from which the ac-
tress onstage had just turned and called. When he made
his unexpected entrance from behind her, the character al-
ready onstage swung her head around and ad libbed, “Oh,
there you are! I’m all turned about!” Somehow she had the
presence of mind to stay in character, and at the same time,
artfully cover his mistake. The appreciative audience never
knew they were watching largely improvised action dur-
ing the entire play. Had our original blocking been more
rigid, I’m not sure the actors would have been so adapt-
able.
On another occasion, three days before our first
performance of The Mouse That Roared, one of the leads
broke his leg skiing. We had no understudies, so rather
than cancel the play, we decided to have the professor play
his part in a wheelchair. We had to make emergency ad-
justments with the blocking, including adding a ramp, but
again, the changes seemed to enhance, rather than dimin-
ish, the performance. I was particularly struck by how
much more verbally expressive the young actor with the
broken leg became when he could no longer rely on his
body language.

47
 Stage space almost always means an unnatural
space. Players become weary soldiers on a battlefield,
sprites in a forest, enraged demonstrators in the streets, law-
yers arguing in a courtroom, lovers on a moonlit beach, all
in an artificially designed, extremely limited acting area.
Most stages provide only a frontal perspective. If perform-
ers adhere to the old theatrical maxim, “Never turn your
back on the audience,” they are forced to contort themselves
in contrived and almost painful positions—bodies facing
forward, heads twisted sideways. How can we create situ-
ations onstage that appear to represent more natural move-
ments, while still honoring the constraints of such limited
playing areas?
Teachers/directors need to familiarize themselves
with some basic laws about moving around in a stage space.
These certainly don’t apply to all stages; arena staging, for
example, which has audience either partially or completely
surrounding the playing area, requires special consideration
of how to orient various scenes. Actors will always be cut-
ting off some portion of the audience to offer another sec-
tion unobstructed views. But for most stages, the follow-
ing points may be helpful:

l) Different levels onstage usually offer more visu-

ally arresting scenes than action which takes place on one
uniform level. Platforms, ramps, ladders, balconies, crates,
spiral staircases, tree stumps—dozens of imaginative set
pieces can provide possibilities for varied elevations. In
the absence of such set pieces, actors onstage can at least
vary their relative heights by sitting, standing, or squat-
ting to offer more interesting groupings.

2) Young and inexperienced actors tend to stand

too close to one another when speaking onstage. Perhaps
they assume that the same distances between people ap-
ply whether they are onstage or not. But when we transfer

48
our typically intimate, conversational proximity to the
stage, the actors seem jammed together, with too much
empty, dead space around them. Unless the actors are ei-
ther engaged in some conspiratorial scheme or a romantic
interlude, putting more space between actors than in ordi-
nary conversation creates more interest and even more ten-
sion.

3) In general, inexperienced actors need to enlarge

their movements and gestures onstage. One of my men-
tors explained it in the following manner: Imagine putting
a life-sized statue, mounted on a pedestal, in a closet. In
that small space, the statue will appear enormous. How-
ever, if you put that same life-sized statue in the middle of
a stage in a theater, the statue will suddenly appear quite
small, dwarfed by the space surrounding it. Therefore,
those of us who are life-sized actors need to become larger
than life onstage, or we, too, will actually appear smaller
than life!
This point was driven home to me when my wife
and I went to a performance of Kiss of the Spider Woman on
Broadway. In the most compelling scene in the play, Chita
Rivera, in the lead role, appeared in black at the center of
an immense, light-created web. At that moment, she
seemed to expand beyond the limits of her own body, to
fill the entire stage with an intensified energy, presence,
aura. After the play, we were fortunate enough to go back-
stage and meet Chita Rivera. We were astonished when
we encountered a very petite actress instead of the giant-
ess she had become in the web. She had certainly learned
how to “get some size” onstage.

4) Certain situations seem to invite archetypal

movements by the actors. For instance, when some secret
needs to be revealed, some aside spoken, some intimate
moment shared, actors invariably move downstage, closer

49
to the audience. When one actor wants to show that she’s
in control of a situation, that she’s got the upper hand over
another character, she can move in an slow arc behind that
character while both are facing the audience. An upstage
position tends to confer, or at least indicate, power or knowl-
edge. Characters wishing to spy on others most often con-
ceal themselves upstage. Think only of the famous garden
scene in Twelfth Night, when Malvolio unsuspectingly reads
aloud the forged love letter in front of a (barely) concealed
Sir Toby Belch and friends.

5) Creating friezes at critical moments in a play—

that is, freezing the actors in various positions—can be both
visually arresting and awakening for both audience and
actors. Such “living snapshots” are very difficult to hold
for very long, but they can disclose what otherwise might
be missed in normally paced action. One overused but still
effective method would be to freeze all other figures in a
scene while one character makes a pointed aside to the au-
dience.
At the end of the second act in the play The Skin of
Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder, a deluge of Biblical propor-
tions is heading towards Atlantic City. In the descending
darkness and whirling winds, the Antrobus family is fran-
tically dashing around the boardwalk trying to locate one
another so that they can board an ark before the pier col-
lapses. Just as the mother screams out the real name of her
missing son Henry—“CAIN!”—the action freezes. For a
moment, all that breathless, frenzied movement is held in
check, and the audience can behold each family member
in some revealing pose. Then Henry/Cain appears, the only
figure onstage moving, which accentuates his isolation from
the rest of his family. Within a heartbeat, the action resumes
at breakneck speed towards its Noah-esque conclusion.
Artfully composed freezes can leave indelible impressions
with an audience.

50
 6) Young actors need to learn how to enter before
they actually enter, to exit beyond the actual stage exit. The
tendency is to begin to act just as they cross that invisible
threshold dividing onstage from off. However, the most
effective actor will begin acting thirty seconds before he
hits the stage. That way his entrance will be a convincing
continuation of what was already begun in the wings, in-
stead of some rather jolting transition from his street self to
his onstage character.

7) Crowd scenes are among the most difficult to

block. Most groups congregrate onstage to support and
focus the central action. However, they can be static, deadly
displays, especially if the group exudes all the interest and
energy of grazing cattle. As in real life, most members of
an onstage crowd feel a certain anonymity and an accom-
panying lack of responsibility for taking a dynamic role in
the scene’s success. In terms of blocking, the worst two
extremes include either:

a) stringing a group out in a straight line, the

“police line-up” formation, or
b) clumping everyone together into a hydra-headed
mass, within which certain actors can com-
pletely hide from the audience. Smaller,
spread-out groupings within the larger crowd
often create more interest, with each mem-
ber of these subgroups related on some level
to those nearby. Ideally, each player also con-
veys some individual quality, without dis-
tracting from the main interaction onstage.

The real key to staging potent crowd scenes de-

pends upon the ability of the group to be true beholders, to
be such active listeners that they act as funnels to focus the
audience’s attention on the central action. At the climax of

51
The Winter’s Tale, Leontes and his court go to see the un-
veiling of a statue of his supposedly long-dead wife,
Hermione. When she stirs, then comes to life, the mem-
bers of the court in the background recoil as Leontes re-
coils; they gasp as he gasps, gape in amazement and fi-
nally witness one of the most touching reunions in all of
Shakespeare’s plays. Without the court members there to
reinforce Leontes’ (and the audience’s) reactions, the scene
loses part of its heart.

8) Every actor onstage needs to move from one

spot to another with some purpose in mind, impelled by
the inner demands of the character or situation. Too often
directors have their players move from one spot to another
in a scene simply to create an opening on the stage for an-
other character’s entrance. Following such mechanical di-
rections is worse than painting by the numbers, because
onstage the journey is every bit as important as the desti-
nation. The conviction with which a character moves will
ultimately determine whether the movement works or not.
Consider the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Demetrius, who has been hotly pursued by the hateful
Helen across the stage, may suddenly turn on her and ad-
vance menancingly. He does this not just for the sake of
variety but out of desperation—fleeing the tenacious young
lady does not seem to be working , so he changes his strat-
egy and says,

You do impeach your modesty too much

To leave the city, and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not:
To trust the opportunity of night,
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity.
(Act II, scene ii)

52
 On a mundane level, it seems most sensible to block
the play chronologically and as quickly as possible. We
have found that a week’s worth of hour-plus rehearsals is
usually enough to get through a slimmed down version
of a full-length play. Students need to bring pencils and
scripts to these classes and to be prepared to erase and
revise initial blocking directions. They must also become
familiar with the actor’s stage orientation. Very few of
them know that stage left or stage right is the actor’s left
or right as she faces the audience. Fewer still know that
upstage means the area furthest away from the audience,
and downstage the closest to the audience. They need to
understand what it means to upstage a fellow actor. If they
saw a production with a raked, or inclined stage, it would
become instantly clear. On a raked stage, suppose I stand
somewhat behind other actors. Not only am I then higher,
and appear to have more stature than my fellow actors; I
also force them to turn away from the audience in order to
address me. The spotlight is on me! It is all too easy for
young actors to unwittingly upstage other players. Some-
times, of course, it is fitting to have every other character
onstage focusing the audience’s attention on a figure up-
stage. But this should be done consciously and not by
happenstance.

53
 Chapter VI

Grounding the Character

In our everyday lives, we constantly express our
soul moods through our physical natures. If a teacher is
edgy and irritable, students may notice immediately that
his gait becomes more clipped in the halls, his head tilts
forward in a battering ram mode, his gestures sharpen.
How students sit in a class often betrays the level of ten-
sion or comfort they feel. Are their legs and arms crossed
protectively? Do they sit upright attentively, or do they
sag in chairs apparently more subject to Jupiter’s gravity
than to Earth’s? As teachers, we learn to “read” our stu-
dents’ body language. It can, of course, be a deceptive sci-
ence. I recall one pupil who dominated classes with her
overblown gestures and general bravado. Yet in a private
conversation on a camping trip, she shared deeply about
feelings of insignificance. Another student had suffered
through the slow, agonizing death of his mother. His out-
ward iciness disguised his fear of getting too close to other
people whom he might lose. Yet more often than not, our
body language reveals much more about ourselves than
we would like. The anxiety-filled fellow drums incessantly
on his desk; the angry young woman “punishes” the floor
when she walks, heel-heavy; the sanguine socializer
bounces on the balls of his feet and talks with quicksilver

54
hands; the timid girl tucks her head between her shoul-
ders, casts her eyes downward, and wrings her hands.
So it is with the characters students portray. Un-
like the fictional figures in novels whose innermost thoughts
and feelings can be disclosed through the author’s omni-
scient point of view, characters onstage usually must rely
on the external to communicate, i.e., the words they speak
and the actions they take. Therefore, students need to learn
how to be physically expressive, how to fill their move-
ments with meaning. One of the most recognizable charac-
teristics of inexperienced actors is the way they uncon-
sciously use their hands to illustrate every phrase they
speak. They flap, point, flail, sweep, and sever the air
around them. In the process they often distract their audi-
ence more than they ever convey to them. They need to
awaken to every gesture, every sidelong glance, every tilt
of the head that might reveal some nuance of soul.
We begin with the simplest of exercises, which in-
troduces students to their own physicality. We ask students
to walk around the room, becoming aware of their gait, the
way their feet touch the floor, the position of their toes, the
stiffness or looseness of their joints, the way their arms
swing, the sway of their hips and arch of their back, the
tension in their shoulders, and the angle of their chin. Stu-
dents usually experience a good deal of self-conscious dis-
comfort at first, especially if some of the participants sit
out and become an audience. I would recommend as a gen-
eral principle the idea of involving all actors at the same
time in these early exercises, both to maximize participa-
tion and to reduce performance anxiety.
After becoming familiar with their own natural
gait, students participate in a series of exercises devised to
break their habitual movement patterns, to introduce a new
plasticity” and heightened awareness into their gestures.

55
 Exercise 25: FOLLOW THE LEADER
Sometimes the simplest of children’s games can
help develop valuable capacities. Divide the class into a
number of small groups, perhaps four to six members per
group. A leader is randomly chosen for each group, with
the rest of the students falling in line behind him or her.
The leaders then begin moving around the room, indepen-
dent of the other lines, in their own inventive ways, with
the followers behind each leader attempting to imitate as
precisely as possible the leader’s movements. It helps if
the leaders move slowly, rhythmically, and rather predict-
ably. At a given signal from you, the leader moves to the
back of the line, and the next student in line assumes the
leader’s role until all members have had an opportunity to
lead the line.

Exercise 26: MIRRORS

Pair students up and position them to face one an-
other, an arms’ length apart. Have one of the actors in each
pair raise his or her hand, thereby designating that person
as the initiator. The initiating students should imagine
themselves standing in front of a full-length mirror. In-
struct them to begin any slow deliberate movement, so slow,
in fact, that the other student can easily and simultaneously
copy the gesture. The objective here is for each initiator and
mirror to move in such a synchronized fashion that an ob-
server would not be able to distinguish between who was
beginning the motion and who was following.
In the beginning students will probably limit their
movements to hand gestures as they explore the plane be-
tween them and their mirror. However, one can encourage
full body involvement. Have them imagine the costume
their characters might wear, from stockings to sashes, from
footwear to jewelry, from hoop skirts to hard hats. Then
ask students to put their characters’ outfit on in front of
their mirror, finishing perhaps with a characteristic pose or
two.

56
 Another variation of this exercise, related to PASS
A FACE (Exercise 2), is to have the initiator make some gro-
tesque face in front of his or her mirror, the kind people
make when they first get up in the morning and inspect for
example, their teeth, tongues, complexion, and barely vis-
ible moustaches. Of course, in all these mirroring exercises,
students should exchange roles and partners as the direc-
tor sees fit.

Demonstration of Exercise #26

Exercise 27: ENVIRONMENTS—THE FOUR ELE MENTS

Since imagination is our most potent ally in work-
ing with young actors, we ask them to picture themselves
moving (and then to actually move!) over varied terrain
and in unusual situations. The possibilities here are end-
less, but here are a few tried and true favorites:
First have students imagine they have been caught
in a clay avalanche; they are buried but still standing. The

57
clay is soft enough for them to push away, but not easily; it
offers resistance and the pushing requires hard work. Their
goal is to gradually push enough clay away from their bod-
ies so that they have room to move. They might start by
using an elbow or knee or nose or finger to nudge back a
bit of the clay, until they gain enough space to use their
hands to create a “clay-free zone” completely around them-
selves. This should be done slowly, silently, and labori-
ously, with a great sense of exertion.
As a follow-up and antidote to the clay work, fill
the room with imaginary water, so that the class can expe-
rience the underwater, slow-motion delights of floating,
swaying like kelp, feeling the buoyancy and lightness bear-
ing them ever upward. To really appreciate this imagina-
tive environment, normally quick-moving students con-
stantly need to be reminded to hold back. Under water,
there can be no sharp or sudden movements. The element
slows and softens every abrupt gesture, rounds out every
straight line. If the actors do this well, the whole room will
turn into an eerily silent, slow-motion, aquatic dance.
Next, the students head for the sky. Have them
become leaves or clouds or scarves fluttering in the breeze.
They cannot help but spin, flutter, and twirl their way
around the room, barely touching the floor. Again the stu-
dents need to feel the levity of the air, the freedom of fly-
ing, unencumbered by gravity. The only caution here is
that mid-air collisions can occur if people are not acutely
aware of their air-borne fellow travelers.
The element of fire can be introduced in one of two
ways, depending upon one’s aim. To stimulate dynamic
movement, have participants imagine the floor transformed
into hot coals; students will instantaneously begin to bound
about, hopping from one hot foot to another. The energy
level will soar in the room, as will the noise level. To offer
students a quieter experience of fire, have them close their
eyes and imagine a candle or torch, steadily burning within

58
them, in the region of their chest. Students should walk
around the room feeling themselves the source of infinite
warmth and light. You will know whether they are really
inwardly experiencing this radiating quality if students
begin to stand more upright and slow their pace as they
walk around the room sharing their light. This is a tremen-
dously effective exercise for any young actor whose char-
acter needs to develop the warmth and generosity required
of a noble soul.
These explorations of the four elements can offer
more than just an experience of earth, water, air, and fire.
They may also serve as outward expressions of four fun-
damental character types. Widely accepted in the Middle
Ages, the concept of the four temperaments was revived
by Rudolf Steiner to help educators develop deeper under-
standings of their students. For actors as well, these gen-
eral types can be useful, as long as they realize that people
are never purely one temperament or another. Each tem-
perament possesses its own strengths, as well as posing its
own set of challenges.
The choleric is often associated with the element of
fire. Energetic, ambitious, even driven, the choleric indi-
vidual is nothing if not intense. If he or she can control this
inner fire, the choleric person can grow into a motivational
leader, a trailblazer who initiates dynamic activities. The
choleric who does not learn to master the bursts of anger
to which he or she is very vulnerable can turn into the un-
predictable volcano, whose eruptions leave a wide swath
of destruction.
The sanguine character is a creature of the air.
Mercurial, gregarious, often irrepressibly cheerful, a pre-
dominantly sanguine person will have a wide range of in-
terests and a natural desire to pursue them all at the same
time. Sanguines typically are jacks-of-all-trades—in their
most evolved form, a Leonardo da Vinci or a Thomas
Jefferson. In class, sanguines are the students whose atten-
tion flits from the blackboard to their neighbor’s lunchbag

59
to the ball game being played on the field outside the win-
dow. They are exceedingly awake in their senses and have
an impressive peripheral consciousness; they can tell you
what everyone else in the room is doing. I have long relied
on my now-teenage daughter’s sanguine awareness. Be-
cause she notices everything, she has always had an un-
canny knack of knowing where I absent-mindedly left my
glasses or car keys or briefcase. The danger here, of course,
is that sanguines can lose focus all too easily and have
trouble regaining it long enough to complete the task at
hand.
People with melancholic dispositions are fairly easy
to identify. They experience life more inwardly, and often
more painfully, than either cholerics or sanguines. They
tend to be highly sensitive souls, sometimes hypersensi-
tive, whose more refined sensibilities often lead them into
artistic fields. They can feel the ever-present tension be-
tween inner desires and outer demands, between the no-
blest ideals and the harshest realities. The fictional Faust
expressed the melancholic’s deeply felt lament.

Two souls, alas, are dwelling within my breast,

And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.
(p. 145)

Their element is the earth, which they carry either as a

great burden or as a plastic, transformative substance.
Individuals with phlegmatic tendencies initially ap-
pear quite sleepy, or at least dreamy. Their inner clock op-
erates more slowly than the choleric’s or the sanguine’s;
they need more time to eat and digest, their schoolwork as
well as their food. And yet, given the time, they can ab-
sorb an experience more deeply than the extroverted types.

60
Phegmatics draw little attention to themselves, will sit qui-
etly in the midst of an uproar, as if transported to some
other realm. For that very reason, they are the best people
to turn to in emergencies. Their watery nature, their placid,
unruffled demeanor, can stem hysteria in a frightened child
or rising panic in a roomful of people. Phlegmatics can be
therapeutic personalities if they overcome a tendency to-
ward passivity and inner lethargy.
I remember long ago hearing a description that
used the simple act of throwing a ball to distinguish these
temperaments. A sage Waldorf educator of many decades’
teaching experience said that if you throw a ball to a cho-
leric, she may pick it up and hurl it back to you twice as
hard. If a sanguine catches the ball, he might bounce it a
few times, toss it behind his back and spin it on his finger
before throwing it to someone else. If you throw a ball to a
melancholic, she might respond in a victimized tone, by
saying, “Why did you throw that ball at me?” And the
phlegmatic might say, after the fact, “What ball?”
How can young actors use temperaments in their
characterizations? Keeping in mind that these predisposi-
tions are really more qualities than types, consider the typi-
cal gait of each temperament. Cholerics tend to stride pur-
posefully, fast-paced, hard on their heels; sanguines con-
tact the earth more lightly, bouncing on the balls of their
feet. Melancholics may walk tentatively, thoughtfully, per-
haps almost reluctantly, while phlegmatics take their time;
they amble more than stride over the ground. Choleric ges-
tures might be sharply defined, energetic, aggressive, even
explosive. Sanguines’ hands will flit and flutter nimbly,
while the melancholic may gesticulate almost melodramati-
cally to accentuate some overwhelming feeling of angst.
Phlegmatics tend to move their limbs very little if they do
not have to. Such impressions are by no means to be con-
sidered definitive descriptions, but they can serve as broad
indicators from which students can construct believable
characters.

61
 Exercise 28: WAYS OF WALKING
Have students slog through an imaginary swamp,
the water first up to their ankles, then their knees, then their
waists. While we require silence for most of these exercises,
for the swamp walk, we encourage our students to make
their own sloshing, sucking, and slurping sounds.
Put them on an imaginary tightrope or highwire, fifty
feet off the ground, and have them slowly make their way
from one side to the other. A horizontal balancing pole is
optional. At a certain point, you can have them do this
exercise as if in a high wind, or somewhat intoxicated, so
that they teeter, reel, wobble, but never completely lose their
balance. Under no circumstances should they fall off. One
other variation involves students beginning to feel quite
confident on their wire and asking them to perform some
amazing trick—a leap or spin or some other “sleight of foot
feat”—that will leave audiences far below gasping in awe
as the highwire artists land expertly back on their perch.
Other ways of walking are limited only by one’s
imagination. Here are a few suggestions. Have participants
walk as if they:

— have on concrete shoes

— have springs on the balls of their feet
— have someone sinister following them
— are cowboys
— are robots
— are runway models (Surprisingly, the boys usu-
ally have no problem with this one if all par-
ticipants look foolish simultaneously.)
— are monsters or giants
— are elves
— are clowns wearing oversized, floppy shoes
— are five years old (Encourage them to interact
with this one. Out of nowhere skipping,
playing hopscotch, jumping rope, sandbox

62
 playing, teasing, crying, block-building, and
block-knocking-over will appear. The energy
level of the room will soar.)
— are ninety-five years old
— are taking their first steps as toddlers
— are carrying the world’s most precious Ming vase
— are grotesquely obese
— are the center of attention
— have arms with a mind of their own
— have no bones in their bodies

Exercise 29: STICK/BALL/VEIL/CANDLE

Have students close their eyes and, using their
hands, create in front of them an imaginary stick of some
kind. Then have them open their eyes and begin to move
about the room with their sticks, leaning on them as if they
were canes, waving them about like swords, twirling or
tapping them. Young people often have a tendency to talk
during these activities. While there will be a time for such
verbal interaction, side chatter while moving disperses fo-
cus. Unless otherwise indicated, silent attentiveness is the
general rule during these initial exercises. As they explore
the space with their sticks, very gradually the sticks disap-
pear and become internalized; the actors no longer carry
sticks—they become sticks. Every movement they make
now has a stick-like character. While each student’s inter-
pretation of this quality may vary, most of them begin to
walk much more rigidly and woodenly around the room.
Their gait will slow, joints will stiffen, and gestures will
become much more angular.
Next have them freeze, then drop out of their stick
character. Again, have students close their eyes, this time
imagining a rather large beachball. Again have them open
their eyes and move around the room, playing with their
beachballs—bouncing them, batting them in the air, show-
ing their dimensions and positions through their hands.

63
After playing for a brief time, the gradual transformation
occurs in which the external objects vanish and the actors
become beachballs. Their movements now lose all angu-
larity; they bounce or waddle or bob as curves triumph
over straight lines.
The same sequence holds for the next two objects.
With the veil, the internalization should lead to leaping,
rippling, whirling, and spinning around the room, as if the
students were some veil or scarf fluttering in the wind.
Their movements with the lit candle (or torch, if a larger
scale is desired) will be much more deliberate. At first, stu-
dents need to walk slowly enough to tend to their “flame,”
but as they internalize the light you should see the same
kind of radiating quality described in the fire section of the
FOUR ELEMENTS exercise.
Such an exercise provides more than imaginative
fodder for young actors; it may also introduce them to new
and surprising dimensions of their characters. For example,
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus, Hermia’s unyield-
ing father who demands that she marry the man of his
choice or else, could be played with a good deal of stick-
like intractability. The actor playing the hot-headed
Demetrius could incorporate an inner blazing fire, while
Titania’s fairies might move with airy spriteliness. In each
case, young actors incorporate these qualities in three
stages:
1) imagining and playing with the external object,
2) internalizing the object so that the actors become the
thing itself,
3) refining and distilling the inner experience of the
object so that what remains is an essence that adds intrigu-
ing undercurrents that vitalize their characters.

Exercise 30: CENTERS

One of Michael Chekhov’s most effective tech-
niques for developing character involved the exploration

64
of centers. According to this idea, every character—for that
matter, every person—operates from a particular center of
energy. This is not some mystical force, such as an Indian
chakra. Rather, these centers are really the creation of one’s
imagination and heightened awareness of a very specific
physical area of the body. For example, imagine putting a
character’s center in an eyebrow. How will that center be
expressed in gesture and movement? It is often a revela-
tion to watch a roomful of teenagers suddenly raise an eye-
brow in supercilious fashion, tilt their heads up so as to
look down their noses at the rest of humanity, and begin to
walk around the room in the most condescending manner.
Simply by directing their attention to a specific
region of their bodies, young actors can often find a key
that unlocks part of a character’s nature. Have students
place their center in their knuckles, and watch their hands
ball up into fists as they begin to pace pugnaciously around
the room. Or ask students to locate their center just above
their heads; several actors have used this idea to become
characters who are either air-headed or inebriated.
The location of the center is not the only variable
that actors can employ. They can also play with the sub-
stance of the center itself. Imagining a red-hot center, like
a glowing coal, will elicit a very different response from
that of a center that resembles the sharp end of a stalag-
mite. As an illustration, students might imagine a center
that is like a hard little ball placed at the very end of their
noses. How will this affect their movement? The vast ma-
jority of participants will thrust their heads forward and
bustle about the room pecking and poking their noses into
other people’s space in the most meddlesome and intru-
sive manner. For a character with an inquisitive or nosy
disposition, such a center would be perfect.
By contrast, if students were to relocate their cen-
ter to their lower abdomen, and turn it into a soft, squishy,
jello-like substance, their gait might slow to an amble or a

65
stroll; were they to engage each other in conversation, their
speech might edge into a southern drawl. Such a center
has the tendency to give people a sense of well-being, al-
most lethargically so.
These characterizations are not theoretical—I have
observed dozens of different groups of young people en-
gage in these exercises, presumably with few preconcep-
tions about how one center or another would affect their
movements. Allowing for individual variations, it was
nevertheless striking to see how many students moved in
similar ways when exploring one center or another. Is there
some objective truth behind these experiences that we can
use in the theater?
Michael Chekhov believed that just as an emotion
might lead to an outer gesture (e.g., a feeling of anger might
be outwardly expressed by making a fist), conversely some
outer gesture might also evoke an inner response. Most of
our work with centers has verified this contention. Some-
times we will ask students to simply make a fist, without
attaching any preconceived emotional content to the ges-
ture, and then play an improvised scene. Inevitably, the
actors’ interaction will move towards some belligerent con-
frontation. If we ask them to begin a scene using the ges-
ture of reaching their arms toward one another, usually
some sympathetic exchange will take place, some recon-
ciliation or comfort achieved.

Exercise 31: CLOSED EYES

Without a doubt, this exercise serves as the corner-
stone of all our character-building work with students. Vir-
tually every other dramatic exploration they undertake
during a production flows from this inner activity. In fact,
we believe so fervently in the power of this imagination
that we ask young actors to do closed-eye exercises daily
in preparation for a play. Furthermore, we have come to
the realization that if audiences experience any uncommon

66
vitality and conviction in our actors, this single exercise may
be one of the primary reasons for our students’ success.
Have students stand in a relaxed manner, eyes
closed, with some space around them to move. They should
imagine their characters at some particular moment in the
play. Beginning with the feet, they need to build as de-
tailed a picture of the characters as possible, led by the
director’s guiding questions:

Physical Inventory
1) How do their characters stand? Do their feet rest
on the ground firmly or tentatively? Does their weight rest
evenly or tend more to the inside or outside of their feet?
When they walk, do their feet hit the ground heel-first, toes-
first, or balls-of-feet first? Are their feet pigeon-toed or
splayed at all?

2) How do their legs feel? Do they have young or

old limbs? Do they experience any stiffness in the knees?
Do their legs feel like springs or pistons, or are they filled
with lead? Are their arms long or short for their body? Do
they swing freely when the characters walk, or are they
tightly held by the sides? Are their hands rough and cal-
loused from outdoor work? Are their fingers nimble or
fumbling?

3) How about the regions of the hips and loins? Do

the hips sway more than usual when the characters walk?
Is the sphincter tight or relaxed? When the characters walk,
do they lead with their loins?

4) How do the abdominal areas feel? Are the diges-

tive processes too active, constantly rumbling, or do the
characters feel a sense of well-being? Are they overweight
and flabby in the middle, trim and fit, or too thin, even
scrawny?

67
 5) How do they breathe? Slowly and deeply, or rap-
idly and shallowly? Are they smokers who breathe rag-
gedly and raspily? Or are they so well-conditioned that
they seem tireless when they run? Are they ever aware of
their heartbeat? Does it beat strongly and rhythmically all
the time, or does it flutter irregularly?

6) What do they “carry” on their backs and shoul-

ders? Do they stand squarely upright, or do they stoop?
Do they suffer from chronic lower-back pain or tightness
in their shoulders? Can they touch their toes when they
bend over?

7) How much tension do they feel in their necks?

Can they easily turn their heads, or is there a restrictive
stiffness there? Do they feel their necks to be long, elevat-
ing the heads well above their bodies, or are the necks so
squat that their heads seem to sit nearly on the shoulders?

8) What do their countenances reveal? Do they have

thin, pursed lips, a broad forehead, a sallow complexion, a
pug-nose? Do they gaze steadily or blink nervously, al-
ways glancing sidelong at the world? Do they have a thick,
unruly haystack of hair or thinning wisps combed over from
the side?

After repeated efforts to experience this physical

inventory, students will begin to become acquainted with
their characters. They may object— “How do I know what
her joints feel like? I’ve never been a 38-year-old pregnant
shopkeeper!” As always, the director simply encourages
such young actors to place their faith in their inexhaustible
imaginations.
Visualizing the Costume
Now ask your students, still with closed eyes, to
picture the clothing their characters might wear, beginning
with undergarments. This exercise will usually be used long

68
before the actors will have their actual costumes, so their
imaginations can have free rein. Have them visualize ev-
ery last detail of their entire outfit, from footwear to head-
gear. Are their characters barefoot, wearing lace-up boots,
expensive Italian shoes, smelly old sneakers? Do they have
on tight skirts or baggy pants, loud Hawaiian shirts or
slinky silk blouses, burlap tunics or kings’ brocaded robes?
Do they sport bowlers, helmets with visors, diadems, fe-
doras, flowered straw hats? What accessories might com-
plete their characters’ attire—pocket watches, scarves, pearl
necklaces, swords, spectacles, goatees?
Throughout this guided costume tour students
should be directed to pay special attention to the colors
and textures of the fabrics, as well as to their characters’
overall appearances. Are they generally slovenly or fas-
tidiously neat? Do their clothes fit them well, or do they
look like a sausage in outfits two sizes too small? Do their
shoes pinch? Do their hats continuously fall over their eyes?
To make this exercise more outwardly active, you can in-
struct your students to actually mime putting on each item
of clothing as they inwardly picture their apparel.

Vitalizing Every Moment

These closed-eye activities can be taken much fur-
ther, enlivening virtually every scene in which the actors
are involved. Have them choose a particular moment in
the play when their characters have a line. They need to
picture as precisely as possible the physical position of their
characters at that moment. Are they standing disdainfully,
with hands on hips, glaring down their noses at an unwor-
thy subject? Are they sitting hunched over and weeping at
the news they have just heard? Are they about to embrace
their lovers? Whatever the stance, ask your students to
actually place themselves in that position, not vaguely or
tentatively, but definitely and sharply. Now, still using their
imaginations, they need to hear their characters say the line

69
accompanying those poses. Then, on a given count, have
all of the actors open their eyes and simultaneously speak
their lines, bringing as much energy and animation into
the moment as possible. When they have all finished, have
them once again close their eyes, see and hear inwardly
what they have just done, and then perhaps have them re-
peat the whole process, only this time have them pose,
speak, and move even bigger—with more volume, more
intensity, more conviction. Daily repetition of this exer-
cise—asking students to find different moments in the play
which they literally imagine into being—will gradually
bring each character to life. The characters will acquire a
depth and dimension not typically accessible to young ac-
tors.

Exercise 32: PLAYING WITH IMAGINARY PROPS

Yet another variation of the closed-eye work is to
have students picture their characters with some prop—
either one scripted in the play or an object that this particu-
lar character might use. In a recent production of Under
Milkwood, imaginary items included an umbrella, a pipe, a
book, a swaddled infant, a fishing pole, a glass of ale, a
shovel, a cleaver, a dog on a leash, and a vial of poison.
First the actors, eyes closed, use their hands to create their
objects in front of them. They need to be encouraged to
create as precisely as possible, giving not only shape but
also weight and texture to their prop. At a given signal,
have all students open their eyes and begin to walk in char-
acter around the room, using their props as they go. After
a few moments, have them pair up and stand in front of
one another. In silence have them show each other what
their props are by indicating their shape, weight, and purpose.
Then have participants exchange props by carefully hand-
ing them over to their partners. Now, armed with new
props that probably have absolutely nothing to do with their
characters, have the actors continue to move about the room

70
in character, acquainting themselves with their newly ac-
quired objects. Again at a certain point have the students
create new pairs and repeat the process of demonstrating
and exchanging props. In this manner young actors learn
to make imaginary objects real onstage.

Exercise 33: WALKING IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER

After some initial closed-eye work, students begin
to at least picture their characters’ distinctive gaits. This
exercise can help them outwardly experience the difference
between their own ways of walking and their characters’.
Divide your rehearsal space into two clearly delineated ar-
eas. In our case, we designate for one area a series of three
wide risers where our audiences usually sit. The other area
is our stage, a wooden floor that the risers partially sur-
round. Have your students be-
gin walking normally in one
area or the other; in our case, the
area of the risers makes the
most sense. However, the in-
stant their feet touch the
wooden floor, have the actors
transform themselves into their
characters. Now a free-swing-
ing teenager becomes a twisted
old crone, dragging an arthritic
leg across the acting area, or a
harried business man pacing
brusquely back and forth, or a
King’s daughter striding nobly
through an adoring crowd.
Then, the moment they cross the
dividing line between areas,
have the students revert to their
normal gaits once again. Demonstration of Exercise #33

71
 This activity will be most effective if participants imag-
ine that the boundary between the two areas is a threshold
not unlike Alice’s looking glass or the back of the ward-
robe in the Narnia stories. They move instantaneously from
one realm to another, without warning or any transition
time. In addition to helping strengthen the contrast be-
tween their own natural walks and their characters’, this
exercise also enhances that all-important inner mobility so
critical to good acting.

Exercise 34: GETTING TO KNOW ME

Take your cast of characters on a journey into their
imaginations. Have them assume their characters and
mime preparing for the trip. What will they wear? Have
them identify and then simultaneously speak aloud the
name of the color most often worn by the character. What
will they bring with them? What foods do their characters
crave? Make sure they at least bring a musical instrument
that most reminds them of their characters. Soon after they
begin the journey (do have your actors walking around the
room), their characters encounter an obstacle. What is it?
How do they surmount it? Have participants actually do
what they imagine their characters would do. Further on,
they meet an imaginary stranger who insults them. Have
them engage the stranger in a spirited exchange, but make
sure the characters only respond in gibberish. After the
stranger departs, instruct the characters to grow tired and
to sit down by a stream to eat. Have them mime very care-
fully the action of unwrapping a sandwich, nibbling on
some cheese, or dipping their hands in the stream to drink.
After lunch, ask the characters to take out their
instruments and play them. Have the students vocalize
the sounds they are making. Then have them resume their
journey. Perhaps they find an object along the way that
reminds them of themselves. What is it? Actors should
pick the object up, make it as real and visible as possible,

72
and then either take it with them or discard it. Finally, the
characters should reach a hut and find a wise old woman
inside. They will ask the woman a revealing question about
themselves, such as “Why am I always angry?” or “Will I
ever find true love?” or “How can I overcome my restless-
ness?” Perhaps they also share with the old woman their
innermost fear before they depart and head home.
Such a journey can be as wide-ranging or probing
as the director’s inventiveness allows. The aim here is to
have the students become better acquainted with their char-
acters by exercising their own imaginations. Any journey
that challenges actors to perform physical tasks in the man-
ner of their characters and, on a deeper level, to plumb the
psychological depths of their characters, will be beneficial.
A more advanced version of this exercise is described in
Exercise 51: CHARACTER BIOGRAPHIES.

Exercise 35: ANIMAL BLIND

This exercise is really a prologue to a most helpful
character-building activity. First, have students stand ran-
domly throughout the room and either blindfold them or
simply have them close their eyes. Whisper in each
participant’s ear the name of an animal (those that make
distinctive noises are best; fish are very hard to enact)—for
example, a mouse, cow, elephant, lion, pig, monkey, seal,
snake, hyena, bee, cat, horse, crow, bear, wolf, owl, por-
poise. Then announce that the cast’s objective is to arrange
themselves in order of their animals’ relative sizes. The
only clues they may give each other are the characteristic
sounds their animals make. No speaking allowed! (On
occasion, we have had one student remain human, to see if
he or she might assume a key organizational role; presumably,
this person would possess the reasoning capacity to help
sort out the animal order.)

73
 Exercise 36: ANIMAL QUALITIES
Once a class has successfully completed the pre-
vious exercise, the director can deepen the actors’ explora-
tion of character by asking the students to think of an ani-
mal that reminds them of their character in some way.
However, the resemblance certainly should not be restricted
to the physical level. Our whole realm of soul qualities
shares much in common with the animal kingdom. One
only needs to look back to ancient myths and legends in
virtually all cultures to confirm this notion. Many gods are
depicted as having animal heads and human bodies—
Anubis the jackal-headed, Horus the falcon-headed, and
Thoth the ibis-headed from Egypt come to mind; so do the
centaurs and minotaur from Greece, as well as the shifting
animal disguises Zeus assumed in his dalliances with mor-
tal women.

Demonstration of Exercise #36

Even our language contains vestiges of a time when

the boundary between the animal and the human was much
more fluid. Why else would we refer to one person as “lion

74
hearted,” another as “pig-headed”? We refer to men who
prey on innocent women as “wolves,” someone who acts
cowardly as “chicken” or a “spineless jellyfish.” A treach-
erous individual is called a “dirty rat” or “snake”; some-
one who is exhausted is “dog-tired”; an embarrassed per-
son appears “sheepish.”
Therefore, it is not so far-fetched to ask students
to find animal qualities in the characters they play. We may
need to offer suggestions to those participants who draw a
blank in this regard. Perhaps one character has the ner-
vous metabolism, and the darting movements of a squir-
rel; another, out of a painful shyness, may pull her head
down towards her shoulders like a turtle or strut like a
rooster or bray like a donkey when she laughs. Once they
have identified some quality, we lead them through a three-
phase exercise:

1) Have them all first become that animal, com-

plete with distinctive movements and sounds. To mini-
mize that feeling of looking foolish, which can be so inca-
pacitating in drama, it is far better to have all cast members
move as animals simultaneously. The menagerie that fills
the room will then be a source of delight for all of them.

2) Next, have the actors close their eyes and imag-

ine this animal quality being incorporated into their char-
acters in some fairly obvious way. A gorilla-like quality
might involve lengthening some actor’s arms or scratch-
ing himself intermittently; a snaky character might narrow
her eyes or flick her tongue suggestively; a horsey charac-
ter might develop the habit of pawing the ground with his
foot or snorting to punctuate his comments.

3) Finally, have the students pair up and engage

each other in some improvisational conversation, now in-
corporating their animal mannerisms into their characters.

75
They may be too obvious or heavy-handed at first; it will
be the director’s job to help actors refine and internalize
these qualities. Eventually, these cruder animal attributes
may all but disappear from view, but still add an animat-
ing, energizing dimension to characters.

Exercise 37: EXAGGERATED MIRRORS

One of the students’ favorite rehearsal techniques
involves mirroring one another. This is a more complex
variation of MIRRORING (Exercise 26), because it combines
verbal, as well as physical, interaction. As with the closed-
eye exercise, ask students to think of a line from the play
and visualize their characters in some specific stances, us-
ing some purposeful gestures. Students should open their
eyes, find partners, and one at a time, speak their line in
character, complete with appropriate stance and gesture.
Now the partner’s task is to act like an after-the-fact-mir-
ror; in other words, after one actor has finished speaking
the line, the mirror repeats it, with the accompanying move-
ment and gesture, but all in a wildly exaggerated fashion.
An almost imperceptible nod transforms into a vigorous
shake of the head, a half-hearted pointing finger becomes
a piercing thrust, a weak wave is magnified into a grand
sweep. A line spoken with some mistrust, “I have ques-
tions about you,” becomes a shrieking, over-the-edge ac-
cusation—“I HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT YOU!” Then the
partners switch roles, with the original mirror offering a
line and the other actor exaggerating every aspect of the
delivery.
Students delight in this exercise—it sanctions a type
of aping and parodying so common to teenagers. How-
ever, because it involves mirrors lampooning characters,
and not people mocking the people creating those charac-
ters, the mimicry can occur without any hint of a personal
attack. The exercise is also very freeing; students who have,
up to this point, played it safe, or who have remained
wooden and inexpressive, can suddenly become animated
clowns.
76
 Directors should be forewarned—this exercise will
raise the energy level of a group to such a degree that it
may be difficult to reel the students back in, unless you use
a time-tested technique which we refer to as

THE FREEZE
This is less an exercise than a method of curbing
the sometimes unbridled enthusiasm exhibited by teenag-
ers. One of the mixed blessings of doing drama is that, in
their exploration of character, young people can momen-
tarily lose themselves, or at least lose their sense of appro-
priate restraint. We have found that The Freeze counter-
acts students’ tendency to spin too far away from their cen-
ters. The Freeze works very simply. During any exercise
or activity, the director says (or screams—sometimes the
noise level requires more volume) “Freeze!” whereupon
the participants stop dead in their tracks; no matter what
the position, they become statues, without the slightest
movement—no speaking, no swaying, no twitching fingers,
not even any blinking eyelids, if possible. Have them hold
this position for several seconds as they struggle to remain
motionless.
Wherever it came from, this inspired idea serves
three essential functions:
1) It enables the teacher/director to instantaneously
regain the attention of an otherwise charged-up roomful of
overly exuberant adolescents.
2) It creates the absolute silence needed to give the
next set of instructions.
3) It offers young actors the opportunity to develop
both an inward and an outward sense of self control. They
learn to switch from madcap emoting to silent statues in
the time it takes to say “Freeze!” They also begin to acquire
mastery over their bodies, utilizing this difficult technique
of remaining motionless for several moments at a time.

77
 Exercise 38: STATUES
This activity is really a simpler version of the more
challenging STATUES INTO SCENES (exercise 52), which
moves into improvisational waters. In this less complicated
exploration, have students pair up. Designate one person
in each pair as the sculptor, the other as the clay. The clay’s
initial position is standing with head and arms down. The
sculptor’s objective is to mold and shape the clay into some
interesting position appropriate to the clay’s character in
the play. Since this is another silent exercise (the clay is
inanimate, of course, a lifeless block), the only way the
sculptor can achieve her goal is by manipulating the clay.
Let us imagine that the sculptor wants to fashion the clay
into a crouching, fearful figure. She might begin by gently
buckling the clay’s knees and pushing down on the shoul-
ders to obtain the desired crouch. Then she might ball the
hands of the subject into fists, take the arms and move them
from the subject’s sides to a protective position crossing in
front of the face. A slight tilt of the clay’s head upward,
and an altered facial expression with eyes wide and mouth
slightly open could complete the statue.
The clay, of course, must be cooperative. It is all
too easy to sabotage any sculptor’s attempts by turning into
“jello” or “concrete.” If the sculptor raises the subject’s arm
into a pointing position, the clay must offer just enough
resistance for the arm to stay there, not to flop back down.
After the sculptor has completed the statue, it is always
interesting to have the sculpture hold its position while all
the artists take a brief tour of the room, admiring other
sculptors’ work. Then at a given signal, the statues should
come to life, like Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. This can be
done either one at a time or simultaneously, with each statue
now speaking some lines in character that are suggested
by his or her sculpted pose.
This is a “touchy” exercise. Some students may
feel uncomfortable being manipulated through touch into
one position or another. Obviously, the sculptor must use

78
good judgment—every class has one wise guy who may
try to put his subject into some impossibly twisted, pretzel
pose. He must also exercise as much sensitivity as possible.
Handling the clay roughly or disrespectfully may result in
exclusion from the activity.

From The Madwoman of Chaillot – 10th grade production

79
 Chapter VII

Playing for Timing

No formula, no stage directions, no dogmatic as-
sertions can ever teach young actors that all-too-elusive
capacity known in the theater as timing. Only a few actors
of any age have that unerring gift of knowing how long to
hold a pause or how quickly to open a letter. Directors,
however, must awaken within them some intuitive sense
of timing; for whatever else a play is, it consists of a series
of moments, some compressed and intense, like little ex-
plosions, some lingering and sustained, like a violin’s held
final note.
Every one of these moments requires a director’s
decision. How quickly should Emily cross the stage to take
her place with the other spirits in the third act of Our Town?
How deliberately should Hamlet speak his “To be or not to
be” soliloquy? How radically should the pace of Cyrano de
Bergerac’s poignant last scene at the nunnery shift from
Cyrano’s quiet revelation as Roxane’s ever-faithful, anony-
mous lover to his final, defiant outburst as he challenges
Death to a duel? These, and a thousand other choices, alter
the pulse of a play. If such moments are not consciously
crafted and synchronized, they will create an impression,
perhaps one akin to musicians in a symphony orchestra all
playing their parts at different tempos. No matter how bril-
liantly one virtuoso plays, the net effect will be cacophony.

80
Directors might think of themselves as conductors, ap-
proaching the movements of a play as musical passages.
Their interpretation of the “dynamics”—the legatos and
andantes and ritardandos—will transform a play from a static,
undifferentiated piece to a vital and compelling experience.
I have found few actual exercises that cultivate this
all-important sense of timing. Most of these moments need
to be modulated in the give-and-take of rehearsal. One
tries a scene at one pace, then sees that it drags on intermi-
nably or gallops away, trampling all possibility of subtlety
or nuance in its path. And within the overall tempo of a
scene, each character contributes a particular rhythm, ev-
ery one of which requires careful orchestration, so that all
these points and counterpoints can be appreciated in the
course of a play.
One simple technique of finding the proper pace
in any given scene is to deliberately speed up or slow down
the action. The following exercise is good preparation.

Exercise 39: CHANGING SPEEDS

Have each of the participants think of any simple
physical task or chore—watering a plant, sweeping the
floor, setting the table, washing a window, folding clothes,
clipping a hedge. They should perform their tasks first as
deliberately as possibly, even in slow motion. Then they
should repeat them at double speed, as if they were in a
video going fast-forward. Finally, they should perform the
actions a final time, somewhere between the extremes, now
at a pace that seems to suit their particular characters’ in-
ner rhythms.

Exercise 40: FOUR-PHASE IMPROV

This is really a more advanced and challenging
activity, partly because it calls upon an improvisational
presence of mind; however, it may be one of the safest of
improvisations, because the actors establish a “blueprint”
for their interaction in preliminary stages. The exercise
proceeds in four distinct phases:
81
 1) Identify four or five volunteers and give them a set-
ting/situation, for example:

— musicians at a quartet rehearsal

— construction workers on site
— customers and employees at a diner
— doctors/nurses in an operating room
— baseball players positioned in the infield
— mountain climbers near a summit

Give your volunteers about thirty seconds to come up

with some rudimentary idea, some initial assignments of
character to provide an initial direction for their scene. Now
have the actors mime some interaction. Make sure all par-
ticipants involve themselves. Allow two or three minutes
for the scene to unfold, then call “Curtain!” when you see
some reasonable ending point.

2) Ask the actors to repeat the scene as exactly as pos-

sible, incorporating as many gestures as they recall; how-
ever, this time their characters speak in gibberish. Gibberish
seems to have a most liberating effect on young actors who
otherwise become tongue-tied and paralyzed when asked
to improvise. In this exercise, the gibberish augments the
gestures already established in the mimed scene; students
find they can use inflections and inventive vocal modula-
tions to convey meaning without having to worry about
the actual meaning.

3) Now students translate their nonsense into English and

recreate the scene a third time. This may be one of the least
“exposing” techniques for introducing improvisation, since
the template for the scene has already been made through
the two previous stages. Again, the objective here is to
retain the gestures that animated the mimed version and
the speaking patterns that energized the gibberish scene.

82
 4) This last stage requires participants to perform the
scene a final time, but at a radically different pace, either in
slow motion or at double speed. If they choose the former,
every aspect of the scene must slow down—their speaking
rhythms will warp into the distorted delivery reminiscent
of an old vinyl record played at 78 rpm instead of 45. Their
gestures will look as if they are occurring underwater. Ac-
celerating the scene will require that all actors synchronize
their actions and speed up their reactions in the manner of
the old Keystone Kops.

Exercise 41: THE SPEED-THROUGH REHEARSAL

The accelerated version of the FOUR-WAY
IMPROV can also be used to great effect towards the end
of any production. Usually a week or so before the actual
performances, the play goes flat. The actors know their
lines, where to move, and how. Yet the cast has lost touch
with some of that original excitement of mounting a pro-
duction and has not yet caught the slightly intoxicating,
frenzied fever of the final days before opening night. In a
word, rehearsals may have become mechanical.
THE SPEED-THROUGH REHEARSAL can pro-
vide the perfect antidote to such lifelessness. The objec-
tive is to perform the entire play in half the time it usually
takes. This is, by any reasonable standards, a daft under-
taking. Asking lethargic teenagers to suddenly act at twice
the pace of normal life is certain to ignite resistance within
the cast. That it does, but assuming the director can rouse
the company to the challenge, THE SPEED-THROUGH also
raises the whole energy level to new heights. It requires
tremendous intensity on the part of the director; the ten-
dency of the actors will be to slow down. They need to
constantly be exhorted to keep the pace up. This usually
means a good deal of screaming, “Faster! Keep it up! Get
moving!” The rehearsal will be a madhouse; actors will be
racing through their lines, bolting on and off the stage,
crashing into one another, losing their composure as their

83
characters double over in laughter, losing any sense of
subtlety in their characters or lines as they charge through
the play. But the renewed vitality within the cast, their sheer
delight in the resulting insanity, is worth any temporary
loss of form or nuance.

The Power of the Pause

Young actors tend to butcher lines in two differ-
ent ways: They either recite them in a labored, undifferen-
tiated monotone, or they gallop through them facilely but
without regard to meaning. Either extreme ignores the
power of the pause to invest any given moment with sig-
nificance. Teenagers generally do not care much for silence.
Think only of the ubiquitous music playing in their rooms—
they awaken to hip-hop; they fall asleep to oldies. My own
teenage children have two automatic responses once they
are in our car—fasten seat belt, turn on radio. It is not sur-
prising that they might feel discomfort with even the small-
est pause onstage. And yet, it is just there—between the
spoken words, between the lines—that the real drama oc-
curs. It enlarges our sense of Gloucester in King Lear when
Lear says to the now blinded old man, “You see how the
world goes,” and Gloucester pauses before responding, “I
see it . . . feelingly.” (Act IV, scene vi) He has felt it first, and
that feeling is communicated in the filled silence. The elec-
trifying pause accompanying Helen Keller’s growing real-
ization that the water flowing out of the pump has a name
fills us, too, with wonder and light.
How can students learn this truth of the theater?
They need to see that virtually every exchange between
characters needs to be mined for its dramatic potential.
Furthermore, they need to learn that pauses have differing
qualities. One character will pause after a question to
formulate a cunningly deceptive answer, an Iago casting a
net to tangle the mind of Othello—the pause filled with
malicious intent. Another will pause after the truth breaks

84
in on him, as when Oedipus discovers his nightmarish
fate—the pause of self-recognition. Still another character
will hesitate when struck dumb by love, as Orlando does
in As You Like It after Rosalind gives him her chain.
Sometimes an entire play can be summed up in a
pause. I know of no more telling moment than when, at
the end of The Grapes of Wrath—Frank Galati’s marvelous
adaptation of the Steinbeck novel—Rose of Sharon and her
mother stumble into a barn sheltering a starving man and
his small son. Rose of Sharon is still weak from having
given birth to a stillborn child and from having to vacate,
because of the rising floodwaters, the boxcar they called
home. The man lies on the floor of the barn, semiconscious.
His child pleads with the two women to find something
for his father to eat or drink so he will not die. At this
moment, Ma turns to Rose of Sharon and wordlessly asks
the question—”Will you help him?” In the ensuing pause,
we experience all of Rose of Sharon’s past pain—the aban-
donment of her husband, the humiliation of being jobless
and homeless, the loss of her child only moments before.
We also feel another impulse rising in her—the desire to
give to another human being who is worse off than she is
the only thing she has left to give. In this pause the entire
ill-fated journey of the Joad family is ennobled; Rose of
Sharon simply says, “Yes,” then goes to the man, bends
over him, and guides his mouth to her bared, milk-laden
breast.
The success or failure of such a profound moment
will ultimately depend upon whether or not young actors
can summon the inner forces to fill these pauses with the
appropriate substance. The next section offers a number
of exercises to help student infuse such moments, and even
the entire atmosphere of a scene, with depth and resonance.

85
 From Museum – 12th Grade production

86
 Chapter VIII

Charging the Atmosphere

How can one describe the experience of walking
into a high school gymnasium late in the fourth quarter of
a tournament basketball game? Thunderous waves of
“De—fense! De—fense!” compete with a chorus of “We
will, we will ROCK YOU!” from the other side of the floor.
The whole building seems to vibrate as the fans scream,
curse, stomp, and cheer with every swish of the ball through
the net, every blown whistle, every stolen pass. The atmo-
sphere is electrifying!
Now consider a scene in another large building,
where vaulted, domed ceilings soar six stories over the
heads of these spectators. Light filters in, illuminating the
huge, stained glass figures as well as the curls of incense
smoke wafting heavenward. Candles flicker around the
altar. Except for a cough or the rustle of someone shifting
positions in the pews, people sit in silence; only a priest’s
voice chanting prayers in Latin breaks the heavy hush that
bows people’s heads and curtails conversation.
The somber atmosphere during a service in a ca-
thedral stands in stark contrast to a championship game in
a gymnasium—that much seems clear. But what really
creates the difference? Does the space always dictate the
mood of the people inhabiting it? Could the atmosphere

87
of that same gymnasium be permeated with the solemnity
of the cathedral if some religious ceremony were held there?
For actors, addressing these questions cannot be a
matter of mere speculation. They cannot readily move their
playing space into a burning building if they want to con-
vey panic, or onto the boardwalk in Atlantic City if they
want to simulate the exhilaration of adults suddenly liber-
ated. No, actors must transform a neutral space into every
imaginable setting. And, unless they have at their disposal
elaborate sets, sophisticated sound and lighting effects, and
splendid costumes, most of this theatrical magic must be
generated through the imaginations of the actors them-
selves.
The success of exercises focusing on atmospheres
depends upon:

1) Attentive silence, at least initially. A more ad-

vanced variation involving dialogue comes later.

2) Collaboration. While one actor onstage alone

can certainly create a palpable mood, that same atmosphere
will not become as tangible if it is not a shared experience
of all actors onstage.

3) Gradual intensification. What begins as a dim

awareness—the seed of a doubt, perhaps—blossoms into
raging suspicion.

4) Internalization. What begins as an objective

feeling or mood in their surroundings by degrees affects
and, eventually, transforms the actors. What was without
moves within—as opposed to the actors’ externalizing some
gnawing feeling.

Exercise 42: WEATHER EXTREMES

As with our other dramatic sequences, it seems
most effective to begin with more “concrete” and accessible

88
physical atmospheres. Extreme weather conditions pro-
vide good material. Ask students to close their eyes and
imagine themselves in a blizzard. Then have them open
their eyes and move, hunched and huddled against the bit-
ing gale and the stinging snow. As they struggle to keep
their footing in the deepening drifts, they believe they see
a dwelling in the distance. They stagger towards the cabin
and finally reach the cabin door. With a final surge of
strength they pry the door open and fall into the warmth
of the shelter. Allow them to experience the contrast of
this interior space. The muffled howls of the wind outside
only accentuate the relief they feel to be out of the storm.
They may take off their wet coats and move to the fire-
place, where the radiating warmth and the golden glow of
the flames gradually fill the room and the weary travelers
with a sense of well-being.
You must, of course, guide young actors through
such experiences with a vivid narration. The more detailed
the guidance can be, the more likely the students will enter
fully into the imaginative space.

Another polarity would be to lead them from a

swamp walk through the thickest, most humid jungle to a
parching, desert trek. Other, albeit less climatic contrasts,
might include having students move

— from a dark to a light place, such as an inky,

dank cavern through a tunnel to a
blindingly bright mountain summit
— from a confined to an expansive area, such as
a crowded elevator to an alpine
meadow
— from a hot to a cold place, such as the rim of
an active volcano to an ice floe
— from isolated to peopled, such as a secluded
tropical beach to Fifth Avenue in
New York City at the end of the work day

89
 — from a frenetic to a tranquil setting, such as a
New Year’s Eve disco party to
an ashram

Although products of imagination, all these situations

share in common physical environments that students can
materialize through their creative efforts. Conjuring emo-
tional atmospheres is a far subtler, but ultimately far more
fruitful, challenge.

Exercise 43: EMOTIONAL ATMOSPHERES

Students might begin by walking normally around
the room; allow them to gradually become aware that a
whiff of uncertainty hangs in the air. Now they move dif-
ferently to reflect this growing apprehension they feel all
around them—their gestures become more guarded, their
steady gaze becomes a series of watchful, even furtive,
glances. Perhaps this atmosphere congeals into suspicion,
a feeling that becomes so oppressive that they begin to glare
accusingly at fellow classmates—no one can be trusted.
They may edge towards the shadowy corners of the room,
the better to avoid being followed, the better to observe
suspects. Participants now express through every darting
shift of the eyes, every jumpy gesture, every anxious breath,
the rampant suspicion in the atmosphere. Perhaps this is
the air that millions of Americans breathed during the
McCarthy era in the early 1950s, when “there was a Commie
under every bed.”
Many other emotional atmospheres or attitudes can be
explored:

— irritation to anger to rage

— distress to depression to anguish
— anxiety to fear to terror
— interest to acute attention to awe
— uncertainty to confusion to chaos

90
 — resolve to courage to foolhardiness
— cleverness to deception
— indifference to neglect to abandonment
— anticipation to enthusiasm to exhilaration
— wishfulness to envy to covetousness
— courtesy to kindness to benevolence
— interest to attraction to passion
— teasing to ridicule
— pride to arrogance
— frustration to exasperation

Exercise 44: SWITCHING ATMOSPHERES

This activity requires a good deal of inner flexibil-
ity. Instead of a one-way intensification of a particular
mood, have students begin working with one atmosphere,
then gradually transform it to its opposite. For example,
you might establish with them an air of resignation in the
room, and then slowly shift the mood to determination.
Or you might switch from an atmosphere of congeniality
to one of hostility. A few other possible polarities include
the following:

— from dejection to hope

— from relaxation to tension
— from cynicism to awe
— from isolation to unity
— from indifference to compassion
— from boredom to fascination
— from timidity to confidence
— from selfishness to saintliness

Exercise 45 : PERSONAL ATMOSPHERES

Usually actors working collaboratively can color a
scene with an overriding atmosphere. But that general,
pervasive mood will often become an amalgam of more
localized and conflicting personal atmospheres. For ex-
ample, in The Skin of Our Teeth; the overall atmosphere in

91
Act II is one of rising panic as the deluge approaches. Yet
Sabina, Miss Atlantic City and archetypal goldigger, has
but one objective—to lure George Antrobus away from his
wife and family by any means necessary. The aura of a
seductress radiates from Sabina. George, on the other hand,
begins the scene irritated at his wife, a feeling that grows
into open hostility at her attempts to keep him on a short
leash when he wants to have some fun. When his vexation
encounters Sabina’s temptation, George does not stand a
chance. Perhaps as much as any other factor, it is this clash
of personal atmospheres that helps to create riveting ten-
sion onstage.
Young actors can explore personal atmospheres in
the most elementary way, by performing actions similar to
those in CHANGING SPEEDS—putting on a sweater, eat-
ing a sandwich, blowing up a balloon, hanging a picture,
feeding the cat, changing a lightbulb, dusting a shelf, ham-
mering a stake, scrambling eggs. Now, however, the ac-
tors complete their task under the influence of a particular,
subjective mood. Have them feed the cat first ashamedly,
then purposefully, coldly, violently, enthusiastically. Each
new variation demands that the actors extend their mood
beyond themselves, so that they color the very air around
them, like an aura.
Other possible portrayals include performing
some action in the following ways:

awkwardly gently haughtily

despondently foolishly vengefully
sentimentally tediously pensively
tauntingly frantically fearfully
distractedly eagerly skeptically
spitefully meditatively carelessly
longingly grandly intimately

This activity can be a springboard to some advanced

improvisations, as most clearly seen in the following exer-
cise.

92
 Exercise 46: EMOTIONAL MIRRORS
The idea here is to enact a scene wherein two or
more participants mirror each other’s changing emotional
states. Have one actor—let us call her Rose—begin a scene
with a specific mood in mind, such as despair. She begins
talking with her best friend about how circumstances are
compelling her to leave her home and a newly discovered,
still tender relationship. At first, her best friend—Cecilia—
mirrors Rose’s despair. Then Cecilia suddenly brightens
as she receives an inspiration—why can’t they travel to-
gether, get away from the overcrowded city, and pay a visit
to Rose’s father, who has a cabin in the north woods? Rose
instantly brightens as well, reflecting Cecilia’s irrepressible
cheerfulness, and even suggests bringing along their best
male friend, Tony, mostly for his capacity to make them
both laugh.
The scenario may sound very familiar to
Shakespeare buffs; it is a thinly disguised update of the
moment in As You Like It when Rosalind is accused of trea-
son by her uncle, Duke Fredrick, and banished from the
kingdom. Celia, daughter of the Duke and Rosalind’s best
friend, attempts to lift Rosalind’s melancholy mood by sug-
gesting they disguise themselves and go to the forest of
Arden to reunite with Rosalind’s exiled father. At once,
Rosalind’s spirits rise as she savors the possibilities both of
dressing up as a man to protect them, and of luring Touch-
stone, the court clown, to accompany them. The scene ends
with both young ladies bubbling with elation and antici-
pation over their secret plans.
Emotional mirroring requires participants to be
keenly attuned to one another. Whatever mood is initially
established by one actor, the other actor immediately
reinforces. When one of them begins to transform the at-
mosphere to its opposite—say, from despair to elation, or
from cynicism to wonder—the other player follows suit.
This exercise, along with MOOD SWING described below,

93
are most challenging activities; usually, only older high
school students possess the inner resources to satisfy the
demands of the activity.

Exercise 47: MOOD SWING

Ask one participant to think of a particular mood
to work with—say, boredom. Another actor may be given
a mood of excitement to convey. In the course of a short
dialogue, the objective of the exercise is to gradually ex-
change one’s given atmosphere for the other actor’s. Here
is an example:

A: I can’t stand another minute behind the counter

of this boring nursery. We haven’t had a cus-
tomer in four hours.

B: Hey, look at this! The seeds I planted last week

are sprouting! My babies are growing!

A: It doesn’t interest me in the least. My feet are

killing me.
B: Look at that! The stem is sending out bifurcated
leaves already.

A: Bi-fur what?

B: Bifurcated. Little leaves split in two. You remem-

ber from botany class. See?

A: You don’t have to shove the pot into my . . . hey

. . . you just planted these a few days ago?
What kind of plants are these?

B: Zucchini, I think. Or are they sunflowers? I

should have labeled them.

94
 A: They’re very cute. The leaves look like little
forked tongues. I love the way they . . . oops!
Oh, no. I thought you were holding it from
the bottom.

B: I wasn’t. You grabbed it away from me. Now

they’re ruined.

A: No, they’re not. Look, we can sweep up the

soil and put them in another pot and . . .

B: Forget it. They’ll die now.

A: Wait! Look! I’m replanting them. They’ll be as

good as before! See? They’re standing tall
and singing, “It’s good to be green and alive!”
Look!

B: It’s no use. I’m not interested.

This is a more advanced exercise not only because

it involves verbal improvisation, but also because it requires
tremendous sensitivity on the part of both actors. They
both need to establish their own, diametrically opposite
moods, ideally by showing, not telling, the audience what
they are. Then they must exchange atmospheres so art-
fully that, in retrospect, the audience might not be able to
identify when the switch began.
When working with a production, the director may
help young actors ascertain which personal atmospheres
may help them develop certain soul qualities. Take, for ex-
ample, the scene in Twelfth Night when Malvolio appears
before Olivia, cross-gartered, yellow-stockinged, and smil-
ing like a lunatic, as he mistakenly believes she instructed
him to do in the forged letter he finds. An air of great ex-
pectation sets up the scene, as the forgers savor the extremes

95
to which Malvolio might go in his ardor for his unsuspect-
ing employer. Malvolio exudes the confidence of a chosen
one; his personal atmosphere conveys all the suppressed
lust he has stored up for Olivia. “Sweet lady, ho ho!” By
contrast, Olivia’s mood shifts from initial shock over his
bizarre appearance to growing concern that he may be ill.
“Wilt thou go to bed, Malvolio?” And, his judgment ut-
terly clogged by his own vanity and desire, he completely
misunderstands the import of Olivia’s words. “To bed?
Ay, sweetheart and I’ll come to thee.” (Act III, scene iv) Such
conflicting personal atmospheres can create the same kind
of dynamic interchange as two storm fronts colliding.
Working with atmospheres can be of immense as-
sistance to young actors in helping them to fabricate not
only a setting, but also a palpable mood. Just as dry ice
vapor or cigarette smoke densifies the quality of the atmo-
sphere onstage, so students can learn to charge the air of
any given scene in a perceptible way. If they can material-
ize and sustain such moods, they may also one day encoun-
ter during a play that quasi-transcendent feeling actors live
for. Like an exhausted swimmer who feels buoyed up by
the surrounding waters, actors onstage can also experience
an almost indescribable feeling of being borne aloft, el-
evated by the very milieu through which they move. Such
is the magic that atmospheres can create.

96
 Chapter IX

Finding Each Other–Ensemble Playing

By their very nature, adolescents are seekers. In a

culture that often appears devoid of purpose or coherence
or community, they are desperately searching for meaning
and relationship. Perhaps part of drama’s appeal for young
people is that it offers—indeed, requires—actors to incor-
porate both meaning and relationship into their efforts. As
hackneyed as it has become, the axiom that drama is the
most social of arts is founded upon a fundamental truth of
the theater. Every production we mount relies upon the
creation of a “concentrated community.” For the three or
four weeks that we work on the play, the players must act
in concert; i.e, they must not only acknowledge each other,
they must both nourish, as well as be nourished by, each other.
If they do not genuinely respond to one another’s charac-
ters onstage, scenes will ring hollow, moments will lack
authenticity.
From the very beginning, we try to obliterate the
notion that this or that role is some star vehicle. No por-
trayal is going to touch an audience if an actor operates in
a vacuum onstage. Every character must be seen as a cru-
cial part of an organic totality. A number of activities can
be employed to underscore this approach.

97
 Exercise 48: SITTING WITHOUT A CHAIR
Although students will see this exercise as pure fun,
even the slightest bit of reflection will help them recognize
its emblematic value. Arrange the cast in a tight circle, all
standing and facing clockwise. Have them take small side-
ways steps towards the center of the circle until they are as
snugly situated next to one another as possible, one person’s
back touching another’s front. At the director’s signal, all
participants slowly and simultaneously sit down on the
knees of the person directly behind them. Done success-
fully, the circle will form one enormous group chair, en-
tirely self-supporting.
This is an easy exercise to undermine for the sake
of a “group spill.” One prankster who decides to miss his
or her perch will cause everyone to take a tumble. How-
ever, even such foolishness can be instructive in this case.
It only takes one actor who misses an entrance or drops
out of character or forgets a critical prop to sabotage an
entire scene. No exercise is better suited for demonstrat-
ing the absolute interdependence of every cast member.

Exercise 49: MAKING A MACHINE

Have one person begin by standing in the center
of a circle and performing some simple, repeatable motion.
The initiator establishes a regular rhythm with this move-
ment and continues unwaveringly throughout the exercise,
or until instructed differently by you. Then have another
student join in by adding a motion that is somehow related
to the first person’s, but without any physical contact. The
rhythm of the second participant’s movement need not be
the same as the initiator’s, but it must bear some relation-
ship to the initial beat. Direct subsequent students to con-
tinue to add moveable parts to this “machine,” always in-
tegrating their movements in some inventive fashion.
Until the last actor completes the apparatus, have
the machine parts move silently. When all students have

98
joined, ask them
to begin making
the sounds they
imagine their
parts would
make. The ensu-
ing cacophony is
always entertain-
ing. As a final
challenge, you
might alter the
speed of the
mechanism by
asking the initia-
tor to speed up or
slow down until
the device comes
to grinding halt.
All parts of the
machine then
must adjust ac- Demonstration – Exercise #49
cordingly to keep
their movements and sounds synchronized.
A variation of this free-form machine is to have
students become the necessary parts of a familiar machine
or other object with moveable parts; some memorable cre-
ations have included an automobile (complete with som-
ersaulting “tires”), a washing machine, a sailboat, an old-
fashioned record player, a typewriter (remember those?),
an oil derrick, and a backhoe. Some students may have to
assume the roles of human beings to operate the device.

Exercise 50: GO ORGANIC!

An “organic” alternative to the machine idea in-
volves asking students as a group to create some living (or
at least moving) form in nature—a tree, an elephant, a

99
volcano. For the elephant, a number of students might
become, for example, the body, four others the legs, an-
other one the tail, still another the trunk. Flora can be most
effectively depicted if represented as growing over time,
from seed to sprout to sapling to, say, full-grown oak.

Exercise 51: CHARACTER BIOGRAPHIES

Earlier exercises (such as Exercise 34: GETTING
TO KNOW ME) asked students to enlarge the characters
they play by activating their imaginations. However, ac-
tors worked primarily as individuals then, not interactively.
This activity calls upon participants to assist one another
in improvised scenes exploring their characters. First, have
all actors imagine their characters as six-year-olds.
After they picture their characters as children, in-
struct participants to begin playing together as six-year-
olds during a school recess or at a park on a Saturday af-
ternoon. Whatever activity they choose—jumping rope,
playing tag, building with blocks, playing house, slaying
dragons—they should always attempt to portray their char-
acters’ fledging individualities.
While you can guide them into other significant,
improvisational moments of their characters’ lives—for
example, first love, some tragic loss, wedding day—an es-
sential phase is to have them imagine themselves towards
the end of their lives, when their characters are, say, eighty-
six-years-old. Have your actors pair up, sit down some-
where, and in character, reminisce about their lives. In their
improvised conversation, they might disclose their happi-
est and saddest moments, their greatest triumph, their deep-
est unfulfilled dream. Perhaps they will even share a se-
cret they have been carrying for decades, because they wish
to unburden themselves before they die.

Exercise 52: STATUES INTO SCENES

As they did in the simpler version (Exercise 38:
STATUES), students assume the roles of sculptors and clay.

100
In this exercise, one sculptor has two clay pieces to work
with. The artist’s aim is to think of the characters portrayed
by these two people in the play. Then, using the same mold-
ing technique as described in STATUES, the sculptor fash-
ions his two figures so that their positions place them in
some physical relationship to one another. One character
may be in the frozen pose of trying to kiss the other, while
the other character may be positioned to ward off such
unwanted advances.
After the sculpture is completed, ask the statues to
hold their poses while artists admire each other’s work.
Then, at a given signal, have the statues come to life. Tak-
ing their cues from their relative positions, the figures
should improvise a brief scene in character, either one pair
at a time or simultaneously. It doesn’t really matter if these
two characters don’t play a scene together in the actual play.
Any interaction stimulated by this exercise will add depth
and amplitude to the characters.

Exercise 53: WALKING AS OTHER CHARACTERS

This is another activity that requires the entire cast
to act cooperatively and also serves to broaden each actor’s
understanding of the entire cast of characters. Ask one stu-
dent to sit down and be an attentive observer as everyone
else begins to walk around the room (and perhaps even
speaks) as the observer’s character. Often the student sit-
ting out will notice one or another classmate’s inventive
movement or gesture that can be incorporated into the ac-
tual character. Over a couple of rehearsals, each actor can
benefit from the experience of watching the entire cast as-
sume his or her role.

Exercise 54: SOUND/WORD SYMPHONY

Ask the entire cast to form two or three horizontal
lines facing you, while you act as symphony conductor.
One line of students might sit on the floor, another in chairs
behind the first, and a third line might stand behind the

101
chairs. Ask the sitting participants to think of a sound that
expresses the quintessential quality of their characters.
Those standing might think of a word that sums up their
characters’ philosophy of life. When everyone has in mind
a particular sound or word, listen to each student’s contri-
bution in succession.
Once you know what sort of raw material you have
to work with, the symphony can begin. Point to one stu-
dent whose sound might be “Grrr,” and give him a tempo
so he can utter his “Grrr” in some continual rhythm. Then
bring in other sounds or words simply by pointing to stu-
dents and giving them counterpoints or syncopated beats
to follow. When all the parts have been introduced, you
can play with the “music” by asking for fortissimo from
some sections, piano from others. With a point and a wave
of your hand, the word section might be silent altogether,
while the sound section swells to a crashing crescendo. Or
perhaps three or four soloists could be selected to high-
light a particular theme. The direction the symphony takes
is limited only by your imagination.

Exercise 55: ALTERNATING WORDS

Break your cast into pairs and have them, in char-
acter, compose a letter to another character in the play.
However, they may only “write” the letter by speaking
aloud, and by alternating words, without prior planning.
The first character may say “Dear,” the second, “Bottom.”
First: I— Second: must— First: inform— Second: you—
First: that—(in continued alternation) my—mistress—con-
siders—you—a—godlike—jackass—with—your—long—
hairy—ears—and—noble—but—drippy—nostrils.
This kind of improvisation demands that each ac-
tor be attuned to the other, so that the letter can have some
coherence. However, an even more complex variation of
this exercise can take unexpected twists.

102
 Exercise 56: FOUR-HEADED CHARACTER
CONFESSIONALS
Choose four actors, who will become “four
mouths” of a single character in the play. The character
may be one currently portrayed by one of the selected stu-
dents, but that is not essential. You should instruct this
four-headed character to improvise some answer to any of
the following, revealing questions:

— What is your most embarrassing memory?

— After whom do you secretly lust?
— What would you do differently in your life if
you could?
— In what ways have you changed since you were
a child?
— In what ways do you most resemble your
mother/father?
— What is the nicest deed you ever did?
— Is there anything you would die for?
— What do you do when no one else is around?

Once the question is posed, the four-headed char-

acter can answer by again speaking only single words in
succession. For example, a four-headed response from
Malvolio to the question “What do you like most about
yourself?” might go as follows (each mouth says only one
word, ideally linking it to the previous words, then passes
the sentence along):

My—toes—are—among—my—favorite—trea-
sures.—I—love—to—dip—them—in—wet—cement—
and—delicately—tapdance—on—my—mistress’—fore-
head.—Another—of—my—best—features—is—my—
right—eyebrow.—Can—you—appreciate—how—it—
arches—like—a—great—banana?

103
 The four-person commentary usually makes even less
sense than this silly example. However, the substance of
the scene is less important than the ensemble feeling en-
gendered by the demands of the exercise. At its best, this
activity can have participants and audience alike on the
edge of their seats. Every word spoken can become a trig-
ger that shoots the entire thought sequence into some to-
tally unexpected direction.

Exercise 57: DUBBING

Sometimes young actors find it difficult to integrate
speech and gesture into their characters. Either they stand
woodenly, declaiming their lines, or their hands gyrate and
flap in unconscious accompaniment. Dubbing awakens
actors to the need for purposeful gestures that enhance,
rather than distract from, the spoken word. At the same
time, the activity of dubbing fosters an unusual form of
collaboration between cast members.
A preliminary exercise might be called VERBAL
MIRRORING. Have students stand in pairs facing each
other. One initiates some conversation, but speaks very
slowly, while the other person simultaneously attempts to
say exactly the same words with the same inflections.
Skilled partners become so adept at this simultaneous
speaking that an observer cannot easily distinguish which
one is leading the conversation.
The primary dubbing exercise calls for an actor and
a dubber, who will speak or animatedly read the actor’s
lines from somewhere behind the actor. As the dubber
reads, the actor may mouth the lines, but his or her main
focus will be to gesture expressively, in consonance with
the lines being spoken. If the dubber weeps, the actor’s
gestures must convey the act of crying. If the dubber
screams, the actor needs to intensify his or her movements
to communicate the passion behind the words. Hearing
someone else speak a character’s lines nearly always awak-
ens an actor to new dimensions and possibilities.

104
 Exercise 58: ENACTING A STORY
One of our favorite theatrical activities represents
the height of ensemble work. Choose a story that is short—
no more than two or three pages—colorful, and full of im-
agery. Russian folktales have proven ideal for our purposes,
such as “Two from the Sack,” or “Treasure,” or “The Crafty
Peasant.” A group could also enact a dream that an actor
retells, or for that matter, some biographical incident. With
these latter suggestions, you should be aware that the di-
rection of the class is straying towards psychodrama, which
can be fraught with both exciting possibilities and poten-
tially explosive personal reactions.
Whatever the source of the story, this exercise is
best done in three distinct stages:

1) Read or tell the story to the group after alert-

ing them that they will be retelling it after you are finished.
The more animated and vivid your presentation, the more
likely the students are able to recall it accurately.
2) Have the listeners now sit in a circle, with each
student recreating a segment of the tale. If someone for-
gets a detail or scrambles the chronology, others are allowed
to gently correct the narrator—not “No, you idiot. First he
took a bath and then the greedy mother replaced the magic
sack with a common one. How could you be such an air-
head?” Try to divide the segments more or less equally
among your participants so every student has an opportu-
nity to relate part of the tale. Again, their retelling is based
on how well they listened—the story is not being passed
around the circle to be read.
3) The third stage is potentially one of the most
stimulating and creative ensemble acting challenges we
know. Explain to the group that their final task is to now
dramatize the tale spontaneously, that is, without any time
to rehearse, assign parts, and so on. Not only that—in this
enactment, actors will portray not only human characters,
but every other significant element in the story, animate

105
or inanimate—a hut, a carriage, the waves of the sea, a pig,
a hat, a table, the north wind, gold pieces—whatever needs
depicting to relate the story as colorfully as possible. Fur-
thermore, since they will have no way of planning the play
in any rational, orderly way, any one or two or even three
people may jump up at any moment to become the narra-
tor or the main character or the oven or the goat. That is
fine—multiple portrayals only add to the wackiness of this
chaotic, preposterous, and often ingenious piece of theater.
The only requirement is that the whole group be involved
in the dramatization and that they stick to the original
storyline more or less faithfully. We hope that each partici-
pant will be sensitive enough not to dominate the play. One
person may begin as a narrator, then suddenly become a
broomstick, transform instantly into one of three old crones,
and end up being a tombstone.
This same technique might be used to enliven an
actual play rehearsal, when the cast hits that predictable
low point late in the production process. Allow the actors
to portray any character except their own, and all of the
other essential props as well. Again, it makes no differ-
ence if two or three people go onstage to play one role. It
will breathe new life into even the most moribund of pro-
ductions.

Exercise 59: GIVE AND TAKE

Young actors can attempt this difficult exercise, but
older adolescents—ages 17 and up—usually have more suc-
cess. Divide your stage into two acting areas, and have
two or three actors sit around a table in each area. Give
each group some topic to discuss that might stimulate a
lively conversation, even an argument: the relative merits
of tennis vs. golf, of dogs vs. cats, of classical music vs. heavy
metal, of living in the country vs. living in the city. Each
group should have a different topic. Then have both groups
begin their conversation simultaneously. The effect, of

106
course, will be “cacophony,” until you instruct one group
to “Turn down the volume,” while the other group carries
the primary action onstage. Then, at a given signal, give
the softer-speaking group permission to take the focus.
Their conversation gets louder and more animated while
the other group’s dialogue fades into the background but
still continues softly. This switching can continue back and
forth, as the actors become evermore adroit at taking and
giving up the limelight.
The exercise helps young people appreciate the
sometimes subtle but constant shifting of focus that takes
place on stage. In this regard theatrical movement is not
unlike the action of a baseball game. The primary focus, of
course, is on the ball, and whatever player is closest to it.
But every other player is continually making almost im-
perceptible adjustments in position, always focused on the
flight of the ball, always moving in anticipation of its next
bounce. At the crack of the bat, a player more removed
from the immediate action—say, the right fielder—sud-
denly takes the stage as the ball heads into his territory. He
fields the ball, throws the runner out trying to stretch a
single into a double, doffs his cap to acknowledge the spec-
tators’ appreciative applause, and returns to his unsung
status in the shadow of the bleachers.
Onstage, as well, inexperienced actors need to learn
when to take the limelight and when to relinquish it for the
greater good of a scene. The most aware supporting actors
will strike that balance between overacting and unrespon-
siveness. The actor in the background whose antics dis-
tract from the central action sabotages a scene just as surely
as the catatonic character who does not react at all to his or
her fellow players. The one diffuses the audience’s focus;
the other creates a vacuum by sucking energy away from
the dynamic of the play.

107
 From Museum – 12th grade production

108
 Chapter X

On a Highwire Without a Net:

Other Improvisational Ideas
So many of the exercises we have gathered from
various sources, or have invented, were designed to achieve
three aims:

1) to liberate students from the natural anxieties of

appearing foolish,
2) to give them confidence that their imaginations
are rich and boundless resources for their acting, and
3) to experience the magic of working collaboratively
with others to create theatrical truths out of illusion.

To accomplish the first objective, I have already strongly

recommended that all your students do many of these ex-
ercises simultaneously. When everyone involved is acting
foolish, no one feels foolish. However, at some point stu-
dents should also experience the exhilaration that can arise
when working on the “highwire without a net,” that is, im-
provising for an audience. Some students (and frankly,
some directors, too) break out in a cold sweat whenever
they think of having to improvise in front of others. It is
certainly a more frightening prospect than prepared pub-
lic speaking, which, we have always been told, creates more

109
anxiety in most people than swimming with sharks. Yet if
the audience consists of fellow classmates, and if the exer-
cises can be artfully arranged in a sequence that gradually
“en-courages” young actors to take chances, the anxiety
usually associated with improvisation can be transformed
into sheer excitement. The sense of risk one feels in impro-
visational work can kindle in young people an almost su-
pernatural awareness of the present moment and of the
people onstage with whom they create each moment.
I have never walked a tightrope without a net, but
I rock climbed over a period of twenty years. The parallels
between rock climbing and improvising are striking. Both
involve an acute sense of exposure—one, of course, more
physical. At the same time, the perception of peril in both
cases intensifies the climber’s/actor’s senses, and most es-
pecially the sense of concentration. One’s heightened
awareness of the surface of the rock face becomes micro-
scopic; even the tiniest nub of an outcropping, the smallest
crack, can become the next toehold or fingerhold. That same
alertness applies to improvisation as well. Participants must
be constantly attentive to any opportunity that might link
the present instant to the preceding and succeeding mo-
ments in some organic way. Improvising actors also quickly
learn that they are inextricably connected to their fellow
performers. Every word one speaks, every gesture one
makes, affects the others; indeed, it can alter the very di-
rection of a scene, so it becomes imperative for them to be
attuned to each other. Climbers, also, are quite literally
joined to one another. The rope is their lifeline, sometimes
even their means of communication. For safety’s sake, they
must develop an acute sensitivity to the movements of the
people belaying above or below them.
Of course, for climbers the rope does act as that
safety net. If they have taken proper precautions—checked
their equipment, climbed “within themselves” and not reck-
lessly, trusted their intuitions and their fellow climbers—
they will return to earth not only unscathed, but maybe

110
even enlarged for having overcome more than mere grav-
ity. Is there an equivalent lifeline for actors who enter into
the risky realm of improvisation? There is, but it is intan-
gible.
Every climber has had the experience of being fro-
zen on the rock face—no move appears possible beyond a
sliver of a ledge up to the left. Legs begin to shake, fore-
arms cramp, as the climber begins to question, “What am
I doing up here, anyway? This is crazy. I’m going to fall.”
However, the veteran climber will swing up to the ledge
without much hesitation, knowing that a new possibility
will present itself that was not discernible below. That is
precisely the situation actors can find themselves in at some
critical moment of an improvisation. They reach a dead
end in some scene, and the temptation becomes overpow-
ering to freeze or to drop out of character and say, “I can’t
do this.” However, if they can only develop the confidence
to make that blind move, new possibilities open up that
they never saw before taking the risk.

Exercise 60: BLIND OFFERS

In Keith Johnstone’s invaluable book Impro, he
describes this activity as a critical, preliminary exercise for
any actors interested in becoming adept at improvisation.
One of the fundamental principles of improvisational work
is that when one actor makes an “offer,” that is, suggests a
direction in a scene, the other actors onstage must not block
or reject the offer. For example, if one person says, “Where’s
your wife?” the other doesn’t respond with, “I don’t have
a wife.” Otherwise, the scene stops dead at that point, be-
cause the second actor has invalidated the first actor’s of-
fer. However, if the second person builds upon the initial
idea and replies with a conspiratorial whisper, “She’s hid-
ing in the closet,” we now have the basis for a most
promising scene.
The following, simple exercise helps students to
accept such creative leads from their fellow actors. Ask

111
participants to pair up, and have one person strike some
interesting pose—maybe she assumes a batting stance and
then freezes. Her partner makes some adjustment to her
original position—perhaps he moves the bat so that the
batter hits herself on the head, or he places both of her hands
in a “hands up, this is a stick-up” pose. Whatever the sec-
ond person does, the first accepts the alteration and says,
without fail, “Thank you.” Then the partners switch roles;
now the second actor begins by assuming another intrigu-
ing position, and the first actor somehow modifies it, fol-
lowed by another “Thank you.” In this way, each partici-
pant is accepting the other’s offer. It is a short step from
this exercise to an extended improvisation in which all the
actors must build upon each other’s initiatives.

Exercise 61: SLAP SNAP

As an elementary warm-up for more advanced
improvisational work, have students stand in a circle and
begin a rhythm in unison. The most common rhythm is to
slap both hands simultaneously on one’s thighs (first beat),
then clap hands (second beat), then snap right hand fin-
gers (third beat), and finally snap left hand fingers (fourth
beat). Once a regular rhythm has been established, the
leader says any word on the fourth beat—for example, “sub-
marine.” The next person in the circle must take the last
letter of that word—in this case, “e”—and start his word
with it—say, “elbow,” WITHOUT BREAKING THE
RHYTHM. The next person must begin with the “w”, and
so the game continues, with the last letter of the previous
word determining the beginning of the next.
If spontaneity is both the lifeblood and blood-chill-
ing ingredient of improvisational work, this game offers a
gentle introduction to the experience of reacting without
premeditation. With so little time to deliberate or plot out
a strategy, SLAP SNAP forces participants to stay abso-
lutely focused in the present moment. It is virtually

112
impossible to have the security of plotting out some word
strategy in advance.

Exercise 62: ALPHABET SCENES

A more advanced and challenging development of
the SLAP SNAP game involves two intrepid volunteers,
who either choose or are given some situation by the group;
Viola Spolin would call it a “Who” and a “Where.” In this
case, let us say that the suggested location is a jungle and
that the actors are explorers. Then the group throws out a
letter of the alphabet, say, “P.” The only rule the actors must
follow is that, beginning with P, each line they speak in
alternation must begin with the next letter of the alphabet.
As an illustration:

He: Please hand me that machete. It’s getting

pretty thick and scary in front of us.

She: Quiet! I think I hear something moving off to

our right.

He: Run for it!

She: So now you want to run? What kind of ex-

plorer are you, anyway?

He: Terrified! I’m the terrified kind. I’m not really

an explorer.

She: Uh. . .what did you say?

He: Veterinarian. Graduated three years ago from

PU. I’m a wing specialist.

She: Why didn’t you tell me this before?

113
 He: Xcellent question (this is an allowable bend
ing of the rules). Because I like to travel, and
I love your perfume.

She: (flattered) You do? It’s called. . .”Jungle Fe-

ver”. . .

He: Zebras have the same arousing scent!

And so on. The scene ends when the actors have com-
pleted the alphabet cycle and returned to their original start-
ing letter.

Exercise 63: LET’S DO THIS!

Another very safe group improvisation requires
one person to suggest performing some simple action, such
as, “Let’s ride a bicycle,” whereupon everyone in the group
enthusiastically chimes in, “Yes, let’s,” and immediately
begins to mime bike riding. At any moment after that ac-
tion has been established, another person can randomly
call out, “Let’s. . .dive for abalone,” which prompts the rest
of the group to respond heartily, “Yes, let’s!” Then, every-
one moves directly from bike riding to miming an under-
water search. The only caution here is that, teenagers be-
ing teenagers, someone might suggest the most inappro-
priate action, such as “Let’s take each other’s clothes off!”
At that point you might want to intercede with a forceful
“LET’S NOT!” and suggest another, less risque action.

Exercise 64: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Have the actors pair up, and ask one to begin mim-
ing some recognizable action—brushing one’s teeth, jump-
ing rope, flipping pancakes. Have the other person observe
for a moment, then ask, “What are you doing?” The first
actor continues to brush her teeth but then says she is do-
ing something totally unrelated— “I’m stamping out a

114
forest fire.” That is the cue for her partner to immediately
begin performing the action just described. As soon as her
partner starts stamping out an imaginary fire, the actor who
had been brushing her teeth stops that activity and asks
the fire-stamper, “What are you doing?” Again the person
stamping out the forest fire suggests an entirely different
action, such as, “I’m sneezing uncontrollably,” whereupon
the person who had asked the question must begin mim-
ing one sneeze after another. In this manner, the pair per-
forms a quick succession of actions based on each partner’s
imagination.
It doesn’t take very long for young people to dis-
cover the power that they exert over their partners in this
exercise. One may say, while miming the activity of bowl-
ing, “I’m standing on my head,” thus compelling his part-
ner to attempt that feat. Teachers should be alert to the
escalation of potentially embarrassing or physically im-
possible mime suggestions.

Exercise 65: IT’S TUESDAY!

Whenever you find yourself confronted with stu-
dents who hold back when they need to emote, who play
too “small” when they need to “get some size,” this exer-
cise, also borrowed from Impro, is the perfect icebreaker.
Again, have your actors pair up. Ask the first to make some
exceedingly bland and neutral observation, such as “It’s
Tuesday” or “The clock stopped” or “Your shoe is untied.”
The more innocuous the statement, the better. Now ask
the second actor to begin overreacting to the initial com-
ment in somewhat the following manner:

(Suddenly panic-stricken, looks down at his sneak-

ers in horror.) “Oh, no! Not again! It can’t be
untied again!! (Trembling uncontrollably)
That’s the sixth time in the last ten minutes! Who is
doing this to me? (Now dropping to his knees,

115
 screaming) What malicious, unseen hand is tortur-
ing me this way? (Hysterically beating his breast ) I
can’t go on like this, I . . .”

At this point, the hysterical person suddenly re-

gains control and calmly makes another dispassion
ate observation: “ . . . see that you are standing next
to the fishbowl.” Then it is the first actor’s turn to
react in the most melodramatic and overly exagger-
ated manner possible:

(Immediately in the throes of despair) “Of course,

I am, you insensitive block. (Beginning to weep).
And why am I standing here? Do you see any fish
in there? No, of course you don’t. (Now sobbing)
That’s because she’s gone . . . gone . . . gone. Gone
forever. (Doubling over inconsolably) And she’ll
never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever come back. There’s
a . . . (now calmly) peanut on the floor.”

Rarely have I used an exercise that achieved its aim

in such an entertaining fashion. Once students see that over-
the-edge exaggeration is exactly what is being required,
they usually commit wholeheartedly to the activity, mak-
ing melodrama look mild in the process.

Exercise 66: GIBBERISH

Gibberish, that is, speaking nonsense with famil-
iar inflections, can be a most liberating tool for young ac-
tors. In one exercise, we have our students pair up and
begin improvising some dialogue in character. At a certain
point, we tell them to switch into gibberish, but all the while
continuing the thread of their conversation. Then, at fre-
quent, irregular intervals, we have them bounce back and
forth between English and gibberish. Whenever we have
employed this activity, we have nearly always made the

116
same objective observation—unfailingly, the energy level
and volume in the room rises dramatically when the stu-
dents speak gibberish, then dwindles back to normal dur-
ing the English exchanges.
A far more ambitious variation is the GIBBERISH
TRANSLATION exercise. Again pair actors up, and have
one of them think of some activity to perform in front of an
audience: demonstrating how to prepare some esoteric
recipe, selling some new-fangled product, giving testimony
at a hearing before a Congressional panel. Then the actor
launches into his or her presentation, only in gibberish,
complete with accompanying gestures. After a sentence or
two, call upon the presenter’s “interpreter” to translate the
gibberish into understandable English. Of course, the in-
terpreter has no idea what the presenter is really saying
(just as often, neither does the presenter), so it falls to the
interpreter to improvise the translation, based at least some-
what upon the tone of the presenter’s voice and the quality
of the gestures. Here is a silly example:

Presenter, holding an imaginary gadget: Drpez ini

orfnok—lalaeatchno mo lorni fobga
eolkabus.

Interpreter: Now you can own this astonishing

new patented device—a titanium-sheathed,
computer-engineered, gamma ray Gnome
Sighter!

Presenter: Olbul nis ek minorik shlub fa sar icknori

blu aragober, ul megor rebos wana soog
alt boorinog?

Interpreter: How many times have you wished you

could see those mischievous little beings who
put your car keys in different locations than

117
 where you put them down, or who pinch all
those socks that disappear from the dryer?

Presenter: Belesh sko nelu ig noria flascumok ilian

blogopi homique terranovsh el fromicar retyr
joflanic pertopow zedu namiva trimolk werty
ip hojrex pitwin axorinda plusca putberty nof
itvicorus ascogia trug filianor mosi li alfo.

Interpreter: With this ingenius device you will be

able to train your sights on even the most
crafty of gnomes by using the technological
breakthrough that recognizes and digitally
reproduces any gnome’s aura.

Presenter: Tramilio boxu oriepro freenul. Ag mool!

Interpreter: So let the remarkable Gnome de Plume

help you find those pesky tricksters. All
you have to do is send in $12.99 and your first
born to qualify for this one-time offer. Hurry!

Exercise 67: ONE KNOWS, ONE DOESN’T

Ask two actors to volunteer for a scene. Whisper to
one who she is and what the context is; the other person
plays the scene “blind,” groping to figure out who he is
based on the gradually unfolding clues of his partner. Imag-
ine that the actor in the know is told she is a painter, and
her partner in the dark is a restless model.

Painter: (Perhaps in a French accent) Stop mov-

ing so much.

Actor #2: I can’t help it. I have mosquito bites all

over my body.

118
 Painter: That’s why I asked you to keep your outfit
on.

Actor #2: (still uncertain who he is playing and

what his relationship to the “painter” is, but
clearly interested in the possibilities of the last
remark) Don’t you want to play Adam and
Eve?

Painter: I’m much more interested in capturing the

interplay of light on fabric than in seeing
swollen red blotches. Now please remain
still!

Actor #2: (beginning to get the context) Must I con-

tinue to balance on one leg?

Painter: And up on tiptoe!

Actor #2: (Now r elishing his newly discovered

direction) My tutu is too tight. I have no feel-
ing in my extremities.

Painter: That’s what happens when you squeeze a

size 48 body into a size 6 tights!

Actor #2: Oh well, I suppose losing a limb is a small

price to pay for the sake of art!

The key to such improvs is how artfully, and subtly

the informed actor reveals the situation to his or her igno-
rant partner. If, in the above scene, the painter had begun
with, “How do you expect me to capture on canvas your
classic ballet pose with your wriggling about?”, the
discovery process would have been entirely short-circuited,
and the actors’ and audience’s interest would have instantly
evaporated. Dropping general clues (especially those that

119
offer wide-open possibilities for misinterpretation, at least
in the beginning) and proceeding to more specific and ori-
enting hints make for most absorbing theater.

Situations for such scenes are limitless but might

include the following:

— a lawyer speaking to his prisoner/client

— veterinarian speaking to pet owner
— a bus driver to an unruly kid in the back
— an eighty-five-year-old husband informing his wife
of 60 years that he’s leaving her for a younger
woman
— expectant fathers in a waiting room
— an environmentalist confronting a logger
— a boss to a secretary who has just ruined the copier
— a homeowner interrupting a bungling burglar
— two gravediggers in Brooklyn
— astronauts about to take off

Exercise 68: GIFT-GIVING

In the previous exercise, at least one player knows
the situation and can guide his or her partner in the in-
tended direction. However, this exercise removes all such
directional aids. Neither participant begins with even the
slightest hint where the scene is going. Ask one actor to
hand another an imaginary package; other than communi-
cating the general size and weight of the package, there’s
no way of knowing the contents until the recipient unwraps
the present. In fact, neither actor has any idea what the gift
is. They both must discover it through the ensuing impro-
vised scene:

Receiver: Oh, my gosh! How did you know that

I’ve been coveting this for years?

Giver: I’m psychic.

120
 Receiver: Who told you? Andrea? Millie? Rex?

Giver: I’m not revealing my sources. Do you re-

ally like it?

Receiver: Like it? I adore it! But do you think it’s

too . . . you know . . . bold?

Giver: How can we know until you try it on?

(This is the first real stab at narrowing down the pos-

sibilities. They now know they’re dealing with some ap-
parel, and not with a CD or a fishing rod. The recipient
now must take a leap of imagination, reach into the box
and let his hands create some item of clothing. He places
an invisible hat on his head).

Giver: It’s perfect! You were born to wear it.

(Up to this point neither participant knows yet what

kind of hat they are describing. One or the other actor has
to offer a direction).

Recipient: I feel so . . . wild and woodsy with it on.

Giver: All you need now is one of those fringed

buckskin shirts and a musket.

(Clearly the giver has taken the recipient’s suggestion

further, “seen” exactly what kind of hat the recipient is
wearing and has also given her partner all the direction he
needs to complete the scene).

Recipient: But should I wear it with the tail in the

back or the front?

121
 Again, the real challenge in playing such improvi-
sations is to allow the discovery process to unfold slowly
(much more slowly than the illustration above has indi-
cated), instead of trying to rush into some fixed and fin-
ished solution. It is precisely that unresolved groping in
which audiences find such delight. Onstage, questions are
so much more interesting than answers. A student of mine
put it even more aptly in an American literature course I
was teaching a few years ago. I asked the students to come
up with some original thought, or at least one for which
they could find no antecedent. This young man wrote,
“Questions are better than answers, for answers are just
questions cut short by arrogance.” An exercise such as
GIFT-GIVING encourages the humility that only living
questions can engender.

Exercise 69: WHAT’S IN THE CLOSET?

Similar to GIFT-GIVING, this exercise begins with
both actors in complete ignorance of their scene’s direc-
tion. Direct one of them to go to an imaginary closet door,
open it and then say something along the lines of, “Would
you please tell me what this is doing in here?”
Depending on the first actor’s tone of voice and
general reaction, the second actor can advance the conver-
sation with some new information: “Where else am I go-
ing to keep it? You already told me that it would be dan-
gerous to keep it in the bedroom!” Again, young actors
should fight the urge to pin down the identification of the
closeted item for a while. Let the tension build that can
arise out of this ensemble groping towards a joint imagina-
tion.

Exercise 70: RHYMING DIALOGUE

The trend in modern poetry has been to disdain
rhyme schemes, with good reason. Unless it is deftly done,
rhyming can quickly fall into a predictable, sing-song tempo
that detracts from, rather than augments, a poem’s content.

122
Yet in an improvisational context, asking actors to trans-
form otherwise prose dialogue into rhyme can have the
most electrifying effects. Perhaps you can initiate this ex-
ercise by giving your instructions in rhyme.

All right, everybody, look lively, it’s time

for all you actors to speak in rhyme.
Whatever lines you have you must find a way
for the last words to rhyme, now heed what I say,
no matter if you’re clothed in burlap, rayon, lace
or doublet,
either rhyme alternatingly or in your standard
couplet!

Not exactly Shakespearean in quality, but that’s pre-

cisely the point. The clumsier your rhyming, the less daunt-
ing and more empowering the challenge will be for the ac-
tors. While you can use this activity for any improvisa-
tional work, it can be particularly effective towards the end
of a production. If your actors have fallen into patterned
ways of speaking their lines, bordering on the mechanical,
or if they have stopped listening to one another, spring this
exercise on them to shake them out of their lockstep. Have
them enact a scene from the play, but now roughly trans-
lating their lines from the original into rhyme. Cornelius,
in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, addresses the audi-
ence with the following speech:

Isn’t the world full of wonderful things? There we sit

cooped up in Yonkers years and years and years and all
the time wonderful people like Mrs. Molloy are walking
around in New York and we don’t know them at all. I don’t
know whether—from where you’re sitting—you can see—
well, for instance, the way her eye and cheek come together,
up here. Can you? And the kind of fireworks that shoot
out of her eyes all the time. I tell you right now; a fine
woman is the greatest work of God.
(Act II, p. 176)
123
 Such a speech might be versified in the following man-
ner:

Isn’t the world full of wonder and joy?

We sit in Yonkers for years and never know
that people exist like Mrs. Molloy.
Can you see from where you sit, just so,
how her cheek and eye and temple meet
to form this irresistible line?
How her eyes shoot—now isn’t this neat—
sparklers and fireworks the entire time?

I tell you all now that with all a woman’s fea-

tures
God’s never created more enchanting creatures.

Another variation of this exercise is to have two char-

acters improvise some dialogue—perhaps inspired by a
scene in the play—in which one actor speaks a line ending
with a word that can be rhymed. Then the other must speak
the next line ending with a matching rhyming word.

Cornelius: Chief clerk! Oh Boy! I’ve been pro-

moted from chief clerk to chief clerk.

Barnaby: Aren’t you happy? You’re finally get-

ting somewhere in your work.

Cornelius: I don’t want to work every day of the

week. I want to live!

Barnaby: Oh, it’s not so bad, Cornelius; it beats

being a sieve.

Cornelius: Barnaby, how much money have you got?

Barnaby: Three dollars—hey, that’s a lot!

124
 Cornelius: We’re going to New York to paint the
town red!

Barnaby: We can’t, Cornelius, by nine I’m in bed.

Cornelius: Don’t you want some excitement in

your life?

Barnaby: I have quite enough whittling with my

penknife.

Cornelius: Well, I’m 33 and I’ve never kissed a girl,

you see?

Barnaby: Yes, but I’m only 17; it’s not so urgent for
me!

Exercise 71: CHARACTER EXCHANGE

Involve two actors in an improvised dialogue of
some kind. The scene could arise from some moment pe-
ripherally related to or suggested by, but not actually dra-
matized in, the play which you are working. In Much Ado
About Nothing, it might be the first time Beatrice and
Benedick ever verbally sparred with one another. In Under
Milkwood, it could be Polly Garter’s visiting Captain Cat
on his deathbed. If you are not working with a formal
play, the scene could be purely fabricated from any situation
that might involve the clash of two very different perspec-
tives, such as one of the following:

— a student being called into the principal’s office

— a psychic breaking some bad future news to a
client
— a city dweller arguing with a farmer about the
merits of urban vs. country life
— a rude customer and an irritable shop owner

125
 — a policeman stopping a speeding motorist
— two inventors of the same device trying to take
sole credit
— a barber and the customer whose hair he just
butchered
— a conductor to an incompetent oboist in the or-
chestra

Allow the conversation to develop so that the par-

ticipants establish their respective views. Then, at a mo-
ment when the dialogue begins to heat up, freeze the ac-
tion. While holding the freeze, have each person note care-
fully the other’s physical position—the tilt of the head, the
location of the hands, the attitude of the legs and feet. At
the director’s signal, the actors change places, meticulously
replicating their partner’s position as precisely as possible.
Each actor holds this new pose until the director says, “Con-
tinue,” whereupon the actors now carry on with the scene
assuming the identity of the person with whom they were
just arguing. The actors now must, initially at least, main-
tain the original view advanced by their partners. At other
critical junctures, the pair can exchange places again and
again, until a suitable endpoint is reached.
This exercise can be particularly effective for an
actor who latches on to one particular interpretation and
then defends it rigidly against all constructive suggestions.
Beyond that, it is one of the most effective vehicles for broad-
ening young people’s awareness, so that they see beyond
their own, fairly narrow standpoints. One of the great stum-
bling blocks to ensemble playing in the theater, and for that
matter to real community building in the world, is our in-
ability to value another person’s point of view. Sometimes
we can only come to such a recognition when life circum-
stances compel us to walk in another’s shoes. A drama
exercise such as CHARACTER EXCHANGE can help to
develop the expanded awareness necessary for us to ac-
knowledge and appreciate differences.

126
 PART THREE

PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF
MOUNTING A PRODUCTION

Chapter XI

Finding the Right Play

I once asked a well-known poet about his inspira-
tion for writing. He replied, “Every so often I get a feeling
like a chicken bone is stuck in my throat. That’s when I
know I’ve got a poem coming. It’s those chicken bones
that turn into poems.” What is the “chicken bone” that
provokes a dramatic production? One cannot say that the
empty stage, as Peter Brooke termed it, calls forth a play
any more insistently than the poet’s blank sheet of paper
does, or the painter’s untouched canvas. For the teacher/
director, the starting point must be the group of eager young
actors who need a particular kind of dramatic experience.
Beginning with a specific play in mind, and then gathering
a group of actors to mount the production, may work in
professional or community theater. Such an approach in a
school setting overlooks the primary reason for doing a play
in the first place— the needs of the students.
How does one choose a play to meet those needs?
Can the director know a class well enough to judge whether
it needs the levity and verbal acrobatics of a witty Molière
comedy or the deepening intensity of a Greek tragedy?
When can Shakespeare be tackled? Where can one find
modern plays filled with idealism instead of cynicism?

127
 In an ideal world, of course, the teacher would
write a class play each year on an age-appropriate theme.
One of my gifted colleagues has done just that, including a
recently staged adaptation of Parzival for his seventh grad-
ers. Writing one’s own script allows the teacher to custom-
ize every student’s role. The loudmouth needing to be sen-
sitive to others may be given the part of a mute; the taci-
turn girl in the corner may benefit from playing a tart-
tongued shrew; the child who lacks will might become a
courageous warrior. Such are the possibilities when one
can compose the play one directs.
Not all of us are both literary and dramatic, so to
find a suitable play we must rely on the works of other
authors. What is suitable? In the Waldorf world, the cur-
riculum can offer a most helpful direction. For example,
seventh graders study the Middle Ages, the Renaissance,
and the Age of Exploration. Many classes have performed
one version or another of Joan of Arc’s life; last year the
seventh graders at my school turned three of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales into a delightful evening of theater. Then
eighth grade students are introduced to the modern world
by way of the American, French, and Industrial Revolu-
tions. Plays about Lincoln, adaptations of Dickens’ stories,
such as A Tale of Two Cities or Nicholas Nickleby, Lawrence
and Lee’s The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, Rostand’s Cyrano
de Bergerac, and the musical Fiddler on the Roof have all of-
fered worthwhile themes for eighth graders.
Other considerations besides curricular themes
may need to be weighed when choosing a play. In tenth
grade, for example, our students find themselves explor-
ing ancient civilizations, from India to Greece. While it is
possible to stage some exceedingly distilled version of the
Mahabharata (Peter Brooke’s ground-breaking adaptation
in the late eighties was over nine hours long), one of the
classic Greek plays might be a more manageable choice.
Indeed, with a small class of students, Antigone or

128
Prometheus Bound could work well. The Greek canon of
tragedies contains some of the most unadorned, powerful,
poignant depictions of the human condition ever written.
The biggest practical problem with these otherwise potent
dramas is the lack of leading roles. Antigone only offers a
director five or six major characters to work with; the rest
of the class would have to be content with being members
of the all-important chorus. Over the years, however, I have
come to realize that such choral work, while challenging,
does not always meet the needs of rapidly incarnating ado-
lescents who hunger to play individuals. Being part of a
strong chorus that speaks and moves in graceful unison
seems more appropriate to fifth graders. They still live much
more strongly in a group consciousness. So for our sopho-
more productions, we have turned to playwrights who
provide young actors with three essential ingredients:

l) Strong characterizations—real individuals who

are complicated enough to allow students to discover hid-
den dimensions, subterranean motives, and a range of
emotions

2) Rich language—that in the speaking can actu-

ally transport young actors to a level they might not other-
wise reach using mundane, everyday speech. Language,
as Orwell so presciently pointed out in 1984, diminishes or
elevates consciousness according to the variety, color, and
texture of possible word choices. Finding a play with such
rich language can actually ennoble the speakers and ex-
pand not only their vocabulary, but also their sense of them-
selves

3) Stirring storylines—a narrative that grips the

imagination, one that has transformative possibilities for
the characters and the actors who play them. We look for a
play that dramatizes familiar, yet universal themes of

129
striving after the ideals that make us human—love, beauty,
truth, redemption, sacrifice, courage, forgiveness. Perhaps
it is no wonder that so many directors turn to the one play-
wright who managed four hundred years ago to encom-
pass each of these elements into his time-transcending ex-
plorations of the human condition—William Shakespeare.

Playing Shakespeare

If it be not now, yet it will come. Readiness is all.

( Hamlet, Act V, scene ii)

Not a single class has graduated from Green

Meadow Waldorf School in the last twelve years without
having had the opportunity to perform a Shakespeare play.
The only small controversy over the years has been not
whether to undertake a Shakespeare play, but when. So many
Waldorf schools without high schools view performing
Shakespeare as a culminating challenge of students’ entire
elementary school experience. If, in fact, the eighth grade
is the last chance for students to do Shakespeare, then by
all means, forge ahead. Yet we have discovered at least a
couple of good reasons for waiting until tenth or eleventh
grade to tackle Shakespeare.
I have seen a number of eighth-grade productions
of various Shakespeare comedies. On one level or another,
of course, they have all been delightful, especially if one
knows the students who revel in portraying a sodden Sir
Toby Belch or a jackass-enamored Titania or tart-tongued
adversaries such as Kate and Petruchio. Yet from another
perspective, most eighth graders seem somewhat over-
matched playing Shakespeare. They often do not under-
stand and, therefore, cannot fully ensoul the majestic lan-
guage they are declaiming. At the same time, they are rarely
capable of bringing enough depth and dimension to these
memorable individualities. Falstaff and Feste, Portia and

130
Prospero, Iago and Ophelia, Benedick and Beatrice—these
and dozens of larger-than-life characters have often become
career-making (or -breaking) roles for professional actors.
For young teenagers just beginning to experience the first
seething storms of their own inner realms, it may be a bit
premature to immerse them in Shakespeare.
The same might be said, of course, for a sixteen- or
seventeen-year-old. Yet any teacher of adolescents will con-
firm the enormous deepening of young people’s capacities
in the interval of those two or three years. In the Waldorf
school movement which distinguishes itself from other edu-
cational models through its age-appropriate curriculum,
this is no small matter. Suddenly, the jealous rage of a
Leontes or Othello, the overweening, ruthless ambitions of
a Lady Macbeth, and the paralyzing self-loathing of a Ham-
let no longer seem out of the reach of a talented young ac-
tor. Simply put, older teenagers have more emotional cache
to call upon than younger adolescents, more gathering ego
strength to anchor their characters and to subdue their own
personal tempests than fourteen-year-olds. None of this is
to say that elementary school students should not stage a
Shakespeare play; only that, given the choice, older stu-
dents will bring more to, and receive more from, the trea-
sures of a Shakespeare production than younger actors.
Some Shakespeare-worshiping teachers might ob-
ject by countering that students can never be exposed
enough to the bard’s genius. As early as first and second
grades, some children skip around the room reciting Ariel’s
“Come unto these yellow sands” song, and few seventh
graders escape the first serious exploration of poetry with-
out learning a Shakespearean sonnet or two. At the right
time, such introductions can only be enriching. The only
caution here is not to fall into the thought-trap of main-
stream education. The prevailing philosophy assumes that
if reading is important to learn, and tests are the best way
to ascertain what students learn, then the earlier that reading

131
can be taught and tests administered, the better. If we were
to follow that approach to its illogical extreme, parents wish-
ing to raise future Olympic champions might start three-
year-olds on weight-lifting regimes; more cerebral parents,
already grooming their child for that doctoral thesis, might
replace their five-year-old’s bedtime fairy tales with a steady
diet of Great Books authors—Plato, Thomas Aquinas,
Descartes, Darwin. Just as children who, at the urging of
ambitious parents, begin competitive sports too early and
burn out by the time they hit adolescence, so, too, students
exposed too early or too intensely to Shakespeare may re-
sist the bard’s gifts later in life.

132
 Chapter XII

Cut to the Quick—

Even Shakespeare Needed an Editor
Only a dramatic genius such as Shakespeare could
give Polonius, that old windbag of a counselor in Hamlet,
some of the most perceptive words ever spoken on a stage,
or for the stage:

Since brevity is the soul of wit . . .

I will be brief.
(Act II, scene ii)

The joke, of course, is that Polonius speaks these lines

just as he is warming up for a speech so interminable that
it becomes a parody of every convoluted explanation ever
delivered. Polonius has a knack for turning a simple sen-
tence into a voluminous commentary. Is it heresy to sug-
gest that Shakespeare himself was guilty of the same pro-
lixity, at least when one considers staging one of his plays
with young actors? This may sound contradictory to the
statement above alluding to Shakespeare’s majestic lan-
guage. Yet as vital and time-transcending as his verse has
proven over the centuries, mounting a Shakespeare play
without prudent editing would be hard on both actors and
audience.

133
 Perhaps we should not fault Shakespeare; perhaps
the blame lies with us. How many of us have allowed our
consciousness to be whittled away and hollowed out by
media, until we have trouble focusing on any experience
that exceeds the twelve-minute attention span between tele-
vision commericals? How many of us latch onto one con-
venient, empty-headed advertising sound byte or another,
such as “Just do it,” or “Is it in you?” or “Like a rock”? Is it
so surprising that most adolescents’ favorite all-purpose
word of the moment is the pithy, noncommittal “What-
ever”?
Whatever the reason, even a brilliantly directed
Shakespeare play needs editing if young actors are perform-
ing it. Indeed, with the time constraints most teacher/di-
rectors have to endure, a shortened version of the play in
question becomes not just desirable, but imperative. So
how can a decidedly nongenius teacher/director presume
to wield the scalpel that excises a third or more of Twelfth
Night or Macbeth or As You Like It? For teachers unaccus-
tomed to such “tailoring,” the idea must sound tantamount
to only playing two of every three notes of a Beethoven
concerto, or looking only at the lines, and not the colors, of
a Cezanne painting. Nevertheless, it is possible to artfully
edit Shakespeare’s work without anyone in the audience,
outside of a few Shakespearean scholars, knowing what
has been snipped.
Would-be editors must first take the time to famil-
iarize themselves with the play in question—not just by
reading it through, but by studying it thoroughly, looking
for imagery, themes, and references in early scenes that
appear in later ones. After a number of close readings, they
should take a pencil and lightly bracket any line, any ex-
change between characters, any seemingly redundant pas-
sage in a longer speech, that might be eliminated without
losing the storyline or mood of the scene. Here is an ex-
ample from Twelfth Night:

134
 Enter Maria and Clown

[Lines to be deleted appear in boldface.]

Mar: Nay, either tell me where thou hast been,

or I will not open my lips so wide as a bristle may
enter in way of thy excuse. My lady will hang thee
for thy absence.

Clown: Let her hang me! He that is well hanged

in this world needs to fear no colors.

Mar: Make that good.

Clown: He shall see none to fear.

Mar: A good lenten answer. I can tell thee where

that saying was born, of “I fear no colors.”

Clown: Where, good Mistress Mary?

Mar: In the wars; and that may you be bold to say

in your foolery.

Clown: Well, God give them wisdom that have it;

and those that are fools, let them use their talents.

Mar: Yet you will be hanged for being so long absent,

or to be turned away—is not that as good as a hang-
ing to you?

Clown: Many a good hanging prevents a bad mar-

riage; and for turning away, let summer bear it out.

Mar: You are resolute then?

Clown: Not so, neither; but I am resolved on two

points.
135
 Mar: That if one break, the other will hold; or if
both break, your gaskins fall.

Clown: Apt, in good faith; very apt. Well go thy way!

If Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert as witty
a piece of flesh as any in Illyria.

Mar: Peace, you rogue; no more o’ that. Here comes

my lady. Make your excuse wisely, you were best.
(Act I, scene v)

This brief exchange cannot be excised completely

without losing two key elements: 1) examples of both
Maria’s and the Clown’s trenchant wit, and 2) the fore-
shadowing in the Clown’s final lines of Sir Toby’s eventual
coupling with Maria. At the same time, the more obscure
references in the exchange can be omitted without losing
the lifeblood of the characters’ dialogue. We must be ex-
tremely careful, of course, not to be so rash and indiscrimi-
nate in editing such scenes that we “sever an artery” or
“remove a vital organ.” Furthermore, whatever lines we
excise, we must stitch the remaining text back together as
seamlessly as possible. This can only be achieved by mak-
ing sure that the dialogue on either side of a cut betrays no
hint of excision, as the example above illustrates. If we can
learn to become artistic surgeons, the resulting abridge-
ments of Shakespeare’s plays will be true to his own cre-
ative impulses. Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s greatest
stories were lifted from other sources, then truncated, re-
cast, embellished, and transformed by the bard himself.
Prudent paring should not be limited to
Shakespeare. By the end of their secondary school careers,
most twelfth graders long to perform a contemporary play,
one that has, in the words of a recent senior, “everything—
levity and gravity, a gripping story, juicy characters,
meaningful theme.” They don’t ask for much, do they?

136
The obvious problem for large high school classes (greater
than twenty or twenty-five) is that the trend in the most
memorable twentieth-century drama has been towards
smaller and smaller casts: Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Jour-
ney into Night has five parts; so do Samuel Beckett’s Wait-
ing for Godot, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and Ed-
ward Albee’s The American Dream. Harold Pinter ’s The
Birthday Party has six roles, Frances Goodrich’s and Albert
Hackett’s The Diary of Ann Frank offers ten, William Inge’s
Picnic, eleven. Of course, one can find notable exceptions—
Wilder’s plays, Miller’s The Crucible, and Moss and Hart’s
comedies; and we have turned to these playwrights more
than once over the years. (See Chapter XVIII: “Plays That
Have Worked” for a list of larger-cast plays we have done
with some success.)
The other problem has more to do with the con-
tent of contemporary drama. As the world has turned
darker, many playwrights have naturally chosen to dra-
matize the growing violence, cynicism, and alienation of
our time. One could argue, of course, that few modern
plays rival Hamlet for exposing the depravity, the estrange-
ment, the shadow side of the human soul. For sheer iniq-
uity, what other play boasts a father’s ghost who demands
bloody revenge for his “unnatural murder,” a mother who
marries the murderer, lifelong friends who turn into spies,
a young woman who goes insane and essentially commits
suicide after hearing about her father’s death at the hands
of her would-be lover, and no fewer than seven other deaths
during the story—death by drowning, venom, execution,
swordpoint? What could be darker than the final scene?
The treachery that has literally poisoned the world of
Elsinore has left the stage littered with corpses.
And yet, through it all, we have witnessed the im-
perishable nobility of an individual struggling to find truth,
love, and meaning in a wicked world. The magnitude of
Hamlet’s questioning, the immensity of his soul, elevates

137
the play into the highest reaches of human striving. Yes,
Hamlet is a tragedy, but because it is, we experience all the
eleos and phobos—the compassion and awe—Aristotle de-
scribed over twenty-five hundred years ago. In tragedy we
see the human spirit laid bare, and it is an awe-inspiring,
humbling sight. Real tragedy is not paralyzing or dispirit-
ing; it transmutes pain into illumination. Through trag-
edy, we discover the depths as well as the heights of what
it means to be truly human.
Many contemporary plays lack precisely this tran-
scendent, revelatory quality, precisely because they deny
the power of the human spirit. The theatrical adaptation
of Orwell’s 1984 is a perfect example of this crushing, de-
humanizing trend. Winston Smith is more a victim than a
tragic figure, whose physical and psychological torture,
whose ultimate self-surrender to Big Brother at the story’s
end, offers no hint of nobility, no crumb of hope, no whis-
per of redemption. One can certainly claim that dramatiz-
ing visions of such dystopias can serve as a warning to all
who scoff at the notion of such a brutal totalitarian state.
Yet ever again we educators/directors need to ask ourselves
what soul nourishment can a particular play provide young
people who are looking to find their moral bearings in the
murky currents of our uncertain world.
Two of the most inspirational modern plays I have
worked with are Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood and Frank
Galati’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Un-
der Milkwood is Thomas’ loving, twenty-four hour depic-
tion of Welsh fishing village denizens. It contains dozens
of all-too-human and memorable characters, in addition to
some of the richest, most poetic language of the twentieth
century. The Grapes of Wrath, as described elsewhere, dra-
matizes the dreams, the despair, the simple dignity, and
the innate goodness of the Joad family as they encounter
tragedy and injustice in their move from Oklahoma’s dust
bowl to California’s fruit-growing fields. Although both

138
plays are beautifully written, again I edited and spliced to
suit our needs.
With The Grapes of Wrath, time constraints again
dictated a number of abbreviated scenes, such as the one
below:

[Lines to be deleted appear in boldface.]

Casy: I been thinkin’. I been in the hills thinkin’,

almost you might say like Jesus went into the wilderness
to think His way out of a mess of troubles.

Granma: Pu-raise Gawd!

Casy: I ain’t sayin’ I’m like Jesus. But I got tired like
Him, an’ I got mixed up like Him, an’ I went into the wil-
derness like Him, without no campin’ stuff.

Granma: Hallelujah!

Casy: I been thinkin’, on’y it wasn’t thinkin’, it was

deeper down than thinkin’. I got thinkin’ how there was
the moon an’ the stars an’ the hills, an’ there was me lookin’
at 'em, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing.
An’ that one thing was holy.
I got thinkin’ how we was holy when we was one
thing, an’ mankin’ was holy when it was one thing. An’ it
on’y got unholy when one mis-able little fella got the bit
in his teeth an’ run off his own way, kickin’ an’ draggin’
an’ fightin’. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when
they’re all workin’ together—kind of harnessed to the
whole shebang—that’s right, that’s holy. An’ then I got
thinkin’ I don’t even know what I mean by holy. I can’t say
no grace like I use’ ta say. I’m glad of the holiness of sup-
per. I’m glad there’s love here. That’s all. (Heads remain
bowed. Casy looks around.) I’ve got your supper cold.
Amen.

139
 All: A-men.
(Act I, pp. 24-25)

With Under Milkwood, I wanted to reduce some of

the narration to give more playing time to the character-
revealing vignettes. An example follows:

[Lines to be deleted appear in boldface.]

Organ Morgan: There is perturbation and music in

Coronation Street! All the spouses are honking like
geese and the babies singing opera. P. C. Attila Rees
has got his truncheon out and is playing cadenzas
by the pump, the cows from Sunday Meadow ring
like reindeer, and on the roof of Handel Villa see
the Women’s Welfare hoofing, bloomered, in the
moon.

First Voice: At the sea-end of town, Mr. and Mrs.

Floyd, the cocklers, are sleeping as quiet as death,
side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown
like two old kippers in a box.
And high above, in Salt Lake Farm, Mr. Utah
Watkins counts, all night, the wife-faced sheep as
they leap the fences on the hill, smiling and knitting
and bleating just like Mrs. Utah Watkins.

Utah Watkins: Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, forty-

eight, eighty-nine . . .

Mrs. Utah Watkins: (bleating) Knit one slip one

Knit two together
Pass the slipstitch over

First Voice: Ocky Milkman, drowned asleep in

Cockle Street, is emptying his churns into the Dewi
River,

140
 Ocky Milkman: (whispering) regardless of expense,

First Voice: and weeping like a funeral.

Second Voice: Cherry Own, next door, lifts a tankard

to his lips, but nothing flows out of it. He shakes
the tankard. It turns into a fish. He drinks the fish.

First Voice: P. C. Attila Rees lumps out of bed, dead

to the dark and still foghorning, and drags out his
helmet from under the bed; but deep in the back
yard lock-up of his sleep a mean voice murmurs.

A Voice: You’ll be sorry for this in the morning,

First Voice: and he heave-ho’s back to bed. His hel-

met swashes in the dark.

Second Voice: Willy Nilly, postman, asleep up street,

walks fourteen miles to deliver the post as he does
every day of the night, and rat-a-tats hard and sharp
on Mrs. Willy Nilly.

Mrs. Willy Nilly: Don’t spank me, please, teacher,

Second Voice: whimpers his wife at his side, but ev-

ery night of her married life she has been late for
school.
(pp. 18-20)

The hardest part of trimming any play, of course,

is knowing that for the playwright, every line is a vital
strand in the play’s tapestry; cutting any single strand could
cause the fabric to unravel. In a play such as Under
Milkwood, we language-loving directors could well cringe
at our own audacity when taking the knife to Thomas’ in-
comparably lyrical lines. Nevertheless, we need to remind

141
ourselves that we are not working with professional ac-
tors, nor do we have an open-ended calendar. Given the
choice of performing badly a full-length, unabridged pro-
duction or performing well a discriminatingly edited play,
who would knowingly choose the agony over the ecstasy?
As a final word on editing, I should issue a note of
caution: any editing a person does without permission from
either the playwright or publishing company is probably
breaking one law or another. The same is true for repro-
ducing scripts on copiers and performing plays without
paying required royalty fees. That said, I know of very
few theatrical productions at the junior high or high school
level that are not altered in some way to suit the specific
needs of a particular class or community.

Scene from The Matchmaker – 10th grade production

142
 Chapter XIII

Casting the Play

There are no small roles—only small actors.

Anonymous

In the Waldorf school world, teachers carry within

them a constant, but usually unspoken, commission. They
strive to envision the higher self of each child entrusted to
their care. This imagining can be therapeutic for both
teacher and student; for the former, it can serve as a re-
minder that a child’s misbehavior on any given day is just
a shadow cast by a greater light. For the latter, a teacher’s
meditative thoughts can have the most profound and salu-
tary effects upon the child. Perhaps in some mysterious
way they provide the child with a guiding image for his or
her future. A teacher’s vividly pictured imaginations may
act as “invisible cairns”—those small piles of rocks that hik-
ers follow to mark a trail above the timberline. Graduates
who come back to alumni events years later sometimes
comment about these signposts. “When I was in the
Waldorf school,” said one alumna at a recent gathering, “I
felt as if the teachers knew me better than I knew myself. I
felt cared for and carried through hard times.”
At no time is this picturing of the child more per-
tinent than when it comes time to cast a play. Yet it is

143
precisely at this point in the production that we teachers,
who are also the directors, can encounter an apparent con-
flict of interests. Any teacher/director with pedagogical
intentions handles the process of casting with the utmost
sensitivity. What role would best serve the present and
future needs of each child? Does one cast with or against
type? Should the class jester be given the part of the clown
or the role of a taciturn hermit? Will the painfully shy child
be overwhelmed by, or rise to, the challenge of playing the
leading character? Will it be more therapeutic for the class’
most self-absorbed young fellow to be given an attention-
getting part or the minor role of a self-effacing monk?
At the same time, as directors of adolescents, we
must balance pedagogical considerations against the artis-
tic requirements of the play. If we think only in terms of
individual children’s needs, the quality of the performances
may suffer irreparable harm. Assigning to a young person
a major role far beyond his or her capacities is not peda-
gogical; it is cruel and unusual punishment, both for the
individual and the other actors who want their play to be
as good as it can be. In actuality, there should be no con-
flict between pedagogical and artistic objectives; if a play
is an artistic triumph, it will also have pedagogical value.
However, a play hopelessly mangled by ill-chosen casting
may not be just an artistic fiasco; it will have pedagogical
implications as well. Young people need to experience suc-
cess in their artistic collaborations. Certainly, one can point
to the character-building aspects of failure. But the athletic
field seems to be a better venue than the stage for such life
lessons. Presumably a teacher/director has more control
of a production’s success or failure than a coach has over
winning or losing some baseball game.
What constitutes success, theatrically speaking, in
our Waldorf circles, or, for that matter, in any amateur
setting? We have no commercial gauge—no scathing or
flattering drama reviews in the local paper, no months-in-
advance reserved seating or standing room audiences, no

144
speculators clamoring to underwrite our next venture. For
me the criteria for success can be reduced to two questions:
1) Did the actors grow from the challenge of mounting the
production? 2) Was the audience moved on some level by
seeing the play?
If young people’s growth is one of the primary
aims of dramatic work, then the ideal casting process will
offer appropriate acting challenges for the maximum num-
ber of students. Given the general shortage of juicy roles
in most plays, we have resorted to double-casting many of
our recent productions, that is, giving the same part to two
different individuals. This method presents some inherent
risks, but the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. Most
critics of double-casting believe that it fosters competitive-
ness and inevitable comparisons between young actors.
“Oh, Marcie was much better than Sarah as Helen Keller—
Sarah just wasn’t as expressive or as believable.” How-
ever, students can be positioned to work collaboratively
on the same role. They can work on lines together, build
the character together by sharing their differing perspec-
tives. Each can borrow nuances, gestures, and inflections
from the other. On a more pragmatic level, having two
people prepare for the same role virtually eliminates anxi-
ety over an actor’s last-minute illness. Two years ago, just
days before a performance of A Winter’s Tale, one of our
leads contracted acute bronchitis and a high fever. Fortu-
nately, we had double-cast the part, and the other Paulina
was already prepared to fill in admirably.
One practical difficulty is the added time necessary
to rehearse with two actors playing the same role. A pos-
sible way of mitigating this time pressure is to block the
play with both actors onstage, speaking their lines simul-
taneously. Another possibility is to ask one actor to shadow
the other in the early phases of production, so both players
are familiar with entrances, exits, crosses. Cramming a
doubled cast into the playing area can certainly clutter the

145
stage initially, but your playing area will seem downright
capacious, once rehearsals involve only one cast at a time.
However, any double-cast actors not onstage at the time
must be present and alert to all directions, so that when
they get an opportunity to rehearse, the director need not
waste time repeating him/herself.
Double-casting offers yet another benefit—as a
remedy for the tendency towards staleness or rote portray-
als in a production. Some professional companies have long
recognized this; to keep their principal actors fresh, they
have them alternate roles from week to week, or even from
performance to performance. Imagine the challenge of
playing Othello one night and Iago the next! What depth
of understanding and inner mobility the actors must bring
to both roles. Double-casting at the junior high or high
school level can have a similarly stimulating effect for the
entire production. No two interpretations of a role are ever
the same.
Never was this more apparent than in a recent
sophomore production of Wilder’s The Matchmaker. I had
cast two extraordinarily different girls in the leading role.
One was stout, sunny, immediately capable of expressing
Dolly Levi’s brassy manner. From the outset, she manu-
factured a marvelous Brooklyn accent. Her counterpart was
tall, willowy, a bit more muted vocally but very expressive
physically. She conveyed more of Dolly’s subtler, schem-
ing side with inflections and gestures reminiscent of a
young Mae West. Both these actresses brought their own
distinctive gifts to the play, and both gave sparkling per-
formances. It was a pleasure to see them working together;
without a doubt, their collaboration helped each one de-
velop qualities the other naturally possessed. Ideally, how-
ever, double-casting might be limited to less central parts,
or at least to roles whose characters are in fewer scenes, to
reduce duplication during rehearsals.
As for actually assigning parts, I am not averse to
enlisting the ideas of the teenagers themselves. Asking the

146
actors to cast the play can be very helpful, as long as they
realize that their lists can only be considered suggestions
and not ironclad guarantees. With high school students, I
usually ask them to cast their classmates in roles most ad-
vantageous to the play as a whole, and then to include three
parts that they themselves would not object to playing: one
large, one medium-sized, and one smaller role. Generally,
I try to accommodate their wishes if I sense that they have
chosen parts with the greater good of the production in
mind. However, some overly ambitious students have oc-
casionally resorted to lobbying, in an attempt to influence
their classmates’ casting decisions. An unexpected
groundswell of support for someone on the casting lists
might tip off the director to such overly enthusiastic lob-
bying.

147
 Chapter XIV

The Production Schedule

Luck is the residue of design.

Branch Rickey

In one’s personal life, being organized or living

with chaos is largely a matter of temperament or choice. In
a theatrical production, organization and foresight are less
a matter of choice than of necessity. Woe to the director
who thinks he or she can pull together a play without proper
planning. A hundred and one details, both onstage and
behind the scenes, must be taken into account before the
fact, or they will explode like little land mines on the set.
Forgot to order the muslin for the flats? It might take ten
precious days to receive it, more if it has to be back ordered.
Did you reserve the hall for that extra Saturday rehearsal,
or will you be sharing the space with the local aerobics class?
Did you make sure safety pins were on hand for the dress
rehearsal? Did you remember the penlight for the prompter,
the music for the pianist, the suspenders for the character
playing Grandpa, the electric tape to hide the lighting wires?
Did you forget to thank Millie in the program for all her
work with costumes, and Mr. Johnson for helping to trans-

148
form a rolling television cart into an Okie truck? For that
matter, did you forget about the programs altogether?
Directors need to think through, in advance, ev-
ery phase of a production. A lighting design cannot really
be tackled until a set design is completed. A choreogra-
pher will have a hard time creating a dance unless the music
and available stage space are identified first. How can a
costuming crew begin work without a color scheme and
agreement about period and style? A production schedule
may not defuse every potential disaster, but it will go a
long way towards achieving that end. Well before rehears-
als begin, create and hand out to the cast a calendar that
includes not only every rehearsal, but also every technical
deadline. An example follows, with boldface print indicat-
ing rehearsals after regular school hours:
The calendar on the next page assumes a four-week
production schedule, which is, of course, never enough time
to do justice to a play. Six weeks would be far better; in at
least one respect we do try to give students that much time.
We usually read the play aloud in English classes two to
three weeks before our rehearsals begin. We first try to
clearly establish what is happening, scene by scene; we
draw diagrams representing main story line and possible
subplots, noting shifts of setting or time; we identify who
the characters are, what their relationships are to one an-
other, how they change. As we reread the script, students
begin to probe characters’ motivations, imagine how they
walk, what their childhoods were like, and hazard guesses
as to what their deepest secrets are. Students retell or en-
act scenes in their own words. Through it all, we try to build
up a vision of the play as a world full of coherence and
purposeful direction.

149
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
Week one: Props list Sound Sketches for Tech. reh.
Rehearsals due effects plan costumes, build
begin due sets, make-up platforms,
posters due flats, hang
lights;
begin costume
Evening work, work
Rehearsal on sound
7-10 PM effects

Week two: Write letter Final posterDance choreo- Posters up; Tech. reh.
OFF BOOK describing design due; graphy due; work on finish flats;
no scripts reserved lighting check dance with lighting and
allowed on ticket scheme makeup box; music sound effects
stage procedure complete distribute check;
ticket letter continue
Music ideas Evening Evening costume
due; props Rehearsal Rehearsal work;
collected 7-10 pm 7-10 pm paint sets

Week three: Makeup Evening Secure ticket Evening Tech. reh.

Backstage needs list Rehearsal takers for Rehearsal finish all
props list complete; Semi-dress performances; Semi-dress detail work
posted; begin 7-10 pm check with 7-10 pm on costumes;
prompting designing maintenance with lights, finish paint-
and lighting program about chairs sound, and ing; re-aim
script lights, set up lights
complete chairs

Week four: Daytime Opening Second Closing

Dress Performance Night Performance Performance
Rehearsal for school Bravo!
First makeup makeup call
call at 6:30 pm at noon Break down
set and
cleanup

150
 During these readings, casting ideas should already
be simmering. Some directors allow students to audition
for specific roles. The biggest danger to avoid is to have a
student become fixated on one part before the casting is
completed. The readings should, therefore, be fluid; girls
can read boys’ roles and vice-versa. Hearing as many voices
as possible reading different parts may lead to a surprising
casting choice. Ideally, the cast should be chosen at least a
week, and preferably two, before rehearsals commence.
With that much lead time, actors can at least become famil-
iar with their lines and begin to imagine their characters
into being.

Learning Lines
“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.”
(Hamlet, Act III, scene ii)

How can actors memorize lines so that the words

do not become little corpses or leaden weights? The worst
way I can think of is to simply repeat the lines over and
over. Yes, some students can internalize their parts through
such rote repetition, but they can also squeeze all the life
out of their lines in the process. Unless actors learn lines in
a dynamic and imaginative manner, they run the risk of
speaking so mechanically that the director might have to
resort to some extreme measures. A few years ago I worked
with a gifted young fellow who had been cast in the role of
Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. For some strange
reason he had learned his lines in this barren, rote fashion,
and his voice became very monotone and almost unintelli-
gibly gravelly. I stumbled upon the notion of having him
sing his lines in rehearsal. After some initial resistance, he
warmed to the idea and began to sound like a silly Pavarotti
belting out operatic phrases. I would not call the results
musical, but the effect on his speaking voice was transfor-
mative. After just a day or two of this singing exercise, his
voice acquired more mobility and vitality. He went on to

151
become a Falstaff at once duplicitous and vulnerable, blus-
tery and contrite, due in no small part to his remarkably
improved vocal range.
Such emergency actions may not be necessary if
the actors can learn their lines as animatedly as possible.
Three approaches have proven effective for our actors:

1) Have the actors move when memorizing lines.

If young people can get their lines into their limbs, their
delivery will be much more dynamic and their gestures
much more natural.

2) Have actors memorize lines using a closed-eye

method. If they can visualize as vividly as possible what
the character looks like—stance, gesture, facial expression,
surrounding atmosphere—their speeches will acquire a vi-
tality that can come from imagining such moments into
being.

3) Advise students to use the memory-enhancing

benefits of sleep to learn their parts. If they read portions
of their parts each night just before dropping off to sleep,
the mysterious, benevolent forces that work on them at
night will help students internalize their lines in the deep-
est possible way.

Of course, for any of these methods to really work,

the actors must first understand what they are saying. I
cannot count the number of times, deep into a production,
when a student would deliver some line blandly or
unconvincingly. Several years ago a young man playing
Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing addressed the fol-
lowing line to Benedick:

Thou wast ever an obstinate heretic

in the despite of beauty,
(Act I, scene i)

152
as if he were speaking Martian. I asked the student, “Do
you know what that line means?”

“Not really,” was his standard reply.

“Do you think it would help your character sound

more insightful and authoritative if you did understand
what you were saying at this critical juncture of the play?”

“Dunno. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea,” the ac-

tor graciously acknowledged.

So, with the infinite patience and deep understand-

ing of the adolescent psyche that every director of young
people needs, I gently and good-naturedly explained what
I thought the line meant. Whereupon, he retorted, “You
don’t have to scream! I’m not an idiot, you know.” This
lofty exchange was just one of many that demonstrate how
rewarding directing can be. In any case, actors need to un-
derstand the words they speak if they are going to invest
them with the meaning and conviction they deserve.

153
 Chapter XV

Tangling Tongues to Strengthen Speech

(Repeat three times rapidly.)

During a production, we work on speech every day,

usually as the first activity in a rehearsal. Most of us don’t
think too often about our speech, especially about the dif-
ference between consonants and vowels, even though they
are the two building blocks that comprise virtually every
word we speak. What is the distinction? Vowels are borne
on the breath; all we need to do to speak a vowel is to
breathe, vocalize the sound, and alter the shape of our lips
and mouth slightly. The gesture is similar to the move-
ment of calm and quiet waters flowing through narrower
or wider channels in a riverbed. By contrast, most conso-
nants are formed through friction. The breath encounters
some obstacle, some resistance in the throat or mouth—
like the roar of whitewater plunging over boulders down a
canyon chute. The sound may be formed by closing the
throat (to form the guttural “g” or “ng” or the unvoiced
“k” or “ch”), by creating the friction of tongue against pal-
ate (“l,” “t,” “d,” “n”), by compressing the air as it flows
through the teeth (“sh,” “f,” “s” ), or by impeding the breath
as it passes through the lips (“b,” “p,” “m”).
Except for “w” and “h,” which are more akin to
vowels since they are formed without such resistance, con-
sonants require much more effort to produce. Of course,
we are normally unaware of this exertion, but speech

154
exercises certainly raise our awareness of the energy needed
to shape our speech. Consonants require us to be “sculp-
tors,” to carve and shape the very breath we expel, yet many
young people today show evidence of damaged wills
through their manner of speech.
Two general tendencies in our students’ speech
patterns have emerged in the past few years. Either they
speak somewhat metallically and mechanically, with
clipped and almost robotic phrasing, due perhaps, in some
part, to the influence of the video voices they have heard
since early childhood. Or they mumble and slur their
speech instead of making the effort to articulate—early
Marlo Brando imitations, but without the expressiveness;
such students are vowel-heavy and consonant-weak. Their
speech lacks crispness and clarity; they deliver lines that
sound trapped within them.
Much of the speech work we do with students is
remedial in this respect. For the mechanical speakers, we
try to get the sound out of their heads, to deepen their
breathing and warm up their speech. For the languid speak-
ers, we work to lift their speech out of their bodies, to en-
courage distinctness and vitality. In either case, tongue
twisters emphasizing different combinations of vowels and
consonants can be enormously helpful in enlivening young
actors’ speech. For example, a clipped and metallic deliv-
ery can be aided by lines full of round, warm vowels.

Old oily Ollie oils old oily autos.

Going to Cologne in a canoe

I met a curious kind of creature.
“Who are you? Some kind of kangaroo?”
“Oh, no, no, no.
A monkey munching mangoes in a zoo
looks more like you.”

155
 Ah! A marvelous mosque with woven walls
in the land of Allah calls to all.

These lines will have the most impact if they are

spoken breathily, with the exhalation beginning from the
diaphragm. To enhance fluency in these same young ac-
tors who speak as if they are intermittently spitting bullets,
the following might help:

Lovely lady leading.

Lipping light laughter.
Lumbering loiterer laggardly lurch.

We employ the related exercise below especially when

we are working on a comedy and need our actors to bring
lightness and brightness to their normally ponderous
speech:

It’s a cinch
Which in me
Link-lock-who
Lock-lack-he
Flirting with
Wits here
Blabs

This little verse should be almost chanted lightly; stu-

dents might think of speaking it as if tiptoeing over nails.
It can even be stage whispered to great effect. The “who”
and “he” at the end of the middle lines should be almost
sung, sliding up to falsetto voice, in an accompanying vi-
brato.
Students with lazy, muddy delivery (and this in-
cludes the vast majority of today’s young people) need to
invigorate their speech, to bring will to their words. Dozens
of tongue twisters emphasizing combinations of consonants

156
can be employed to brighten and vitalize students’ persis-
tent mumbling.

The big, gold-braided burglar grabbed a biodegrad-

able dog.

A box of biscuits, box of mixed biscuits, and a biscuit

mixer.

A big blue bucket of black and blue bruised blueber-

ries.

Three blue beads in a blue bladder rattle.

Four fat friars frying flat fish.

Ted threw Fred three free throws.

A fat-thighed freak fries thick fish.

Eight gray geese grazing gaily in Greece.

Cows graze in groves on grass which grows in grooves

in groves.

K or C

Coffee from a proper copper coffee pot

Chickens clucking, crickets chirping.

157
 Creeping Greek grapes keep Greeks great.

Camp Glenbrook’s glad campers grab blenders.

Men munch much mush.

Women munch much mush.
Many men and women munch much mush.

Aluminum, linoleum.
Linoleum, aluminum.

Knit nine gnomes in nimbus mutely musing.

The peaceful pleading priest preaches peace.

A proper crop of poppies is a proper poppy crop.

Tom bought some fine prime pink popcorn

At the fine prime pink popcorn shop.

Please, Paul, pause for applause.

Pause for applause, Paul.

The rat ran by the river with a lump of raw liver.

Really weird rear wheels whirl randomly round the

long rough lake.

Wild Ruth’s wine red and royal white wet roof.

158
S

Sheep shouldn’t sleep in a shack;

Sheep should sleep in a shed.

She sews shirts seriously;

She says she shall sew a sheet soon.

Does this shop stock short socks with shocking spots

for shortstops?

The seething sea ceaseth seething.

Shy Sarah saw six Swiss wristwatches and six ripped,

preshrunk shirts.

Strange strategic statistics.

Soldiers’ shoulders shudder when shrill shells shriek.

Slapped slimy slush shivers slightly.

The old school scold sold the school coal scuttle.

Tim, the thin twin tinsmith, twists with Tim’s slim twin
sister.

Two tiny painters pointed to a pint of ointment.

Tom threw Tim three thumbtacks.

Th

Thin sticks, silver thimbles, thick bricks.

159
 Three sick thrushes sang thirty-six thrilling songs.

The sixth thick thistle Cecil saw was Cecil’s sixth thick
thistle.

I spied three shy thrushes; you spied three shy thrushes.

Which wristwatches are Swiss wristwatches?

Wind the red wire round the white reel.

All of the above tongue twisters should be spoken

slowly and clearly at first. Obviously, adding repetitions
and increasing speed will raise the level of difficulty. How-
ever, one of the wonders of these exercises is that our
tongues seem to have some inexplicable capacity for ab-
sorbing and mastering them over time. The student who
today mangles one of the shortest and most difficult of all
tongue twisters—”Peggy Babcock” (skeptics should try re-
peating it five times without a stumble)—will usually, magi-
cally be able to speak it perfectly three days hence, even
without practicing it outside of class.
Students may see mastering tongue twisters as an
end in itself, but most of them also recognize soon enough
that such daily exercises have further-reaching effects. This
heightened sensitivity to speech helps to give young ac-
tors’ characters richer textures and deeper dimensions. If
someone is playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night, he learns that
by overenunciating consonants in the most fastidious man-
ner, he creates a foolish figure in love with the sound of his
own voice. If an actress has tackled the challenging role of
Dolly Levi in Wilder’s The Matchmaker, she may find that
by dissolving her “r’s,” and by bending and redirecting
her vowels through her nasal passages to acquire a Brooklyn

160
accent, she may begin to sound like a most convincing
yenta.
In their everyday life as well, young people’s
speech becomes clearer, more robust, and more animated.
They acquire more “colors in their palette” for expressing
the nuances of their burgeoning thoughts and feelings.
Behind all of the improved communication skills and en-
hanced dramatic possibilities, another unexpected trans-
formation is taking place. It is well-known by now that
crawling in the first year of life somehow years later makes
reading much less of a struggle than it is for someone who
never crawled. How mysterious that some kinetic activity
we perform as infants actually develops a certain readi-
ness for reading later on.
The Greeks also understood this seemingly ob-
scure connection between one activity and another. In our
sports-minded culture, much attention has been given to
the Greeks’ love of athletics and to their founding of the
Olympics. In particular, the ancient pentathlon has been
hailed as the prototype of the modern decathlon, the defin-
ing event in any Olympics. Yet few people know that the
Greeks used the pentathlon events—running, jumping,
wrestling, discus, and javelin throwing—as a training for
the development of cognitive and dramatic skills. Was it
an accident that Plato was a champion wrestler in his youth?
Or did all that wrestling training prepare him to grapple
with deep philosophical riddles?
Another event—javelin throwing—aided speech
formation. As far-fetched as this may seem, consider that
both activities involve a “reaching back”; in the case of
speaking, we had better gather our thoughts before ver-
balizing them. Both activities then require a taking aim at
a target before letting fly. Even our vocabulary retains the
faintest hint of the relationship between these two tasks.
The javelin hurler’s delivery must be straight and true. The
effective speaker’s delivery must be the same if he or she is

161
to hit the mark. For the Greeks, then, the effect of such
physical movement went far beyond mere athletic excel-
lence.
In a similar fashion, speech work may also have
an unexplainable, salutary effect on another part of our
being—it strengthens forces of individuality in each of us.
Perhaps this is not very surprising when one thinks of the
uniqueness of every human voice. Is it not a source of
wonderment that every voice in the world has its own dis-
tinctive timbre? The particular inflection and pitch of a
friend’s voice can identify that person as accurately as fin-
gerprints. If we strive to refine our speech, is it so far-fetched
to think that such efforts work deeply on the very source of
our individuality, fortifying and quickening that sense of
self we call our ego? Teachers, then, whose task it is to
guide young people into a healthy sense of themselves, can
further this end through concerted speech work with their
students. In this larger context, every tongue twister, ev-
ery exercise we offer them, builds ego forces for the distant
future.
It should be mentioned here that Rudolf Steiner also
used archetypal gestures to enhance speech and drama
work. He identified six basic qualities of speech and ac-
companying gestures that reflect people’s varying relation-
ships to the world around them. They are briefly summarized
below:
l. Quality: indicating, directing, pointing out
Gesture: pointing
Voice: sharp, incisive in tone. “Please do it.”

This pointing gesture can be in the nature of a com-

mand, but it can also draw our attention to some external
truth. “There it is.” The famous speech from Christopher
Fry’s A Sleep of Prisoners serves as a resounding illustra-
tion:

162
 The human heart can go to the lengths of God.
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move,
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for?
It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake?
(p. 209)

2. Quality: thoughtful, reflective, pondering

Gesture: holding onto oneself
Voice: longer, drawn-out speech, even ponder-
ous

This gesture should reinforce the impression of an in-

ner activity, a ruminating or musing. Holding one’s fin-
gers pressed against the temple or brow or chin is a fairly
typical way to indicate such reflectiveness. Any number
of speeches in Hamlet convey this quality, but none more
stirringly than the “To be or not to be” soliloquy:

. . . To die—to sleep.
To sleep—perchance to dream: Ay, there’s the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect

163
 That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolences of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all . . .
(Hamlet, Act III, scene i)

3. Quality: questioning, searching uncertainly,

“Can I do this?”
Gesture: arms and hands groping forward
Voice: tremulous, faltering, hesitant

The direction here is outward instead of inward, but

obstacles appear which challenge the individual and leave
the achievement of some objective in doubt. After he agrees
to murder the king, Macbeth’s agitated conscience leads
him to the following moment:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee!
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
(Macbeth, Act II, Scene i)

164
 4. Quality: antipathy. “I’m busy. You’re insignifi-
cant. Get out!”
Gesture: hand(s)/arm(s) thrusting away from
the body
Voice: hard, cold, consonantal

This gesture is unambiguously sharp and dismissive.

Both gesture and speech have a hard edge. Another speech
from A Sleep of Prisoners captures the quality of this gesture
effectively:

Any damn where he makes himself at home.

The world blows up, there’s Pete there in the festering
bomb-hole making cups of tea. I’ve had it
Week after week till I’m sick.
(p. 164)

5. Quality: sympathy, affirmation, comfort

Gesture: reaching out, as if to touch
Voice: gentle, soothing. “I’m here for you.”

Both gesture and speech are full of warmth. The palms

of the hands should feel as if they are radiating that warmth
in the direction of the intended party. In Cyrano de Bergerac’s
classic balcony scene, written by Edmond Rostand, we can
experience this mood almost viscerally:

. . . Can you feel

My soul, there in the darkness, breathe on you?
—Oh, but tonight, now, I dare say these things—
I . . . to you . . . and you hear them! . . . It is too much!
In my most sweet unreasonable dreams,
I have not hoped for this! Now let me die,
Having lived. It is my voice, mine, my own,
That makes you tremble there in the green gloom
Above me—for you do tremble, as a blossom

165
 Among the leaves—You tremble, and I can feel,
All the way down along these jasmine branches,
Whether you will or no, the passion of you
Trembling . . .
(Act III, p. 110)

6. Quality: withdrawing into oneself. “I would

rather be alone.”
Gesture: hands thrusting away from body
Voice: curt and clipped, but not hostile

This quality can be confused with antipathy if not prop-

erly understood. The intention here is to hold one’s ground,
to protect one’s privacy, perhaps. The gesture lacks the
sharp and cutting character of the antipathetic thrust.
Rather, the hands push away slowly but firmly, as if to cre-
ate some personal space. The lines below from T.S. Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral reflect this mood:

Then I leave you to your fate.

I leave you to the pleasures of your vices
Which will have to be paid for at higher prices.
Farewell, my lord, I do not wait upon ceremony.
I leave as I came, forgetting all acrimony.
Hoping that your present gravity
Will find excuse for my humble levity.
If you will remember me, My lord, at your prayers,
I will remember you at kissing-time below the stairs.
(p. 25)
These qualities of speech and their accompanying
gestures were not intended to represent the entire range of
dramatic possibilities onstage. Rather, the gestures might
serve as bodily experiences to help enliven actors’ speech.
We have occasionally incorporated them into warm-up
exercises to help actors explore the gestures and intentions
of their characters.

166
 Once work on a production begins, two other exer-
cises can be employed to counteract the tendency to speak
too softly. Many young actors have the hardest time being
heard onstage. Some will speak softly out of timidity, oth-
ers out of obliviousness, still others out of a kind of leth-
argy. No matter how energetically the director exhorts his
or her charges, certain students will simply not understand
the need to project to the back of the hall.

Exercise 72: COUNTING TO TEN

One effective way to stretch both young actors’
vocal chords and their awareness is to ask them to count to
ten aloud. The only condition is that each number the ac-
tors speak is louder than the one before it. 1–2–3–4–5–6–
and so on. Most students will begin too loudly and reach
their maximum volume by 5 or 6. Others will hold back,
afraid to let go with ear-piercing bellows on the high num-
bers. But with repeated attempts, young actors will de-
velop a capacity for modulating the volume of their voices,
so that the director might say, “Franny, you need to speak
those lines at an “8” instead of a “3.”

Exercise 73: HURLING THE JAVELIN

Ideally, to aid in their vocal work, students might
have access to real javelins and an unpeopled field nearby
where they can practice their deliveries. Since few schools
have such equipment readily available, an imaginative ex-
ercise may be nearly as effective. Have students stand with
plenty of room around them, in lines facing the back of the
hall or auditorium in which they rehearse. Then ask them
to create an imaginary javelin, to reach back as far as they
can, and then to fling it through that back wall, turning
their shoulders, shifting their weight from back to front foot.
Simultaneously, have them speak some line with strong
consonants—we use “Dart may these boats, through dark-
ening gloaming”—hurling the javelin on “Dart,” and then
using the rest of the line to watch the flight of the spear as

167
it sails out of sight. This follow-through is critical to the
exercise, because adolescents have a tendency to speak
words the way carbonated bubbles burst on the surface of
the seltzer water—once they’re spoken, they pop and dis-
appear. Young actors don’t always experience the exten-
sion, the “flight” of their words. This javelin hurling can
stretch their awareness, from the reaching back— which is
akin to finding the idea behind the words—to the delivery
and follow-through. As they witness the arc of the javelin,
they can become more mindful of the arc and the impact of
their words. Whether students hurl actual javelins or per-
form such an action using their imaginations, the exercise
should sharpen their sense of intentionality when they de-
liver their lines.

168
 Chapter XVI

Technical Tasks
A sleek new automobile rolls off the assembly line
looking so seamlessly constructed that it requires a leap of
imagination to picture the piecemeal, detailed labor of weld-
ing, bolting, and fitting glass, metal, fabric, and rubber parts
together. Similarly, when the curtain goes up on a play,
few in the audience without dramatic experience ever real-
ize how much effort it takes to synthesize the work of cos-
tumers, set and lighting designers, musicians, carpenters,
sound technicians, and makeup artists. Yet from the in-
ception of a production, all these technical elements and
more must be integrated into the grand vision of the play.
The first essential step in mounting a production is to ar-
ticulate that vision. Before scissors, hammer, or paintbrush
can be employed, the director and his/her associates need
to create a conception of the play that will channel
everyone’s efforts in the same artistic direction. What time
period will best suit this particular Shakespeare play? I
have seen Hamlet’s ghost booted and helmeted as a Nazi
soldier, Falstaff and the merry wives he pursues living in a
mining town of the old west, midsummer night’s lovers in
modern dress wandering through Oberon’s casino. Not
all of these inventive motifs necessarily improved upon
Shakespeare’s original settings, but they nevertheless

169
served as the unifying inspiration for the work onstage and
off.
Once a course has been charted, technical crews
need to be assembled. In most amateur theater, this usu-
ally means two very separate groups of specialists work-
ing on a production—actors on the one hand, and techni-
cal staff on the other, with the latter’s unsung labors serv-
ing the more visible and celebrated efforts of the former.
Over the years, however, we have settled on an approach
that melds the two groups into one. In our play produc-
tions, the actors are the technicians; all of the technical crew
members also act. In a recent show entitled Museum, the
young man playing the lead spent dozens of extra hours
constructing clothesline dummies out of chicken wire,
Styrofoam, and latex. Other members of the cast built ped-
estals for the outlandish sculptures they created out of ani-
mal skeletons, shells, fur, and bits of metal. Still others hung
lights, painted sets, composed music for a guard’s “dance
of protest,” and transformed drab gray jackets into guards’
costumes by sewing gold piping on the lapels, cuffs, and
shoulders. Virtually every technical task, from the design-
ing and drawing of the play poster to sweeping the hall
after striking the set, was completed by the cast.
Certainly adolescents cannot be expected to tackle
all the technical aspects of a play without guidance. The
handwork, music, woodworking, and eurythmy teachers—
even the handy maintenance supervisor—have helped to
oversee student initiatives behind the scenes. Parents with
theatrical or technical background have been invaluable re-
sources; many have been exceedingly generous in volun-
teering their time. In recent productions, one parent, who
made a living as a stuntman, taught the students the finer
points of stage fighting for a scene in The Grapes of Wrath.
Another took responsibility for the lavish costuming needs
of The Matchmaker. It is imperative, however, that such vol-
unteers understand the overall conception of the play, and

170
that they are working with, and not instead of, the student/
actors.
The advantages of having the cast assume respon-
sibility for the technical aspects of a play far outweigh the
drawbacks. Yes, it requires a greater time commitment from
the actors, who might otherwise focus their attentions solely
on the demands of their roles. They will probably not paint
a backdrop or design a lighting scheme or play the cello as
expertly as professionals might. However, they will have
an experience of a theatrical production in its entirety, and
they may appreciate how their offstage efforts served that
totality. They may also feel the deep satisfaction of having
used their hands as well as their minds, hearts, and voices
to create the magical arena of a play.
As has been mentioned earlier, drama contains the
potential for the best and worst of human aspirations. It
can become the fire that warms bone-chilled travelers or,
uncontrolled, it can consume a forest. At theater’s worst,
would-be actors strut onstage purely for the self-aggran-
dizing recognition and adulation; their every gesture seems
to trumpet, “Pay tribute to my brilliance.” Actors who do
not have to concern themselves with any of the mundane
technical aspects of a production are more likely to fall prey
to this demon than others who highly value and contrib-
ute to the technical work. However, drama can also find its
highest expression in young people who see their task as
service-oriented. In their efforts onstage and off, they serve
the greater vision of a play. They may even create that rare
moment when they share their collective work so artisti-
cally that both actors and audience are bound together in a
kind of inspired communion.
As with many such intense activities, the partici-
pants do not want the “high” to end. They desire the tri-
umphs and insights gained from the experience to carry
over into their daily lives. If the young people have inter-
nalized the lessons that a play can teach, they can, indeed,

171
preserve the essence of their theatrical experience; they go
forward enlarged and energized. However, the danger is
that some actors may want the applause to continue; they
find it difficult to resume the classes, chores, homework,
and after-school job without the acclaim. The need to make
a transition back to reality is one reason we strike the set
the same night that the show closes. What took a month or
more of deliberate planning and artistic execution comes
down in an hour. The players remove the platforms and
flats, destroy the props that cannot be reused, store the ones
that can, hang up the costumes, stack the chairs, and
vacuum the carpets. The breakdown always tempers the
post production celebration a bit, but it also brings the com-
pany back to reality in a striking way. They realize, as they
sit on the now-empty stage, that the experience they have
created no longer exists on a physical plane; instead, it lives
on as imperishably as the memories of the players and the
audience.

A few thoughts about specific technical work

Costuming—A much-admired colleague of mine who
teaches high school basketry and bookbinding also, on oc-
casion, helps to costume plays. She always begins her work
by creating with the students some striking visual repre-
sentation of the play’s primary theme,. For instance, she
once used the gesture and colors of a volcano to reflect the
passions of A Winter’s Tale, which is set in the shadow of
Mt. Etna in Sicily. She then drew in the relationships of the
main characters, linking them with certain colors. This
colleague worked from the premise that color is the lan-
guage of the soul, as well as an extension of characters’
inner landscape. She found color combinations that con-
nected each character to others and also expressed some
essential inner quality. For example, on the volcano draw-
ing she created for A Winter’s Tale, she denoted Leontes
using his black moods and raging red outburst against his
wife, contrasted with a more muted but noble burgundy to

172
represent Hermione, a deep red edged with the gold that
reflected her pure nature. Once the hues became apparent,
the costuming itself took on a much clearer direction.
Whatever the final lines or styles of the actors’ attire, this
process of artistically charting the color connections of the
characters ensured that the costumes reinforced the larger
vision of the play.
As a general rule, actors should rehearse in their
costumes as early as possible. The fairy in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream who stomps around in clogs or hiking boots
simply cannot experience or convey the airy movement
necessary to the part. One of the more controversial peda-
gogical principles in our school is that clothing influences
consciousness. Adolescents, of course, bristle at this dec-
laration, believing that apparel has absolutely no bearing
on their ability to concentrate in class. Whenever this ar-
gument arises, I remind them of those Halloweens that fall
on a school day, when everyone comes to school costumed,
buzzing with excitement, and hopelessly distracted in class.
They remember who came dressed as Dracula, complete
with blood-dripping fangs, or what color their classmate’s
belly dancing veil, was far better than the lesson pointing
out the difference between Whitman’s and Dickinson’s
poetic styles.
In the theater, the truth that clothing affects con-
sciousness is never more evident than when actors don
their costumes. Almost immediately the student who
wears a judge’s robes becomes more deliberate in her de-
livery, more judicious in her manner. The young fellow
who claps on sword, breastplate, and helmet suddenly
stands more upright, strides like a warrior, speaks more
decisively. Even if the company only has access to a part
of a costume during the middle stages of a production—a
hat, a shawl, a vest, an apron—wearing such apparel will
hasten the transformation from students into convincing
characters.

173
 One other guideline: A brilliant seamstress/de-
signer who used to work at the Sadler Wells Theatre in
England once told me that the most effective costumes were
those that drew the least attention from the audience. In
other words, if they become showpieces in their own right,
if they overwhelm the actor or jar the audience, then the
costumes are somehow inappropriate.

Lighting—Illuminating a play is rarely a simple matter

of making scenes darker or lighter. Again, understanding
the effect of color combinations is all-important. The light-
ing designer must know that a predominance of green gels
turns stage action eerie, that blues cool the mood as much
as reds and yellows warm it. Shadows onstage can be
highly dramatic, but undesired shadows distract from the
action. A lighting scheme cannot really be tackled until
blocking is fairly well established, so that stage areas can
be defined, lights can be aimed, and different gels tried.
Another reason for getting actors onstage in costume as
soon as possible is to determine how the lights affect the
colors of the fabrics. Under a red light, for instance, a green
dress will appear quite black, while a red blouse seems
much redder. Allowing enough time to experiment with
lighting effects will diminish stress and unwanted surprises
later on.

Stage sets—It would be presumptuous to offer any spe-

cific guidelines about the construction of sets, since they
can vary from a couple of chairs and a ladder, as suggested
by Thornton Wilder for Our Town, to an elaborate, if scaled-
down version of a seventeenth-century French opera house,
as in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Nevertheless, a few gen-
eral indications might be considered:

1) Whatever the crew builds—platforms or flats,

thrones or pirate ships—bear in mind that less might be
more. Shakespeare may have had the right idea by

174
suggesting the merest indication of scenery and backdrops.
Instead of building a complicated, heavily panelled tavern
interior for a scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor, why not
use a couple of barrels for stools and a simply constructed,
lightweight counter for the hostess to stand behind?

2) Increasingly, we have moved away from the

two-dimensionality of cut-outs and flats. Rather, we have
discovered the possibilities offered by fabric. When we
produced A Winter’s Tale, we dyed and speckled muslin in
volcanic browns and reds, then stretched the sheets from
the ceiling to the walls in overlapping, angular slopes. The
result was a backdrop much more textured and three-di-
mensional than any flats could be. Under the lights, the
mottled color effects created a much more visually arrest-
ing background than some static, realistic rendering of
Leontes’ throne room. In fact, such archetypal sets can con-
vey a timeless quality that also serve as effective backdrops
for a range of scenes. Their versatility can eliminate one of
the greatest headaches of amateur theater—the seemingly
endless blackouts when one set is carted off and another
dragged on.
Fabric solved another dilemma in a recent produc-
tion of As You Like It. For years we had laboriously con-
structed trees out of a plywood base, a wooden substruc-
ture, chicken wire scaffolding shaped to resemble trunk and
branches, and countless strips of muslin dipped in a glue-
water solution. The resulting trees represented an improve-
ment over two-dimensional cutouts, but they were also
time-consuming to build, very heavy, and cumbersome to
move on- and offstage. They also posed storage problems
after a play ended. For As You Like It we hit upon the idea
of sewing long cylindrical tubes of muslin. We dyed and
streaked them the color of bark; then, to maintain the trunk’s
shape, we inserted several circular plywood discs horizon-
tally every two to three feet and secured by stapling them
to the muslin. We drilled holes through the discs, knotted

175
the bottom with nylon rope, and threaded the rope through
the entire trunk. To complete the effect, for branches we
pinned a few more dyed muslin strips at various diago-
nals from the upper trunk to the ceiling and covered them
with gauzy green tulle. Then, using a pulley system at-
tached to the ceiling, we could pull the trees up into the fly
space as they folded like Chinese lanterns. When we
needed an instant Forest of Arden, presto! The muslin tree
trunks dropped in seconds to the stage, a triumph of low-
tech, low-budget theater.

3) Because most stage sets need to be portable, we

try to build lighter, rather than heavier. Constructing with
two-by-threes, and even one-by-threes for ribbing, instead
of two-by-fours, will not significantly weaken your plat-
forms or staircases. Using screw guns and screws rather
than hammer and nails also allows for a quicker breakdown
and recycling of materials. At the same time, build stur-
dily and secure every set piece. Years ago, a valiant eighth-
grader playing Cyrano entered through an up-center door
into Raguneau’s bakery. Somehow, the door swinging shut
behind him dislodged the entire flat from its precarious wire
fasteners hanging from the ceiling. The result was not un-
like watching a slow-motion train wreck. The flat hesitated
for a moment, seeming to savor its newfound emancipa-
tion, then slowly toppled on Cyrano’s unsuspecting head.
To his credit, a somewhat stunned Cyrano buckled at the
knees, but did not fall. Because the flat was made of light-
weight muslin, he was able to lift it off his head, held it
poised at an awkward tilt above him for a moment, as if
deciding whether to speak his lines while simultaneously
supporting the set piece. Wisely, he let it drop to the floor
and proceeded with the scene. However, he involuntarily
glanced behind him every few seconds to see if any other
backdrops were planning a sneak attack.

176
 Properties—Props can either be a constant burden to
memory-challenged actors or provide the concrete inspi-
ration that ignites their characters. How many productions
have we all seen where the messenger digs into his pocket
to deliver a critically important letter, only to discover that
he must hand over . . . air? I watched a scene in one of our
plays (through the shaking fingers covering my horrified
eyes) where one participant in a sword fight dueled under
the rather extreme disadvantage of having forgotten his
sword. To make matters worse (or better, depending upon
the audience’s sense of humor), the surrealistic contest pro-
ceeded for perhaps twenty seconds—with one combatant
slashing and thrusting with his very real sword, the other
sheepishly parrying with one feeble forefinger—before off-
stage cast members realized what was amiss; then, one
quick-thinking lad grabbed the missing sword and lobbed
it from the wings towards the unarmed actor, where it
clanked onto the stage, a marvelous example of deus ex
machina if ever there was one. By contrast, when we were
producing Under Milkwood, I saw a simple tobacco pipe
transform one young actress from a painfully self-conscious
gypsy into a most convincing and seductive lady of the
night.
Of course, one can choose to eliminate the onus of
having to remember props by simply doing away with
them. Imagination is the most potent ally an actor pos-
sesses. Invisible props made real by skilled actors can ut-
terly captivate an audience. However, most young actors
are not yet adept enough to make the invisible so visible,
and, as has been stated, props can assist inexperienced per-
formers in deepening their characters. If props are desir-
able, then a system needs to be devised to ensure that they
find their way onstage in a timely fashion; this is where a
stage manager can perform an invaluable service.

177
 Stage manager—there is an old saying that “God
couldn’t be everywhere, so he made mothers.” The same
could apply to the theater. Directors are hardly gods, but
an alert stage manager can act as an indispensable back-
stage surrogate. At this amateur theatrical level, the histri-
onics that occur in the wings can be more eventful than
what is happening onstage. Props vanish into a black hole;
a dreamy actor unwittingly sits down on and crushes a
queen’s poorly situated cardboard crown—an argument en-
sues between the irate queen and the hat-crusher, one that
threatens to drown out the scene onstage; the lead, who is
supposed to be confronting the villain thirty seconds from
now, is outside the building chatting with a friend; the
wrong sound effects tape is in, so instead of the sound of
screeching brakes and a head-on collision, the audience
hears a dramatic organ playing Bach’s “Dorian Toccata and
Fugue in D Minor for Organ.”
If the director must be in the house, perhaps to for-
tify an unsure lighting operator, it will be the stage man-
ager who deals with all the backstage crises. Such an indi-
vidual must be well-organized, direct without being dicta-
torial, and most important, unflappable. Usually one or
two students in a given cast can be quite successful in this
capacity, but they must be content with cameo acting roles
themselves.
Most potential disasters can be avoided with
proper foresight. A well-ordered crate with all necessary
props can be located just offstage. Lists of entrances and
exits and prop reminders can be posted in the same area.
The stage manager checks actors’ costumes for hanging
threads and open flies. She calms a classmate about to miss
his first cue because he is hyperventilating from stage fright,
then gives him a helpful shove into the scene. Such an ef-
fective stage manager can add years to a harried director’s
career.

178
 Chapter XVII

A Sample Production Sequence

“The time is out of joint.”
(Hamlet, Act I, scene v)

Suppose we had before us the daunting challenge

of performing As You Like It three or four weeks hence. Our
task will only be possible if we have already followed the
suggestions above, that is, edited liberally, read and really
understood the play in its entirety several weeks in ad-
vance, assigned parts, handed out production schedules,
and begun to learn lines as imaginatively as possible.
Actors will need to recognize in the early stages of
our readings that this play contains an archetypal polarity
between the treachery and divisiveness of the court and
the restorative powers of simple goodness and love flour-
ishing in the Forest of Arden. Duke Fredrick rules the court
with a Machiavellian grip; having overthrown and exiled
his older brother Duke Senior, Frederick now banishes his
brother’s daughter Rosalind. Accompanied by her lifelong
friend Celia, Frederick’s own daughter, and by Touchstone
the clown, she goes into the forest to find her father. The
noble Orlando must also flee, for his life has been threatened
by his envious brother Oliver. No one is safe in this insidi-
ous atmosphere.

179
 By contrast, Duke Senior lives amid the tranquil-
ity and bounty provided by nature. He has come to recog-
nize that

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running
brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
(Act II, scene i)

This setting provides another kind of enlightenment for

the exodus of characters from the court. During the play
Rosalind, Orlando, Celia, and perhaps most remarkably,
Touchstone the clown all find their soulmates and pledge
their undying troth. The Forest of Arden not only rewards
the virtuous, it also transforms the misguidedly wicked. By
the play’s end, both Duke Frederick and Oliver have shed
their “snakeskins.” Oliver repudiates his evil ways after
first being rescued from a lion by Orlando and then falling
in love with Celia. Frederick meets a holy man in the for-
est, finds enlightenment, and promptly restores his brother
to his rightful dukedom.
Clearly Shakespeare intended to emphasize this
contrast between the corrupt court and the healing forest.
With such a polarity, we can trace the progression from act-
ing upon the baser impulses of our lower selves to the har-
monizing, ennobling effects of living life guided by our
higher selves. The playwright’s message seems clear here;
every aspect of the play—the sets, costumes, atmosphere
onstage, and characters’ interactions—must reinforce this
movement from corruption to redemption, from divisive-
ness to reconciliation.

180
Week One—Exploring the Physical: Establishing the
Where, Introducing the Who
Each of our daily rehearsals can be divided into
three parts:

1) warm-ups and exercises,

2) class conversation focusing on tasks to be accom-
plished or on problems needing resolution,
3) actual rehearsal of individual scenes or run-throughs
of larger segments of the play.

Hearkening back to the organic sequence we have suc-

cessfully used over the past two decades, we might spend
the first week familiarizing the cast with the physical space
of the play—entrances and exits, general location of set
pieces, and the first tentative movements of characters in
relation to one another. Thus, the primary work of the first
week’s rehearsals would be to guide the cast through an
initial blocking of the entire play, ideally an act per day.
However, before embarking on this journey, cast members
need to warm up, both vocally and bodily, and to begin
character-building. Possible first week exercises and a few
interesting blocking problems are described below:

Rehearsal 1: Tongue twisters loaded with crisp conso-

nants , such as “Two tiny painters pointed to a pint of oint-
ment,” or “Creeping Greek grapes keep Greeks great”
sharpen the actors’ attention from the outset and also help
them articulate more clearly than they normally speak. We
might also PASS A SOUND (Exercise 6), or PASS A CLAP
(Exercise 8), and then do CIRCLE MIRROR (Exercise 16).
Breaking out of the circle, students now begin to
walk around the room, first over different terrains, with
WAYS OF WALKING (Exercise 28), or THE FOUR ELE-
MENTS (Exercise 27), then perhaps in character. Initial at-
tempts to walk in character are often, unsurprisingly,

181
notoriously unsuccessful. Students either create carica-
tures, or they simply continue to walk as themselves. Two
exercises can help immensely, especially when used in tan-
dem. The first is the daily visualization of each actor’s char-
acter, called CLOSED EYES (Exercise 31); as students be-
gin imagining their characters into being, they will also start
to translate that imagination into their gestures and voices.
The other effective exercise is WALKING IN AND OUT
OF CHARACTER (Exercise 33), which helps students be-
gin to feel the difference between their own gaits and their
characters’. Frequent switching from their normal walk to
their characters’ will gradually sharpen the distinction be-
tween the two.
After a good half-hour to forty minutes of warm-
ups and exercises, the cast sits down for an overview of
the production process. Technical tasks will have been as-
signed before now, so students can begin to organize them-
selves in various crews (see section on Technical Tasks for
amplification). We go over the production schedule, alert
the cast to upcoming deadlines, and address any thematic
issues informing our understanding of the play. One stu-
dent asks why Rosalind seems to relish the role of
puppetmaster once she dons the disguise of Ganymede and
toys with Orlando in the forest. “Why doesn’t she drop
the manly act once she knows Orlando is crazy about her
and reveal her true identity?” A lively discussion ensues
about the wooing game and the issue of power in relation-
ships before we turn to blocking.
In subsequent weeks, students will divide up to
work on scenes in different locations during the primary
rehearsal time. But as tedious as it can be for actors not
directly involved onstage, having everyone there for the
blocking phase helps to build a common vision of the play.
On our cramped stage, it will be critically important for
actors to see how far the stage-right court extends towards
and interpenetrates the area of the stage-left forest. During

182
this first week, actors will still have their scripts onstage, a
necessary evil because students will need to note entrances,
exits, crosses, and so on. However, scripts impede the act-
ing process and get in the way of gesture and character
interaction. The sooner scripts can be dispensed with, the
better.
One major, initial Act I blocking challenge in As
You Like It is the wrestling scene between Charles and Or-
lando. How can we stage it so that it seems somewhat plau-
sible that the Goliath-like Charles can be knocked uncon-
scious by the valiant but overmatched Orlando? We de-
cide to exploit Charles’ own muscle-bound bulk and hulk-
ing immobility; Orlando will leap upon his back and ride
him until Charles dizzies from his clumsy turning and twist-
ing to rid himself of this “leech.” Then Orlando will use a
feigned forearm shiver to deck the charging, reeling hulk.
Thankfully, one of the actors has taken classes in some mar-
tial art or another and knows how to fall with such a thwack
on the stage that it sounds as if he must have broken sev-
eral bones when he lands. However, he invariably bounces
up after every tumble and gladly teaches the technique to
his theatrical adversary. The grappling must be rehearsed
repeatedly, within a carefully prescribed area, so as not to
injure either actor or the interested onlookers.

Rehearsal 2: More tongue twisters, such as “A proper

crop of poppies is a proper poppy crop” or “Soldiers shoul-
ders shudder when shrill shells shriek,” can be followed
by PASSING HOPS (Exercise 9) and PASSING A FACE
(Exercise 5), as well as the BALL TOSS (Exercise 2). With
the latter, have students toss a tennis ball or bean bag to
someone across the circle, calling out the name of the in-
tended target’s character as they toss.
For movement exercises, students could play FOL-
LOW THE LEADER (Exercise 25) as a warm-up. Then they
might pair up and engage in MIRRORS (Exercise 26), an

183
activity that trains actors on many fundamental levels. They
must become more observant, develop more self-control,
and learn to speak and to listen with their limbs. After in-
troducing STICK/BALL/VEIL/CANDLE (Exercise 29), the
cast can begin to experiment with one or another quality as
it might apply to the characters. The stiffness of the stick
might be incorporated into an old man’s or woman’s gait,
for instance, for Corin, the aged shepherd in As You Like It;
the radiating warmth of the candle might translate into the
noble, generous-hearted expansiveness in a character such
as Orlando. After daily visualizing, the blocking continues
for the remainder of the rehearsal.
A technical difficulty to be surmounted in the tran-
sition between Act I’s court scenes and Act II’s Forest of
Arden is how to transform the set, that is, how to make the
pillars and throne room of Frederick’s court vanish and the
trees of the forest appear in a matter of seconds instead of
minutes. We come up with two fairly simple solutions; one
is a painted forest backdrop that unrolls from a ceiling via
a pulley arrangement and falls in front of the court set. But
we aren’t content with the two-dimensionality of the back-
drop, so we also rig up “trees” made of fabric that can also
drop from the ceiling and offer characters an obstacle to
hide behind when necessary.

Rehearsal 3: Speech work might focus on “Four fat fri-

ars frying flat fish,” or “Eight gray geese grazing gaily in
Greece,” or “A box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits, and
a biscuit mixer.” Circle activities could include PASS AN
IMAGINARY OBJECT (Exercise 10) and lead into PLAY-
ING WITH IMAGINARY PROPS (Exercise 32). Both of
these exercises strengthen young actors’ ability to make
visible the invisible. At the same time, thinking about the
props their characters might handle in the play helps the
cast members deepen their understanding of their roles.
One direct application of this training with imagi-
nary props occurs in Act III, when Touchstone and Audrey

184
enter. As the clown in a heretofore pretty unfunny play,
Touchstone needs to provide some immediate laughter with
his entrance. Since one of his first lines is “I will fetch up
your goats, Audrey . . .” we decide that he will come in
tugging an imaginary rope behind him, as if he is pulling
along Audrey’s goats. The more he exerts himself, the more
the offstage goats resist, until the rope breaks, and Touch-
stone goes flying backward, landing on his derriere. Watch-
ing the goats scamper off into the distance, Touchstone can
now say with an odd mixture of contriteness and ardor,

I will fetch up your goats, Audrey. And how,

Audrey, am I the man yet? Doth my simple
features content you?

Audrey, perhaps a bit miffed by her goats’ escape, can

reply with an air of superiority she surely does not deserve,

Your features? Lord warrant us, what features?

(Act III, scene iii )

Fortunately, the cast approves of the idea for the en-

trance.

Rehearsal 4: Following on the heels of the imaginary

prop work, the speech activity might include HURLING
THE JAVELIN (Exercise 73) to bring more a more emphatic,
bodily energy to actors’ lines. Another effective warm-up
at this stage of a production is STATUES (Exercise 38), which
encourages young actors to become more conscious of each
other’s bodily instruments and the physical space through
which they move.
The Act IV blocking presents an interesting di-
lemma in scene i, where Rosalind-as-Ganymede encour-
ages Orlando to woo her. The question has to do with
Celia’s positioning during the scene. If she is placed too
far away, seemingly oblivious to Rosalind’s manipulations,

185
then it makes little sense when, after Orlando departs, Celia
upbraids Rosalind by declaring that “You have simply
misus’d our sex in your love-prate.” (Act IV, scene i) So
Celia must be close enough to hear Rosalind’s misleading
words without seeming to impose on the intimacy of the
courting.

Rehearsal 5: Another essential and most helpful activ-

ity that might be employed late in the first week is
Chekhov’s CENTERS (Exercise 30). After numerous pro-
ductions, students have praised this particular technique
as a highly effective way of animating their characters
through physical suggestions. Yet another stimulating ac-
tivity is EXAGGERATED MIRRORS (exercise 37, p. 43),
which invariably raises the energy level of all of the actors
as they explore distorted versions of their characters.
The biggest blocking challenge of any Act V
Shakespearean comedy is how to arrange all the charac-
ters who congregate on the stage for the final scene. In As
You Like It this problem is complicated by the appearance
of the goddess Hymen. Should she simply walk on, as
Rosalind and Celia’s escort? Should she descend from the
heavens or appear in a flash of light or out of a thick mist?
Should she move among the characters as she addresses
them, which might humanize her somewhat, or should she
stand above and separate from the assembly, presiding over
the proceedings as a lofty divinity? Our answers to these
questions will leave a lasting impression on the audience,
so we need to decide how significant Hymen’s role is in
the play.
To sum up, the goal of the first week is to begin
giving the production, again to quote Shakespeare, “a lo-
cal habitation and a name.” The speech work and circle
activities, the closed eye, character-building exercises and
the slow process of blocking all are designed to ground
each scene and each character in some concrete, physical

186
reality, while giving the cast a general sense of the play in
its entirety. Once the initial blocking is completed and the
scripts can be left offstage, the tempo and intensity of the
rehearsals will quicken.

Week Two—Developing Character and Tempo

Rehearsal 6: For a comedy such as this, the almost
nonsensical “It’s a cinch,” speech exercise helps foster the
appropriate nimbleness and gusto in young actors’ deliv-
eries. They should learn to speak it lightly, as if they were
tiptoeing over the sounds with their tongues, even at times
in a stage whisper.
The acting exercises during this second week
should take the cast beyond purely physical modes of ex-
pression. GETTING TO KNOW ME (Exercise 34) helps the
actors make discoveries about their characters’ inner lives.
The more collaborative CHARACTER BIOGRAPHIES (Ex-
ercise 51) can further deepen the actors’ understandings of
the roles they are developing. What recognizable attributes
of their current characters can be recognized in seed form
when they were children? Was the melancholy Jacques,
the sour little boy, always on the periphery of other
children’s games? Did the child Orlando possess even then
the innate nobility that his older brother Oliver envied with
such malice? Was Touchstone already the class clown? Was
Phoebe already so proud? Was Rosalind already knowing,
clever, and in control of most situations? Did she love to
dress up as a boy?
As for actual rehearsal of the play, having an as-
sistant director or colleague around at this juncture makes
it possible to even consider mounting a production in such
a squeezed time frame as three weeks. Most plays can be
subdivided into scenes that enable different groups to re-
hearse simultaneously in different locations. After the to-
getherness of the first week’s blocking, it makes little sense
to work on a single scene at a time, with the rest of the cast

187
merely spectating. With prudent planning, nearly every-
one in the company can be occupied in concurrent scenes.
For example, while the director is rehearsing the beginning
of Act II, with Duke Senior extolling the virtues of nature
to his lords, an assistant might be working with Act I, scene
ii, which introduces Rosalind, Celia, Touchstone and Le
Beau. At the same time, smaller groups can be rehearsing
independently; Oliver and Charles can play their opening
scene, while Orlando and faithful old Adam may work on
the Act II scene wherein Adam proposes that they both flee
the court. Jacques can be working on his “All the world’s a
stage” soliloquy, and the shepherds Corin and Sylvius may
refine their dialogue about being in love. With double-cast-
ing, such simultaneous rehearsing can involve nearly the
entire cast.

Rehearsal 7: Whatever speech work the cast undertakes

during the rest of the week, have them use their characters’
voices. Even the slightest alterations in pitch or inflection
can immensely aid a young actor struggling to create a con-
vincing portrayal. Touchstone may need to sharpen his ar-
ticulation and quicken his normally ponderous speech;
Jacques may be played by a girl, so she may need to lower
the timbre of her voice; the country wench Audrey has to
work on sounding dimmer; Duke Frederick, more imperi-
ous; Corin, more aged. Use the speech exercises to give the
actors practice in perfecting their characters’ voices.
As for warm-ups, ANIMAL QUALITIES (Exercise
36) may unlock new dimensions for some actors’ charac-
ters. It may also be time to work more improvisationally
for those actors beginning to latch onto comfortable but
mechanical methods of expression. A conversation between
pairs of actors in character, alternating between gibberish
and English, might be a mild “loosener.” Others might be
ALTERNATING WORDS (Exercise 55) or FOUR-HEADED
CHARACTER CONFESSIONAL (Exercise 56). Students
might also begin working more consciously with their

188
characters’ personal tempo in exercises such as CHANG-
ING SPEEDS (Exercise 39).

Rehearsal 8: Assume for a moment that a mini-crisis is

brewing; for whatever reasons, several actors seem to be
fearful about appearing foolish onstage. They are risking
far too little, holding back in their character portrayals. They
are either speaking too timidly or moving inexpressively.
What can a director do? COUNT TO TEN (Exercise 72)
during the speech work can be invaluable. Such restrained
and tentative souls sometimes need to experience the lib-
erating effect of wild exaggeration. IT’S TUESDAY! (Exer-
cise 65) is a perfect activity to stimulate more risk-taking.
Yet another helpful exercise for young actors having trouble
with gesture (“What do I do with my hands? They feel like
dead fish!”) is to employ DUBBING (Exercise 57). Often
students feel weighed down by their lines; having some-
one else speak them can help such people concentrate on
gesturing more freely.

Rehearsal 9: To continue preparing the cast for enrich-

ing improvisational work, the simple but challenging circle
game SLAP SNAP (Exercise 61) both awakens and ener-
gizes the entire company. Students may be ready for exer-
cises that demand that they work together improvisation-
ally but in character. STATUES INTO SCENES (Exercise
52) serves this purpose, as might some version of RHYM-
ING DIALOGUE (Exercise 70).
In the scene rehearsals, a new difficulty arises. The
boy playing Oliver and the girl playing Celia are supposed
to fall in love onstage, but the boy can barely stand to be in
the same room with the girl, much less look adoringly at
her. At the moment he refuses to take her hand in the final
scene. Where is Puck’s “love juice” when we need it? It
takes a long private conversation convincing the fellow that
acting often involves putting aside one’s personal feelings
for the sake of one’s character. He says simply that he

189
cannot look the girl in the eyes without wanting to strangle
her. I suggest that he look not at her eyes but at a spot
somewhere above her eyes on her forehead. After much
coaxing, he agrees not only to try this higher gaze, but to
also take Celia by the hand in the play’s final scene. Un-
fortunately, he never gets beyond holding it as if it were a
dog’s paw; this union between Celia and Oliver seems
doomed before the echo of their vows dies away.

Rehearsal 10: Timing becomes ever more important in

rehearsals. One effective sequence to employ is a version
of the FOUR-PHASE IMPROV (Exercise 40), wherein
groups of actors improvise—in character—scenes related
to the play. All the betrothed couples might stage a wed-
ding feast scene after the end of the actual play. Dukes
Frederick and Senior might improvise the banishment scene
that occurs before the play begins; Sylvius and Phebe or
Audrey and William could improvise the first time they
ever met. The aim here is to play not only with the imagi-
native interactions but with tempo. Have the actors play
their scenes deliberately too slowly, then too quickly, be-
fore they find the most effective pace.
By the end of the second week, actors should feel
increasingly comfortable in and familiar with their charac-
ters, able to identify their characters’ deepest fears, great-
est strengths, secret dreams, or some nagging physical ail-
ments. They should have discovered some of the inner
rhythms guiding their characters’ lives—the tempo of their
walking, breathing, speaking. The skeletal blocking of the
first week will have acquired more clarity and certainty,
especially if props and set pieces have found their way
onstage. However, the interactions between characters
probably lack convincing connectedness, and the stage
spaces those characters inhabit still need another enliven-
ing dimension.

190
Week Three—Adding Atmosphere, Deepening Relation-
ships
The work of the third week focuses on invisibili-
ties—the mood that colors a scene, the motives that impel
characters to act, the feelings behind the pauses that
heighten accelerations of impassioned dialogue. This is a
critical phase of any production; can young actors reach
beyond themselves and begin to charge the very atmo-
sphere through which they move? Can they develop that
most undervalued capacity—both in the theater and in
life—concentrated listening? The tendency of so many ac-
tors is to listen only for the cue lines supplied by their fel-
low actors. Yet such acting rarely conveys believable in-
tensity or intimacy between characters. That is why direc-
tors need to help young actors stretch their imaginations
beyond their typically narrow horizons.

Rehearsal 11: Assume that for this production, the ac-

tors are still struggling to create the dramatically different
moods between the court and the forest. The director can
lead the cast through a series of exercises designed to elicit
“atmospheric effects,” beginning with WEATHER EX-
TREMES (Exercise 42). Then the actors need to experience
EMOTIONAL ATMOSPHERES (Exercise 43), especially the
diametrically opposed feelings of suspicion and trust,
treachery and loyalty, uncertainty and security. In rehears-
als, these atmospheres need to pervade every scene, so that
the air onstage is permeated with a mood as palpable as
the humidity of a tropical forest or the dust of a sandstorm.

Rehearsal 12: As the actors become more adept at im-

buing each scene with its own distinctive mood, they can
also begin to explore the potentially absorbing encounters
between characters who carry contrasting personal atmo-
spheres onstage. Nowhere is this more apparent in As You
Like It than in Act II, scene vii, when Duke Senior and his
men are just sitting down to a festive meal in the forest.

191
Orlando lurches in, half-crazed for lack of food. He assails
the banqueters at swordpoint, demanding food in the fierc-
est manner that a starving man can summon:

Forbear, I say!
He dies that touches any of this fruit
Till I and my affairs are answered.

Yet instead of reacting in fear or with an equal mea-

sure of hostility, Duke Senior calmly defuses Orlando’s
seemingly implacable fury with his generosity.

What would you have? Your gentleness

shall force
More than your force move us to gentle-
ness.
(Act II, scene vii)

Here we can clearly see the fascinating juxtaposition

of two contrasting moods confronting one another. How-
ever, unless both the wise serenity and virtue of the Duke
and his men are as well-developed as Orlando’s frenzied
desperation, the scene will not deliver all the impact it
could. PERSONAL ATMOSPHERES (Exercise 45) helps
young actors cultivate this capacity for enlarging and ex-
tending their characters’ soul moods so that they suffuse
the atmosphere of every scene. EMOTIONAL MIRRORS
(Exercise 46) can also assist in this process.

Rehearsal 13: As performances near, young actors of-

ten need assistance broadening their focus. Some are only
interested in how their particular characters are develop-
ing. Others begin to get stage fright days in advance and
become stiff and clammy onstage. In either case, they lose
any real sense of connection with their fellow actors. Sev-
eral exercises can re-enliven this contact and empathy. One
is a variation of CHARACTER RELAY (Exercise 71). At

192
this late stage of a production, the director can shake up a
lethargic, anxiety-ridden, or overly smug cast by having
the players assume different parts during a rehearsal. The
actor playing Rosalind exchanges roles with the fellow play-
ing Orlando; Touchstone and Audrey, Jaques and William,
Dukes Frederick and Senior, Phoebe and Silvius, Celia and
Oliver; each trades parts with the other. Then, without ben-
efit of script, they perform selected scenes, ad libbing to the
best of their abilities. They usually know enough of their
fellow actors’ lines to do a passable, and often hilarious,
imitation of the scene in question. The aim here is to stir
the pot a bit—to ease some of the growing tension, and to
expand actors’ consciousness beyond their own roles.

Rehearsal 14: In addition to the regular run-through

practice that a cast needs towards the end of the produc-
tion process, it may also be helpful to stage a SPEED-
THROUGH REHEARSAL (Exercise 41). The SPEED-
THROUGH is particularly effective in helping young ac-
tors see the entirety of a play. By their very nature, most
early rehearsals proceed in a piecemeal fashion. One must
focus intensively on first one scene, then another, often out
of chronological sequence. Inevitably, young actors will
have little sense for the wholeness of the play until a run-
through. The SPEED-THROUGH serves that function, and
the accelerated pace demands a heightened sense of antici-
pation on the actors’ part that can only strengthen their sense
of the play’s forward movement.
In these latter stages of rehearsals, the director is
ideally tightening and refining every scene—adding stage
business, eliminating wasted or ineffectual action. Every
gesture, every step, and every sidelong glance should be
purposeful without appearing too artificially orchestrated.
For instance, in As You Like It, the scene where Touchstone
the clown meets and recognizes the bumpkin William as a
rival for Audrey’s hand needs improvement. Touchstone

193
should become convincingly intimidating as he first inter-
rogates, then terrorizes William. The scene requires Will-
iam to cringe and back-pedal before the suddenly
fiercesome clown. Up to this point, Touchstone has been
more jocund than ferocious, and William has been more
bemused than cowed. However, when Touchstone ad-
vances on William and is directed to deliver several crisp,
well-timed jabs to William’s chest to accompany the fol-
lowing lines, the whole exchange begins to work.

(Italics below indicate my stage directions to the actor.)

Therefore, clown, abandon, which is in the

vulgar, leave (poke), the society, which in the
boorish is, company (poke), of this female,
which in the common is, woman (jab): which
together is, abandon (jab) the society (push)
of this female (push), or, clown, thou perishest
(shove) . . .
(Act V, scene i)

Nearly always, such refinements will arise most suc-

cessfully out of staying true to the text. If actors and direc-
tor can illuminate the intentions living beneath the words,
suitable actions will follow.

Rehearsal 15: An intriguing paradox arises towards the

end of a production. On the one hand, rehearsals of the
play itself need to be approached with the utmost earnest-
ness. The players cannot have so much fun that they fall
out of character or get distracted by the horseplay so typi-
cal of teenagers. On the other hand, we must contend with,
and even allow for, that ubiquitous adolescent energy and
agitation, particularly as the actors’ anxiety about upcom-
ing performances increases. The SPEED–THROUGH and
CHARACTER RELAY rehearsals described above certainly
help to channel that turbulence. Another such outlet is to

194
orchestrate a rehearsal in which the actors play their parts
in a variety of accents or according to different motifs.
For example, every actor in Act I, scene i, might be-
gin As You Like It speaking with a French or Spanish ac-
cent, followed by an ever-so-proper English or heavy Ger-
man accent in scene ii. Celia, Rosalind, and the Duke might
try the ensuing banishment scene, normally bristling with
Frederick’s hostility, in an Irish lilt or an Italian accent. If
the actors have trouble replicating ethnic accents, they could
be directed to sing their lines as an opera, to croon them as
if they were Sinatra or Streisand, or to become rappers. Yet
another option would be to have them play a scene as cow-
boys, monsters, spies, or as six-year-old versions of their
characters. One of the most effective genres involves ask-
ing the cast to play a scene as if they were in a soap opera;
the resulting melodramatic delivery of their lines often
helps animate certain actors whose characters were too pale.
The goal of such an exercise is not great theater; on
the contrary, subtlety and attention to detail will, in all like-
lihood, disappear, supplanted by an atmosphere border-
ing on the burlesque. However, such a rehearsal will in-
variably relieve pressure through hilarity, and perhaps even
encourage apprehensive cast members to enjoy themselves
onstage.

Week Four—Giving Notes, Final Touches

The last few days before performances are never
restful, but they need not be characterized by cold sweats
or rising panic. Most rehearsal time is given over to run-
throughs, followed by the critically important process of
giving actors notes, that is, specific directions to fine tune
lines, gestures, entrances, and so on. The director can give
notes either individually to actors or collectively, our pre-
ferred method. Even though the cast is often weary after a
run-through, we have found it more effective over the years
to give notes immediately after a rehearsal, so the actors

195
can 1) practice, or at least visualize, the alterations while
the scene is still fresh, and 2) sleep on the suggestions. It
goes without saying that the director needs to share as many
encouraging remarks as critical ones.
One final recommendation in preparing for upcom-
ing performances is a closed eye, HORIZONTAL RE-
HEARSAL (Exercise 74). Usually the day before, or the
morning of, our opening show, we find some comfortable,
quiet room, carpeted if possible, and ask the company to
lie down as if they were spokes in a wheel, with their heads
toward the center. The actors then go through the entire
play with their eyes closed. As they speak their lines aloud,
they visualize every entrance, every nuance, every mood
change. They need not put all their energy into blasting
their lines in this run-through. Rather, they should con-
centrate on imagining every element of the play as vitally
as possible. This experience of the play can provide the
cast with a final, shared vision. For a number of weeks
they have been building a vessel, but from many different
angles—some have been planking the prow, others the
stern, still others have been carving the figurehead or se-
curing the mast. This exercise allows them to inwardly
climb aboard, set their course, and begin sailing together
Thus, all of our efforts to work dramatically with
teenagers begin and end with the cultivation of imagina-
tion, not as some whimsical flight of fantasy, not even as a
means of creating theatrical truth. In some circles, imagi-
nation is accorded little respect; it is dismissed as either the
trifling source of children’s make-believe fancies or, worse
yet, a misleading mode of perception, whose clouded filter
distorts reality. We have become convinced over the years
that working with imagination in the ways described here
does not constitute an escape from reality; rather, it can
plumb a deeper reality, one grounded in the material world
but stretching towards, and sometimes even touching, a
higher realm.

196
 Young people need to exercise this incipient power
of imagination, in part, of course, because it can help them
become better actors. More significantly, however, imagi-
nation rightly nurtured can also become a vehicle for ap-
prehending greater truths, in oneself and in the world. Like
Walt Whitman, we can recognize that we are all larger than
we ever thought possible, that we do, indeed, “contain
multitudes.” Through imagination as well, perhaps we can
begin, like Wordsworth “to see into the life of things.” In
fact, in Romanticism Comes of Age, Owen Barfield reminds
us that imagination can even bridge the gap between the
self and the world. “Imagination is not content with merely
looking on at the world. It seeks to sink itself entirely in
the thing perceived . . . to overcome the duality between
subjective and objective.” (p. 39) Barfield ascribes to imagi-
nation the potential to actually span the rift that has led to
the isolation so characteristic of our time. “It involves a
certain disappearance of the sense of ‘I’ and ‘Not I.’ It stands
before the object and feels ‘I am that.’” (p. 30)
Seen in this light, imagination can actually become
an instrument for addressing some of the rampant social
ills that afflict our modern world—the loss of community,
the growing sense of meaninglessness and despair, the de-
humanization of the human being, the rising tide of vio-
lence. Someone once said that “Resorting to violence is a
failure of imagination.” On many occasions, Rudolf Steiner
spoke of the healing power of art in general, and of imagi-
nation specifically, not simply as a remedy for lack of cre-
ativity, but as a means of elevating human interactions into
a moral realm. The seeds for this moral imagination can be
cultivated in young actors who work with a deeper pur-
pose than merely staging a play. Drama can help them de-
velop the empathy to identify with the struggles and
strivings of others. Imagination can take young people even
further; it can enable them to recognize the higher possi-
bilities in others and to act—onstage and off—in accordance
with that vision of the higher.

197
 From The Skin of Our Teeth – 12th grade production

198
 Chapter XVIII

Plays That Have Worked

As mentioned earlier, finding suitable plays for
young people is no easy task. Far too many playwrights of
the past fifty years either have severely reduced their cast
sizes or focused on pessimistic themes that dispirit instead
of inspire. We have searched high and low for plays of
substance that have some redeeming value as well as lan-
guage worthy of students’ consideration. The list below
includes many of the productions we have staged (or have
considered) over the past two decades. It includes male/
female cast size, a very brief synopsis, and noteworthy chal-
lenges or possibilities.

Antigone by Sophocles (3 m, 3 f, and a chorus that was

traditionally 15)
The third in the Oedipus trilogy, this archetypal trag-
edy revolves around Antigone’s decision to bury her
brother’s corpse despite a decree by King Creon forbid-
ding it. Sentenced to a living entombment, she kills her-
self, as does her betrothed, Creon’s son, when he finds her
dead. Creon’s wife also stabs herself when she hears of
her son’s fate. It explores the age-old conflict between per-
sonal conscience and societal law.
The major drawback here is the dearth of leading roles,
but choral work can be particularly engaging for students,

199
especially with emphasis on masks, speech work, and cho-
reography.
One might also look at Jean Anouilh’s modern adapta-
tion, with 6 male and 4 female roles, but without a chorus.

The Bonds of Interest by Jacento Benevente (13 m, 6 f)

A Spanish farce, written at the turn of the last century
but set in the early seventeenth century. Written in the
commedia dell’ arte tradition, it follows the manipulations
of Crispin, posing as Leander’s servant, who uses his wiles
to outfox the Pantalone and Dottore and arranges for Silvia
to fall in love with Leander.

Camino Real by Tennessee Williams (27+ m, 12+ f)

This is Williams’ grim yet poetic vision of life in some
unidentified, Spanish-speaking police state, where ruthless-
ness, corruption, and cynicism seem to prevail over inno-
cence, goodness, and idealism until the very end. A host of
fascinating characters, from Lord Byron to Don Quixote,
from gypsies to aristocrats, reside on the Camino Real, des-
perately trying to survive or, in some cases, escape. At stake
is nothing less than retaining the core of human dignity.
Camino Real can be a stunningly theatrical piece, with
a number of opportunities for music and creative choreog-
raphy. The set requires two very different sections—the
suggestion of tenements and dark alleyways on one side,
and a faded but still luxurious hotel on the other, with a
great flight of stairs bisecting the set that leads up to an
upstage wall. Downstage, a dried-up central fountain needs
to flow with very real water at the play’s end.

Conference of the Birds from Farid U-Din Attar by Jean-

Claude Carriere and Peter Brook (7 m, 6 f, but flex-
ible)
A company of birds is in dire straits. Urged on by the
Hoopoe, they go on a journey to find their king. They meet
with both despair and triumph as they attempt to cross the

200
seven valleys. Cryptic at times, profound at others, this
can be a feast for the imaginative costumer and director.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller (10 m, 10 f)

Miller’s searing dramatization of the Salem witch tri-
als echoes the U. S House of Representatives’ Un-Ameri-
can Activities “witch hunt,” which spun out of control in
the early 1950s. A group of young girls in Puritan New
England, flirting with forbidden activities, such as noctur-
nal dancing in the woods, escape punishment by blaming
several townspeople of devil worship. Accusations fly, fear
and superstition run amok, and John and Elizabeth Proc-
tor become victims of the mass hysteria.
This is a grim, intense drama, with a number of juicy
female roles, especially Abigail and Elizabeth. Costuming
is relatively easy, and the sets can be very simple.

The Curious Savage by John Patrick (5 m, 6 f)

Mrs. Savage has been committed by her children to a
posh sanitarium in Massachusetts. With the help of the
other colorful “guests,” she outfoxes her relations as they
attempt to wrest her estate from her.
This is light-hearted and farcial, anchored by memo-
rable and zany characters. The set is an interior and re-
quires parlor furniture, but offers few other difficulties.

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (tr. Brian

Hooker, or Anthony Burgess) (30+ m, 10+ w)
Cyrano de Bergerac is the classic story of a dashing, sev-
enteenth-century swordsman with a poetic soul and a gro-
tesquely long nose. He falls in love with Roxane, but she
has eyes for another, the handsome but dull Christian.
Cyrano helps Christian win Roxane’s affections, but when
Christian falls in battle, Cyrano resolves never to reveal that
it was he who wrote the love letters that melted Roxane’s
heart.

201
 This play has everything—an opportunity for elabo-
rate costumes and sets, swordplay, beautiful language,
unforgettable characters, and a story teeming with ideals
of self-sacrifice, devotion, courage. It is, however, a long
play; liberal editing would help. We eliminated the entire
fourth act with a bit of fill-in narration.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury (10 m, 8 f)

In yet another midwestern setting, a middle-aged man
plagued by loneliness goes back in time as a stranger to
befriend his teenage self.
We have not tackled this play yet, but it sounds intrigu-
ing.

The Diviners by James Leonard (6 m, 5 f)

This absorbing, unusual tale tells of a backward young
man who is befriended by a disaffected preacher in the
Midwest during the 1930’s. The boy’s phobia about water
and the preacher’s efforts to get the young man to wash
collide in a catastrophic climax.
As a backdrop to the relationship between the two prin-
cipals, the play evokes the small-town feeling reminiscent
of Our Town.

The Enchanted by Jean Giraudoux (9 m, 11 f)

A young woman in a French village develops an ob-
session with the supernatural. A number of bureaucrats
attempt to prevent her from upsetting the security and hide-
bound provincialism of their lives. They cannot, however,
prevent her from falling in love.
This play has a charming, challenging female lead.
Some interesting problems arise concerning how to present
a ghost. Other characters are somewhat stereotypical or un-
derdeveloped.

202
An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen (9 m, 2 f)
Ibsen’s story concerns a Norwegian doctor who goes
from hero to enemy when he learns that the town’s main
attraction—the municipal spa waters he first discovered—
now have become a health hazard. No one wants to admit
the truth of the doctor’s findings, which would imperil the
town’s prosperity; the doctor, Stockman, cannot imagine
compromising his principles.
Although the dialogue is heavy-handed at times, this
is another sharply drawn dramatization of the conflict be-
tween public interest and private ideals.

Grandchild of Kings Adapted by Harold Prince

(23 m and f, flexible casting, doubling)
The play portrays Sean O’Casey’s life. Narrated by
the mature O’Casey, the play reenacts significant moments
in the Irish playwright’s formative years. The play teems
with singing and dancing as well as funerals and family
conflict. It celebrates the spirit of a people as well as the
spirit of the playwright-to-be.

The Grapes of Wrath adapted by Frank Galati

(20+ m with doubling possibilities, 8-9 f)
John Steinbeck’s poignant, gripping story chronicles
the Joad family as they leave the Dust Bowl for the prom-
ise of a better life in California. Galati’s brilliant adaptation
is filled with humor, heartache, and ultimately, the nobility
of the human spirit.
This play has a number of unique features, including
wonderful possibilities for blues or bluegrass musical ac-
companiment. It also requires some ingenuity to create an
old jalopy that is both mobile and sturdy enough to sup-
port several people.

203
Idiot’s Delight by Robert Sherwood (17 m, 10 f)
In a northern Italian mountain resort during the 1930s,
an international group of guests is detained because of
impending war preparations. An American song-and-
dance man and his show girls entertain, among others, a
French arms dealer and his Russian paramour, British
honeymooners, a German scientist, and several Italian sol-
diers.
The play provides another opportunity for live music,
this time a small nightclub band playing show tunes from
the ’20s and ’30s. The international cast also seems tailor-
made for a variety of accents.

The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol (20 m, 6 f)

This trenchant satire skewers the corrupt petty bureau-
crats of nineteenth-century Russia. A clever drifter is mis-
taken for a government inspector and plied with bribes,
propositions, and other blandishments by the townspeople,
who get their just desserts when the scoundrel leaves just
before the real inspector arrives.
It is possible to alter the script so that certain minor
roles change from male to female, if the need arises.

The Italian Straw Hat by Eugene Labiche and Marc-

Michel (11 m, 6 f)
A potentially hilarious farce, this play is really one long
chase, involving the misadventures of a young man about
to be married, who leads the wedding party all over town
to find a replacement for the straw hat his horse inadvert-
ently eats.
Fast-paced, with lots of doors opening and slamming
shut, this play proves that timing is everything!

J.B. by Archibald MacLeish (12 m, 9 f)

MacLeish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning version of the story
of Job is set in a circus arena. The language here is uncom-
monly majestic, and the quintessential questions posed—

204
about the nature of suffering and of evil, of the relationship
between the human and divine world—elevate this play
into rarefied realms.
The set need not be elaborate, but some central circle
suggesting a circus ring demarcates the acting area. Two
rather high platforms for Zuss and Nickles—MacLeish’s
vendors portraying God and Satan—need to be constructed.
Masks for the divinities might add to the mystery surround-
ing those characters.

Jabberwock by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

(26 m, 17 f)
This play offers a light-hearted look at young Jamie
Thurber’s life, before he became the creator of the Walter
Mitty stories. It is peopled by a delightful cast of wacky
characters, especially the members of Thurber’s family and
neighborhood.
The set can be quite simple, except for the electric car
that suddenly appears onstage. We used a disguised golf
cart quite effectively.

The King Stag by Carlo Gozzi (tr. Carl Wildman)

(19 m, 3 f)
This little-known, but charming story tells of a king who
seeks a wife and the wicked minister who seeks to over-
throw him. The play is really a fairy tale, complete with a
magic bust and sorcerer trapped in a parrot’s body, but it
incorporates many of the commedia dell’arte characters.
The play requires a number of ingenious set and prop
devices, including a parrot that flies, a bust that can laugh,
two stags, and a sorcerer who seems to appear out of no-
where. The production may be best suited for younger
adolescents.

Look Homeward, Angel by Ketti Frings (10 m, 8 f)

This is a brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of
the novel by Thomas Wolfe, which depicts his coming-of-age

205
years in the person of Eugene Gant, living with his turbu-
lent family and an odd assortment of boarding house char-
acters.
The play is filled with a compelling blend of humor
and grief and features some memorable figures, especially
Eugene’s overbearing, materialistic-minded mother and his
tragically flawed father. Both mother and father must be
played by very strong actors, as must Eugene. One of the
centerpieces of the production is a large sculpture of an
angel, which can be a challenging artistic project.

A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt (11 m, 3-4 f)

Bolt brilliantly dramatizes Thomas More’s struggle
with Henry VIII and his minions to remain loyal to his sov-
ereign without compromising his principles. All of the char-
acters are exceedingly well-drawn, even the minor ones.
The set can be very simple. The only shortcoming here
is too few female parts.

The Madwoman of Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux

(24 m, 15 f)
An often-performed production brings to the stage a
colorful, daft older woman and her friends. Together they
manage to derail a corporate scheme, which would destroy
Paris in the process, aimed at extracting oil from the sub-
soil below the city.
The long-standing popularity of this play rests in the
parade of charming Parisian characters, but the
playwright’s statement about human greed masquerading
as “development” is perhaps more pertinent today than
ever.

The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder (9 m, 7 f)

One of the best American farces ever written follows
the misadventures of two lowly clerks who work for the
wealthy Horace Vandergelder. He is determined to find a
wife, and they are determined to bamboozle their employer

206
by sneaking into New York to carouse. The matchmaker
arranging Vandergelder’s marriage manages to end up
with Horace herself, and the clerks each find romance
through a hilarious sequence of complications.
Dolly Levi, the matchmaker, must have real stage pres-
ence. The costumes can be glorious, especially some the
hats, since one of the scenes takes place in a milliner’s shop.

The Miracle Worker by William Gibson (7 m, 7-12 f)

This extraordinary story dramatizes the early relation-
ship between Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan.
The play is funny, moving, and ultimately inspiring and
provides a rare moment of genuine transcendence when
Helen finally sees light shining in her lifelong darkness.
The members of Helen’s family provide challenging
roles, but the success of this production rests squarely on
the shoulders of the two actors playing Helen and Annie.
Helen, in particular, must be played by a girl with expres-
sive body language.

The Mouse that Roared by Leonard Wibberley

(12 m, 16 f)
A microscopically small, bankrupt country in Europe
decides to declare war on America, since history suggests
that the quickest route to prosperity is to lose the war and
then receive billions of dollars in aid from the United States.
The plot of this satirical comedy about international diplo-
macy thickens, however, when Tully Bascomb and his band
of bowmen win!
This is a fine ensemble piece, with a large number of
substantial roles. Sets can be spare, but safety measures
need to be taken when arrows fly.

Museum by Tina Howe (16+ m, 22 f, fewer with doubling)

A scathing portrait of the modern art world and its
patrons, this play takes place in a modern art gallery, while
a parade of intriguing characters react to the artwork.

207
 The only significant shortcoming here is that little trans-
formation takes place in any of the individuals in the play.
The playwright focuses instead on the broader message
established by her satirical tone. However, the array of fas-
cinating characters makes this an absorbing, and often very
funny, theatrical piece. The major challenge in mounting
Museum is the creation of grotesque, contemporary sculp-
tures and a rather elaborate clothesline complete with hang-
ing dummies.

Nicholas Nickeby by adapted by Tim Kelly (15+ m, 15+ f)

A decent adaptation of Dickens’ tale follows Nicholas
as he goes from the harsh conditions at Wackford Squeers’
Dotheby Hall to Crummles’ theatrical company to the
Cheeryble Brothers’ counting house. The language is some-
times pedestrian, and the play cannot possibly convey the
scope of the novel, but the characters are suitably
Dickensian and melodramatic.

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail by Jerome Lawrence

and Robert E. Lee (11 m, 6 f)
This play arose out of the anti-war days of the Viet Nam
conflict. It dramatizes Thoreau’s brief stay in jail for refus-
ing to pay taxes that would help finance the Mexican War.
Through a series of flashbacks, the play explores Thoreau’s
early adulation of Emerson, his attempt to start a school,
an ill-fated and fumbled romance, his handyman days, and
his befriending of a fugitive slave.
This intelligent script is laced with some of Thoreau’s
trenchant observations and a number of well-drawn sup-
porting characters. The final scene is a challenging dream
battle that requires heightened sound and lighting effects.

Once in a Lifetime by George Kaufman and Moss Hart

(24 m, 14 f, doubling possible)
This Hollywood comedy set in the 1920’s chronicles
the fortunes of three down-on-their-luck vaudeville

208
performers who parlay the invention of “talkies” into short-
lived success. The production brims over with eccentric
characters—film magnates, German directors, neglected
screen writers, wacky secretaries, glamorous gold diggers,
aspiring starlets, and, at the center, George, a slow-witted
but good-hearted stooge who becomes Hollywood’s most
successful film maker.
This play is quite complex, requiring a number of dif-
ferent interiors and some “showpiece” costumes, but the
breezy dialogue and vivid characters make this an appeal-
ing show.

Ondine by Jean Giraudoux (15 m, 12 f)

Ondine weaves the enchanting but ill-fated story of a
knight who falls in love with a water sprite. We have not
tackled this piece in English, but an ambitious French
teacher directed an abbreviated version in French.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder (17 m, 7 f)

Wilder portrays universal truths in his loving depic-
tion of a small New Hampshire town at the beginning of
the twentieth century. His genius is to discover the extraor-
dinary in the most ordinary, everyday lives of people such
as George Gibbs and Emily Webb. The final act depicts
existence in a spiritual dimension, and depicts the poignant
relationship between the dead and the living. This is a clas-
sic of American theater.
Wilder has made this a remarkably easy play to stage,
using only the simplest suggestion of set pieces—a few
chairs and a ladder usually suffice.

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Paul Green

(26 m, 12 f)
Ibsen’s masterpiece depicts a wild, boastful, and irre-
sponsible young man who tramples on others in his quest
for self-gratification. During his adventures in foreign
lands, he leaves behind one disaster after another, until he

209
finally confronts the button molder and the consequences
of his egotism.
This is a play of epic proportions, of grand scope and
vision. Its length alone presents staging challenges, and
editing should be seriously considered. The hall of the troll
king offers promising choreographing possibilities, as does
the incorporation of Grieg’s music. Peer is a huge role, so
large that we divided it among three actors, one for each of
the three acts.

Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s plays are an annual staple of our drama
productions and are familiar to most audiences, due in no
small part to the recent spate of movie versions. As I men-
tioned earlier, Shakespeare’s unparalleled language, unfor-
gettable characters, and stirring themes make his plays a
natural choice for directors working with teenagers. How-
ever, the chief drawback is the dearth of female roles. Some
girls interested in challenging parts may have to content
themselves with playing male characters. A list of our most
successful Shakespeare productions follows:

As You Like It
A Comedy of Errors
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Romeo and Juliet
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
Two Gentlemen from Verona
A Winter’s Tale

Based on our experience with A Winter’s Tale, the com-

edies and romances are more accessible for adolescents than

210
the tragedies or histories. However, we would consider
directing a Hamlet or King Lear or Macbeth if the right cast
came along.

The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder

(25 m, 11 f, doubling advisable)
Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning satire depicts the ex-
ploits of the Antrobus family through the ages. They battle
Biblical plagues and the encroaching ice age in this wacky,
anachronistic tale variously set in the New Jersey suburbs,
Atlantic City, and a post-Armageddon environment.
Through it all, Wilder’s profound faith in humanity makes
this play as moving as it is humorous.
The three related, but somewhat independent, acts
make double or triple-casting feasible. A projection screen
for slides is required, as are prehistoric animal costumes.

Temptation by Vaclav Havel (8 m, 7 f)

Loosely based on the legend of Faust, this dark com-
edy by a contemporary playwright turned statesman gives
the audience an experience of life in Eastern Europe before
the iron curtain was lifted and the Wall came down.

Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas

(29 m, 28 f, plenty of doubling)
Originally written for radio, the lyric richness of Tho-
mas’ script makes this a feast for language lovers as well as
for theater aficionados. The play reveals the secret dreams
and everyday activities of Welsh fishing village inhabitants
from their predawn sleep to their private evening rituals.
Thomas lovingly creates a world peopled with unforget-
table common folk whose longings and griefs we recog-
nize only too well as our own.
This extraordinary piece provides an opportunity for
true ensemble work. There are no huge roles, only a pal-
ette of colorful characters who emblazon themselves in our

211
hearts with very few actual lines. The interweaving of nar-
ration and dozens of vignettes makes it most challenging
to stage seamlessly. Multiple staging areas and only the
suggestion of a backdrop will certainly help.

Other plays we have not done but would consider:

The Bourgeois Gentleman by Moliere (8-12 m, 4-8 f)

Moliere takes a satirical look at the pretensions of people
obsessed with status. It includes a number of parts that
can be played very broadly, as the would-be gentleman is
conned by charlatans and family members alike.

The Coarse Acting Show II by Michael Green et. al.

(variable casting)
These four one-acts parody Moby Dick, The Cherry Or-
chard, Shakespeare’s Henry plays, and the avant garde
genre. Monty Pythonesque in spirit, these pieces can be
irreverent, sometimes in questionable taste, and very funny.

Dinner at 8 by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber

(14 m, 11 f)
On the outside, the setting is a posh dinner party for
the upper crust. However, just under the surface, a seeth-
ing cauldron of intrigue involving servants makes this play
both humorous and moving.

The Good Doctor by Neil Simon (variable casting)

Simon has written a humorous series of vignettes based
on several Chekhov pieces, including a sketch about a man
who harangues a bank manager, another about a would-be
seduction, and a third about a man offering to drown him-
self for three rubles.

212
The Lady’s Not for Burning by Christopher Fry (8 m, 3 f)
A verse comedy portrays an enchanting woman ac-
cused of turning an old man into a dog. It follows the
romantic entanglements of several men competing for the
would-be witch’s affections.

The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge

(7 m, 5 f)
This lyrical story is set in an Irish pub where a young
man shows up boasting he has just killed his abusive fa-
ther. He is hailed as a hero, and two women vie for his
hand, until the alleged corpse shows up.

State of Siege by Albert Camus (24 m, 10 f)

The Plague, personified as a stereotypical dictator, and
his female companion, Death, terrorize a Spanish city and
attempt to strip away the inhabitants’ essential humanity.
Only the courage and love of a single man breaks the siege.

Street Scene by Elmer Rice (16 m, 11 f)

Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama depicts life in a
New York City neighborhood and contains some adult
themes, including a sordid affair and a double murder.
Now considered a classic, the play portrays the diversity
of voices, the ferment, and the rhythms of urban life.

Thieves’ Carnival by Jean Anouilh (10 m, 5 f)

Larceny and romance intertwine in a faded resort town
where an aristocratic couple and two attractive nieces en-
counter a trio of thieves. The younger pickpockets fall in
love with the girls to complicate matters.

Tiger at the Gates by Jean Giraudoux (16 m, 7 f)

This twentieth century play updates the classic con-
frontation between the Greeks and Trojans described in
Homer’s Iliad. It focuses on Hector’s disillusionment with
the glorification of war and his decision to return the beautiful
but soulless Helen.
213
The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan (18 m, 7 f)
Saroyan’s Pulitzer prize-winning play focuses on a wa-
terfront saloon frequented by vivid characters searching
for happiness.

To Kill a Mockingbird adapted by Christopher S e r g e l ,

from the novel by Harper Lee (11 m, 9 f)
This compassionate, stirring story, set in a small south-
ern town, dramatizes one family’s struggle to come to grips
with prejudice.

Tonight at 8:30 by Noel Coward

These nine one-act plays sparkle with Coward’s char-
acteristically clever repartee and showmanship.

Tonight We Improvise by Luigi Pirandello

(approx. 50 characters)
Pirandello’s groundbreaking play is about a wife be-
ing courted by a man who finds her relatives quite daft.
Improvisation, actors dropping out of character and directly
addressing the audience, and mime are all techniques
Pirandello incorporates into the staging.

You Can’t Take It With You by George S. Kaufman

and Moss Hart (12 m, 7 f)
Kaufman and Hart offer audiences a humorous fam-
ily portrait of a wacky family and friends, including a Rus-
sian wrestler, an ice delivery man invited eight years ago
to stay for awhile, a grandfather who collects snakes, a hide-
bound business tycoon plagued by digestive problems, and,
of course, young lovers.

The best resources for finding plays are the cata-

logs from the Samuel French Publishing Company, The
Dramatic Publishing Company, and Baker’s Plays. Al-
though dated, Theodore Shank’s Digest of 500 Plays can also
be helpful.

214
 Index of Exercises

Exercise l: YES 34
Exercise 2: BALL TOSS 35
Exercise 3: PULSE 35
Exercise 4: PASS A STRETCH 35
Exercise 5: PASS A FACE 36
Exercise 6: PASS A SOUND 36
Exercise 7: SINGING TO THE BLIND 36
Exercise 8: PASS A CLAP 37
Exercise 9: PASSING HOPS 37
Exercise 10: PASS AN IMAGINARY OBJECT 37
Exercise 11: CLENCH AND UNCLENCH 38
Exercise 12: FINDING ONE’S BALANCE 38
Exercise 13: BECOMING A MAST 39
Exercise 14: HAND WRESTLING 39
Exercise 15: DYING A THOUSAND DEATHS 39
Exercise 16: CIRCLE MIRROR 40
Exercise 17: GOTCHA 41
Exercise 18: ZIP/ZAP/ZOP 41
Exercise 19: CHANGING PARTNERS 42
Exercise 20: SOURCE OF THE MOTION 42
Exercise 21: STREETS AND ALLEYS 42
Exercise 22: HA-HA AND HEE-HEE 43
Exercise 23: HAGOO 44
Exercise 24: BALL FREEZE 45
Exercise 25: FOLLOW THE LEADER 56
Exercise 26: MIRRORS 56
Exercise 27: ENVIRONMENTS—THE FOUR ELEMENTS 57
Exercise 28: WAYS OF WALKING 62
Exercise 29: STICK/BALL/VEIL/CANDLE 63
Exercise 30: CENTERS 64
Exercise 31: CLOSED EYES 66
Exercise 32: PLAYING WITH IMAGINARY PROPS 70
Exercise 33: WALKING IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER 71
Exercise 34: GETTING TO KNOW ME 72
Exercise 35: ANIMAL BLIND 73
Exercise 36: ANIMAL QUALITIES 74
Exercise 37: EXAGGERATED MIRRORS 76
Exercise 38: STATUES 78
Exercise 39: CHANGING SPEEDS 81
Exercise 40: THE FOUR-PHASE IMPROV 81
Exercise 41: THE SPEED-THROUGH REHEARSAL 83

215
Exercise 42: WEATHER EXTREMES 88
Exercise 43: EMOTIONAL ATMOSPHERES 90
Exercise 44: SWITCHING ATMOSPHERES 91
Exercise 45: PERSONAL ATMOSPHERES 91
Exercise 46: EMOTIONAL MIRRORS 93
Exercise 47: MOOD SWING 94
Exercise 48: SITTING WITHOUT A CHAIR 98
Exercise 49: MAKING A MACHINE 98
Exercise 50: GO ORGANIC! 99
Exercise 51: CHARACTER BIOGRAPHIES 100
Exercise 52: STATUES INTO SCENES 100
Exercise 53: WALKING AS OTHER CHARACTERS 101
Exercise 54: SOUND/WORD SYMPHONY 101
Exercise 55: ALTERNATING WORDS 102
Exercise 56: FOUR-HEADED CHARACTER CONFESSIONALS 103
Exercise 57: DUBBING 104
Exercise 58: ENACTING A STORY 105
Exercise 59: GIVE AND TAKE 106
Exercise 60: BLIND OFFERS 111
Exercise 61: SLAP SNAP 112
Exercise 62: ALPHABET SCENES 113
Exercise 63: LET’S DO THIS! 114
Exercise 64: WHAT ARE YOU DOING? 114
Exercise 65: IT’S TUESDAY! 115
Exercise 66: GIBBERISH 116
Exercise 67: ONE KNOWS, ONE DOESN’T 118
Exercise 68: GIFT-GIVING 120
Exercise 69: WHAT’S IN THE CLOSET? 122
Exercise 70: RHYMING DIALOGUE 122
Exercise 71: CHARACTER EXCHANGE 125
Exercise 72: COUNTING TO TEN 167
Exercise 73: HURLING THE JAVELIN 167

216
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. Poetics. trans. Gerald Else. University of Michigan

Press, 1967.
Barfield, Owen. Romanticism Comes of Age. Great Britain:
Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966.
Brandreth, Gyles. The Biggest Tongue Twister Book in the World.
New Jersey: Wings Books, 1992.
Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. NewYork:
Routledge, 1992.
Bridgmont, Peter. The Spear Thrower. Ireland: AnGrianan, 1983.
Brook, Peter. The Empty Stage. New York: Atheneum,1987.
Chekhov, Michael. To the Actor. New York: Harper and Row,
1953.
Eliot, T.S. Murder in the Cathedral. New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Co., 1935.
Fluegelman, Andrew, ed. The New Games Book. Garden City,
New York: Headlands Press, 1976.
Fry, Christopher. Three Plays. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973.
Galati, Frank. Grapes of Wrath. Garden City, NY: The Fireside
Theatre, 1990.
Gibson, William. The Miracle Worker. New York: Samuel French
Publishing Co., 2000.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. trans. Walter Kaufman.
Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963.
Johnstone, Keith. Impro. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.
Leonard, Charles. Michael Chekhov’s To the Director and
Playwright. New York: Limelight Editions, 1984.
Marowitz, Charles. Stanislavsky and the Method. New York: The
Citadel Press, 1964.
Martin, Robert A. and Centola, Steven R. The Theater Essays of
Arthur Miller. New York: Da Capo Press, 1978.

217
Rostand, Edmond. Cyrano de Bergerac. trans. Brian Hooker.
New York: Bantam Books, 1951.
Shakespeare, William. A Winter’s Tale. New York: Washington
Square Press, Folger ed., 1998.
_________. As You Like It. New York: Washington Square Press,
Folger ed., 1997.
_________. King Lear. New York: Washington Square Press,
Folger ed., 1993.
_________. Hamlet. New York: Washington Square Press,
Folger ed., 1958.
_________. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. New York: Signet
Classic, 1987.
_________. Much Ado About Nothing. New York: Washington
Square Press, Folger ed., 1995.
_________. Macbeth. New York: Washington Square Press,
Folger ed., 1992.
_________. Twelfth Night. New York: Washington Square Press,
Folger ed., 1960.
Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for the Theatre. Northwestern
University Press, 1999.
Steiner, Rudolf. Speech and Drama. London: Anthroposophical
Publishing Company, 1959.
_________. Education for Adolescence. London:
Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1996.
_________. Stages of Higher Knowledge. London:
Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1990.
Thomas, Dylan. Under Milkwood. New York: New Directions,
1954.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: The Modern
Library, 1950.
Wilder, Thornton. Three Plays. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

218
 Stages of Imagination

Stages of Imagination
David Sloan was born and raised in
southern California. He graduated
from Harvard College in 1971, then
Working Dramatically
completed a Waldorf teacher training with Adolescents
in 1975 after attending Emerson
College in Sussex, England. At
Emerson he also met his wife-to-be,
Christine, and developed his lifelong
passion for Shakespeare’s work.
After working in a school for
troubled adolescents, David began
teaching English and drama at the
Green Meadow Waldorf School in
Chestnut Ridge, New York, in 1979.
Except for a year in Boulder, Colo-
rado, helping to launch a high school
at the Shining Mountain Waldorf

David Sloan
School, David has been at Green
Meadow ever since. David and
Christine have four children; two
attend college, and two are still
students at Green Meadow. David’s
other publications include articles in
Renewal, Peridot, and The
Anthroposophical Newsletter, a booklet
entitled Computers in Education, a
chapter in More Lifeways, and as-
sorted poems.
AWSNA Publications

Published by by
David Sloan
The Association of Waldorf
Schools of North America
38 Main Street
Chatham, NY 12037

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black