I Get So Emotional

About a week ago, I did a make-up class on Wednesday night.  I couldn't make my usual Saturday slot on account of a baby shower.  A baby shower for my baby. [Pause for appropriate emotional responses from all of you wonderful readers.]

All of the actors in class were strangers, even if a few had vaguely familiar faces.  I didn't bother to learn any of their names.  I guess that makes me an aloof prick, but nobody asked me my name either.  So, there.

Back to my notes and observations from class.  We concentrated on emotional reactions in our scenes.  The sort of emotional reactions that somebody has when they've been holding onto something personal about somebody and have avoided saying it for too long.  You know these sort statements: I love you. You're selfish. This isn't working.  I hate your meatloaf recipe.  That sweater is actually pretty ugly.  You ruined oral sex for me.  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  The emotional response is a good piece of advice.  Too often we make the mistake of being too polite in our scene work, probably because it's closer to the pussy-footing we do in our everyday conversations.  And, perhaps, the tendency to mimic the insipid interactions we have every day is a misguided attempt to make our work seem more realistic.

We were also encouraged to make physical or emotional movements before we speak to get ourselves out of our heads on stage.  The added bonus of making an emotional or physical movement before uttering a word is that your scene partner gets something to react to -- it puts less pressure on them to create something out of thin air.

To help with the night's emphasis on reactions, we played an immensely fun game called "Sentences."  We each wrote a personal sentence on a scrap of paper and tossed them on top of a table.  Then, you and your scene partner take five scraps of paper and put them in our back pockets.  (Except for a woman who wore a dress that had no pockets.  She held the papers in her hand.)  The papers were there to be used when we were at a loss for a reaction to what our partner was saying.  Gellman told us that the game is played poorly when the sentences are used as an initiation or in a manner equivalent to mad libs.  A highlight was a scene involving Bosnian janitors (man and woman) who were having a contentious conversation that delved into unrequited love.

The main thing we took away from this exercise is that if you get emotional on stage, then you can't fuck it up.  You just gotta go for it.  That being said, anger is the emotion that is used as a default because it's the easiest one to reach for. I'm guilty of this.

The challenge is to reach for other emotions, to go elsewhere on the palette.      

We then tried to put our knowledge to use in some improv games that we learned and payed numerous times in Levels A through E: 4 square and scene tag.  The basic principles that we worked on was to make physical choices, to react, to play with emotion, and to listen.

I had fun playing with this new group, but I missed my Saturday posse.