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As you can see from the casting breakdown exercise, actors need to bring their own qualities and experiences to the process of making a play, they need to exercise their imaginations to be able to understand how to take the words and make them practical and physical. They work with a director to find all of the clues in the play that will help them make decisions along the way. Rehearsals are the perfect opportunity to explore the ideas and questions that we have about a character. It is important to remember that in a play like Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, only 10% of the play is what people say, the other 90% is found in what people don’t say, what they do and how they react to one another. In order to think like an actor, you have to be open to what else might be happening, because of your experience of knowing what it feels like to be human. We have put together some exploratory exercises that we used in rehearsals for you to try for yourself to help you to start to think like an actor.
REHEARSAL PREPARATION EXERCISE Knowing what is said about a character, or what a character says to others is a useful starting point for rehearsals. Pick a character and look through the text, make a list of: • What a character says about themselves • What the character says about other characters • What other people say about the character Be cautious, the text often contains opinions rather than facts. To think like an actor, you need to work out the difference. There is an example below to guide you. Once you have made your own list, complete the chart below in a group to start to build a picture of how the characters interact with one another. What do you discover from what others have found out?
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Photography: Marc Brenner
