TALKING IT OUT
There is a reason we don’t simply pass out a script to the audience, have them read it, and then go home. The audience doesn’t come to the theater for the text of the play, they come for what the actor brings to the text: The experience of the words on the page.
Talking Out. It’s one of the most useful rehearsal tools I know. Not only does it help you live truthfully in your character’s world — it helps you discover that world in the first place.
Why “Talking Out” Helps
The fact that you say it doesn’t make it true.
Every fact of a play must be experienced by the actor. Facts in a play are dead pieces of information until they are fed through the actor’s imagination and become the experience of the facts. It’s one of the things that separates merely functional actors from the exceptional. The functional actor may believably represent the facts of the play, but the true talent lets us see the depth of the experience. It’s why Stella insisted, “There is no such action as the action to report.” There’s a difference between the actor who reports a line like, “It was the middle of the war…” as if she were passing on a piece of a history lesson – and the actress who says the line and we know that she lived through it.
Experiencing vs. Reporting
Sharon Carnicke in her book Stanislavsky in Focus says that she thinks the most important word in Stanislavsky’s work is perezhevanie, the Russian word for experiencing. It was the most important word in Stella Adler’s work as well. Talking everything out leads you to this experiencing. The way you say it is the way you’ll do it. That refers to everything connected to the text, even the stage direction. There are actors who can tell you that the stage direction says, “a shabby room…” and you not only can see it, you know sense everything about the oppression of the room.
Talking out everything helps us get to owning the experience of the text. If we report the facts of the play, it will deaden us. There is a tone to reporting. A news reporter’s job is “to report”. They report disasters with no emotional connection at all. But that is not the job of the actor. The job of the actor is to take every fact of the play and feed it through the imagination, so what we get is the experience of the facts. If an actor says he lost almost all of the men in his platoon during the
war, we not only must believe that is true, we must believe how it affected him.
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A more complicated use of talking out is based on something Stanislavsky said very late in his work with the Moscow Art Theater. “It’s all subconscious.” A play lives on two levels: What am I talking about? … and … What is really going on? A simple example of this is someone at a bar turning to the person next to them and commenting on the weather. Obviously they’re not at the bar to discuss the weather.
The ability to talk out what’s going on is helpful in getting to what is really going on. It probably doesn’t matter to most actors, but it does make sense that you get to the subconscious consciously. And talking out allows you to free float wherever you want to go. It’s a use of improvisation that is not meant for entertainment, but rather to free you from the text. [It’s the reason the Stanislavsky community began using the term “etude,” when discussing that kind of work. It’s difficult to do an improvisation without thinking you need a punchline.] I have always been intrigued by the idea that when Stanislavsky directed Cherry Orchard, he rehearsed the scene between Varya and Lopakhin in Act IV by having them talk out what was going on, not the lines.
Practical Exercises and Examples
The beginning work with talking out is a deceptively simple exercise: talking out something you love and then take the same thing and build that you hate it. [Or, obviously, the reverse.] The idea here is that you talk out what is behind the “line” of dialogue: what you love or hate.
Madior very simply built he loves traffic and hates traffic. https://vimeo.com/1059456859
This is an exercise you can do every day. In fact if you do the same love/hate every day, it helps develop the ability to keep your choices fresh, ridding yourself of the problem of simply repeating your work and getting stale.
Veanna took the same exercise and built that she loves “stuff” and hates “stuff”. What I particularly notice in this exercise is how she takes her time to visualize what she’s talking about. It follows the idea of “see it before you say it”. It’s an important concept. It keeps an actor from forcing a performance. The “I know how I’ll play this” syndrome. Notice how completely she lives off what she’s talking about.
https://vimeo.com/1154401001?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
The practical application of this idea can be seen in JP’s preparation for his audition for The Rookies (a part he got). Notice that he talks out his preparation completely in character, pauses briefly (so he can cut the preparation out of his self-tape) and then he says the line, “You’re a brave man. Disappearing with my dope…” Of course, he did a lot of talking out in rehearsal, before pulling it down to just what he needed to lead into the first line.
https://vimeo.com/1087864737?fl=ip&fe=ec
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Case Study: Chris Alexander
I’ve asked Chris Alexander to do a video diary of Jamie in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I thought it might be helpful to see how an actor works by talking out.
In every exercise you do, it’s helpful to be clear in your mind what specifically you’re working on. Actually verbalize: “In this exercise, I’m working on…”. There are an endless number of facts in a play, any of them can get you thinking and stimulate your work.
In this first video diary entry of Chris’s, he chose to work on something in Jamie’s personality that was actually quite far removed from Chris: Jamie’s lack of seriousness about his work. It’s referred to often in the play and one of the big source materials that Chris used for his research was the Arthur and Barbara Gelb biography of Eugene O’Neill.
A couple of things to notice. Chris allows himself to wander around until he lands on something that stimulates him. He doesn’t have it when he starts, but he senses when he’s on to something. The key in this instance is an event in the past. Events help an actor be specific, keeping in mind that the more specific you are the bigger the payoff. When you find yourself being too general, ask yourself “like when?” Also, when he finds it, he gives himself permission to play with the choice.
This is not necessarily a plot point, although it can be. Sometimes you are only talking out something that is meant to help you get a sense of a character trait or personality.
Keep in mind Chris has done a lot of script analysis work on this part, – what, in a rehearsal setting, would be called table work. Although there is always a danger that research or script analysis leads an actor to being in their head too much, if you can avoid sounding as if you’re reporting your analysis, talking out helps you get to the experience of any fact.
Talking out your relationship to your partner is vitally useful. I point this out because so many of the scenes I coach these days are two-character scenes. If I own the relationship to my partner experientially, quite often the action of the scene unfolds effortlessly. Kaleb is in rehearsals for The Stronger, an adaptation revolving around the relationship between two actors. This was in answer to the question: what do you think about Simon as an actor?
In this next example of talking out, Chris was specifically working on his relationship with his younger brother, Edmund. Keep in mind this is only a first rehearsal. It’s based on impressions he has from reading the script – and also, from the first research he’s been doing. If you were in rehearsals for a play and in the early stages of working, you certainly would want to walk in with the beginnings of the truth of the relationship.
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Translating the facts of a play into the experience of the facts is one of the most difficult tasks of acting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard actors give a grocery list of the facts of a play. As if saying them made them come true.
There is a fact in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Jamie goes to whores. In this diary entry, Chris is wandering around until he finally lands on something that feeds him, – and then he’s off and running. When he starts, he gets specific about what he’s working on. I think that’s extremely useful for actors: define specifically what you’re working on. You might even consider that after you do the work, you evaluate whether you accomplished what you set out to accomplish.
An etude: Jamie going to whores. Note how slowly and clearly Chris works. He’s not pushing for a result, but rather letting it happen.
Dialogue with Chris
I enjoyed hearing Chris reflect on the work. It’s not polished. It’s not performed. It’s discovery, and it’s honest. Here’s part of our exchange after one of his sessions.
Chris: There’s a lot to sift through in this one. It’s really me just kind of talking out loud and seeing where it goes, but you see me make some interesting discoveries. I think that’s the whole point of the improvisation/ talking out, is to get to an experience or understanding. It always interests me the more I do it.
Milton: I think it’s exactly what you are meant to do. Wander around and then periodically you’ll bump into something. Paying the whore to clap for you is genius. No one in history would ever come up with that. That’s what happens, when you just let your creative impulses go where they want to go. Letting it happen instead of forcing it. All the years of your personal work and your knowledge of the technique give you a security to work like this.
Chris: Absolutely! It always pleases me to know that I can do this and wander around and bump into a choice that really surprises me. it’s different than trying to write something interesting or journaling because you’re stream of consciousness can take you places that are completely surprising.
Milton: You are specific in the world that you’re living in. Also, you don’t rush it. It’s a very peculiar but important distinction. It’s not like you were thinking of something to say, but more like you are letting the circumstance you’re in land on you and tell you where to go. I find it fascinating.
Chris: With writing you’re not really getting to an experience, which is why this is so useful, isn’t it? It’s really fascinating because only when I did enough research, did I feel
comfortable enough in the world to improvise. It was only when I had enough of an
understanding. If I had tried to improvise too soon, I don’t think it would have worked and would have been all over the place and not specific.
Milton: This is the big truth of working on a part - and this is what everyone is missing. It’s not just about improvising. If you don’t know what world you’re in (the given circumstances of your play), then you are not making specific choices for the play. And it takes a lot to figure this out.
It’s the reason you periodically go back to the world to do more research. You fill in more and then play with it.
Final Thoughts
Talking Out is not about being clever. It’s about experiencing the world of the play. It helps you get specific about your character’s past, their partner, their plot. When you talk it out, it comes to life. If you don’t, you risk just indicating.
Talking Out is meant to help you both live honestly off the given circumstances of the play – and also help you get to a character. If you don’t talk out by building elements such as the plot, the place, the relationship to the partner, the relationship to the plots … etc. etc. etc. …, then you’re in danger of indicating a relationship to all of them.
Experiencing, connecting, and building your relationships are all variations on the same theme.
You want to be able to analyze, you might even want to philosophize, but it must be turned into something act-able. Behavior. The creative actor work you do doesn’t just live in your head, – in your thinking. It’s out. It’s not something that you merely think about – and it’s certainly not something that you write about. When you talk out your creative work, it helps you get to the truth of the play, and experience it. “Mean it,” as a colleague once suggested.
Layering in a little at a time [“I can believe this much today.”] will eventually get you to your character’s relationship to everything.
Talking out your rehearsals can take as much as time as you need. I realized recently how much more it takes to work on a play than on a television audition. I’ve been rehearsing a Strindberg One-Act for months and I seldom spend more than an hour coaching an actor on a TV audition. There are countless facts in any play. And in order to get to the experience of the facts, it’s much more complicated. Television (and for the most part in film) is really about plot, so any choices you bring to the character come from your talents and your resolve to avoid cliches … and not from the text itself. Even the breakdowns are laughable. I should really post a collection of them.
Talking out all of your actor work helps you experience the vast choices that are available in any
text. Reporting the facts of the play kills your talent.