Tag: acting tips
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Frodo Is Becoming Obsolete
I started teaching drama and acting right about the time that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy was finishing up. Nearly everyone had seen it, and almost universally raved about it. The characterizations of the film provided the perfect example for me when I attempted to illustrate for my young actors what it means…
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The Show Ends
Last night, we capped off an amazing weekend of drama at the Penang Performing Arts Centre. Good responsive crowds watched as my amazing young actors perform everything from comedy, to dramatic storytelling, to hard hitting drama. It’s such an emotional thing for a writer and director to see the work they’ve toiled on for months…
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Using Verbs to Color Your Acting
One of the techniques I use in my Intro to Theatre Arts class is one that I’ve drawn from several different sources. It’s the idea of using an action verb to help describe what a person is supposed to do in a scene. First, I will tell the actors to think of an action verb…
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The Biggest Mistake of Young Actors
The biggest (or one of the biggest) mistakes of young actors is not spending nearly enough time inside the script. I’ve directed a lot of young actors over the past eight years, and it never ceases to happen that as a show nears performance, I hear one actor say, “Oh, so that’s what that means!”…
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How to respond when an actor asks, “What should I do?”
I get to teach and work with young actors. Some have experience. Others do not. It’s incredibly fun seeing someone take the stage for the first time and try to find their way, try to understand their character, try to understand the relationships between the other characters, and try to, ultimately, figure out what they…
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A Brilliant Object Lesson on Good Acting
The most awesome thing happened in my Intro to Theatre Arts Class today. We were in our drama circle, and I was debriefing an exercise we did two days ago where one person sat in a chair and was told that if she left the room, her family would die. Another person was outside and…
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The Key to Great Acting: Doing
When was the last time you walked into an office and saw four people standing shoulder to shoulder doing nothing in particular? As in just awkwardly standing there? In the middle of the work day? I suppose the answer to that is never. That was the certain scene I had to wrestle with today in…
Author Mark W Sasse 