Insights

The Actor’s Role in New Play Development: Testing the Text

By Ciji Guerin

Rosalind Fell and Garland Lyons in a vignette within the production of Ghouls, Ghords & Get-Ups.

This is the fifth article in a series about how the role a cast and creative team member serves in the new play development process affects the feedback they give playwrights.

In our last article, The Actor’s Role in Play Production: Building a Character & Creating a Role, we discussed how the actor’s role in the production of an established text is to “make it work” regardless of the state of the text, and a general overview of a common process actors use toward that objective. In this article, we’ll dive into an actor’s role and process in new play development to reveal the differences.

In a full production the actor’s goal while analyzing a script is to find and interpret the information they need from the script to create an original and dynamic performance inspired by the text.

In new play analysis, however, an actor is only to use what is directly stated or implied by the text and needs to avoid using their craft to “fix” an unfinished character, clarify ambiguities, or mend weak points they discover in the script.

A new play in development is incomplete by nature. If a play is complete, then it doesn’t need development; it’s ready for production.

Goal During Script Analysis

In broad strokes, the actor’s job during the new play development process is to:

Give the playwright and director a chance to see the material on its feet as it’s written so that they can see what works and what doesn’t.
Collaborate with the cast and creative team to discover the playwright’s intent, how it’s expressed in the text, and establish the core of their character.
Participate in the process of discovering and developing the characters, settings, ideas, and other aspects of the script by disclosing, describing, and discussing their process and findings.

During the process, actors utilize many of the same tools and techniques they might use in a production of an established script. But, instead of using these tools for a rather solitary process of interpreting the text and following their creative instincts and sense of craft as they do in a full production, in new play development actors use these techniques to:

Test and explore the script to see if the playwright provides the necessary information the actor needs to develop a character by seeking answers to the following questions:
- - - What is the character’s theatrical potential, believability, and unique artistic attributes?
    - Do the character’s choices and actions make sense beat-to-beat?
    - Is there a character arc, a journey the character takes as they move through the story?
    - Is there a core to the character, a single defining characteristic or value?
    - Does the character have relationships with each of the other characters and the world of the play? Do the relationships make sense?
    - Are the characters attributes, association, actions and responses consistent with the world of the play?

Participate in discovering and developing the play by:
- - - Offering ideas and suggestions for the character’s development based on rehearsal investigations and explorations of the script;
    - Being open to—and accepting of— changes in the text, some of which might lead to such a strong re-envisioning of the character that the role needs to be recast or cut.

Above all, in new work development actors need to be flexible. Rewrites happen often. At times, the rewrite is surprisingly significant.

When a rewrite comes in, actors need to be ready to put aside all previous work, integrate the new pages and rethink their role as though the new pages have been there since the start. For this reason, it’s good practice for actors not to get too attached to any aspect of the character being tested. Actors shouldn’t confine the character with any early assumptions or valued qualities. They need to be ready for the character to become redefined to the point of needing to be recast or removed from the script entirely because they’re unnecessary.

Analysis Process

Actors always use some degree of dramaturgy in their process. But in new play development, the entire process is dramaturgical.

The analysis process for actors in new play development utilizes the same tools and techniques as in production, but they are employed in different ways.

Stage directions

In a full production of an established script, an actor has to assess which stage directions and parentheticals are from the prompt book and which are clues from the playwright. In new play development, every word is from the playwright. Not a single word can be ignored.

However, the play is incomplete in some way, or it wouldn’t be in development. Therefore, the actor has to discern which stage directions and parentheticals are relevant and make sense, which don’t and what’s missing.

Facts, Questions, Ambiguities

Once an actor has a sense of the the overall story and what state it’s in, they often try to make a list of the following:

Facts: Definitive information about the character directly stated in stage directions or dialogue.
Questions: Inquiries that arise from compiling the list of facts but that aren’t answered directly by the script.
Ambiguities: Moments in the script that need to be clarified by the actor’s character choices.

Actors often use this technique in the production of an established script as well. But in the case of new play development, actors may have to perform the task on a character who is part of a story that doesn’t yet make sense. Actors may learn the information they need is not yet in the script, and they may find contradictions they can’t reconcile. Regardless, actors can’t go outside of the script.

As we stated in our last article, “the given circumstances” is a dramaturgical tool actors use to develop their understanding of the play’s world and context (the world is its context). In the production of an established script, the text usually defines the given circumstances fairly well, so the actor’s job in defining those circumstances isn’t often too difficult.

In new play production, however, the given circumstances are key to testing, developing, and establishing the play’s world and its context which is the basis of the play’s thematic meaning. In most cases, the given circumstances are the least defined aspect. In situations where the given circumstances start off well defined, they are still most common aspect of the script needing to be redefined repeatedly throughout the process.

Objectives, Obstacles, Intention, Motivation

Given the potential complexity of helping to discover and develop a character a new play, and to make it possible to integrate the continual changes to the script, actors often start the analysis with a simplified approach. First, actors tend to give the character one primary motivation for the play. Then, looking for strong objectives, obstacles, and intentions can be clarified into something simple and precise for each scene. This process usually makes it easier for the actor to discover whether (a) an essential conflict exists for each scene, (b) strong, actionable choices are possible for each beat only from what is directly stated and implied by the script, and (c) underlying motivational and emotional content are revealed by the action and dialogue.

Plotting Actions

Event chain analysis. Plotting action. In new work development, actors usually chart out their actions beat-to-beat to test the clarity and completeness of how their actions connect and contribute to the larger events of the play. They tend to pay special attention to changes in their characters’ perception of their world and shifting motivations behind their beat- and scene-level objectives. To fulfill their role in the larger discovery and development, actors share where these aspects of the character’s throughline were obvious, where these aspects of the character were more implied than stated, and instances when what they need for the character could not be found.

Only after the basics are established do actors start seeking the nuances and adding complexity to the character. As they do, it’s important they continue to clearly communicate to the rest of the cast and the creative team when their choices are stemming from the script and when they’re not.

Analysis Tools For New Play Development

An actor may chose to include the following dramaturgical tools in production. Every actor’s process is unique to their own talents and interests. Generally, actors tend to utilize the following:

Character function

In a full production of an established script, it isn’t necessary for the actor to understand the narrative function their character serves. They can simply trust the script. But in new work development, testing, exploring, and assessing whether a character serves a narrative function, defining what that function is, and whether their character successfully serves that function is key to understanding the play’s structure.

Relationship webs

Relationship webs are the complex network of connections and relationships within the story. In new works development, actors often chart out these interconnections to test their clarity and completeness.

Power of Collaboration

When actors participate as full collaborators in rehearsal investigations, analysis, experimentation, discussions and performance, working towards discovering, developing and establishing the defining aspects and core of their characters, they empower the development process. They open up the dramaturg, director and playwright to details and connection often overlooked without them. Actors are key to finding the unifying aspects of the piece. It’s difficult to discover the script and its theatrical potential without them.

Real World Example

For our example, we’ll continue the story that began in the article, The Dramaturg’s Role In New Play Development: Excavating Hidden Depths. The example relays the new play development process of a new script called Fates, based on the Greek tales of the Fates, three goddesses who personify the inescapable destinies of humankind. The goddesses in the play met, conspired, and held their rituals in a modern-day women’s bathroom.

Early in the process, before production meetings started, the dramaturg guided a reading of the play with the script’s playwright, cast and creative team along with the theatre’s resident playwright. The feedback session began with a discussion of the opening scene. In the opening action of the play, the lead character, Chloe, enters a bathroom and fixes her appearance in a mirror. A toilet randomly grumbles incoherently as though it is a sentient creature. A second character, Lachelle, enters. The two begin small-talk with an occasional obscure reference to the Fates that seem out of place in its modern setting.

The opening scene came across as a bit chaotic and meaningless. The resident playwright, dramaturg, and director’s feedback were examined in previous articles in this series. The feedback from the two actors in the first scene is below.

Actor 1 (Playing Chloe) Feedback

“I’m at a loss in the first scene. I don’t even know what to say about it. I mean, it’s not incoherent or anything. But outside of the few lines where they greet each other and talk about what they’re about to do, the rest seems just like random dialogue. I mean, some of it has some facts that I think might be important if I understood the play better. Some of the later scenes make more sense—a few of them are really great scenes. I can kinda see that, about halfway through, she’s starting to change her mind about what she and the other Fates are doing to these people. And I basically get why she walks away in the end. But I don’t really see any motivation in it. Or the character. It’s just like … things happen, so she does stuff. Why? I don’t know. Does it matter? Doesn’t seem to. I mean, it’s funny. There’s a lot of really funny lines. But, outside of being one of the Fates, I don’t really know who this person is. I don’t know what she thinks about this bathroom they never leave, or why she’s bothering to be there, or if she cares about the other Fates, or the people they’re messing with. In some scenes I can see what she’s trying to make happen, kind of, but it seems kinda pointless. I mean, why does she bother?”

Actor 2 (Playing Lacie) Feedback

“One of the reasons neither of us can make much sense of the first scene is because it’s really disorganized. There’s no beats. There’s no wins and losses, no indication of what my take is on what [Chloe] just said to me or vice-versa. One minute I’m talking about the blood, then I’m not for a while, then I get upset about the toilet ’cause it’s noisy, but I seem fine with the rest of the noise and that the toilet’s grumbling, which is weird. Then I bring up the blood again for no apparent reason. Somehow, logically, the scene still makes sense: Two people walk into a bathroom appearing to each other in a form other than their usual, so they have to test each other to confirm that they are who they claim to before they talk about what they’re up to. But that only takes maybe ten lines and the scene is 14 pages long. And no part of it tells me anything about this person or this place. I can see the broad strokes of the plot too. Which is good, but, even though all three of the fates have different speech patterns and statuses in the group, they don’t seem to have any distinct traits or desires. They do seem like they’re taking different sides of the play’s argument and the scenes where they do that play well. But it doesn’t reveal why they have different points of view on it. The characters seem fairly interchangeable.”

Initially, the feedback from the actors might look like they’re addressing issues different than those raised previously by the resident playwright, dramaturg and director in our previous articles. Superficially, that’s true. The resident playwright’s feedback questioned why the writer chose to structure the first scene in an unconventional way. The dramaturg’s feedback asked about the lack of definition and inconsistencies in the world of the play. The director’s feedback focused on the script’s incomplete moments and the lack of meaningful action.

The actors feedback seems to be more about the specific information that’s missing as they try to figure out their characters, their relationships with each other, and their world. They inquirre about their given circumstances, motivation, objectives, and intentions, and their overall character arc.

But, if we look deeper and keep in mind what each cast and creative team member is seeking in a script and how each character usually fits into the play’s conflict and its world, it becomes more evident how all seven participants are addressing the same issues.

As we stated in our last article, the resident playwright, dramaturg, and director’s feedback on the play arose mostly from their mutual inability to make sense of the play’s world—the play’s context—which left them unable to make sense of the playwright’s choice in structuring the scene, the purpose behind using the Fates and the nonrealistic world, and the meaning behind the main character’s actions.

The actors are struggling with the same issues. Regardless of how consciously the actors are aware of it, they’re struggling with defining their character’s given circumstances. Specifically, they are trying to understand who their characters are, where they are (and the significance of the location, if any), what they want, and why they want it. If we keep in mind that “the given circumstances” is a dramaturgical tool that actors use to develop their understanding of the play’s world, it becomes evident that the actors—like the resident playwright, dramaturg, and director—are struggling to make sense of the play’s world.

When Actor 2 comments on the lack of beats in the first scene, she, like the resident playwright, is commenting on the scene’s structure. Beats are the smallest unit of action in a play, the smallest structural unit.

During the feedback session, the resident playwright was quick to point out that working on each character’s given circumstances is often an effective way for a playwright to discover the world of the play. The dramaturg was wary of that approach because the world of the play is a world a character inhabits, it’s not the world in and of itself. In the end, they were both right. The playwright couldn’t access the world of the play without accessing it through the play’s characters. But, once they had defined each character’s given circumstances, they weren’t consistent with the facts and implications they used to define them. The result was an an inconsistent world that caused the play to lose some of the coherency it had before.

This often the way new play development goes: one step forward, two steps back. But by contributing feedback from the perspective of their roles, actors play a vital role in long-term forward progress.

What’s Next

In our next installment, we’ll look at the role of designers in new play development and the feedback they gave in our real world example.

Ciji Guerin

Ciji Guerin is the Producing Artistic Director of Northwest Theatre Workshop (www.nwtw.org) and creator of their Create and Develop new play development programs. She has an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and a BA from the University of California at Berkeley. Over the last twenty years, she has worked on multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary and traditional theatre projects as a dancer, actor, lyricist, playwright and director. Her work has been shown nationally at theatres such as REDCAT, The Kitchen, the Sarah Lieberman Theatre at Marin Theatre Company and locally at Oregon Contemporary Theatre, Portland Theatre Works and Northwest Theatre Workshop (NWTW).

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