ACT I
Scene 1
How does real life happen?
Most people don’t think about that most of the time. When everything people care about happens they way they expected it to, most people don’t wonder why.
That question is the foundation of science. But even then, before you can try to figure out how something works, first you need to notice that you don’t know something.
Scene 2
The most important theatre critic in history was a dog.
Somewhere in Moscow in the 1880s a theatre company met in a church in the evenings to rehearse. One actor brought his old dog every night. The dog would lay down in the corner and sleep the whole time. But every night when they finished, the dog would be waiting for his owner by the door.
Constantin Stanislavski, the director, noticed that and wondered what the dog was responding to. Eventually he realized that the only consistent thing they were doing every night was that when they stopped rehearsing they stopped using their stage voices and went back to using their normal voices.
That meant their acting wasn’t even realistic enough to convince a dog!
Scene 3
Acting looks easy. It’s just a bunch of pretending, and we’ve all done that since we were three. But that kind of pretending doesn’t tell real stories.
The main problem is that to act in a play you have to know what the play is about and how it ends. But in real life we don’t know how the events we’re in the middle of are going to end, and we don’t know what they’re going to end up being stories about.
So how do you live the story moment by moment as it happens to the character, while simultaneously knowing the whole play as the actor?
ACT II
Scene 1
Stanislavski devoted the next 50 years of his life to solving this problem. He founded the Moscow Art Theatre to train a new generation of actors in his discoveries, just to test his hypotheses. Training young actors was the only way he could be sure that their performances were the result of what they learned from him, instead of what they learned from someone else.
His earliest discoveries are observations about people that you might’ve noticed too.
First, everything you do with your body is a decision. But most of human mental activity is subconscious.
When you stand, you have one posture out of all the postures you could have. When you talk, you talk with a tone of voice, out of all the tones of voice you could use. When you talk, you also do something with your hands, out of all the things you could do with your hands.
You make decisions about your body language and tone of voice all the time, even though you usually don’t notice you’re making them. But the electricity that made your body do those things came from your brain, even if you don’t think of them as decisions.
Scene 2
With every decision you make, you’re trying to accomplish a goal.
A goal is something you want. When you want something, it means that you feel it’ll make things better for you or something you care about in some way.
When you make decisions consciously, you consciously decide that one course of action is better than another because it benefits you or something you care about more than any other course of action would.
When you make decisions without knowing why you make them, for some reason you feel that the decision you make is going to make your life better in some way than any other decision you could make. You make those decisions consciously, but your reasons for making them are subconscious.
Decisions you make about things like your tone of voice and your body language usually are subconscious decisions, but they’re close enough to consciousness that you can think about them and make them consciously.
When you talk to someone, you might choose your words consciously because you think they’re the best way to get the other person to understand what you mean.
You could choose your tone of voice consciously also, as the best way to get them to understand what you mean.
Or you could choose your words consciously and your tone of voice subconsciously.
Scene 3
You always try to reach your goals as easily as possible.
When you make decisions consciously, whatever decision you make feels to you like the best way to get what you want. The best way means the easiest way. The easiest way possible means with the least energy possible.
If the decision you make doesn’t work for some reason, because something goes wrong unexpectedly, you do the next best thing to get what you want. That means either you try the next easiest way you can see to get what you want, or you change your mind about what you want.
If you go to a restaurant, you order what you want the most from the menu. If the waitress tells you they’re all out of the ingredients to make that order, you probably order something else. If there isn’t anything else on the menu you want, you leave. You don’t tell her you’re just going to sit there at your table until tomorrow and wait for them to get more ingredients. That wouldn’t make any sense.
People are like the electricity that flows though our brains. We look for the path of least resistance to getting what we want.
Scene 4
When you put all that together, it means people always make
the best decisions
we can think of
in the situations
we’re in
for ourselves
and the people
and things
we care about.
Not only with our conscious decisions, but also our subconscious decisions. When you decide consciously what you want to order from the menu, you also decide subconsciously what you feel is the best tone of voice to use to tell the waitress.
All of the decisions you think of, consciously and subconsciously, are largely the result of your personality. That means if someone else sees you make a lot of decisions, that will tell them a lot about your personality.
Meanwhile, everyone else makes all their decisions the same way. When you see other people make a lot of decisions, that tells you a lot about their personalities.
ACT III
Scene 1
How do actors get from living their own lives into living their characters’ lives? Next is what Stanislavski called the Magic If.
The behavior of any one person is always some number of steps removed from the behavior of any other person. It’s easy to act like yourself, because you do it all the time with no effort. It’s fairly easy to act like someone who’s just like you except for one difference. You just have to ask yourself, “What would I do if…?”
There’s a theatre game you learn in acting classes to help get you used to thinking about this. It’s called What’s on the Floor?
Everyone starts out walking around the room like normal. Then the director calls out, “The floor is covered in…”
Now everyone starts walking as if the floor is covered in…
Ice.
Marbles.
Glue.
Tall grass.
Banana peels.
A foot of mud.
Snakes.
Each of those changes in your situation would change how you’d walk.
Scene 2
Now think about what that means for imagining your character’s role in a play.
What would you do if you lived 200 years ago? That’s a good question to get you started.
Now you need to fill in a lot more information.
What part of the world do you live in?
What’s happening there at the time?
What kind of job do you have?
What kind of house do you live in?
What’s outside your house?
What’s inside your house?
Now you keep breaking it down to finer details.
When your character is at home on a normal evening and it starts getting dark, what do they do for light?
Light a fire?
Light a candle?
Light an oil lamp?
Now keep breaking it down to finer details.
How do they light an oil lamp?
Do they use a match?
Where do they keep their matches?
And does the lamp have enough oil in it already, or do they need to fill it?
If they need to fill it, where do they keep the oil?
Scene 3
The more differences there are between yourself and the character you’re playing, the harder it gets to play them realistically.
If you try to jump right into the role and guess what it’s like to be them, you probably won’t make it look realistic. But if you make the shift from being yourself to playing the character gradually, by visualizing how they’re different from you one step at a time, you can do it.
The fact that we’re all human and we all have a human brain structure, means that everyone in the world is living a different version of your life.
So far we’ve been talking about differences between your setting and your character’s.
How do you visualize the differences between your personality and your character’s personality?
ACT IV
Scene 1
Artists’ first step in creating personalities for their characters is reading the play several times.
First they read it to see how the events of the story lead from the beginning to the end. Then they read it again to reverse engineer how the story unfolds for each of the characters. Each character has their own story, and all of their stories fit together into the story of the play.
First they identify the goals of the characters. Then they look at how each of the decisions each character makes is
the best decision
they can think of in the
situation they’re in
to try to reach their goals.
Then they find personalities for the characters. They do that by figuring out for each of them what kind of personality would make each of those decisions seem to them like
the best decisions
they could make
in the situations
they’re in.
Scene 2
In every play, movie, or TV show, each character has an overall goal that they’re trying to achieve. Stanislavski called that their superobjective.
(He worked mostly in theatre, so I’m going to call them plays for now.)
In every scene of a play each character in the scene has a goal. Stanislavski called that their scene objective. Each character tries to achieve their scene objective as a step toward achieving their superobjective.
This is easy to see with the main characters, because they’re in most, and sometimes all, of the scenes. Each character has their own story, where they try to achieve their goals. Every decision they make is a step toward trying to achieve their goals. That includes all of the decisions they make in interacting with the other characters.
Sometimes characters help each other achieve their goals because their goals are compatible. Sometimes they come into conflict because their goals are incompatible. The story of the play is the combined story of each of the main characters.
Supporting characters who have large parts appear in several or many scenes. It’s still the same thing. Each supporting character has their own story. The audience just doesn’t see as much of those stories as they do for the main characters.
For characters who only appear in one scene in the play, you might think their scene objective and their superobjective are the same thing. But they’re not.
They have an objective that they’re trying to achieve over the course of the play, and they have an objective they’re trying to achieve in the scene. What does the character want to accomplish by the end of the play? That’s their superobjective. How is this one scene part of that? That’s their scene objective.
Just as with all the other characters, one-scene characters have their own stories. The difference is that for these characters, the audience only sees one scene of what they’re doing to try to achieve their superobjectives.
If your main character is on an epic quest to defeat an evil sorcerer who’s trying to take over the kingdom in a year from now, and he stops to spend the night at an inn and he talks to the inn keeper, what does the inn keeper plan on doing for the next year? Renting rooms to customers. So how does his scene objective of renting a room to the main character, fit with his superobjective of running his business?
Scene 3
Within each scene each character has smaller objectives.
With each line of dialogue, and every other action the character takes, the character has at least one objective. Stanislavski called these units of intention, also known as beats. Every unit of intention is an attempt to accomplish part of the character’s scene objective.
(They got the name beats from the way he explained them in English. In Russian he called them pieces. In British English that translates as bits. He had a Russian accent. So when he said things like, “You divide the dialogue up into bits,” people thought he was saying beats, as some kind of analogy to music, so that’s how they wrote it down.)
Units of intention, combined with the characters’ personalities, are what create the emotions in a scene. Decisions are attempts to accomplish goals, and emotions motivate decisions. So to find the emotions artists work backward from the goals and decisions.
Emotions are the result of the unique people interacting with their unique situations. That makes emotions essentially infinite.
If you get a general idea of the character’s emotions in a scene and act out generalized happiness, generalized anger, generalized fear, or whatever other emotion, it will look fake, because that’s not what people do in real life.
Scene 4
Every time you interact with someone, you try to have an effect on them that will be beneficial to your goals. Most of the time when you interact with someone else, you’re trying to get them to do something that will benefit you. Meanwhile, they’re usually trying to get you to do something that will benefit them.
In most of the interactions you have with people it’s easy for both of you to get the other to react favorably. In fact, those interactions are so commonplace that you often don’t notice them.
When you interact with a clerk at a store or restaurant, you have the obvious goal of exchanging money for a product or service. But you also have the longer term goal of interacting with each other positively now to pave the way for you to interact positively in the future.
When a clerk finishes your transaction and says “Have a nice day,” they’re trying to get you have a positive feeling about the store when you leave, and also trying to get you to have a positive feeling about them.
If you saw a stranger get hit by a car crossing the street, you’d probably try to help them. If you saw a clerk from your grocery store get hit by a car, and you’d had positive conversations with them all 20 times you’d talked to them, you’d probably try harder to help them— even if you didn’t know anything else about them.
In most situations, the more people have positive feelings about you, the better off you are, and you can make that happen with essentially no effort.
Scene 5
Next time you talk to someone, think about how you’re trying to get them to react to you.
Units of intention are always verbs, because you’re trying to do something. What are you trying to do to the other person that will make them feel like doing what you want them to do?
Are you trying to encourage them?
Flatter them?
Surprise them?
Threaten them?
Seduce them?
Just think of all the verbs you could fit here.
People have noticed a lot of different ways that people do things that have emotional effects on other people. Now look some of these words up in a thesaurus.
Most of them have a lot of synonyms that mean almost the same thing, but not quite. That’s because people have noticed there are subtle differences in the kinds of effects people try to have on each other.
That’s why encouraging someone isn’t quite the same thing as inspiring them, motivating them, emboldening them, or invigorating them.
That’s why surprising someone isn’t quite the same thing as startling them, shocking them, astonishing them, amazing them, or astounding them.
Scene 6
People don’t write plays about ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary situations. They usually start with characters doing ordinary things in ordinary situations. But then something interesting starts happening.
Soon the events of the play start building up to the characters needing to take big risks to succeed at important goals. The higher the stakes and the more urgent the situation becomes, the harder the characters try to have effects on each other, and the bigger the effects are.
That’s why a husband and wife can start out a play or a movie talking to each other about their feelings, and near the end they start yelling at each other.
Did they start out talking to a marriage counsellor and end up getting so frustrated with each other that they want a divorce?
Did they start out making plans for the weekend and end up trapped in a burning building, trying to find each other?
Did they start out talking to a marriage counsellor and end up trapped in a burning building together?
However it happens, in a play or in real life, the more intense the situation becomes, the more life changing it becomes. That’s when people, or characters, start trying to have bigger emotional effects on each other, more urgently.
ACT V
Scene 1
Once the artists have discovered the internal consistency of each character, the next step is to figure out how to show it to the audience.
The artists read the script to find the characters’ goals from their superobjectives to their scene objectives to their units of intention. The audience sees the characters from the opposite direction, from their units of intention to their scene objectives to their superobjectives.
If everything the audience sees you do, from the moment they first see your character, is internally consistent with that character making
the best decisions
they can think of
in the situations
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about,
the audience will get a feeling of the personality you developed for the character.
After the first scene or two, the audience will get a feeling of who the character is. Then, if it’s someone they identify with, they’ll empathize with them.
That’s another side of most of human mental activity is subconscious. That makes them feel the story that’s happening to the character. Every time the character feels confident about their situation, or surprised, confused, afraid, frustrated, courageous, or anything else, the story doesn’t just happen on the stage. It happens in the minds of the audience.
Scene 3
What happens when you know things about two characters in a movie that they don’t know about each other?
If two characters fall in love with each other but neither of them dares to make the first move, you feel that story in a way neither of them do. If two characters get separated and they’re both looking for each other, or if they get in an argument over a misunderstanding, it’s the same thing.
If you don’t develop internal consistency, you’re basically throwing together situations and decisions by the character at random. You can make the audience wonder what’s going to happen from one moment to the next, but you can’t make them feel the story along with the characters.
If you make your story interesting just by making unexpected things happen all the time, essentially you’re making a cartoon. And not even a good cartoon. Even the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote have internally consistent personalities.
Scene 4
People have stretched this outline in every direction over the years. From comedy to horror to science fiction to fantasy, if you get a sense of who the characters are and how they’re going to react to their changing situations, it means the actors have done all of this to create internally consistent characters.
Science fiction and fantasy movies make that happen by creating situations that don’t happen in real life, but that have an internal consistency of their own. Once you understand how the world of the movie is different from real life, you can anticipate how the characters are going to react to their changing situations. A big part of showing you how normal life works in the world of the movie is showing which things the characters think of as normal and which things they’re surprised by. You don’t need an explanation for how their magic or technology works if you can empathize with characters who use it all the time.
Horror villains have internally consistent personalities that make them make decisions that the audience wouldn’t think of, but that the audience can see make sense for that character in that situation. The best villains are ones the audience hates but empathize with anyway. That turns the conflict the villain iscausing in the story into a conflict within the audience’s minds by making them empathize with the heroes and the villain simultaneously.
Characters in comedies have internally consistent personalities that make them make decisions the audience didn’t expect but that the audience can see are consistent with the character’s personality. What makes a comedy funny is that the characters say and do things that are surprising but simultaneously make sense.
All of these genres depend on unexpected things happening, but the audience can still understand the story because the characters and their situations are internally consistent. The artists create the surprises in these stories by using the internal consistency of the characters and their situations to make the audience expect one thing, but then making something else happen that the audience realizes in retrospect is also internally consistent.
ACT VI
Scene 1
Stanislavski started writing a trilogy about his discoveries, called An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role.
Getting his books published was hard, because by then Russia had become the Soviet Union and Stalin was in charge. Unfortunately Stanislavski died before he finished Building a Character, so pieces of it are missing.
Soon after the Cold War ended the first two books were retranslated and compiled into a single volume called An Actor’s Work. His notes and drafts of Creating a Role have been republished as An Actor’s Work on a Role.
Scene 2
Actors and directors have many different ways of thinking about, feeling, and talking about how they develop their characters and stories.
Some of them see themselves as using Stanislavski’s system while others don’t.
Some use acting styles that other people developed based on his style. Some actors are so intuitive they don’t seem to need anyone else’s style. But any acting style that produces consistent realism leads back to his discoveries, one way or another.
Getting an audience to feel personally connected to the story depends on getting them to feel the internal consistency of the characters and their situations. People feel the internal consistency of characters through the empathy they use to relate to people in real life.
Getting the audience to empathize with the characters makes them feel the story along with the characters. That’s the most emotionally powerful way to tell any story.
Scene 3
These discoveries revolutionized the theatre industry worldwide, beginning around the time moving pictures were invented. The approach to creating realistic characters that Stanislavski discovered elevated the art of theatre to a whole new level. That’s why he’s known as the founder of modern theatre.
What happens when you watch a TV series with eight diverse main characters?
If you empathize with all of them you get a feeling of how their lives fit together. Gene Roddenberry started that with the original Star Trek in 1966. That’s one way artists have been helping to tell the story of Being Human on Planet Earth.
