In today’s world of fast communication—especially email—there is specific skill, a trait, I have observed that most actors have when it comes to writing. In writing email correspondence, most actors possess a natural instinct in discerning a major or minor shift in tone or subject that then logically leads to the appropriate double-spacing between sentences. In short, most actors have a good sense of when to start a new paragraph. However, when an actor cold-reads a monologue written by someone else, often their natural instinct to feel a sense of a shift in tone, or change of subject, disappears.
Here’s why: If you look at a monologue as written by a playwright and as it appears in a published play, it consists of a huge block of words. There is no change in structure of the wording. In short, the writing is not broken down with indentations or spacing that signifies the start of new paragraphs as it would in other forms of writing. That’s how plays are formatted. It’s up to actor to take what the playwright has written, and supply his or her interpretation of the words as they exist on the page, and to then supply the appropriate changes and nuances that turn the character into a living,
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