TheatrGROUP Theatre Company

Guestbook

Method Acting Workshop With Actors Studio Members Ron Gilbert & Anthony Cardarella

"To Illuminate The Life Of The Human Spirit"

PURPOSE

Although the Workshop has been discontinued, TheatrGROUP will remain visible on the Internet as an educational resource for actors and theatre enthusiasts everywhere. The information offered here covers everything from Getting Started As An Actor to Method Acting Procedures, as well as including links to other valuable acting and theatre related websites.

Simply stated, "Method" acting is acting "real" by using experiences and impressions from the actor's own life to create the life of the character onstage.

Lee Strasberg described the results of this approach by stating that "conventional" acting comes out to you, the audience, and "shows" you, and "demonstrates" to you. ["Method"] acting demands that you, the audience, go where it is going, so that you not simply understand what the character is experiencing, you also experience it.

Training in the fundamentals of Relaxation, Sense Memory, Concentration & Imagination, the actor begins the lifelong process of using himself to breathe life into the fiction of the play, as his inner awareness and artistic sense of truth develop with time and experience.

RELAXATION

Tension is the actor's greatest enemy. Strasberg devised an exercise which helps the actor identify unwanted tension in the body, including mental tension, then release that tension through an act of will. Until an actor is properly relaxed onstage, he cannot express in purest form the thoughts and emotions which propel his character through the events of the play. The importance of relaxation is proven repeatedly in the workshop.

SENSE MEMORY

The actor must learn to make his senses respond onstage as they do in real life. Strasberg's Sense Memory exercises were developed to help the actor strengthen his awareness of how the senses affect him in life. Only when the actor believes that what he is doing on the stage is real, will the audience also believe that what he is doing on the stage is real. Sensory exercises help the actor learn to concentrate on specific "objects of attention" (determined from the logic of the play) and to overcome "moments of difficulty" in his life onstage.

Although executing a simple Sense Memory exercise, the actor pictured at left might appear as though he had suddenly discovered his entire family brutally murdered.

Philip Watt executing a "cold shower" sensory exercise.

Barry Prmus Interview

The Actors Studio