Scene Context: Dedicated To The Craft Explores Tactics & Objectives Within Given Circumstances

It is time to get struck. This is the Electric Secrets variety podcast. 

Oh my goodness, welcome in everybody. Nice to have you back with me again. In this episode of Dedicated to the Craft, I want to expand the scene work we were doing by adding layers of context. So, as a recap, we've already discussed how tactics, which are specific, actionable verbs like “proclaim,” “comfort,” or “spatter,” remember you can use something that's a little bit more abstract, those are powered by your imagination and vocal energy. So those are things you can play rather than a mood like “sad” or “angry.” Choose a good verb, especially a verb with imagery that's really helpful. Which, if you remember what an objective is or the formula for an objective, it is a tactic plus a desired outcome. And we can state an objective like this: hassle them so that they apologize or deny this so that they will drop the subject, and the “they” is the person you're trying to get something from.

Remember, your tactics and objectives always have a focal point, which could be another character, it could be the audience, or it could be something abstract that you choose to focus on. In the end, it's whatever works and whatever communicates to your collaborators, like the director, most importantly. So what we've already done is applied these to an open scene, and we experimented, we used curiosity, we took a single tactic and rode the tactic like it was a wave through the entire scene.

We also experimented with using different tactics or changing your tactics within the scene to try to get what you want from the other character. And we used open scenes so we could create the context of the scene, who these characters are, where they are, and what's going on. What we're going to do in this episode is do what you have to be able to do as an actor, work within context that is already given to you. Working within the given circumstances that are provided by the playwright. 

Now remember, you can find open scenes all over the internet. They're easy to find, but most of the time you won't find anything with context. It will just be characters speaking in dialogue. But I found a scene online called The Waiting Room, which, hey, the title gives us some context already. The scene features two characters, Alex and Jamie. So the context is given that they are in a hospital waiting room. And what I notice in the dialogue is that it has a heightened quality to it, almost like it's melodramatic, which makes it a little trickier to pin down tactics and objectives. So I'm going to read the scene to you. It's very short. I'm going to read it in a neutral tone, and I will give the character's name before each of their lines. Here we go.

Alex:

The clock ticks louder than it should, Jamie. Don't you hear it?

Jamie:

It's just a clock, Alex. It's doing its job.

Alex:

Its job is to mock us, to count down what we can't control.

Jamie:

You're reading too much into it. Sit down.

Alex:

I can't sit. Not while the air feels this heavy. Don't you feel it?

Jamie:

I feel tired. That's what I feel.

Alex:

Tired. How can you be tired when everything's hanging in the balance?

Jamie:

Because I've been here before. It doesn't get easier, but it gets familiar.

Alex:

Familiar. This isn't a routine, Jamie. This is a precipice.

Jamie:

Call it what you want. I'm just trying to get through it.

And that's the whole scene. It's an interesting style. It has rhythmic sort of loaded dialogue. There's a lot of deeper meaning in the dialogue, it seems. I'm not certain if we've gotten into beats yet. If we got into beats in another episode, this will be a little bit of a recap. If not, hey, it's a great opportunity to introduce beats. 

So a beat is what you use to break the scene down, to divide the scene into manageable parts. And a good exercise when you're doing scene study is to provide tactics for every beat of the scene for whatever character you're playing, whomever you're playing gets a new tactic, each beat of the scene. So let's take a look at this particular scene. I'll go through it for you and sort of explain how we're going to break down the beats of the scene. Okay?

So, Beat One starts with Alex's line, “The clock ticks louder.” And it goes to Jamie's line, “It's just a clock.” Now you want to take your time in analyzing your script and your beats and just notice things and be curious about things, especially for your character. So it seems like Alex is fixated on the clock and projecting some kind of anxiety onto it. Jamie dismisses the clock. Jamie's trying to kind of stay grounded in the moment. So Alex's tactic might be to amplify the situation, to get Jamie to engage. So that can be expressed. I'm going to amplify so that I engage Jamie or Jamie becomes engaged emotionally. So emotional engagement. Maybe Jamie's tactic is to deflect. Just like we talked about in the last episode, you could deflect or avoid what Alex is trying to do. So, in a microcosm, that is an example of thinking about your tactics for a scene, for a beat of a scene. 

So, Beat Number Two, beat number two would start with Alex's line, “It's job is to mock us.”

And that will go to Jamie's line. “You're reading too much.” So now we see Alex doubling down, still kind of escalating the clock's significance in order to kind of push Jamie to acknowledge what's going on, or maybe the stakes of what's going on. And Jamie shuts it down again with a direct command, just kind of suggesting a tactic, maybe to control. Maybe Jamie's trying to control the situation or control Alex. Remember, you need a focus for your tactic. 

Okay, Beat Three begins with Alex's line, “I can't sit” and goes to Jamie's line, “I feel tired.” So Alex rejects sitting. It's kind of obvious. Maybe Alex stands up and it sort of emphasizes an oppressive atmosphere, at least for Alex. You know, I get nervous in hospitals all the time. I feel kind of strange like, like I'm about to get sick, especially if I'm waiting on somebody. And there are people that really, really feel anxious in hospitals. So maybe Alex is that type of a person. So in order to deal with this atmosphere, Alex stands up and maybe even starts pacing around. Remember, we can have physical tactics as well as emotional tactics. So tactics live in the imagination, but they also have a focused impetus. So I can't sit here. I have to stand up. Maybe the standing up itself has a tactic. Maybe Alex wants to provoke. I love that tactic, provoke Jamie to feel what they feel. I want to provoke. Jamie's not behaving the way I think Jamie should. If I'm playing Alex, right? Jamie's not behaving the way I think Jamie should. So I am trying to provoke Jamie into feeling the same way I feel. And against that, Jamie responds with a little bit of experience because “I've been here before,” right? Maybe using a tactic to reassure or to calm Alex by kind of normalizing the situation. You know, “I've been here before. I've done this before. You need to relax.” So that's four beats so far. 

Beat Five, the last beat of the scene. It goes from Alex's line, “familiar. This isn't routine.”

And it goes to Jamie's “call it what you want” line. So Alex still rejects Jamie's attitude toward the context of what's happening, and maybe to amp things up a little bit, we try a tactic as Alex. Alex's tactic may be to insist on making Jamie see how important this is. Jamie seems very dismissive, but Alex wants to put a lot of importance on whatever's happening. So it's likely that Jamie is probably still going to evade or avoid Alex. 

Now here's the thing. Scenes behave exactly like whole stories, whole plays, whole novels, whole books. There's a rising action to a climax, and then maybe a falling action or a transition to another scene.

So to give the scene that sense of a rising action, we want to try to intensify our tactics, one up each other, or give ourselves a little bit of a one-up process or a sequence of tactics. So if I look at Alex's tactics from beat one to beat five, I go from “amplify” to “escalate” to “reject sitting.” That's a physical one. I also have a tactic of “emphasizing the atmosphere.” Beat Four “challenge” is Alex's tactic, and beat five “reject.” So if you look at all of those tactics, you can kind of see a through line of intensifying the situation, building that rising action. Now, is that something that the audience is going to pick up on in a way that they think, oh, they're intensifying the beats. No, they're going to feel it viscerally. They'll feel it without thinking about it because you are following the story structure of rising action to a climax. And Jamie's reaction to Alex will intensify the scene as well because it's all about characters trying to get something from another character, and the other character isn't giving it to them, isn't giving them what they want. And that helps build the rising action.

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All right, so we've talked tactics. Let's talk objectives. So, remember, we can express the objective as a tactic plus a desired outcome. So, for Alex, let's express Alex's objective as this. I want to “unsettle Jamie” so that Jamie “acknowledges the gravity of the moment.” Keep in mind, we don't really know what's going on yet. We don't know if they're waiting for someone to get out of surgery. This is not given to us yet. So the playwright has not chosen to give us those details yet. And we have to accept that and honor that, which makes sense because it helps us as actors live in the moment and not act as if we know what's coming. So Alex's objective I want to unsettle Jamie so that Jamie acknowledges the gravity of this situation. And I have tactics for Alex. Beats one through five. My tactics are “amplify,” “escalate”, “provoke,” “accuse,” “insist.”

Now, for Jamie, let's express Jamie's objective as I'm going to “deflect” so that Alex stays calm and gets through this. And I might even add so that Alex and myself can remain calm and get through this situation. Get through the weight, right? It seems very clear context-wise of the scene is that they're waiting, and it's weighing on both of them. It's hard to wait. So we can speculate that they're waiting for somebody to get out of surgery. But again, the playwright has not given us those details yet. Keep the audience in mind. So Jamie's objective? I'm going to “deflect” so that Alex and I can stay calm and get through the weight. Jamie's beats one through five “dismiss,” “control,” “withdraw,” “reassure,” and “evade.” 

Kind of harder to see the skeleton between those beats. But remember, the escalation has to happen. The rising action has to happen between the characters. One character can't pull the other character along completely, right? So you both have to be acting and playing tactics and playing objectives, so that it feels real in the moment. It feels natural that way. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to try the scene again, applying these tactics and objectives. So I'll read each character's name, then they're tactic, then I will apply the energy of the tactic to the line.

Alex (Amplify): 

The clock ticks louder than it should, Jamie. Don't you hear it?

Jamie (Dismiss):

It's just a clock, Alex. It's doing its job.

Alex (Escalate):

Its job is to mock us. To count down what we can't control.

Jamie (Control):

You're reading too much into it. Sit down.

Alex (Provoke):

I can't sit. Not while the air feels this heavy. Don't you feel it?

Jamie (Withdrawing):

I feel tired. That's what I feel.

Alex (Accuse):

Tired. How can you be tired when everything's hanging in the balance?

Jamie (Reassure):

Because I've been here before. It doesn't get easier, but it gets familiar.

Alex (Insist):

Familiar. This isn't a routine, Jamie. This is a precipice.

Jamie (Evading):

Call it what you want. I'm just trying to get through it.

All right. With that reading, I know it was kind of weird, but you can hear how the tactics are bringing the scene to life. Alex's escalating energy pushes against Jamie's deflections. It creates tension. It creates conflict, which is the main ingredient of drama. We have to have conflict. And that's the nuts and bolts of it.

Tactics, objectives, those things playing against each other, creating the tension that amplifies the conflict, creating that rising action. It makes the scene feel like it's alive, like it's happening for the first time. And again, we still don't know what they're waiting on. So the audience is going to feel that tension as well. And that's part of the playwright's craft, to not let the audience in on everything all at once, because then the play and the scene have no place to go. So there is a method to every script that the playwright is using, and it's up to the actor to figure out how to keep things going naturally so that it doesn't seem like the characters know what's about to happen, because that's part of the actor's awareness.

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I just thought of another point I wanted to make. I hope you heard this when I was doing my readings of the scene. The floweriness of the language, the sort of melodramatic quality of the scene, and its dialogue didn't really come out because I was so folded into the tactics of each character as I read them. And that's very important because if you play the floweriness of poetic language, whether you're doing a melodrama or whether you're doing Shakespeare, there is a certain quality of tone that a director might want you to have. In Britain, they're great at this. British actors are so well trained, especially with Shakespeare, to really play the mood of the lines or play the poetry of the lines. But the natural quality of performance comes from those tactics. Tactics and objectives make things sound natural, no matter if they're poetic or if the dialogue is abstract, like you would get with Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Tactics are the most important thing in modern acting theory. You can add mood, but playing mood is not going to get you a natural or realistic result. It does have a place in surreal drama and maybe experimental stuff, but really, you want to rely on figuring out those tactics. Okay, back to the exercise at hand. We're going to add a little bit of a listening element to this. It's your turn now. I'm going to provide a new open scene with some context in the notes. The scene, again, I found it online. It's called The Bridge. Two characters again. The characters' names are Sam and Riley. So your challenge is to listen to the scene, and you can read the scene in the transcript. Break the scene into beats. I will provide a document as part of the transcript where you can get the scene and print it out if you want. Assign tactics and objectives for each character. By reading the scene out loud with a scene partner, sitting back to back. That's very important. Focus on the vocal energy just like we did in episode two. So it's not about getting up and rehearsing the scene as if you're doing the scene. This is all about exercising the tactical energy and the objectives. And you can experiment with different tactics and see how they shift the dynamics of the scene. It's all about curiosity and experimentation. So nothing is correct or incorrect. You're just using your curiosity, your tactics, your energy, and your imagination to explore the scene. So here's the scene. 

The context. Sam and Riley are meeting on a bridge. It's dusk. They haven't seen each other in years. And there's an unspoken history between them. That's what the note says. The dialogue is sort of poetic. So that gives you a challenge. Don't play the poetry. Play the tactics. So here's the scene. I'll read it to you so you can listen to it. Same way I did before. Character and line in a neutral tone.

Sam:

The river runs like it remembers us, Riley.

Riley:

It remembers nothing. It just flows.

Sam:

You used to see stories in its currents.

Riley: 

I grew up. Stories don't pay the bills.

Sam:

But they fed us once, didn't they?

Riley:

We were kids. We didn't know hunger.

Sam:

I still feel it. That ache for something more.

Riley:

You're chasing ghosts, Sam.

Sam:

And you're running from them.

Riley:

I'm standing here, aren't I?

And that's the Sam and Riley scene. Again, I'll have a copy of it with the transcript. Along with another group of so-called open scenes, but here's the thing. These are really challenging scenes that I got so tired of trying to find open scenes for my students that had a little bit more of an edge or a challenge to them. So I wrote some myself. It's a single document with four separate scenes with different characters, but here's the challenge. You have to figure out the context, at least part of the context, whatever is given to you, but you have to figure that out only using the dialogue of the characters and the stage directions. Okay?

So there's context there, but you've got to discover what your character's relationship seems to be and do the same type of exercise, dividing the scene into beats, assigning each character a tactic for each beat, and again, just being curious, experimenting. If you need any feedback on the Sam and Riley scene or the more challenging open so-called scenes, so-called open scenes, I should say, feel free to shoot me an email info@monstervoxproductions.com, and to get the scenes that you can print out, visit www.monstervoxproductions.com and click at the top on the Electric Secrets variety podcast page. Find the Dedicated to the Craft segment and just find the title to this episode. “Scene Context” is what the title is, and the documents should be there with the transcript. 

All right. Thank you so much for listening and for your scene work, and I hope this sparked your imagination and gave you some tools to make bold choices with your tactics in these scenes and in whatever show you are rehearsing right now or in the future.

In the next episode of Dedicated to the Craft, I will be adding more layers upon some of the scenes we have already looked through when we talk about using sense memory and emotion memory when looking at the environment of the scene and what's going on inside the characters. It's memory and emotion memory help add depth to your characters and to the scene itself. 

Thanks once again, I am Scott. Until next time, stay dedicated.

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Click Here To Download The "Sam & Riley" Open Scene

Context: Sam and Riley meet on a bridge at dusk. They haven’t seen each other in years, and they have an unspoken history.

Sam: The river runs like it remembers us, Riley. 

Riley:  It remembers nothing. It just flows. 

Sam: You used to see stories in its currents. 

Riley: I grew up. Stories don’t pay the bills. 

Sam: But they fed us once, didn’t they? 

Riley: We were kids. We didn’t know hunger. 

Sam: I still feel it. That ache for something more. 

Riley: You’re chasing ghosts, Sam. 

Sam: And you’re running from them. 

Riley: I’m standing here, aren’t I?

Click Here To Download All Open Scenes.

Open Scene #1: Anderson & March

Open Scene #2: Keller & Dietrich

Open Scene #3: Murphy & Fluellen

Open Scene #4: Dillon & Samuels