High School Theatre & Drama

Advice to the players

In Act 3, scene 2 of Hamlet, a company of traveling actors is about to perform at the Danish court, and the prince stops them for a voice lesson. "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue," he tells them, "but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines." He has a second complaint: it "offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings."

Read those lines as a list of faults and they are still the faults a director hears at a first rehearsal. Mouthing: chewing the words so that the sound gets in the way of the sense. The town crier: one loud, flat, public voice for everything. Tearing a passion to tatters: shouting the emotion instead of playing it, which hurts the listeners' ears and, as you will see, the speaker's throat. Hamlet's cure sits in the middle of the speech: "in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness." Temperance means control. The storm is real, and the voice stays in charge of it.

This lesson is a procedure for building that control. You find out how your voice is made, because you cannot protect a machine you cannot picture. Then you take the advice that voice doctors and speech-language pathologists give, walk through a ten-minute warm-up step by step, and practice projection as support and clarity rather than force. All of it works in a bedroom, and none of it involves shouting.

How a voice is made: power, source, resonance, shaping

Your voice is a wind instrument with four working parts. You do not need medical vocabulary to use it well, but you do need to know which part does which job, because most vocal trouble actors run into comes from asking the wrong part to do the work.

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) describes the middle of this chain plainly. When you are not speaking, the vocal folds stay open so that you can breathe. When you speak, they snap together "while air from the lungs blows past, making them vibrate," and the vibrations travel through the throat, nose and mouth, "which act as resonating cavities to modulate the sound." The size and shape of the folds and of those spaces give each person's voice its own quality, which is why no two actors sound alike.

The power comes from below. The American Lung Association calls the diaphragm "the main muscle for breathing": a dome of muscle under the lungs which, when it contracts, pulls air in through the nose or mouth. When you breathe in fully and calmly, your lower ribs widen and your belly softens outward while your shoulders barely move. When you breathe in shallowly and in a hurry, as most people do when they are nervous, the shoulders rise and the neck tightens, and that tension sits right beside the larynx.

Try the chain now, one link at a time. Put your hands on your lower ribs, at your sides, and breathe in slowly through your nose: feel the ribs widen into your hands. Let the air out on a long, quiet "sss" and feel them come back. Now hum on a comfortable note with your lips closed and feel the buzz on your lips and the bridge of your nose: that is resonance you can touch. Finally, say "the tip of the tongue, the teeth, the lips" three times, quickly and lightly. That is articulation, and it is what Hamlet meant by trippingly.

Key idea: Breath is the power, the vocal folds are the source, the throat, mouth and nose are the amplifier, and the lips and tongue shape the words. Loudness made by squeezing the folds, instead of by breath and resonance, is strain.

What voice specialists tell anyone who talks for a living

Two U.S. bodies publish advice that applies directly to actors: NIDCD, part of the National Institutes of Health, and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), the professional association for speech-language pathologists. Their advice overlaps, and for an actor it comes down to five habits.

1. Drink water. NIDCD advises drinking plenty of water and balancing any caffeinated drinks with more water; ASHA notes that caffeine can cause dehydration. NIDCD also suggests a humidifier in winter or dry climates, at about thirty percent humidity.
2. Avoid the extremes. NIDCD warns against "the extremes of your vocal range, such as screaming or whispering," and notes that talking too loudly and too softly can both stress the voice. ASHA states the surprising half bluntly: "Whispering can also strain your voice."
3. Rest it. NIDCD recommends "vocal naps," resting your voice through the day, and resting it when you are ill or when it is already hoarse or tired. ASHA compares the voice to other muscles: it needs time to recover.
4. Do not compete with noise. Both advise against talking over loud noise, and both recommend a microphone when one is appropriate.
5. Warm up gently. ASHA suggests warming up before a busy day with gentle humming to loosen the muscles and prevent injury.

NIDCD also lists the signs that a voice may have a problem: it has become hoarse or raspy, it suddenly sounds deeper, you have lost some high notes when singing, your throat often feels raw, achy or strained, talking has become an effort, or you keep clearing your throat. ASHA's guidance is that hoarseness or other signs of vocal strain lasting longer than two weeks should be evaluated by an ear, nose and throat doctor. NIDCD's older fact sheet on hoarseness sets the line at three weeks, especially if you have not had a cold or the flu, and says to see a doctor promptly if you cough up blood, have trouble swallowing or breathing, feel a lump in your neck, have pain when speaking or swallowing, or lose your voice completely for more than a few days. When two careful sources give different numbers, use the more cautious one: two weeks.

The point: Water, rest, no screaming and no whispering, no competing with noise, and a gentle warm-up. Hoarseness that lasts more than two weeks is a reason to see a doctor, not a reason to push through.

The ten-minute warm-up, step by step

A warm-up does two jobs. It wakes up the parts the voice depends on, in the order they work: posture, breath, the folds, resonance, the articulators. And it tells you how your voice is today, before a rehearsal asks anything of it. Do it standing, in any room, at a comfortable volume. If anything tickles, scratches or hurts, stop that step and sip some water. A warm-up should never hurt.

Two steps are the ones people most often get wrong. In step 2 the goal is a steady stream of air, not the longest possible hiss: forcing out the last of the air with a clenched stomach trains exactly the squeeze you are trying to lose. In step 3, if your lips will not flutter, press a fingertip lightly into each cheek beside the corners of your mouth, which takes some of the weight off the lips; if they still will not, hum instead. And if you are getting over a cold, or your voice already feels tired, the right warm-up is shorter and quieter, and may be gentle humming alone.

Remember: Warm up in the order the voice works: body, breath, hum, open sound, articulators, text. Stay at a comfortable volume throughout; a warm-up that hurts has stopped being one.

Projection: reaching the back row without force

Projection means being heard and understood at the far end of the room. Notice the two halves. An actor who is loud but blurred has failed half of it; so has one who is crisp but audible only in the first three rows. Neither half is solved by shouting, which tightens the throat, flattens the voice into Hamlet's town crier and, as NIDCD warns, stresses the voice.

Projection is built from three things you have already warmed up:

• Support: a full, low breath before the line and a steady flow of air through to its last word. Most lines that disappear disappear at the end, when the breath runs out and the voice drops.
• Resonance: an open throat and a free jaw, so that the sound is amplified rather than muffled. The buzz you felt on your lips is the sensation to keep.
• Clarity: consonants. Vowels carry the sound, but consonants carry the meaning, and a crisp consonant travels further than a vowel pushed harder.

Add one thing you have not warmed up: intention. You speak to someone. Try this with a partner. Stand an arm's length apart and say Hamlet's first line: "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue." Then have your partner cross to the far side of the room and say it again so that it reaches them. Do not decide to be louder; decide that they must hear it. Most people breathe more deeply and speak more clearly without being told to. Then ask your partner which words they lost. It is usually the end of the line, "trippingly on the tongue." Repeat, carrying the breath through to the last consonant.

Alone, use your phone as the listener. Prop it on a shelf at the far side of the room, record the line, then listen back. If you can hear every consonant from that distance, so could an audience.

Some scripts call for a shout or a scream. In this course you do not practice them at full volume. Singers and actors protect themselves in rehearsal by marking demanding moments: playing the intention, the energy and the lift in pitch at a level the voice can repeat many times over. A production that truly needs a full scream gets it worked out with a voice teacher or vocal coach, not by trial and error in a living room.

Why this matters: Projection is support, resonance and clarity aimed at a listener. If you are pushing from the throat, you are making noise, not projecting.

Vocal rest across a run

A single rehearsal rarely hurts anyone. Trouble comes from accumulation: rehearsal after a school day of talking, a cast chatting backstage over the crew's noise, a week of evening performances, and then a closing-night party where everyone talks over loud music. Plan rest as deliberately as you plan rehearsal.

• On rehearsal and performance days, take NIDCD's vocal naps: stretches of silence between classes, before call time and on the way home.
• Treat the dressing room as a quiet room. Talking over backstage noise is exactly the competing-with-noise that NIDCD and ASHA warn about.
• Keep a water bottle at rehearsal. On a day off, rest the voice instead of spending it at a loud game or concert.
• After a performance, finish with a short, quiet version of steps 3 and 4: gentle hums and slides. This cool-down is the warm-up in reverse, and it gives you one more check on how the voice feels.
• If you get sick during a run, tell the director or stage manager early. NIDCD's advice is to rest the voice when you are ill and to avoid speaking or singing when it is hoarse or tired; a production would rather adjust a rehearsal than lose a voice for the week.

Common misconceptions

• Projecting means shouting. Projection is breath, resonance and clear consonants aimed at a listener. Shouting tightens the throat and, NIDCD warns, stresses the voice.
• Whispering rests the voice. ASHA warns that whispering can also strain your voice, and NIDCD names whispering, along with screaming, among the extremes to avoid. Silence rests it.
• The voice comes from the throat. The vocal folds make the vibration, but the power comes from the breath and much of the volume from resonance. An actor who thinks of the throat as the engine tends to squeeze it.
• Hoarseness after a show always goes away by itself. Often it does, with rest. Hoarseness that lasts longer than two weeks should be checked by a doctor, according to ASHA.
• A real warm-up is loud. This warm-up stays at a comfortable level throughout. Its job is to prepare the voice, not to test it.

What to carry forward

• Hamlet's advice still holds: speak trippingly, do not mouth, do not tear a passion to tatters, and keep control even in a whirlwind of feeling.
• Breath powers the voice, the vocal folds vibrate, the throat, mouth and nose resonate, and the lips and tongue articulate.
• Drink water, rest the voice, avoid screaming and whispering, do not talk over noise, and use a microphone when appropriate.
• Warm up in order: release, breath, hum, open sound, articulators, text.
• Project with support, resonance, clarity and intention, never with force. Mark shouts and screams in rehearsal.
• Hoarseness that lasts more than two weeks needs a doctor.

Sources

1. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Hamlet (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 3, scene 2). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.
2. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. (2017, March 6). What is hoarseness? National Institutes of Health. NIDCD.
3. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. (2025, June 11). Taking care of your voice. National Institutes of Health. NIDCD.
4. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2025, August 7). Protect your voice this back-to-school season [News release]. ASHA.
5. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2026, April 10). Losing your voice? Millions experience persistent problems each year [News release]. ASHA.
6. American Lung Association. (2026, June 4). How lungs work. American Lung Association.

A stage direction about a body

The first stage direction of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), in William Archer's translation, says nothing about how Nora feels. It says what her body does. She "enters, humming gaily," lays her parcels on a table, takes "a bag of macaroons" from her pocket and eats one or two, and then "goes on tip-toe to her husband's door and listens." Her husband's first words, called from offstage, describe her movement too: "Is that my lark twittering there?" and then "Is it the squirrel frisking around?"

Before Nora says anything that matters, the audience has learned a great deal about her from how she moves: quick, light, secretive, a little performed. That is the actor's body doing the work of a paragraph of description. This lesson compares the tools for doing that work on purpose. You start from neutral, the zero point. You learn to scan for tension, so that you know which movements are yours and which are the character's. Then you work through Rudolf Laban's eight effort actions, compared side by side in a table, and finish by building Nora's walk from the evidence Ibsen gives you.

Neutral: the zero you start from

Everyone already has a walk, a way of standing, a place they hold tension and a habit with their hands. Onstage, those habits read as character. If you play a nervous king and a confident servant with the same raised shoulders, both characters seem to have your shoulders. Neutral is the state in which your own habits are switched off, so that whatever the audience sees is something you chose.

The French teacher Jacques Lecoq built a famous training around a neutral mask, a plain, expressionless mask that leaves the body to do all the talking. Simon Murray's study of Lecoq describes it as a teaching tool rather than a mask for performance: it exaggerates every habit of the wearer, and it is always in a state of balance. You do not need the mask to find the stance. Work through it now, standing:

1. Feet: under your hips and parallel, weight spread across the heel and the balls of the feet.
2. Knees: soft, not locked back. Locked knees stiffen the whole body and, held for long, can make you light-headed.
3. Pelvis: level, neither tucked under nor pushed back.
4. Spine and head: long, as if the crown of your head were floating up; chin level, neither poked forward nor tucked in.
5. Shoulders and arms: wide and dropped, arms hanging, hands loose at your sides.
6. Face and breath: jaw unclenched, tongue resting, breath low and easy, eyes looking level at the horizon.

Neutral is not slumped and it is not stiff. It is alert and ready, like a goalkeeper before a penalty kick who has not yet guessed a direction. If you feel that you are doing nothing, you are probably close.

The point: Neutral is a balanced, alert stance with your own habits switched off. It is not a performance; it is the zero from which every character choice is measured.

The tension scan

From neutral, scan your body from feet to head and ask one question at each stop: is anything working that does not need to be? The common hiding places are the same for almost everyone:

When you find tension, do not fight it. Breathe in, and on the breath out let that part go, then check again a minute later, because tension creeps back. The real test comes when you speak. Say a line, any line, and scan while you say it: most people's shoulders rise or jaw tightens the moment the words start.

Tension is not the enemy, though. It is a dial. Make a fist at full strength, as tight as you can, then at half, then at the least effort that still keeps it closed. Now walk across the room at full body tension, at half, and at almost none. A soldier on parade, a person carrying a full tray, a teenager pretending not to care: each lives at a different setting. The difference between an actor's tension and a character's tension is that the character's was chosen.

Remember: Scan from feet to head, release on the breath out, and scan again while speaking. Accidental tension belongs to you; chosen tension belongs to the character.

Laban's four factors

Rudolf Laban (1879-1958), born in what was then Austria-Hungary, was a dancer, choreographer and movement theorist; he invented the dance notation now called Labanotation. Trinity Laban, the London conservatoire that carries his name, records that in his later years in England he worked in industry, studying how workers moved, and that his work laid "a basis for the expressive movement training of actors." His book for performers, The Mastery of Movement on the Stage, appeared in 1950, and a revised edition prepared with his collaborator Lisa Ullmann followed in 1960.

Laban's central idea for actors is effort: not how hard something is, but the quality of a movement. Researchers who use his system today describe effort as "the qualitative aspect of movement, expressive of a person's inner attitude toward movement." Two people can make exactly the same gesture, a hand reaching for a cup, and one reach can look greedy while the other looks shy. Laban broke that difference into four factors, each running between two poles:

Notice that time is about attitude as much as speed. A sustained movement is one that feels it has all the time in the world; a sudden one feels there is no time left. Space works the same way: a direct movement goes to one point, while an indirect one takes in the whole room on the way.

The eight effort actions compared

Combine the two poles of weight, time and space and you get two times two times two: eight combinations. Laban called them the eight basic effort actions. The table below gives each one with its three qualities, as Jean Newlove sets them out in her step-by-step guide for actors, and an everyday action that contains it.

Read the table in pairs. Press and punch differ only in time: the same strength, aimed at the same point, released in an instant instead of slowly. Punch and dab differ only in weight. Glide and float differ only in space. Every action has three neighbors, each one change away, and that is the most useful thing the table teaches: when a character feels wrong, change one factor at a time and watch what happens. A character who presses through every argument becomes a different person if the same pressing turns indirect and becomes a wring.

Flow sits on top of all eight. Newlove notes that pressing is a movement of obvious bound flow, while floating can be done with bound or free flow. Try a float with free flow, a drifting and unbroken movement, and then a bound float, as though you were drifting but afraid of being seen. The second is already a character.

Work through the eight in three stages, standing in a cleared space. First, do each action with one arm, saying its name aloud as you do it. Second, let the action spread through the whole body. Third, take it for a walk: a pressing walk, a floating walk, a dabbing walk. Then add the voice. Newlove's guide pairs each action with sound, and you can hear the difference at once: say Nora's first line, "Hide the Christmas-tree carefully, Ellen," as a dab, then as a press, then as a float.

What matters here: The eight effort actions are every combination of strong or light, sudden or sustained, direct or indirect. Neighboring actions differ by one factor, so changing one factor at a time is a reliable way to find a character.

Leading with a body part

A second tool is simpler. Walk around the room and let one part of your body lead, as if a string were pulling it forward: the nose, then the chest, then the belly, then the pelvis, then the knees. Give each one a full minute. Most people find that their thoughts change with their center. A walk led by the nose tends to feel curious or superior; one led by the chest, proud or eager; one led by the knees, tired or careful. None of these meanings is fixed, and an audience from a different culture may read them differently, but each center changes the picture the audience sees.

Centers and efforts combine. A nose-led glide and a nose-led dab are different people. When you build a character, you are looking for a small number of choices, a center, an effort, a tension setting, that you can repeat every night, not a collection of tricks.

Building a walk from the evidence: Nora in Act 1

Now the comparison becomes a method. A character's body is built from three kinds of evidence in the script, and they are not equally reliable:

Put the evidence into Laban's terms. The humming and the frisking suggest light and sudden: dab and flick. But look at the tip-toe to the door. Listening is direct, and creeping is sustained and bound: that is a glide held with bound flow, the movement of someone with a secret. So the evidence gives you not one walk but two. When Helmer is watching, Nora flicks and dabs, the lark he wants to see. When she is alone, or when she thinks she is, the movement narrows into something controlled and careful. An actor who plays only the lark has believed Helmer; an actor who finds both has read the play.

Notice what you did not use: a limp, a funny voice or a walk invented because it looked interesting. Every choice traced back to a line of the script. That is the habit to build.

Why this matters: Build a character's body from what the character does first, from what others say second, and from what the character says about herself with care. When the evidence splits, as Nora's does, the split is usually the character.

Common misconceptions

• Neutral means having no personality. Neutral is readiness, not blankness. It is the zero you measure from, and you leave it as soon as the character begins.
• Relaxed means floppy. Release only the tension you do not need. Neutral keeps the alertness and length that let you move in any direction.
• Each effort equals one emotion. Shafir, Tsachor and Welch found that sets of Laban motor elements were associated with particular basic emotions, but an effort describes how a movement is done. The scene decides what it means, so try an effort and test it.
• A character walk is a funny walk. A believable walk usually comes from a few small, repeatable changes traced to the text, not from a limp or a stagger added for color.
• Laban is only for dancers. Laban's system began in dance, but Trinity Laban records that his late work became a basis for the expressive movement training of actors, and guides such as Newlove's were written for actors.

The short version

• Neutral is a balanced, alert stance with your habits switched off: feet under hips, soft knees, level pelvis, long spine, dropped shoulders, free jaw, low breath.
• Scan for tension from feet to head, release on the out-breath, and scan again while you speak. Tension is a dial a character can set.
• Laban's four factors are weight, time, space and flow. Weight, time and space combine into eight effort actions: press, wring, punch, slash, glide, float, dab and flick.
• Neighboring actions differ by one factor; change one at a time to find a character.
• Leading with a body part changes the picture the audience sees.
• Build the walk from evidence: what the character does, what others say and what she says, weighted in that order.

Sources

1. Ibsen, H. (1907). A doll's house (W. Archer, Trans.). In The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Vol. 7). William Heinemann. (Original work published 1879). Project Gutenberg.
2. Shafir, T., Tsachor, R. P., and Welch, K. B. (2016). Emotion regulation through movement: Unique sets of movement characteristics are associated with and enhance basic emotions. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 2030. Frontiers.
3. Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. (n.d.). Rudolf Laban. Trinity Laban.
4. Laban, R. (1950). The mastery of movement on the stage. Macdonald and Evans. Revised with L. Ullmann as The mastery of movement (2nd ed., 1960).
5. Newlove, J. (1993). Laban for actors and dancers: Putting Laban's movement theory into practice; a step-by-step guide. Routledge.
6. Murray, S. (2003). Jacques Lecoq. Routledge.

What Stanislavski saw from the audience

Some time after the 1906-1907 season, Konstantin Stanislavski, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, sat in a Moscow audience watching a visiting star and found that he could not take his eyes off the man. In his autobiography, My Life in Art (1924), he explains why: "his entire attention was on the stage and the stage alone, and this abstracted attention forced me to be interested in his life on the stage." The star was not trying to win anyone over. He was busy with the life of his character, and that made the audience lean in.

Stanislavski drew a rule from it that every actor eventually learns the hard way: "the more the actor wishes to amuse his audience, the more the audience will sit in comfort waiting to be amused." But "as soon as the actor stops being concerned with his audience, the latter begins to watch the actor." His summary is a single sentence: "The concentration of the creating actor calls out the concentration of the spectator."

This lesson starts from a problem everyone has seen: acting that looks false. It works backward from the symptoms to their cause, which is nearly always the same, and then tries four fixes: circles of attention, the magic if, a real task, and a partner you actually listen to.

The problem: five ways acting looks false

Watch a weak school play, or a recording of your own first attempt at a scene, and the false moments sort into a few familiar types. Look at the third column, because it is the diagnosis.

In every row, attention has left the world of the play. It has gone to the audience, to the script, or to the actor's own performance. That is why each symptom looks false: real people in a real kitchen are not checking how they come across. They are busy with the kitchen and the person in it.

What matters here: False acting is usually misplaced attention. Before you change a line reading or a gesture, ask where your attention was.

Fix one: circles of attention

Stanislavski turned his discovery into exercises, and his training book, An Actor Prepares (1936, translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood), dramatizes them. It is told by a student named Kostya in a class run by a director called Tortsov. In the chapter on concentration of attention, Tortsov darkens the stage and lights a single lamp on a table. The pool of light on Kostya's head, hands and the small objects in front of him is a small circle of attention, and inside it the objects hold his attention without any effort. Kostya notices that he feels entirely alone, even though the class is watching. Tortsov names the mood: the translation calls it "Solitude in Public," often shortened to public solitude. You are in public because people are watching; you are in solitude because your attention encloses you, in the book's image, "like a snail in its shell."

Then the light grows. A medium circle takes in a group of furniture and several people; a large circle takes in the whole room. The students lose control as the circle widens, and Tortsov's remedy is to go back to a single point, such as the lamp, draw a small circle around it again, and rebuild from there. He also shows that the small circle can travel: a spotlight follows Kostya around the stage, and Kostya decides it is the most practical thing he has learned.

You do not need a lighting rig. Try it now:

1. Small circle. Sit at a table with one object within arm's reach: a key, a mug, a shoe. For two minutes, examine it and name its details aloud: the scratch near the handle, the color inside the rim, the weight in your hand. When your mind wanders, and it will, bring it back to the object.
2. Medium circle. Widen your attention to everything within a few steps: the chair, the edge of the rug, the light switch. Name what you notice.
3. Large circle. Widen again to the whole room and out of the window.
4. Back to small. The moment your attention breaks, return to the object and start over. That return is the skill.

Key idea: Attention is something you can place and size on purpose. When it breaks onstage, shrink it to one real object nearby, then widen it again.

Fix two: the magic if and given circumstances

Attention needs something to hold. In an earlier chapter of An Actor Prepares, on action, Tortsov asks a student named Vanya to close a door. Vanya slams it. Tortsov tells him that closing a door implies a wish that the door be shut, and that Vanya simply banged it with no reason in his mind. Then Tortsov changes one thing. He tells the students to suppose that a dangerous man is on the other side of that door. At once they are measuring the distance to the door, looking for ways out and pressing against it. Nothing about the door has changed; what has changed is the if.

That is Stanislavski's magic if: not "I am Nora," which no one can believe, but "what would I do if I were in Nora's situation?" The if works only when the situation is specific, and the situation is what Tortsov calls the given circumstances: the story of the play, its facts and events, the time and place, the conditions of the characters' lives, and the production around them, from the set to the lighting. In the book's words, "all the circumstances that are given to an actor to take into account."

Tortsov's most practical advice follows: when you work this way, forget about your feelings, because they cannot be ordered up on command, and put your attention on the given circumstances, which are always within reach. You cannot decide to feel afraid. You can decide that the man behind the door is real, that the bolt is loose, and that your little brother is asleep in the next room. Feeling, if it comes, comes from that.

The upshot: The if moves your attention from yourself to a situation, and the given circumstances make the situation specific enough to believe. Play the circumstances, not the feeling.

Fix three: a real task

The simplest way to put attention somewhere real is to give it a job. Real people are almost always doing something while they talk: cooking, packing, searching for keys, avoiding someone's eye. Sanford Meisner, who joined the faculty of the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York in 1935 and spent decades developing what is now called the Meisner Technique, built his training on what his students call the reality of doing: when you do something onstage, you actually do it, rather than pretending.

Test the difference. Ask someone to hide a coin somewhere in a room while you wait outside. Come in and pretend to look for it, knowing it is a game: you will probably play searching, with big head turns and puzzled faces. Now have them hide it again and actually look. Your body changes completely. You move more slowly and less, your eyes do the work, and you stop caring whether anyone is watching. The second search is what an audience believes.

A real task also gives a scene its texture. In Susan Glaspell's Trifles, which you will study in Lesson 6, two women talk while handling the objects of a kitchen; the talk would be thin without the real jars, the quilt, the sewing. A task is never decoration. It is the place your attention lives between lines.

Fix four: listening, and Meisner's repetition exercise

The fifth symptom in the table, waiting to speak, needs a partner to fix. Meisner's signature exercise, the repetition exercise, does exactly that. In its first form, two actors sit facing each other. One makes a simple, true observation about the other: "You're wearing a green shirt." The partner repeats it from their own point of view: "I'm wearing a green shirt." Then the first actor repeats that, and so on, back and forth. The words hardly change. What changes is how they are said, and the rule is that every change must come from something you actually notice in your partner: a smile, a shift in the chair, a flash of irritation at being stared at.

It sounds pointless, and for the first minute it feels pointless. Then something happens. Because the words carry no meaning of their own, the only thing left to respond to is the other person. The exercise trains attention off yourself and onto your partner, and it trains you to let what you see change what you do, which is the definition of reacting. Meisner taught that the actor's reality comes from the other person, not from the actor's own ideas about the line.

Try five minutes with a friend or a family member, in person or on a video call. Keep the observations simple and physical, and do not try to be interesting. If you are alone, practice the listening half: sit still for three minutes and name aloud each sound you hear, from the nearest to the farthest. Then do it again and listen for the sounds you missed the first time. That shift, from hearing to listening, is what you are building for the stage.

Worth holding on to: Listening means letting what your partner actually does change what you do. The repetition exercise strips away the words so that nothing is left to play except the other person.

Putting the fixes on one line

Here is how the four fixes work on a single line. In the first scene of A Doll's House, Nora creeps to her husband's study door and listens, then says: "Yes; he is at home." Played with attention on the audience, it becomes a little wink: aren't I sly? Now set it up properly. Stand at a real door in your home with someone, or a radio turned low, in the next room. Small circle: the door, the handle, the crack of light underneath. Given circumstances: you have spent money he does not know about, and you are eating macaroons he has forbidden. The if: what would you do if being caught mattered? The task: listen, for real, for what is on the other side. When you actually hear something, say the line. It will be quieter, quicker and private, and it will be much easier to watch.

Common misconceptions

• Good actors work up the feeling and the audience catches it. Tortsov's advice is the reverse: feelings cannot be commanded, so put your attention on the given circumstances, which are always within reach, and let feeling follow if it comes.
• Concentration means forgetting the audience exists. Public solitude is solitude in public. You still project, find your light and hold for laughs; your attention simply lives in the world of the play rather than on the house.
• Listening means waiting quietly for your cue. Waiting is the fifth symptom. Listening means taking in what is actually said tonight, which may differ from what you heard in rehearsal, and letting it change you.
• The repetition exercise is about the words. The words are deliberately meaningless. The exercise is about noticing your partner and responding to what you notice.
• If a performance looks false, the actor needs more energy. More energy aimed at the audience usually makes indicating worse. The fix is to move attention onto an object, a task or a partner.

The takeaway

• Stanislavski noticed that an actor absorbed in the stage draws the audience in, while an actor trying to amuse them makes them sit back.
• False acting usually means attention on the audience, the script or yourself. Diagnose that first.
• Circles of attention can be sized on purpose; when attention breaks, return to one small, real object.
• The magic if and the given circumstances give attention a specific situation to hold. Play the circumstances, not the feeling.
• A real task, really done, keeps attention in the world of the play between lines.
• Meisner's repetition exercise trains listening: let what your partner actually does change what you do.

Sources

1. Stanislavsky, C. (1924). My life in art (J. J. Robbins, Trans.). Little, Brown. Chapter "The Beginnings of My System," pp. 463-465. Internet Archive.
2. Stanislavski, C. (1937). An actor prepares (E. R. Hapgood, Trans.). Geoffrey Bles. (First published 1936, New York: Theatre Arts.) Chapters on action and on concentration of attention.
3. The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. (n.d.). Our history. The Neighborhood Playhouse.
4. Meisner, S., and Longwell, D. (1987). Sanford Meisner on acting. Vintage Books.
5. Silverberg, L. (1994). The Sanford Meisner approach: An actor's workbook. Smith and Kraus.

A storefront in Hyde Park, July 1955

In July 1955, in a storefront next to a bar near the University of Chicago, a troupe called the Compass Players opened for business with a problem: they did not have enough scripts. Their co-founder David Shepherd had wanted short, topical plays about ordinary people, and nobody could write them fast enough. "I was forced to go into improvisation," he said later, "because I found that nobody could write the scripts I needed for the theater that was in my head." His partner, the director Paul Sills, had a solution at home. His mother, Viola Spolin, had spent decades inventing theater games.

The line runs back further. Spolin (1906-1994) trained at Hull House, the Chicago settlement house, under the social worker Neva Boyd, who used games, storytelling and folk dance to stimulate creative expression. Spolin carried those ideas into teaching drama for the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal jobs program, and into her own workshops, and in 1963 Northwestern University Press published them as Improvisation for the Theater. Meanwhile the Compass broke up, and in December 1959 Sills, with Bernard Sahlins and Howard Alk, opened a small cabaret theater on Chicago's North Side called The Second City, built on Spolin's games. It is still running.

This lesson is a procedure for doing what the Compass Players did: making a scene from nothing, in front of people, with a partner you cannot predict. You learn the handful of terms that describe what happens in a good improvised scene, walk through a scene built step by step, watch the same scene die when one input changes, and play games that build the skills alone and with a partner.

The vocabulary: offer, accept, block

Keith Johnstone, the British teacher whose book Impro (1979) you will meet properly in the next lesson, defined the basic unit simply: "I call anything that an actor does an 'offer'." A line is an offer. So is a gesture, a mimed object, a tone of voice, even a yawn. Each offer, Johnstone wrote, can either be accepted or blocked.

• Accepting means treating your partner's offer as true in the world of the scene. If they hand you an invisible baby, you are holding a baby.
• Blocking means refusing it: "That's not a baby, it's a sandwich." A block cancels what your partner built, and the scene has to start again.
• Adding means contributing something new on top of what you accepted: "She has your eyes. And she just bit me."

Put accepting and adding together and you have the rule improvisers now call yes, and. Its exact origin is hazy. The playwright and historian Jeffery Sweet, as reported by University of Chicago News, describes it as a synthesis of one of Spolin's core ideas, never deny someone's reality, and suspects the phrase itself came from Compass members such as Del Close, Elaine May and Mike Nichols. Sweet recalls their rooming-house "Kitchen Rules," including "Don't deny a reality which is established" and "Make the active rather than the passive choice."

Remember: Everything you do is an offer. Accept your partner's offers as true, then add something of your own. A block throws away the scene your partner was building.

The procedure, step by step

Spolin gave her games a simple structure. In the first edition of Improvisation for the Theater, she writes that the structure of a scene is the Where, Who and What, plus a point of concentration: a problem the players focus on solving. Turn that into a procedure and you get six steps.

1. Start with a clear offer that answers at least one of where, who and what. "Dad, did you eat the last of the birthday cake?" tells your partner who you both are, roughly where you are and what is going on.
2. Accept. Whatever your partner establishes is now true: the relationship, the place, the objects.
3. Add one thing. A fact, a feeling, a want. One is enough. Five new ideas in one line bury your partner.
4. Endow. Endowment means giving your partner, an object or the place a quality through how you treat it or what you say about it. "Careful, that's Grandma's recipe card" endows a mimed card with value; backing away from your partner endows them with menace.
5. Make the active choice. Do something rather than discuss doing it. Characters who only talk about a problem are stuck; characters who act on it move the scene.
6. Let something change. A scene is a story about a change: a relationship shifts, a secret comes out, a plan is made. When something has changed, you can end.

A scene from nothing: transcript one

Here is a short scene, written for this course, showing the steps at work. Two players, A and B, begin with nothing but an empty space. Read it aloud with someone if you can, then look at the notes beside each line.

Notice what neither player did. Nobody planned a joke or tried to be clever. Each line accepted everything before it and added one thing, and the cake turned out to be about the grandmother. That is how improvised scenes usually find their subject: by accumulation, not by invention.

Change one input: transcript two

Now run the same opening with one change. Player B blocks.

The scene is dead in four lines, and it is worth seeing exactly why. B's first line threw away three facts at once, and B's second line refused the only thing A could think of to rebuild. Blocking feels safe to the blocker, who keeps control, but it leaves both players with nothing.

Here is the rescue. A cannot undo the block, but A can treat it as an offer. "I'm the plumber" is, after all, a fact about the scene. So A accepts it and adds: "Then why are you wearing my dad's bathrobe?" Suddenly there is a mystery, a stranger in the kitchen and a missing cake, and B has something to play. The principle is the same one as before, applied to a block: yes, and.

In short: A block kills a scene by refusing what has been built. If your partner blocks, do not argue; accept the block as a new offer and add to it.

Games to build the skills

Improvisation is learned by playing, and most of these games work in a living room. Play each for five minutes.

The "yes, but" round is the most revealing. The party never gets planned: every idea is half-accepted and then knocked down. In the "yes, and" round, the party usually becomes absurd within two minutes, and both players are laughing, because both are building.

Why this matters: These games train the habits a scene needs, accepting, adding, endowing and following, until you do them without deciding to.

Common misconceptions

• Improv means being funny. The Compass began improvising because it needed plays about ordinary life. Laughter often comes from scenes that accept and build honestly, as in the grandmother's recipe card, but it is a side effect, not the goal.
• Yes, and means your character must agree with everything. Characters can argue, refuse and fight. What you accept is the reality of the scene: who these people are, where they are and what has happened. "I'm not giving you the car keys" accepts that there are keys, a car and a relationship.
• Good improvisers plan clever lines. A planned line ignores what your partner just did. The scene in transcript one worked because every line answered the one before it.
• When your partner blocks, the scene is over. A block is still an offer. Accept it and add, as A did with the plumber.
• Improvisation is only for comedians. Spolin's games grew from Neva Boyd's work with games and creative expression, and they are used to train actors in scripted theater because they build listening and responsiveness.

Putting it together

• Modern improvisation runs from Neva Boyd at Hull House to Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater (1963), the Compass Players (1955) and The Second City (1959).
• Everything an actor does is an offer. Accept it as true, then add one thing: yes, and.
• Establish where, who and what early; endow your partner, objects and the place; make the active choice; let something change.
• Blocking refuses what has been built and stalls the scene. If you are blocked, accept the block as a new offer.
• Practice alone with yes-and stories, object transformations and Where; with a partner, play Mirror, yes-but then yes-and, and Gift.

Sources

1. Lee, T. (n.d.). Improv, explained. University of Chicago News. University of Chicago.
2. Northwestern University Press. (n.d.). Improvisation for the theater: A handbook of teaching and directing techniques (3rd ed., V. Spolin; book page and author note). Northwestern University Press.
3. The Second City. (n.d.). History. The Second City.
4. Spolin, V. (1963). Improvisation for the theater: A handbook of teaching and directing techniques. Northwestern University Press. (3rd ed., 1999.)
5. Johnstone, K. (1979). Impro: Improvisation and the theatre. Theatre Arts Books.

Florence, 13 May 1589

On 13 May 1589, during the celebrations in Florence for the wedding of Ferdinand de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine, an actress named Isabella Andreini, born in 1562, went mad on purpose. Her piece was called La Pazzia d'Isabella, the Madness of Isabella. According to the University of Chicago's Italian Women Writers project, it required her to feign madness, to play the parts of all the comedians in her troupe, male and female, and to speak in several languages. A spectator named Giuseppe Pavoni wrote in his diary that as long as the world lasted, her eloquence would be praised.

Think about what that performance assumed. Andreini could switch from one comedian to the next in front of a court audience because every person in the room knew those characters already: the old Venetian merchant, the pompous doctor, the hungry servant, the boasting soldier. She was playing a set of types that Italian companies had been building for half a century. This lesson follows that tradition, the commedia dell'arte, from a contract signed in Padua to the book that printed its scenarios, and picks up the actor's tools it left behind: stock characters, masks, lazzi and the play of status.

A contract in Padua

The theatre historian Allardyce Nicoll, in The World of Harlequin (1963), points to a contract among eight actors drawn up at Padua on 25 February 1545. Led by a man called Ser Maphio, known as Zanini, they set out before a notary the rules by which their company would work. It is the earliest known contract of its kind, and it marks what made the commedia new. These were professionals: actors who earned their living by playing. The name says so. University of Chicago News glosses commedia dell'arte as the "comedy of professional artists," and arte here carries the sense of a trade or guild.

What did such companies perform? Not written plays, mostly. They worked from a scenario, a plot outline of the action scene by scene, and improvised the dialogue around it. Each actor specialized in one character for years, sometimes for life, and carried a store of speeches, jokes and routines for that character that could be fitted into any plot.

The Gelosi and Isabella Andreini

By the 1570s the best companies were touring beyond Italy, and Duchartre calls the Gelosi the most famous of them all. Isabella Canali, born in Padua in 1562, joined it in Bologna in 1576, at fourteen, to play the prima donna innamorata, the leading young woman in love. The troupe included Flaminio Scala, who later became its director. After performing in France for King Henry III, she married a fellow member of the company, Francesco Andreini, in 1578. Francesco later became famous as Captain Spavento, a cowardly braggart, and went on to direct the Gelosi himself.

Isabella Andreini was also a writer. Her pastoral play La Mirtilla appeared in 1588, a volume of poems followed in 1601, and she was one of the few women of the Italian Renaissance admitted to a literary academy, the Accademia degli Intenti of Pavia. In 1603-4 she toured France for the third time, performing for Henry IV at Fontainebleau and Paris. On the journey home she miscarried and died in Lyon. Her death was marked with a public funeral and a commemorative medal.

In short: The commedia dell'arte was professional, improvised theatre built from scenarios and long-practiced characters. Its first known company contract dates from Padua in 1545, and its most famous actress, Isabella Andreini, was also a published writer.

Masks and the stock characters

The commedia's characters were regional types, and Pierre Louis Duchartre's history The Italian Comedy (English translation, 1929) sums up where they came from: Bologna, with its old university, contributed the Doctor, as foolish as he was pedantic; Venice, the city of merchants and adventurers, produced Pantalone and the Captain; and Bergamo produced the servants Arlecchino and Brighella. The masks were made of thin leather lined with linen. The lovers did not wear them: Duchartre notes that their chief asset was their good looks, so they "played without a mask," and so did the actresses.

A mask changes how an actor works, and Duchartre makes the point sharply: a masked actor always has the same leather face and cannot show the audience a feeling through facial expression. Everything has to go into the body. He quotes the English actor David Garrick admiring one masked Harlequin: "look at the character and expression in Carlino's back!" This is Lesson 2's work on the body taken to its limit, and it is why masked commedia acting is so physical.

Lazzi and the scenario

The commedia's comic routines were called lazzi (singular lazzo). Duchartre explains that the word means turn, trick or Italian business, and that an actor would use one "whenever a scene began to drag." His examples: Harlequin pretending to throw cherry stones in Scapin's face, or catching a fly in mid-air and munching it "with great gusto." Lazzi were practiced and polished; they were the reliable material an improviser carried in his pocket.

The scenarios that held it all together survive mainly through one book. In 1611, in Venice, Flaminio Scala published Il Teatro delle favole rappresentative, fifty scenarios, forty of them comedies, from the repertory of his company. As Duchartre describes them, every comedy is in three acts and built on a love intrigue, and the scenarios are not in dialogue: an eighteenth-century actor-historian, Luigi Riccoboni, observed that they explain only what the scene is about and what the actor is to do. Scala also listed the properties each play needed at the start of each scenario. In performance, a scenario was posted backstage, where the actors could check what came next.

The point: A scenario tells the actors what happens and what each character does; the actors supply the words and the lazzi. Stock characters make that possible, because everyone knows what Pantalone wants before he opens his mouth.

Status: the engine under the masks

Why are master-and-servant scenes so durable? Keith Johnstone, the British director and teacher whose Impro (1979) became a standard text for improvisers, offers an answer in the idea of status. Johnstone's key move is to separate status from social rank: "Status is a confusing term unless it's understood as something one does." A king can play low and a servant can play high, moment by moment, and the audience follows every shift.

The commedia runs on exactly that gap. Pantalone is rich and powerful, the highest in rank onstage, yet he spends every scenario being fooled, robbed and frightened, and so playing lower and lower. Arlecchino is the lowest in rank and often the one in control. The Captain claims the highest status of anyone and collapses at the first threat. The comedy is the distance between the status a character claims and the status he actually plays.

You can feel status shift in your own body. Try each pair with the line "Your dinner is ready, sir," and notice which version seems higher:

• Head completely still while you speak, or small movements of the head as you talk.
• Holding eye contact steadily, or glancing away and back.
• A complete sentence with no hesitation, or an "um" before you begin.
• Taking up space, feet apart and arms easy, or shrinking, feet together and hands touching your face.
• Moving slowly, or hurrying.

Now play a servant who is low in rank but plays high: still, unhurried, eyes steady, delivering the line to a master who fidgets. Then play the same servant playing low to a master who is calm. The words have not changed. The scene has.

Why this matters: Status is behavior, not rank. Comedy, and drama too, lives in the gap between the status a character holds and the status the character plays.

The commedia in Shakespeare and Moliere

English audiences knew the Italian types. In The Taming of the Shrew, the stage direction that brings on Bianca's suitors calls one of them "Gremio, a pantaloon." In As You Like It, Jaques's speech on the seven ages of man reaches old age with the same figure: "The sixth age shifts / Into the lean and slippered pantaloon, / With spectacles on nose and pouch on side." Shakespeare could name the type and trust his audience to see it.

In France the connection was closer still. Duchartre records that from 1660 the Italian company played regularly in Paris, sharing the Palais-Royal theatre with Moliere's company on alternate days, and that Moliere held the Italian actor known as Scaramouche "in great esteem for his natural acting" and used him as a model in training his own actors. Duchartre concludes that Moliere took from the commedia plots, scenes, stage business and characters. You can see it in Moliere's The Impostures of Scapin (1671), whose scheming servant Scapin is a commedia zanni in all but name, and in his misers and pompous doctors, whom you will meet in Lesson 9.

A scenario to play

Here is a short scenario in Scala's manner, written for this course. It gives the action and nothing else; you supply the words.

The Strongbox. A comedy in three acts.

Persons: Pantalone, a Venetian merchant; Isabella, his daughter; Flavio, in love with Isabella; the Doctor, of Bologna; Arlecchino, Flavio's servant; Franceschina, Isabella's maid; Captain Spavento.

Properties: a strongbox and its key; a hat; a letter; a plate of macaroni; a chair.

Act 1. Pantalone, alone, counts his gold into the strongbox, keeps losing count, and hides the key in his hat. The Doctor arrives and asks for Isabella's hand, speaking learned nonsense; Pantalone agrees, because the Doctor will take her without a dowry. Isabella, overhearing, faints into Franceschina's arms and swears she will marry Flavio or no one.

Act 2. Flavio sends Arlecchino with a love letter for Isabella. Arlecchino, starving, is distracted by a fly: the lazzo of the fly. He drops the letter. The Captain finds it, announces that Isabella loves him, and challenges the world to fight; when Arlecchino says "Boo," he runs. Franceschina and Arlecchino plot to get the key from Pantalone's hat.

Act 3. Arlecchino, disguised as a hat-seller, talks Pantalone into trying on new hats until the key changes hands: the lazzo of the hats. The strongbox is opened before everyone, and it holds not gold but the Doctor's unpaid bills, which Pantalone has bought up. The Doctor flees. Pantalone, outwitted, gives Isabella to Flavio. Arlecchino finally eats the macaroni.

To play it alone, do what Isabella Andreini did in her Pazzia: play every character yourself, switching instantly. Give each a clear physical signature from Lessons 2 and 3: Pantalone's bent back and grabbing hands, the Doctor's chin raised and slow speech, Arlecchino's quick, light flicks and dabs, the Captain's chest-led strut. Play the fly lazzo in full: track the fly with your eyes, lunge, miss, lunge, catch it, check your closed hand, and eat it with relish. With a partner, split the characters between you and improvise the dialogue scene by scene.

Common misconceptions

• The commedia was amateur street clowning. Its defining feature was professionalism: companies under contract, like the Padua troupe of 1545, with specialists who played one character for years and performed for courts across Europe.
• Improvised means made up from nothing. Commedia actors worked from a written scenario and a store of rehearsed speeches and lazzi. The improvisation happened inside a structure everyone knew.
• Everyone wore a mask. The old men, the Captain and the servants wore character masks, but the lovers and the actresses did not; Duchartre notes that the women wore at most a little black velvet mask to protect their complexions.
• High status means being rich or powerful. Johnstone separates status from rank. Pantalone holds the highest rank onstage and is constantly made to play low.
• The commedia died out with the Renaissance. Its types passed into Shakespeare, Moliere and much later comedy; the improvised scenario lives on in the companies you met in Lesson 4.

Where this leaves us

• The earliest known company contract dates from Padua, 25 February 1545; the commedia was a professional theatre of scenarios, specialists and improvised dialogue.
• Isabella Andreini, the Gelosi's leading lady from 1576, was an actress of European fame and a published writer; Flaminio Scala printed fifty scenarios in 1611.
• Stock types came from regions: Pantalone and the Captain from Venice, the Doctor from Bologna, Arlecchino and Brighella from Bergamo. The old men and servants wore leather masks; the lovers and the women did not.
• Lazzi were rehearsed comic routines used when a scene began to drag.
• Status, in Johnstone's sense, is something you do, and comedy lives in the gap between the status a character holds and the status it plays.
• Shakespeare's pantaloons and Moliere's servants, misers and doctors carry the commedia forward.

Sources

1. University of Chicago Library. (n.d.). Andreini, Isabella (1562-1604). Italian Women Writers. University of Chicago Library.
2. Duchartre, P. L. (1929). The Italian comedy (R. T. Weaver, Trans.). George G. Harrap. Internet Archive.
3. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). As you like it (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 2, scene 7). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.
4. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). The taming of the shrew (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 1, scene 1). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.
5. Lee, T. (n.d.). Improv, explained. University of Chicago News. University of Chicago.
6. Nicoll, A. (1963). The world of Harlequin: A critical study of the commedia dell'arte. Cambridge University Press.
7. Johnstone, K. (1979). Impro: Improvisation and the theatre. Theatre Arts Books.

A kitchen on a wharf

In the summer of 1916, Susan Glaspell sat alone on a backless wooden bench on a fishing wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and stared at a bare little stage. Her husband, George Cram Cook, had just announced a new play by her for the next bill of their company, the Provincetown Players, and she had not written one. In her memoir The Road to the Temple (1927) she describes what happened next: "After a time the stage became a kitchen, a kitchen there all by itself. I saw just where the stove was, the table, and the steps going upstairs. Then the door at the back opened, and people all bundled up came in." She remembered something else too: "When I was a newspaper reporter out in Iowa, I was sent down-state to do a murder trial, and I never forgot going into the kitchen of a woman locked up in town."

The play was Trifles. The printed text records that it was first performed by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre on 8 August 1916, and that Glaspell herself played Mrs. Hale. The case she remembered was real: as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News, she had covered the prosecution of Margaret Hossack, an Iowa farm wife charged with killing her husband with an ax as he slept.

The actor's problem: the story has already happened

Here is what makes Trifles hard to act, and why it is the right play to learn this skill on. John Wright is dead before the play begins. His wife, Minnie, accused of strangling him, never appears; she is in jail in town. Almost everything that matters happened before the curtain rose, in rooms and years the audience never sees. Onstage, five people stand in a cold kitchen and talk. If you play only the words, the scene is thin. If you know what the characters know, every line is loaded.

Stanislavski's name for that knowledge, from Lesson 3, is the given circumstances: the facts of the story, its time and place, the conditions of the characters' lives. The method for finding them is detective work. You read the script as evidence, write down only what it actually establishes, and keep track of where each fact came from. Work through it in four steps, then sort what you find.

Step one: who

Start with the people, and with what the text, not your imagination, says about each.

Notice the third column. Every entry has an address in the script, and several of the most important facts about the Wrights come from one witness, Mrs. Hale. Hold that thought.

Step two: where and when

The opening stage direction gives the place exactly: "The kitchen in the now abandoned farmhouse of John Wright, a gloomy kitchen, and left without having been put in order." The lines fill in more. The farm is remote, "down in a hollow and you don't see the road," with no telephone. The County Attorney has come back from Omaha, and he speaks of other farmhouses in the county, so this is the rural Midwest. The house is cold enough that the fruit jars froze and burst: the Sheriff says it "dropped below zero last night."

The time is just as precise. Hale found Mrs. Wright "yesterday morning," sitting in her rocker pleating her apron. Today is the morning after, and the men have come to search. The world is the early twentieth century: horses are a "team," a telephone is a shared party line, and a sheriff's wife, the County Attorney jokes, is "married to the law." Every one of these facts changes how a body moves in the room. Cold makes people huddle at the stove and keep their coats on; a house where a man was killed upstairs makes the women stand "close together near the door."

Step three: what happened before

Now build the backstory as a timeline, using only the evidence the play gives:

The play never says who killed the bird. The women draw a conclusion; the text does not state it. That difference is the subject of the next step.

The upshot: Given circumstances are the who, where, when and what-happened-before of a scene, and each one should be traceable to a line or a stage direction. If you cannot point to it, it is not a given.

Facts, claims and choices

A detective separates what is proven from what someone says. An actor needs three columns, not two, because some things are neither proven nor claimed: they are left open for the production to decide.

The claims column is where the play does its work. Hale's line about trifles is a fact about Hale, not about women, and the play spends the rest of its length proving him wrong. The Sheriff's "Nothing here but kitchen things" is the most mistaken sentence in the script. And Mrs. Hale's portrait of John Wright is evidence from someone who admits she stayed away, which an actor playing her can use: she is partly accusing herself. The choices column is yours, and every production fills it differently. What matters is that you know which column you are in.

What matters here: Facts are fixed, claims tell you about the person making them, and choices are the actor's to make. Mixing them up leads either to ignoring the text or to treating a character's opinion as the truth.

The kitchen as evidence

The men search the bedroom and the barn for a motive. The women find it in the kitchen, among the objects the men call trifles, and an actor has to know each object as well as they do, because each one is a cue for behavior:

• The rocker. Mrs. Wright sat in it when Hale arrived. When Mrs. Hale nearly sits in it, she sees "what chair it is," and steps back; the empty chair rocks. That is a physical action the audience will remember.
• The half-wiped table and the bread outside its box. Work stopped in the middle. Mrs. Hale "makes a move as if to finish work," then stops herself.
• The jars of cherries. Minnie worried in jail that the cold would break them. Only one is left whole.
• The quilt. Log cabin pattern, neatly sewn, except one block where the stitching "looks as if she didn't know what she was about." Mrs. Hale pulls the bad stitches out and resews them: she is changing evidence.
• The birdcage. The door is broken, "one hinge is pulled apart."
• The pretty box. Inside, wrapped in silk, the canary with its neck wrung.

Read in order, the objects tell the story the County Attorney wanted: a motive, "something to show anger, or sudden feeling." The joke of the title, and its tragedy, is that the evidence was in the room the whole time.

Reading the quilt passage aloud

Here is the moment the women first notice something wrong, in the 1920 printed text. (The dashes of the original are shown here as ellipses.)

MRS. HALE: [Examining another block.] Mrs. Peters, look at this one. Here, this is the one she was working on, and look at the sewing! All the rest of it has been so nice and even. And look at this! It's all over the place! Why, it looks as if she didn't know what she was about!

[After she has said this they look at each other, then start to glance back at the door. After an instant Mrs. Hale has pulled at a knot and ripped the sewing.]

MRS. PETERS: Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?

MRS. HALE: [Mildly.] Just pulling out a stitch or two that's not sewed very good. [Threading a needle.] Bad sewing always made me fidgety.

MRS. PETERS: [Nervously.] I don't think we ought to touch things.

MRS. HALE: I'll just finish up this end. [Suddenly stopping and leaning forward.] Mrs. Peters?

MRS. PETERS: Yes, Mrs. Hale?

MRS. HALE: What do you suppose she was so nervous about?

MRS. PETERS: Oh ... I don't know. I don't know as she was nervous. I sometimes sew awful queer when I'm just tired.

Read it aloud once with no preparation. Then read it again with the circumstances in your body. It is below zero outside, and the room is barely warm. The men have just gone out to the barn; they could come back through that door at any moment, and they have already laughed at you once, over this same quilt. Mrs. Hale's "Mildly" is a cover: she has just destroyed evidence and is pretending it is fussiness. Mrs. Peters, the sheriff's wife, has seen her do it. "I sometimes sew awful queer when I'm just tired" is Mrs. Peters offering an innocent explanation, to Mrs. Hale and perhaps to herself.

Notice what the second reading changes. The glances at the door now have a cause. The pause before "Mrs. Peters?" fills up. And the stage direction "they look at each other, then start to glance back at the door" stops being an instruction and becomes something you would do anyway.

Common misconceptions

• The given circumstances are the setting description at the top. The opening stage direction is only the start. Time, backstory and relationships are scattered through the dialogue, and the most important ones in Trifles come late.
• Whatever a character says is true. Lines are claims. Hale's remark about trifles and the Sheriff's "Nothing here but kitchen things" tell you about the men who say them, and the play proves both wrong.
• You should invent a rich backstory first. Invention comes after evidence. A backstory that contradicts the text, such as a Minnie who never liked singing, makes the scene harder to play, not easier.
• The actors must decide whether Minnie is guilty. The play never shows the killing. What the actors must decide is what their characters believe at each moment, which changes as the evidence appears.
• Objects are just set dressing. In Trifles the objects are the plot. Each one is a cue for an action, from stepping back from the rocker to pulling out the bad stitches.

What you now know

• Glaspell wrote Trifles for the Provincetown Players in 1916, imagining a kitchen on the bare wharf stage and drawing on an Iowa murder trial she covered as a reporter; she played Mrs. Hale herself.
• Given circumstances answer who, where, when and what happened before, and each should be traced to the text.
• Sort a script into facts, claims and choices. Claims reveal the speaker; choices belong to the actor and production.
• Objects in a setting are evidence and cues for action.
• The same passage read with its circumstances in your body changes its pauses, glances and subtext without changing a word.

Sources

1. Glaspell, S. (1920). Trifles. In Plays (pp. 1-30). Small, Maynard. Project Gutenberg.
2. Glaspell, S. (1927). The road to the temple (pp. 255-256). Frederick A. Stokes. Internet Archive.
3. History Matters: Celebrating Women's Plays of the Past. (n.d.). Trifles. History Matters.
4. Ben-Zvi, L. (Ed.). (1995). Susan Glaspell: Essays on her theater and fiction. University of Michigan Press.
5. Cody, G. H., and Sprinchorn, E. (Eds.). (2007). The Columbia encyclopedia of modern drama (entry on Susan Glaspell). Columbia University Press.

"You shall keep me company"

At the end of their first scene together in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), the moneylender Nils Krogstad bows and leaves Nora Helmer with a sentence that has been chilling audiences ever since. In William Archer's translation: "if I am flung into the gutter a second time, you shall keep me company." Almost every actor who reads the scene for the first time decides the same thing. Krogstad is the villain, so he is angry and menacing. Nora has a guilty secret, so she is frightened. Play those two feelings, the reasoning goes, and the scene will work.

It does not. Two actors who rehearse it that way usually find the scene going flat within a minute: a scowl facing a trembling lip for ten pages, with nothing changing between them. This lesson debugs that approach. It traces exactly where playing the feeling fails, replaces it with the tools that work, objective, obstacle, tactics, beats and stakes, and then scores the whole scene beat by beat.

The wrong approach, played out

Start with the text, because the first failure is simple: the feelings are wrong. Look at what Nora actually does in the opening minutes. When Krogstad asks whether Mrs. Linden is to have a place at the Bank, Nora answers: "How dare you catechise me in this way, Mr. Krogstad, you, a subordinate of my husband's?" Then she brags: "You see one has a wee bit of influence, after all." That is not a frightened woman. She is haughty, even enjoying herself, because she thinks Krogstad has come about a loan payment that is not yet due.

Krogstad's lines refuse the villain label just as firmly. Ibsen's stage direction has him change course, "Taking another tone," and ask: "Mrs. Helmer, will you have the kindness to employ your influence on my behalf?" He explains himself at length: "My sons are growing up; for their sake I must try to recover my character as well as I can." He is begging before he threatens. An actor who plays menace from the first line has nowhere to go when the begging comes, and the audience never sees why a man would do something this desperate.

The second failure is deeper. A feeling is not something you can do to another person. You can frighten your partner, but you cannot do "frightened" to them. If Nora's only task is to be afraid, her attention goes inward, to her own face and voice, and the result is the indicating you met in Lesson 3: a picture of fear, aimed at the audience. Her partner gets nothing to push against.

Stanislavski saw the same failure in his training book, An Actor Prepares. In the chapter on units and objectives, the director Tortsov asks two students to play objectives named by nouns, "a mother's love" and "the fanatic's duty." One puts on an angry expression, stiffens his spine and stamps across the floor; the other tries to express tenderness in general. Tortsov's verdict is that the nouns made them play a picture of a feeling, and his rule is short: the objective "must always be a verb."

So what?: Playing a feeling fails twice. It is usually the wrong feeling, because characters change tactics constantly, and it gives the actor nothing to do to the partner, so attention turns inward and the acting becomes a display.

The fix, part one: objective and obstacle

Replace the feeling with a want. A character's objective is what the character wants from the other person in the scene, phrased as something to make them do. It should be specific, and it should be possible to tell whether it has been achieved.

The obstacle is whatever stands in the way: the other person's resistance, a circumstance, sometimes the character's own fear. Without an obstacle there is no scene; Krogstad would ask and Nora would agree. The stakes are what is lost if the objective fails. Krogstad states his plainly: "If need be, I shall fight as though for my life to keep my little place in the Bank." High stakes are why characters keep changing tactics instead of giving up.

The fix, part two: tactics as action verbs

A tactic is the way a character tries to get what they want at a given moment, and it is best named by an action verb: a transitive verb, something you do to someone. Two tests decide whether a verb is playable. Can you do it to your partner? And could your partner tell whether it worked?

Feelings do not disappear when you play actions. They arrive on their own, as the result of trying something and having it fail. Nora pleading and being refused will produce something like fear without the actor deciding to show it.

Beats: scoring the scene

Stanislavski's Tortsov compares a play to a roast turkey: you cannot swallow it in one mouthful, so you carve it into pieces. The pieces of a scene are called beats (Hapgood's translation calls them units). A beat runs for as long as a character pursues one tactic, or the subject stays the same. When a tactic fails, or new information lands, a new beat begins. Here is the Nora-Krogstad scene scored, with the line that opens each beat in Archer's translation.

Read down the columns and the scene's shape appears. Krogstad works through tactic after tactic, from probing to pleading to threatening to trapping, and he does not reach his darkest one until his gentler ones have failed. Nora starts the scene on top, boasting, and loses ground beat by beat until she is reduced to arguing with the law itself. That journey is what the feeling-based version erased.

Key idea: Score a scene by marking where each beat begins and giving each character one action verb per beat. A new beat starts when a tactic fails or new information lands.

One line, debugged: the admission

Test the method on the hardest moment in the scene. Krogstad has shown that Nora's father, who died on 29 September, apparently signed the bond on 2 October. The feeling approach says Nora collapses: tears, a broken voice, shame. Now read Ibsen's stage direction: "After a short silence, throws her head back and looks defiantly at him." Then: "No, it was not. I wrote father's name."

The action is to defy. She is not confessing to a judge; she is daring Krogstad to make something of it, because she believes, wrongly, that she has done nothing a reasonable person would punish: "You will soon get your money." Played as defiance, the line sets up everything that follows, including her argument that the law "must be a very bad law," and it makes the fear arrive later and harder, when Krogstad tells her she "will be condemned according to law." Played as collapse, the line spends the fear too early and contradicts the text.

Even Nora's tearful line earlier, "The secret that is my joy and my pride," marked "With tears in her voice," has an action underneath it: she is trying to shame Krogstad out of telling. Tears can be the result of an action. They are rarely the action itself.

Common misconceptions

• You have to feel the emotion to play the scene. Feelings cannot be ordered up on cue, as Stanislavski's Tortsov says. Pursue an objective with real tactics, and whatever feeling the moment produces will be truer than one you manufactured.
• A villain should be played as a villain. Krogstad pleads, confesses and explains himself for his sons' sake before he threatens. An actor who plays only menace loses the man and makes the threat less frightening.
• The objective is whatever the character says they want. Characters lie and evade. Nora says she has no influence; she has just bragged that she has. Look at what a character is trying to make the other person do.
• A beat is a pause. In many scripts "beat" marks a short pause. In scene study, a beat is a unit of the scene with one tactic or subject. The two meanings are different; know which one a director means.
• Choosing verbs makes acting mechanical. The verbs are for rehearsal. Once they are in your body, you stop thinking about them and simply try, moment by moment, to change your partner.

Summing up

• Playing a feeling usually picks the wrong feeling and gives the actor nothing to do to the partner; the result is indicating.
• Objective: what you want the other person to do. Obstacle: what stands in the way. Stakes: what you lose if you fail.
• Tactics are action verbs you can do to someone, and your partner could tell whether they worked.
• Beats divide a scene into units of one tactic or subject; a new beat begins when a tactic fails or news lands.
• In the Act 1 scene, Krogstad moves from probing to pleading to threatening to trapping, and Nora from boasting to denying to defying to arguing with the law.
• Stage directions often name the action for you: "looks defiantly at him" means to defy, not to collapse.

Sources

1. Ibsen, H. (1907). A doll's house (W. Archer, Trans.). In The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Vol. 7, Act 1). William Heinemann. (Original work published 1879). Project Gutenberg.
2. Kallenbach, U. (n.d.). Et Dukkehjem. In Lex [Danish national encyclopedia]. Lex.dk.
3. Stanislavski, C. (1937). An actor prepares (E. R. Hapgood, Trans.; Chapter 7, Units and objectives). Geoffrey Bles. (First published 1936, New York: Theatre Arts.)

A ring on the ground

Early in Act 2 of Twelfth Night, the steward Malvolio catches up with a young man called Cesario and throws a ring at his feet. "If it be worth stooping for, there it lies in your eye," he says, and leaves. Cesario is really Viola, a shipwrecked young woman disguised as a man to serve Duke Orsino, and she has just been sent to woo the Countess Olivia on Orsino's behalf. She has given Olivia no ring. Alone, she picks it up and starts to work out what it means.

Look at how the Folger edition prints the two halves of the scene. Malvolio's speeches, and Viola's replies to him, run to the right-hand margin like a paragraph: that is prose. The moment she is alone, the lines change shape. Each begins with a capital letter and stops short of the margin: "I left no ring with her. What means this lady?" That is verse, and it carries instructions an actor can read. This lesson is a procedure for reading them: six steps, worked end to end on Viola's speech, then tested on a second passage where the meter changes how the scene is played.

Step 1: prose or verse?

Check the page first. In a modern edition such as the Folger's, verse lines begin with capitals and break before the margin; prose runs on. Shakespeare moves between the two constantly, and the switch is information. In this scene, the practical business of returning a ring is done in prose; the private discovery is in verse. The switch is not simply about social rank, either. Hamlet, a prince, gives his long advice to the players in prose, because it is practical instruction, not a heightened private moment.

Step 2: count the syllables

Most of Shakespeare's verse is iambic pentameter. An iamb is a pair of syllables, unstressed then stressed: da-DUM. Pentameter means five of them in a line. So a regular line has ten syllables, with the stress on the even-numbered ones. When it does not rhyme, it is called blank verse.

Count Viola's first line on your fingers: I / left / no / ring / with / her. / What / means / this / la / dy. Eleven. Before you decide the line is broken, go to the next step.

Step 3: mark the stresses

Say the line naturally and tap the table on the syllables you stress. Capitals mark the stresses here:

i LEFT no RING with HER. what MEANS this LA-dy?

Five stresses on the even syllables, two, four, six, eight and ten, and then one extra, unstressed syllable: the "-dy" of "lady." The acting teacher Kurt Daw, in a scansion guide written for beginners at the College of the Holy Cross, describes this as a variation placed at the end of lines: an extra unstressed syllable that lengthens the line to eleven and creates "a softened impact." Its traditional name is a feminine ending. It is not an error. A line that ends on a soft syllable sounds unfinished, which suits a woman asking a question she cannot yet answer.

Daw's other common variation comes at the start of a line: the first two syllables reversed, DUM-da, for "a surprising and vigorous beginning." Viola's second line has it, and a feminine ending too:

FOR-tune for-BID my OUT-side HAVE not CHARMED her!

The inversion, often called a trochaic inversion, throws the weight onto "Fortune," the first word of a sudden fear. Daw's advice is that you rarely have to force any of this. Read the line naturally, and the variations are already in it.

Worth holding on to: Count to ten, mark the five stresses, and treat departures as clues. An extra soft syllable at the end, or a stressed first syllable, is Shakespeare varying the rhythm on purpose.

Step 4: read the irregular lines

Some lines will not count to ten or eleven, and they repay attention.

• Elisions. The last line of the speech prints "t' untie," with an apostrophe where a vowel has gone. The apostrophe tells you to run "to untie" together into two syllables so the line keeps its ten: "it IS too HARD a KNOT for ME t' un-TIE."
• Short lines. "That methought her eyes had lost her tongue" has only nine syllables in the Folger text. Something is missing, and the missing beat is a choice. Some actors stress "That" and leave a tiny gap; others lean on "methought," as though Viola has to search for the next words. Either way, the line stumbles at the moment she remembers Olivia stumbling.
• Rhyming couplets. The speech ends with two rhyming lines, "not I" and "t' untie," and it has an earlier pair as well, "not we" and "such we be." A couplet often closes a thought or a scene; here, it is the sound of Viola giving up and handing the problem to Time.

Step 5: find the antitheses and the operative words

Antithesis is the setting of opposites against each other, and Shakespeare's characters think in it. Viola's speech is built on it:

The words that carry the opposition are the operative words, the ones the sense depends on: man and woman, master, I and she, Time and I. Point them, with a little more weight or a slight lift, and the audience follows a complicated situation on first hearing. Hit every word equally and the triangle of Orsino, Viola and Olivia turns to mush.

Step 6: breathe at the line end, and carry the thought

Two habits complete the procedure. First, take your breath at the end of a line, not in the middle, and support the line through to its last word, as in Lesson 1. The last word of a verse line is often important, and the end of the line is where untrained speakers let their voice drop. Second, notice where sentences actually end. Some thoughts run across several lines; "She made good view of me, indeed so much / That methought her eyes had lost her tongue, / For she did speak in starts distractedly" is one sentence. Honor the line ending with the slightest lift, but do not stop dead: keep the thought moving until the full stop.

Key idea: Breathe at line endings, support each line to its last word, and let the sentence, not the line, decide where the thought ends.

The ring speech, worked end to end

Put the six steps together and the speech turns out to have a shape you can act. It moves through six beats, each a new step in Viola's reasoning:

Speak it standing, with a real ring, or a hair tie, in your hand. Pick it up on the first line, as the Folger stage direction says. Let each beat be a new discovery, and notice how much of the acting the verse has already done: the soft endings on the questions, the vigor of the inverted lines, the click of the couplets.

Change the passage: a shared line in Macbeth

Now see the meter change how a scene is played. In Macbeth, Act 2, scene 2, Macbeth comes back from killing King Duncan with the daggers still in his hands. Lady Macbeth asks:

LADY MACBETH: Did not you speak?

MACBETH: When?

LADY MACBETH: Now.

MACBETH: As I descended?

LADY MACBETH: Ay.

On the page it looks like five separate lines. The Folger edition shows otherwise: the first four speeches are set out as one line of verse stepped across the page, a shared line. Count it: did / not / you / speak / when / now / as / I / de / scend / ed. Eleven syllables, with a feminine ending. Four speeches make one pentameter line.

That changes the scene. An actor who sees five short lines tends to leave a pause after each one, building slow suspense. An actor who sees one shared line hears an instruction in it: there is no room for pauses. Each speaker comes in on the other's cue, and the exchange becomes what it is, two terrified people whispering in the dark, finishing each other's line. Try it both ways with a partner, or alone, speaking both parts. Most people find the second version much more frightening, and much closer to what the verse is asking for.

The point: When one line of verse is split among speakers, the meter suggests that the cues are picked up instantly. Reading the lineation can change a scene's pace more than any decision about feeling.

Common misconceptions

• Iambic pentameter should be spoken with a heavy da-DUM beat. Tapping out the beat is for finding the stresses, not for performance. Spoken naturally, the rhythm is a pulse underneath the sense.
• An eleven-syllable line is a mistake. The feminine ending is one of the commonest variations; Viola's speech is full of them.
• Kings speak verse and servants speak prose. Rank is only part of it. Hamlet uses prose for his practical advice to the players, and Viola uses prose with Malvolio before switching to verse alone.
• You should stop at the end of every line. Many sentences run across several lines. Lift the line ending slightly and keep the thought going until the punctuation ends it.
• The meter is only for scholars. A shared line, a feminine ending or a missing beat is practical stage information about pace, weight and thought.

Recap

• Check verse or prose first; a switch between them is information, and it is not just about rank.
• Iambic pentameter: five iambs, ten syllables, stresses on the even ones. Count, then mark the stresses by saying the line naturally.
• Common variations: a feminine ending (an extra soft syllable at the end) and a trochaic inversion (a stressed first syllable).
• Apostrophes mark elisions; short lines suggest a missing beat to fill; couplets often close a thought.
• Point the operative words in each antithesis so the audience can follow the argument.
• Breathe at line ends, support to the last word, and let the sentence decide where the thought stops.
• A shared line, like "Did not you speak? When? Now. As I descended?", tells actors to pick up cues at once.

Sources

1. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Twelfth night (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 2, scene 2). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.
2. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Macbeth (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 2, scene 2). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.
3. Daw, K. (n.d.). The down and dirty guide to scanning verse: Some hints to help with sounding Shakespeare's words. College of the Holy Cross, Measure for Measure teacher's guide. College of the Holy Cross.
4. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Hamlet (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 3, scene 2). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.

Two scenes, 227 years apart

On 14 February 1895, at the St. James's Theatre in London, the actress Rose Leclercq, playing Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's new comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, sat down with a notebook and pencil and interviewed the young man who wanted to marry her daughter. Within a few minutes he had told her, "Gravely," that he had been found as a baby "In a hand-bag."

On 9 September 1668, at the first performance of The Miser in Paris, Moliere himself, playing the old miser Harpagon, rushed in from the garden without his hat, crying, in Charles Heron Wall's translation, "Thieves! thieves! assassins! murder!" His cash box, ten thousand crowns in gold, had been dug up and stolen.

Both scenes are among the most famous comic passages in their languages, and they get their laughs in nearly opposite ways. One is a seated conversation in which nobody raises a voice; the other is a man coming apart in front of the audience. Comparing them is the quickest way to learn what the two have in common, which is the real lesson: the timing, and the seriousness, that make comedy work.

The comparison at a glance

Read the last two rows first. They are where the scenes meet, and where most comic performances fail.

Wilde: wit played as seriousness

Lady Bracknell's interview runs like a form being filled in. "Do you smoke?" Jack admits he does. "I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind." "How old are you?" "Twenty-nine." "A very good age to be married at." Then: "Are your parents living?" "I have lost both my parents." And the line everyone waits for: "To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

The joke has a mechanism you can see. The first half of each answer sets up something familiar: approval, sympathy. The second half flips it: smoking is approved as an occupation, losing your parents becomes a failure of care. The audience laughs at the gap between what it expected and what it got. Wilde's play calls itself "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People," and the actor's job is in that phrase. Lady Bracknell is entirely serious. She is a mother interviewing a candidate, with "the same list as the dear Duchess of Bolton," and her logic, however monstrous, is consistent. If the actor lets the audience see that she knows the line is clever, the line dies.

Wilde builds the straight playing into the stage directions. Jack's answer about his origins is marked "Gravely." His next line, "Yes, Lady Bracknell. I was in a hand-bag, a somewhat large, black leather hand-bag, with handles to it, an ordinary hand-bag in fact," is marked "Very seriously." Lady Bracknell's reply to his question about the fashion of Belgrave Square is marked "Sternly." Wilde's characters never know they are funny. That is why they are.

The core of it: Comic characters do not know they are comic. Play their logic and their wants with complete seriousness, and let the audience find the joke.

Moliere: a body taken over by a fixed idea

Harpagon's comedy works differently. Earlier in The Miser, his steward Valere tries to argue that a daughter should not be married against her will to an old man. Every time Valere starts a reasonable sentence, Harpagon interrupts with the same two words: "Without dowry!" The suitor will take her without one, and nothing else matters. The philosopher Henri Bergson, in his essay Laughter (1900; English translation 1911), uses this very scene as an example: behind the recurring exclamation "we faintly discern a complete repeating-machine set going by a fixed idea." For Bergson, much of comedy is the sight of a living person behaving like a machine.

The cash-box monologue in Act 4 takes the machine and runs it into the ground. Follow its stages:

1. The alarm. "Thieves! thieves! assassins! murder! Justice, just heavens! I am undone; I am murdered; they have cut my throat; they have stolen my money!"
2. The search. "Where is he? Where is he hiding himself? ... Where shall I run? Where shall I not run?"
3. The self-arrest. He seizes his own arm: "Give me back my money, wretch.... Ah...! it is myself."
4. The lament. "Alas! my poor money! my poor money! my dearest friend." He mourns it like a person: "I am dying; I am dead; I am buried."
5. The accusation. He turns on the audience: "Everyone seems to be my thief.... They all look at me and laugh."
6. The threat. "I will hang everybody, and if I do not find my money, I will hang myself afterwards."

Each stage tops the one before, and the last is the biggest: a threat so absurd it includes himself. That is a build, and its rule is that every step must go further than the last, or change direction. If the actor starts at full volume on "Thieves!", there is nowhere left to go by the time he reaches the gibbets. The smart Harpagon starts big but not at his limit, finds a sudden quiet in the lament, and saves his greatest energy for the end.

Bergson makes the same point about Harpagon that Wilde's stage directions make about Jack: "a comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself." Harpagon has no idea he is ridiculous. His agony is real to him, which is exactly why the audience can laugh.

Moliere's physical comedy needs control, not risk. Running in from the garden, searching, seizing your own arm: all of it can be done at home in a cleared room. Nothing in this scene requires a fall, and in this course you never practice one.

Timing: the pause, the build and holding for a laugh

Timing is the management of the moments around a laugh. Four techniques cover most of it.

• The pause before. After Jack says "In a hand-bag," Lady Bracknell's "A hand-bag?" needs a beat of silence in front of it: long enough for the absurdity to land, short enough that the audience is still holding its breath. Try it with no pause, a short one and a long one, and you will hear that one length is clearly funniest.
• The build. Repetitions must escalate or change. Harpagon's "Without dowry!" works because each one is a little more triumphant, or more impatient, than the last. Said identically every time, it goes flat by the third.
• The topper. A run of laughs is often capped by one bigger line. Lady Bracknell's dismissal of Jack ends with the idea that her daughter might "marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel." Deliver it with the most dignity of all.
• Holding for a laugh. When the audience laughs, stop speaking but stay in the scene: freeze the moment, keep the energy up, and wait until the laugh peaks and starts to fall. Then come in with the next line, so that it is not drowned. Speaking through a laugh is called stepping on it. And if no laugh comes, do not wait for one; go on as though nothing was expected.

Why this matters: A comic line is set up, landed and protected. The pause lets it land, the build makes each laugh bigger, and holding keeps the next line from being lost.

Common misconceptions

• To be funny, act funny. Signalling a joke kills it. Wilde's stage directions say "Gravely" and "Very seriously," and Bergson argues the comic character is unaware of being comic.
• Repetition means saying it the same way. Bergson's "repeating-machine" is in the character's fixed idea. The actor still builds each repetition, or it stops being funny.
• Physical comedy means falling over. Harpagon's scene is all searching, seizing and addressing the audience. Falls are specialist work for trained performers under supervision, and this course never asks for one.
• Louder is funnier. Volume used up early leaves the build nowhere to go. Variety, including sudden quiet, is what keeps a monologue alive.
• Wait for every laugh. Hold only when a laugh actually comes; pausing for laughs that never arrive drains the scene of energy.

Pulling it together

• Wilde's comedy is verbal wit: lines that set up something familiar and flip it, delivered by characters who mean every word.
• Moliere's comedy here is a fixed idea taking over a body: repetition ("Without dowry!") and a monologue that builds to an absurd climax.
• Both are played straight. The character never knows the scene is funny.
• Use the pause before the line, the build across repetitions, a topper to cap a run, and hold for real laughs without stepping on them.
• Physical comedy is controlled and safe: searching, seizing, freezing. No falls.

Sources

1. Wilde, O. (n.d.). The importance of being earnest: A trivial comedy for serious people (Act 1). (Original work first performed 1895; this edition prints the cast of the first production, St. James's Theatre, 14 February 1895). Project Gutenberg.
2. Moliere. (n.d.). The miser (C. H. Wall, Trans.; Act 1, scene 7, and Act 4, scene 7). (Original work first performed 1668). Project Gutenberg.
3. Bergson, H. (1911). Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic (C. Brereton and F. Rothwell, Trans.). Macmillan. Project Gutenberg.

Five people and a stove

The first stage direction of Susan Glaspell's Trifles moves five people before anyone speaks. "At the rear the outer door opens and the Sheriff comes in followed by the County Attorney and Hale." The men "are much bundled up and go at once to the stove. They are followed by the two women." Then the sentence that sets the whole play: "The women have come in slowly, and stand close together near the door." Before a word of dialogue, the audience can see who has taken charge of this room and who does not want to be in it.

That is blocking: in the words of the stage manager and teacher Christopher Boltz, "where actors are standing and what business they are doing for every moment they are on stage." This lesson is a procedure for doing it: map the stage, know the shape of the theatre, use the body and its focus, read the playwright's directions, write it all down, and finally block the opening of Trifles, first on one kind of stage and then on another, where the same choices stop working.

Step 1: map the stage

Directors and actors divide the stage into areas, named from the actor's point of view as they face the audience. The National Park Service's glossary for Wolf Trap, its performing arts park, puts the rule simply: stage directions "are designated from the perspective of the performer on stage, facing the audience." Stage right is the actor's right; house right is the audience's right, which is the actor's left.

Why is the back "up"? Because stages used to slope. The same NPS glossary defines a raked stage as one "lower in the front, toward the audience, and higher in the back," and notes that in most modern theaters it is the audience seating that is raked while the stage is flat. Upstage was literally uphill. The glossary adds that important action tended to happen downstage and in the center, and an actor who moved upstage of a partner forced the partner to turn away from the audience to talk to them: "Hence, the concept of being 'upstaged' was born."

Step 2: know the shape of your theatre

Where the audience sits changes everything about blocking. Ben Crop's open textbook Mastering the Art of Stagecraft, from Santa Barbara City College, describes the main types:

Bottom line: Blocking is written for a particular audience shape. A stage picture that works through a proscenium arch can fail completely when the audience surrounds the actors.

Step 3: the body, the cross and the focus

On a proscenium stage, an actor's position relative to the audience has names. Full front faces the audience; a quarter turn is still mostly open; profile is side-on; three-quarter is mostly turned away; full back faces upstage. The more open the position, the more of your face the audience sees.

• A cross is any move from one place to another, written X. "X DL to rocker" means cross down left to the rocker.
• Countering is a small adjusting move made by one actor when another crosses, so that neither blocks the other and the stage stays balanced.
• Cheating out means turning partly toward the audience while still playing to your partner: two actors in a quarter turn can look like they face each other while both stay visible.
• Giving and taking focus. The audience looks where the actors look, at the most open face, and at whoever is highest, closest or moving. An actor who wants to give focus to a partner turns toward them; an actor upstage of a partner, facing out, takes it.

Stand in your own room and try it. Say a line to an imaginary partner in profile, then cheat out a quarter turn and say it again. Then have someone stand upstage of you and speak while you turn to look at them: notice that you have just handed them the scene.

Step 4: read the stage directions

Playwrights tell actors where to go in very different amounts. Shakespeare tells you almost nothing. His printed directions are mostly entrances and exits, often added or expanded by editors; the Folger edition marks editorial additions with brackets. When he does write one, it is short: "Enter Viola and Malvolio, at several doors" in Twelfth Night, or, in The Winter's Tale, "He exits, pursued by a bear."

Much of Shakespeare's staging is hidden in the dialogue instead. When Hamlet tells the players, "Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus," the word "thus" is a stage direction: he demonstrates the gesture he is mocking. Glaspell does the same in Trifles. Hale's line "there in that rocker" comes with the direction "[pointing to it]," and then "They all look at the rocker," a moment in which every actor's focus sends the audience's eyes to the same empty chair.

Ibsen and Shaw give you far more. Ibsen's first direction for A Doll's House furnishes a whole room, down to "A what-not with china and bric-à-brac" and "A fire in the stove." Bernard Shaw goes further. His comedy Arms and the Man, set in Bulgaria in 1885, opens on a young woman on a balcony, "intensely conscious of the romantic beauty of the night, and of the fact that her own youth and beauty is a part of it." No lighting cue can show that. Shaw is writing for readers and for the actress, telling her who Raina is.

So read directions as evidence, the way you read the kitchen in Lesson 6. Directions embedded in dialogue, like "thus" or "this door," are close to essential: the lines do not make sense without them. Physical directions in the text are strong evidence of the playwright's picture. Directions about a character's inner life are character notes, to be played, not staged.

Step 5: write it down

Blocking that is not written down is forgotten by the next rehearsal. Boltz explains that the stage manager records it in the prompt book, the master copy of the script, so that understudies and replacement actors can recreate the staging and designers can ask where a moment happens; he notes that in a professional production the prompt script belongs to the producer. Every stage manager builds a personal set of symbols, with a key at the front of the book. A common layout has the script on one page and a small ground plan of the set on the facing page; each move is numbered in the text, described in shorthand, and drawn as an arrow on the plan.

Step 6: block the opening of Trifles

First, build the ground plan from Glaspell's own directions. The outer door is "at the rear": up center. There is a stove, a "big kitchen table, center of the room," and Mrs. Wright's rocker. On the left, "three steps lead to a stair door"; a door at the right leads to the front room; a small table stands "in the left rear corner." Put the stove down right, so that the men warming themselves there are visible, and the rocker down left, where it will matter later.

Read the picture you have made. Three men in a warm group down right, two women in a cold huddle up center, and an empty rocker down left that everyone is about to stare at. The blocking has told the story of the play's first minute.

Change one input: the same scene in the round

Now move the production into an arena. Every choice above depended on a front. In the round there is no rear wall, so the "outer door" becomes an aisle between seating banks, and the women's huddle sits at the mouth of that aisle, with some of the audience right behind them. The stove cannot stand against a wall, so it moves near the center and stays low; the big table shrinks or disappears, because a solid table at center would hide actors from a quarter of the house. The men cannot simply stand at the stove facing out; they keep turning and shifting, so that each side gets faces in turn. Even the rocker moment changes. When everyone looks at the chair, the actors' eyes now pull the audience's attention across the space toward one another's faces, which can be even more powerful than the proscenium version, as long as the chair sits where all four sides can see it. The story is the same. Nearly every move is different.

Key idea: Build the ground plan from the playwright's directions, notate each move with a number and a reason, and re-block whenever the audience's position changes.

Common misconceptions

• Stage left is the audience's left. Stage directions are given from the actor's point of view facing the audience. The audience's left is house left, which is stage right.
• Upstage means more important. Upstage just means the back, once the higher end of a raked stage. An actor upstage of a partner can take focus, which is why "upstaging" became a complaint.
• Never turn your back on the audience. On a proscenium stage full back is used sparingly, but in the round some of the audience always sees your back, and a turned back can be a strong choice.
• Printed stage directions must all be obeyed. Directions hidden in dialogue are close to essential, but many printed directions were added by editors or describe a character's mind; read them as evidence, not commands.
• Blocking only matters to actors. Designers depend on it too: Boltz notes that a lighting designer regularly asks where onstage a moment happens, and the answer is in the prompt book.

Looking back

• The nine stage areas are named from the actor's point of view; upstage is the back, because stages once sloped up away from the audience.
• Proscenium, thrust, arena, traverse and black box stages put the audience in different places, and blocking must be built for the shape.
• Body positions, crosses, countering, cheating out and the direction of the actors' gaze control focus.
• Stage directions range from Shakespeare's few to Shaw's novelistic many; directions hidden in dialogue are the most binding.
• Record blocking in the prompt book with a key, numbered moves, shorthand and arrows on a ground plan.
• Trifles' opening tells its story through blocking; in the round, the same story needs almost every move changed.

Sources

1. National Park Service. (n.d.). Language of the theater. Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. National Park Service.
2. Crop, B. (2024). Theatre spaces and Navigating the stage. In Mastering the art of stagecraft (Sections 2.1-2.2). Santa Barbara City College; LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
3. Boltz, C. R. (2024). Blocking notation. In B. Crop (Ed.), Mastering the art of stagecraft (Section 15.3). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
4. Glaspell, S. (1920). Trifles. In Plays. Small, Maynard. Project Gutenberg.
5. Shaw, G. B. (n.d.). Arms and the man (Act 1). Project Gutenberg.
6. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). The winter's tale (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 3, scene 3). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.

A king whose feet do not reach the floor

Konstantin Stanislavski never forgot one scene from a touring production of Schiller's The Maid of Orleans. The company came from the small German duchy of Meiningen, and in My Life in Art (1924) he describes what he saw: "A skinny, piteous, forlorn king sits on a tremendous throne; his thin legs hang in the air and do not reach the floor." Around him a confused court tries to keep up the forms of royal ritual. English ambassadors enter, "tall, stately, decisive, courageous and impudent." When the king gives a humiliating order, the courtier who receives it starts to bow, stops halfway, straightens, stands with lowered eyes, and runs out in tears. "With him wept the spectators, and I wept also," Stanislavski writes, "for the ingenuity of the stage director created a tremendous mood by itself."

Notice what made the moment. Not a great actor: Stanislavski is sharp about the leading lady's "vocal fireworks." It was a picture, arranged by someone outside the scene: a throne too big for its king, a bow that cannot be finished. That someone is the director. This lesson starts from a picture that fails, traces exactly why, and fixes it. Along the way it covers where directors came from, what they do from first idea to final note, and the part of the job that matters most: keeping everyone in the room safe.

Where the director came from

For most of theatre history there was no director in the modern sense. Leading actors, playwrights or managers arranged the staging. The figure we would recognize took shape in the nineteenth century, and the Meiningen company is the usual starting point. Its patron, Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen, wanted productions that were, in Stanislavski's words, "historically true, with well-directed mob scenes, fine outer form and amazing discipline"; its director, the actor-turned-stage-manager Ludwig Chronegk, ran the rehearsals. Scholars such as Ann Marie Koller and John Osborne have traced how, from 1874 to 1890, the company's guest appearances carried this disciplined, unified style across Europe.

Stanislavski, whose translator spells the name Kronek, also recorded the cost. At rehearsals, Chronegk sat in silence until the clock reached the hour, rang a large bell and said, in a quiet voice, "Anfangen," begin. When an actor was late, he let the whole company stand "as if awaiting sentence" through a long, threatening pause, then gave the part to another actor on the spot. Stanislavski admits that as a young amateur director he admired this "despotism," and then adds a sentence worth remembering: "I did not know to what a terrible end it might bring an actor." His conclusion is the modern view of the job: "The stage director can do a great deal, but he cannot do everything. The most important thing is in the hands of the actor, whom one must help."

A director today does five things. Finds a concept, a central idea for the production drawn from the play. Casts it. Works with the designers so that set, lights, sound and costumes tell the same story. Stages it, in pictures and movement. And runs a rehearsal room in which actors can do their best and safest work.

Concept: one idea for the whole production

A concept answers the question: what is this production about, and what should the audience feel and see? It must come from the text. For Trifles, three directors might write three different sentences:

None of these is right or wrong. Each is tested against the play, and each gives the designers and actors a direction to pull in together.

Debug: a stage picture that fails

Here is a plausible first attempt at the climax of Trifles, when Mrs. Hale opens the pretty box and the women find the dead bird. The director has placed the two women side by side at center, both facing the audience, standing behind the big kitchen table, with the box lying flat on the tabletop between them. Every word is clear. And the moment, the turning point of the play, lands with almost no force. Trace why, one problem at a time.

The fixes all come from the same handful of principles. The audience looks where the actors look, so focus is steered by eyes. Unequal positions create emphasis, which is why directors use triangles rather than lines. Levels, sitting, standing, a step, change who dominates. Depth keeps actors from blocking one another and gives the stage a background as well as a foreground.

The director and teacher Alexander Dean gave the deeper principle a name in his Fundamentals of Play Directing (1941): picturization, which he defines as "the visual interpretation of each moment in the play." The test is simple. Turn the sound off. If a stranger looking at the picture could tell that two women have just found something terrible, and that they are deciding something together, the picture is doing its job.

Why this matters: A stage picture fails when it gives the audience nowhere to look. Fix it with focus, triangles, levels and depth, and test it with the sound off: the picture should tell the moment's story by itself.

Rehearsal phases and giving notes

Most productions move through the same phases. Table work: reading and discussing the play, as you did with the given circumstances in Lesson 6. Blocking: staging each scene, recorded by the stage manager as in Lesson 10. Working rehearsals: going back through scenes for objectives, beats and timing. Run-throughs of whole acts and the whole play. Then the technical and dress rehearsals you will plan in Lesson 29.

Throughout, the director gives notes: comments after a run or a scene. Good notes are specific and playable. "Be sadder here" asks for a result, which, as Lesson 7 showed, sends the actor's attention inward. "Try to make her stay" gives an action. Good notes are also timed and placed with care: a note about a personal matter is given privately, and a director who saves the note for the right moment, rather than stopping every line, protects the actors' concentration. Chronegk's bell and his long, threatening pause are the opposite of all this.

The director's duty of care

A director is responsible for the safety of everyone in the room, physical and emotional. Two simple tools appear in many theatre programs' policies. Skidmore College's theater department, for example, establishes that any actor who feels safety has been compromised may say "Hold," and the action stops. And all physical risk is planned rather than improvised.

Stage violence is the clearest case. The Society of American Fight Directors, founded in 1977, gives its mission as "to promote the safe and effective dramatization of violence," and it defines stage combat broadly: "A slap to the face, a fall down some stairs, an epic fifteen-person battle with swords and axes," all of it. A safety handout from the University Interscholastic League, the body that runs Texas school theatre competitions, opens with a warning: when a fight is not properly staged, "even a simple slap can be dangerous." The principles that professionals agree on are these:

• The partner receiving the action controls it. The UIL guidelines put it in five words: "The victim determines the movement."
• Distance. A safe distance between partners is set by the fight director and kept every time.
• Slow speed. Fights are learned in slow motion and never performed at full speed; the UIL handout notes that even performances run at about three-quarter speed.
• Eye contact. Partners make eye contact before each sequence, a check that both are ready.
• A qualified fight director. Toronto Metropolitan University's production handbook requires a professional fight director to choreograph and oversee physical action, says no one else may change the choreography, and calls for a fight call, a walk-through of every fight, before the first performance each day. The SAFD's own certification requires at least thirty hours of training with a certified teacher before a test.

That is the whole of this course's stage combat: principles, not techniques. Do not try to stage a slap, a punch, a fall or any fight with a friend at home. Skidmore's protocols go further and say that no stage combat should be assigned in introductory classes at all. If a scene you work on contains violence, stage it as a stage picture, frozen, or as a moment just before or just after, and leave the action itself to a production with a fight director.

Key idea: The director's first job is a safe room. Anyone may call "Hold," the receiving partner controls the action, fights stay slow, distanced and checked by eye contact, and only a qualified fight director stages violence.

Common misconceptions

• Directing means telling actors where to stand. Blocking is one part of a job that also includes the concept, casting, working with designers and running a safe, productive room.
• The best directors control everything. Chronegk's bell produced discipline, but Stanislavski, who admired it once, later wrote that he had not known "to what a terrible end it might bring an actor."
• A stage fight is just careful acting. The SAFD treats stage combat as a specialist craft, and professional policies require a qualified fight director; a careful friend is not one.
• Slow speed is only for rehearsal. Fights are performed below full speed too, and a fight call before each day's first performance keeps them safe.
• A good note tells the actor how to feel. Notes that name a result usually produce indicating. A playable note gives an action, an objective or a change in the given circumstances.

What to remember

• The modern director grew out of companies like the Meininger, whose stage pictures moved Stanislavski to tears, and whose director's despotism he later regretted.
• A director finds a concept, casts, coordinates the designers, stages the play and runs the room.
• A failing picture usually lacks focus, triangles, levels or depth; Dean's picturization asks that each moment tell its story visually.
• Rehearsals move from table work to blocking, working rehearsals, runs, tech and dress; notes should be specific and playable.
• Duty of care: "Hold" stops the action; the receiving partner controls it; distance, slow speed and eye contact; a qualified fight director stages all violence. This course teaches no technique to try.

Sources

1. Stanislavsky, C. (1924). My life in art (J. J. Robbins, Trans.; chapter "Genius of Director Kronek," pp. 196-200). Little, Brown. Internet Archive.
2. Society of American Fight Directors. (n.d.). About and FAQ. SAFD.
3. University Interscholastic League. (n.d.). Stage combat safety and Stage combat terminology [Theatre handouts prepared by Liles]. UIL Texas.
4. Toronto Metropolitan University School of Performance. (n.d.). Stage combat policies. In Production handbook. TMU Pressbooks.
5. Skidmore College Theater Department. (2023). Departmental protocols for rehearsing and performing scenes with violence, stage combat and extreme physicality. Skidmore College.
6. Dean, A. (1941). Fundamentals of play directing. Rinehart and Company.
7. Koller, A. M. (1984). The theater duke: Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen and the German stage. Stanford University Press.
8. Osborne, J. (1988). The Meiningen Court Theatre, 1866-1890. Cambridge University Press.

Ten pages

Jon Jory, the longtime producing director of Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky, championed a form most theatres had never taken seriously: the ten-minute play. Actors Theatre ran a National Ten-Minute Play Contest and, with the publishers Samuel French and Smith and Kraus, put the results into a long run of anthologies, from Ten-Minute Plays from Actors Theatre of Louisville to collections sorted by the number of actors. Jory's foreword to one Samuel French volume ends with a writing assignment for the reader and one condition: make sure the play is "not more than ten pages long."

Ten pages is ten minutes, because in standard script format one page runs about a minute onstage. Inside that limit a ten-minute play is a complete play, not a sketch: it has people who want something, a conflict and an ending that changes them. An article on teaching the form in one of the Louisville anthologies calls these plays "fulcrums of change for the characters." This lesson is a procedure for writing one. You will see a ten-minute play written for this course, built step by step, then watch the play turn into a different play when one ingredient changes, and finish with a table read at home.

Step 1: a want

Start with a character who wants something from another character, now. This is the objective from Lesson 7, written instead of played, and the same test applies: it must be something the other person can give or refuse, and the audience must be able to tell whether it happened. "Wants to be happy" is not a want. "Wants her to put her shoes on and go onstage in ten minutes" is.

Step 2: an obstacle

Give the second character a reason to say no, and make the reason strong. The best obstacle is another person's want, in direct collision with the first: one person needs the door open, the other needs it shut. A weak obstacle, a refusal with no reason, collapses the moment the first character pushes, and your play is over on page two.

Step 3: a turn

Somewhere past the middle, something must change in a way that cannot be undone: a secret comes out, a decision is made, the power flips. That is the turn, the fulcrum the Louisville article describes. Ask what the play is about, and the honest answer is usually whatever the turn reveals.

Step 4: start late, end early

Ten minutes leaves no room for exposition. Begin as close to the conflict as you can, with the want already in motion, and let the audience catch up from what the characters do. Keep to one place and continuous time, and two or three characters. When the turn has landed and the consequence is clear, stop. A ten-minute play that keeps going after its turn is spending minutes it does not have.

Key idea: A ten-minute play is a want, an obstacle and a turn, started as late as possible and ended as soon as the turn has landed, in one place with very few characters.

Step 5: format the page

Standard format is what makes "one page, one minute" true, so use it from the first draft. A formatting checklist from Regent University's writing center, adapted from Gordon State College's guide, sets out the usual rules: Courier New at 12 point; a left margin of 1.5 inches and 1 inch elsewhere; dialogue starting at the left margin; character names in capital letters, set about four inches from the left edge of the page; stage directions in parentheses, set in about 2.75 inches; a title page and a cast of characters page before the play. On a typewriter-style page, it looks like this:

                         OMAR
Ruby. This is the ten-minute call. Ten
minutes, please.

            (She does not look up.)

                         RUBY
Thank you, ten.

Competitions and publishers sometimes vary the measurements, so always follow the rules of the contest or theatre you send a play to.

The play: Places

Here is a ten-minute play written for this course, printed in full. Read it aloud, alone or with a partner, before reading the notes after it.

PLACES

Characters: RUBY, sixteen, playing the lead in her school's play. OMAR, seventeen, the assistant stage manager, with a headset around his neck.

Setting: Backstage, beside a prop table, ten minutes before curtain. We can hear an audience filling the house.

(Lights up. RUBY sits on the floor beside the prop table, in costume except for her shoes, which are on the table. OMAR hurries in with a clipboard and almost walks past her.)

OMAR: Ruby. This is the ten-minute call. Ten minutes, please.

RUBY: Thank you, ten.

OMAR: Great. (He starts to go. Stops.) You're on the floor.

RUBY: I'm aware.

OMAR: Your shoes are on the prop table.

RUBY: I'm aware of that too.

OMAR: Nobody puts shoes on the prop table. That's the first rule.

RUBY: Then take them off it.

(He picks up the shoes and holds them out. She does not take them.)

RUBY: I'm not going on.

OMAR: Okay. (Beat.) Okay, that's funny. You're doing a bit.

RUBY: I'm not doing a bit.

OMAR: You signed in. Your name is on the sign-in sheet on the call board. In pen. That's basically a contract.

RUBY: Then cross it out.

OMAR: (Kneeling.) Ruby, there are two hundred and twelve people out there. I counted the tickets. Twice.

RUBY: That's nice for them.

OMAR: Your little sister is in the front row with a sign.

RUBY: She made it in art class. It has glitter on it.

OMAR: So you have to go on. Because of the glitter.

RUBY: (She almost laughs. Doesn't.) Kendra knows every line.

OMAR: Kendra is your understudy. Kendra cried when she got cast as your understudy. Right now Kendra is in the bathroom eating crackers because she is sure she will never go on. If I tell her she's going on in nine minutes, she will see those crackers again.

RUBY: Eight minutes.

OMAR: (Checking his watch.) Eight minutes. Thank you.

(Pause. Offstage, the audience laughs at something.)

RUBY: Were you at dress rehearsal?

OMAR: I'm always at dress rehearsal. It's my job.

RUBY: Then you saw. Act Two. The letter speech. I got to "I kept every one of them," and there was nothing. White. Like somebody erased the inside of my head. I stood there for... I don't know how long.

OMAR: Eleven seconds.

RUBY: You timed it?

OMAR: I time everything. It's in the rehearsal report. "Eleven-second hold, Act Two. Actor recovered."

RUBY: The actor recovered because Mr. Bell yelled the line from the back row.

OMAR: So he'll yell it again.

RUBY: He's in the booth tonight. He told me, "Tonight it's all yours." Like that would help. (Beat.) Two hundred and twelve people, Omar. Watching me stand there with nothing.

(OMAR sits on the floor beside her.)

OMAR: Can I tell you something that will make this worse?

RUBY: Yes. Please. That's exactly what I need.

OMAR: Dana's not here.

RUBY: What?

OMAR: Dana. The stage manager. She has the flu. She called at five-fifteen. She sounded like a garbage disposal.

RUBY: Then who's calling the show?

(He points at himself with the clipboard.)

RUBY: You've never called a show.

OMAR: I have called zero shows. I have called the half-hour. I have called the fifteen. I just called you the ten, very professionally, while sweating through my shirt. In seven minutes I put on this headset and say "Lights one, go," and if I say it at the wrong moment, your whole first scene happens in the dark.

RUBY: Why didn't anybody tell us?

OMAR: Mr. Bell said if the cast found out, they'd panic. (Beat.) Which, apparently, is happening anyway.

(Pause.)

RUBY: Your hands are shaking.

OMAR: They've been shaking since five-fifteen.

(She looks at him for a long moment. Then she takes one shoe from him.)

RUBY: What's the first cue?

OMAR: Lights one. On your entrance, when you cross down right to the window.

RUBY: What if I'm late?

OMAR: Then I wait for you. I don't call it until your foot hits the spike mark. That's the deal. You're my cue.

RUBY: (Putting on the shoe, slowly.) And if I go white again? In the letter speech?

OMAR: Then I'll be in the left wing. Five feet away. Script open. You look left, I mouth it. "I kept every one of them." Big, like a fish.

RUBY: You'd do that.

OMAR: For two hundred and twelve people? I'd do it with flags.

(She puts on the other shoe and stands. She shakes out her hands, the way she does in warm-ups.)

RUBY: And if you miss a cue?

OMAR: Then you'll be standing in the dark.

RUBY: Then I'll stand in the dark. And I'll wait for you. And I won't go white, because I'll be too busy thinking about you being an idiot.

OMAR: That's fair.

(A voice crackles from the headset. He holds it to his ear.)

OMAR: (Into the headset.) Yes. Yes, she's here. (To RUBY.) The house manager says the house is ready.

RUBY: Then call it.

(He stands, takes a breath and puts the headset on properly.)

OMAR: (Loud and steady, to the whole backstage.) Places, please. This is your places call. Places for the top of the show.

RUBY: Thank you, places.

(She goes. He watches her go, looks down at his shaking hands, and picks up the clipboard.)

OMAR: (Into the headset, very quietly.) Standby lights one.

(Blackout.)

END OF PLAY

How Places was built

Notice where it starts. Not at the half-hour call, not at dress rehearsal, not in Ruby's bedroom the night before: at the ten-minute call, with the want already in motion. Everything the audience needs about dress rehearsal comes out when it is useful to Ruby's argument. Notice too that every one of Omar's tactics fails until he stops trying to win. The turn works because he stops pushing.

Remember: Start with the want already in motion, let backstory come out only when a character needs it, and stop as soon as the turn has landed.

Change one input: a different turn

Now revise the play with one change. Suppose Omar never confesses. Instead, at the moment he says "Can I tell you something," he plays his strongest threat:

OMAR: Kendra's mom is in the lobby telling everyone tonight might be Kendra's big night. If you're not at places in five minutes, I walk into that bathroom and hand Kendra your costume.

(Long pause. RUBY puts on her shoes without looking at him. She stands.)

RUBY: Thank you, five.

(She goes. OMAR ticks something off on his clipboard.)

The plot is the same: Ruby goes on. But the play is now about something else. In the first version she goes on because someone met her fear with his own; in the second she goes on because she has been beaten. One change to the turn has flipped the meaning of every line before it, and turned a warm comedy into a quietly sad one. Neither is wrong, but you have to choose, and the choice is what the play is about.

Why this matters: The turn decides what a short play means. When you revise, change one element at a time and read the whole play again, because one change can alter everything before it.

The table read at home

A play is not finished until you have heard it. Gather two or three people, family or friends, around a table. Give each a copy, assign the parts, and ask someone else to read the stage directions aloud, briefly. Then read the play straight through without stopping, and time it. Afterward, ask three questions: where did you laugh, where did you get lost, and where did your attention drift? Mark those places in your script. If the play runs well over ten minutes, the trouble is usually at the start; if a moment confused everyone, the trouble is usually the line just before it.

Common misconceptions

• A ten-minute play is a sketch. A sketch can be one joke repeated. A ten-minute play has a want, an obstacle and a turn that changes the characters, which is what the Louisville writers mean by fulcrums of change.
• You need to explain the background first. There is no time. Start in the middle of the conflict and let the background come out when a character needs it, as Ruby's dress rehearsal does.
• More characters make a fuller play. Every extra character costs minutes. Two or three is the usual range, and one place in continuous time keeps the clock honest.
• Format does not matter in a first draft. Standard format is what lets you judge length: about one page, about one minute. A draft in a word-processor default looks shorter than it plays.
• If the table read goes badly, the play is bad. A first table read is a diagnosis. It tells you where to cut and what to clarify, which is exactly what it is for.

What to carry forward

• Actors Theatre of Louisville and Jon Jory made the ten-minute play a recognized form: a complete play in about ten pages.
• Build it from a want, an obstacle that is another person's want, and a turn that cannot be undone.
• Start as late as possible, keep to one place and few characters, and end when the turn has landed.
• Use standard format: Courier 12 point, names in capitals, stage directions in parentheses, about a minute a page.
• Revise one element at a time; changing the turn can change the whole play's meaning.
• Hear it at a table read: time it, and mark where listeners laughed, got lost or drifted.

Sources

1. Regent University Writing Center. (2023). Playwriting formatting checklist (adapted from Gordon State College, The standard stage play format). Regent University.
2. Dixon, M. B., and Engelman, L. (Eds.). (1995). Ten-minute plays from Actors Theatre of Louisville (Vol. 4; foreword by J. Jory and an article on teaching the ten-minute play). Samuel French.
3. Dixon, M. B., and Wegener, A. (Eds.). (2000). Ten-minute plays (Vol. 5; foreword by J. Jory). Samuel French.
4. Actors Theatre of Louisville. (2001). 30 ten-minute plays for 2 actors from Actors Theatre of Louisville's National Ten-Minute Play Contest. Smith and Kraus.
5. Glaspell, S. (1927). The road to the temple (on writing Trifles for the wharf stage, pp. 255-256). Frederick A. Stokes. Internet Archive.

An archon's first job

Every year a new chief magistrate, the archon, took office in Athens, and one of his first duties was theatrical. The Constitution of the Athenians, a treatise from Aristotle's school, records it in a single sentence of Frederic Kenyon's translation: as soon as the archon enters office, "he assigns Choregi to the tragic poets, choosing three of the richest persons out of the whole body of Athenians." A choregus paid for a chorus. In other words, the city chose three playwrights to compete, and then ordered three of its wealthiest citizens to fund their productions, as a public duty and a chance at public glory.

That sentence holds the whole system. Tragedy at Athens was not a commercial show; it was a civic event, organized by the state, paid for by the rich, judged in public and performed for a god. This lesson follows one year of it, from the archon's appointment to the performance, then looks at its two great tools, the chorus and the mask, and finally travels to Rome, where theatre became something else again.

The City Dionysia

The festival was the City Dionysia, held in honor of Dionysus. The classical scholar A. E. Haigh, in The Attic Theatre (third edition, 1907), sets out what the ancient evidence shows. It took place in the month Elaphebolion, at about the end of March, when the sea had become navigable again and Athens was crowded with visitors, and it lasted at least five days. It opened with a procession carrying the god's sacred image out of the city and back by torchlight, and Haigh describes the image being carried at the end, not to its shrine, but to the theatre itself.

In the fifth century BCE, each of the three tragic poets presented four plays: three tragedies and then a satyr play, a rowdy short piece with a chorus of satyrs, the god's goat-legged followers. Haigh notes the one known exception: in 438 BCE Euripides was allowed to substitute Alcestis, "a tragedy with a slightly comic tinge," for the usual satyr play. Judges chose a winner, and a poet who won was said to have won "a city victory."

Where did tragedy come from? The honest answer is that the origins are uncertain. Aristotle's Poetics traces tragedy back to the leaders of the dithyramb, a choral song to Dionysus, and says that it "advanced by slow degrees." The name attached to its beginnings in Athens is Thespis, who, Haigh writes, "is said to have introduced tragedy into Athens," at first as a private venture rather than a state contest. Actors are still called thespians after him.

The point: Athenian tragedy was a state-run competition at a festival of Dionysus: the archon picked the poets, rich citizens paid for the choruses, and each poet offered three tragedies and a satyr play.

Three actors and a theatre on a hillside

The early tragedies had very few actors. Aristotle gives the sequence: "Aeschylus first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the Chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue. Sophocles raised the number of actors to three, and added scene-painting." Three actors, all men, shared every speaking part in a play, which is why the mask mattered so much.

The plays were performed in the open air, in daylight. Haigh pictures citizens making their way soon after sunrise "to the southern slopes of the Acropolis, where the theatre of Dionysus was situated," to fill tiers of seats rising up the hill. Below them was the orchestra, the circular dancing floor where the chorus performed; behind it was a stage building, the skene, which gave the actors a backdrop and doors to enter from. Ben Crop's stagecraft textbook, which you used in Lesson 10, traces the modern proscenium arch back through the Roman stage building to this Greek arrangement.

The chorus

Haigh's evidence puts the tragic chorus at fifteen members, led by a coryphaeus, the chorus leader, who probably spoke the lines in which the chorus talks with the characters. The chorus entered with an opening song and dance, and between the episodes of dialogue it sang and danced odes. Many odes are built in matched pairs of stanzas called strophe and antistrophe, with the same metrical pattern, presumably answered by matching patterns of movement.

Aristotle had firm views about how a chorus should work: "The Chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action, in the manner not of Euripides but of Sophocles." He complains that later poets wrote choral songs that could fit any play, mere interludes. For an actor, his point still stands: a chorus is a character, a group with its own stake in what happens, not a decoration.

The mask

Every actor in Greek drama was masked. Haigh explains why the mask was "indissolubly connected" with Greek tragedy: "without masks it would have been impossible for one actor to play several parts, or for men to play the parts of women." He adds that masks were said to add resonance to the actor's voice in vast theatres, and he notes the cost: the actor lost all facial expression. As with the commedia masks in Lesson 5, everything had to go into the voice and the body, and at the size of a hillside theatre the body's whole shape had to speak.

Why this matters: Three masked men could play every part in a tragedy. The mask made doubling and cross-gender casting possible and moved all expression into the voice and the body.

What tragedy does: Aristotle's definition

The Poetics, written in the fourth century BCE, about a century after the great tragedians, offers the most famous definition in drama, in S. H. Butcher's translation: "Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament...; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions."

Two parts of that sentence matter for actors. "In the form of action, not of narrative" means tragedy shows; it does not tell, which is the same principle as Lesson 7's playable actions. And "purgation," the Greek word katharsis, has been argued over ever since: purging, purifying, clarifying? Butcher chose "purgation," but readers still disagree about what Aristotle meant. You do not need to settle it to feel what he was describing: an audience that has lived through pity and fear and comes out changed.

Speak it: the ode on man from Antigone

Here are the first strophe and antistrophe of a famous ode from Sophocles' Antigone, in Francis Storr's translation for the Loeb Classical Library (1912). The chorus of Theban elders is marveling at human skill and daring.

(Str. 1)
Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man;
Over the surging sea, with a whitening south wind wan,
Through the foam of the firth, man makes his perilous way;
And the eldest of deities Earth that knows not toil nor decay
Ever he furrows and scores, as his team, year in year out,
With breed of the yoked horse, the ploughshare turneth about.

(Ant. 1)
The light-witted birds of the air, the beasts of the weald and the wood
He traps with his woven snare, and the brood of the briny flood.
Master of cunning he: the savage bull, and the hart
Who roams the mountain free, are tamed by his infinite art;
And the shaggy rough-maned steed is broken to bear the bit.

Speak it as a chorus, not a recitation. A chorus speaks together, so the first job is a shared rhythm: say the strophe several times until the beat is steady, then find the one word in each line that the whole group would lean on. Then add movement. Walk a slow line in one direction during the strophe, and walk back during the antistrophe, so that the matched stanzas become matched paths. If you are alone, record yourself speaking the strophe, play it back, and speak along with your own voice: you are now a chorus of two, and you will hear at once where you rush. If family or friends can join, speak in unison, and give the last line of each stanza to one voice, the coryphaeus.

Rome: comedy, Seneca and a theatre disguised as a temple

Rome took Greek drama and changed its purpose. Haigh notes that Greek New Comedy, the comedy of everyday manners that followed Aristophanes, "was transferred to Rome in the translations of Plautus and Terence." Their plots of misers, clever slaves and mistaken identities have never left the stage. Charles Heron Wall's introduction to The Miser, which you met in Lesson 9, notes that Moliere "has borrowed from Plautus" for it: the comic miser runs from Rome to Paris.

Roman tragedy survives mostly in one writer. Frank Justus Miller's 1907 translation of Seneca calls his plays "the sole surviving representatives, barring a few fragments," of Rome's tragic drama. Seneca's bloody, rhetorical tragedies mattered enormously later: Miller's edition opens with John Matthews Manly's essay on their influence on early English drama, the drama that produced the Elizabethan revenge play.

Rome was also slow to build permanent theatres. For a long time plays were staged on temporary wooden structures. Samuel Ball Platner and Thomas Ashby's Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929) records the change: the Theatre of Pompey was "the first permanent theatre in Rome, built of stone by Pompeius in his second consulship in 55 B.C." The Christian writer Tertullian, about two and a half centuries later, tells why it took that shape. Fearing censure for building what moralists considered a "citadel of all impurities," Pompey "superposed on it a temple of Venus," and called it not a theatre but a temple, "under which," he said, "we have placed tiers of seats for viewing the shows." The seats of Rome's first stone theatre were, officially, the steps of a temple.

Common misconceptions

• Greek plays were staged like modern ones, indoors with lighting. They were performed outdoors, in daylight, on a hillside, with the chorus dancing in a circular orchestra in front of a stage building.
• The chorus was background decoration. The chorus was fifteen trained performers with their own songs, dances and stake in the action, and Aristotle insisted it should be treated "as one of the actors."
• Masks hid the acting. Masks removed facial expression but made doubling and cross-gender casting possible, so the acting moved into voice and body, as in the commedia.
• Greek tragedy was nothing but gloom. Each tragic poet's tetralogy ended with a satyr play, and Euripides' Alcestis had "a slightly comic tinge."
• We know exactly how tragedy began. We do not. Aristotle points to the dithyramb and the tradition names Thespis, but the early history is thin and disputed.

Summing up

• The archon assigned three wealthy choregi to three tragic poets each year; the City Dionysia, at the end of March, ran at least five days.
• Each fifth-century tragedian offered three tragedies and a satyr play; Thespis is the name tradition gives to tragedy's beginning in Athens.
• Aeschylus added a second actor and Sophocles a third; three masked men played every part.
• The chorus of fifteen sang and danced odes, often in strophe and antistrophe; Aristotle wanted it to act as one of the actors.
• Aristotle defined tragedy as the imitation of a serious, complete action, shown rather than told, achieving catharsis through pity and fear.
• Rome adapted Greek comedy through Plautus and Terence, left its tragedy mainly in Seneca, and built its first permanent stone theatre under a temple of Venus in 55 BCE.

Sources

1. Aristotle. (n.d.). The Athenian constitution (F. G. Kenyon, Trans.; Part 56). Project Gutenberg.
2. Aristotle. (n.d.). Poetics (S. H. Butcher, Trans.; Parts 4, 6 and 18). Project Gutenberg.
3. Haigh, A. E. (1907). The Attic theatre (3rd ed., rev. A. W. Pickard-Cambridge). Clarendon Press. Project Gutenberg.
4. Sophocles. (1912). Antigone (F. Storr, Trans.). In Sophocles (Vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library). William Heinemann. Project Gutenberg.
5. Platner, S. B., and Ashby, T. (1929). Theatrum Pompei. In A topographical dictionary of ancient Rome. Oxford University Press. LacusCurtius.
6. Tertullian. (1885). De spectaculis (S. Thelwall, Trans.; ch. 10). In Ante-Nicene Fathers (Vol. 3). Tertullian Project.
7. Seneca. (1907). The tragedies of Seneca (F. J. Miller, Trans.; introduced by J. M. Manly). University of Chicago Press. Project Gutenberg.

A bee that is not there

Early in Kalidasa's play Shakuntala, a young woman watering plants in a forest hermitage suddenly cries out, in Arthur Ryder's 1912 translation: "Oh, oh! A bee has left the jasmine-vine and is flying into my face." The stage direction adds: "She shows herself annoyed by the bee." There is no bee. The actor must make the audience see one, with her eyes and hands, while a king, hidden among the trees, watches her and falls in love. A moment later she asks herself, "Oh, why do I have such feelings when I see this man?"

That scene poses a problem every theatre has to solve. Lesson 7 argued that actors should play actions, not feelings. But the audience is supposed to feel something, here the first stirrings of love, and in Lesson 13 Aristotle described tragedy working through pity and fear. How does a performance produce a feeling in the people watching it? Indian theatre's oldest treatise gives a detailed, practical answer, and it starts from the audience's side of the footlights.

The Natyashastra

The Natyashastra, the treatise on drama attributed to the sage Bharata, is an encyclopedia of performance. It covers the building of the playhouse, music, dance, gesture, costume, speech, plot structure and the training of actors. Its date is uncertain. UNESCO, which in 2025 added a manuscript of it held at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune to its Memory of the World Register, describes it as "codified around the 2nd century B.C."; other scholars date its compilation later, and much of it probably grew over a long period. This lesson quotes the English translation by Manomohan Ghosh, published in Calcutta in 1950.

The answer: rasa

The Natyashastra's central idea is rasa, a word that means juice, flavor or taste, and that Ghosh translates as "Sentiment." Its account of how rasa arises is a single sentence, often called the rasa sutra: rasa "is produced from a combination of Determinants (vibhava), Consequents (anubhava) and Transitory States (vyabhicari-bhava)." Then comes the comparison that gives rasa its name. Just as a taste results from combining spices, vegetables and other ingredients, the text explains, the combination of emotional states becomes rasa, which is so called because it is capable of being tasted. Spectators enjoy it the way well-disposed diners enjoy a dish cooked with many spices.

Notice whose feeling rasa is. The actor shows causes and signs; the audience tastes the flavor. That fits Lesson 7 surprisingly well. The actor is not asked to sink into a private emotion, but to present its causes and effects so precisely that the spectator experiences the rasa.

What matters here: In the Natyashastra, rasa is produced from determinants, consequents and transitory states, and it is tasted by the audience, like the flavor of a well-made dish.

The eight rasas

Ghosh's translation lists the eight Sentiments "recognised in drama," each paired with a dominant state:

A footnote in Ghosh records that later writers on Sanskrit poetics added a ninth, shanta, peace, which is why you will often hear of nine rasas today. The Natyashastra itself names eight.

The four kinds of abhinaya

Abhinaya is the actor's means of carrying the meaning to the audience, and the Natyashastra divides it in four. In Ghosh's words, it "is known to be fourfold: Gestures (angika), Words (vacika), Dresses and Make-up (aharya) and the Temperament (sattvika)."

The fourth is the hardest and the most interesting. The text lists eight "Temperamental States," signs the body produces by itself: paralysis, perspiration, horripilation (hair standing on end), change of voice, trembling, change of color, weeping and fainting. You cannot fake a blush on command, but you can imagine its cause so fully that the body begins to answer.

The point: Abhinaya works through four channels at once: body, voice, costume and the involuntary signs of inner states.

Two plays: Shakuntala and The Little Clay Cart

Shakuntala is the most famous Sanskrit play. Ryder, introducing his translation, writes that Kalidasa "probably lived in the fifth century of the Christian era," a date he gives "with considerable hesitation," and that Indian tradition has always regarded him as the greatest of Sanskrit poets. The play follows the love of King Dushyanta and Shakuntala, a girl raised in a hermitage, from the meeting you have just read to separation and final reunion. Its dominant flavor is the romantic rasa, colored at times by sorrow and by wonder.

The Little Clay Cart (Mrcchakatika), which Ryder translated for the Harvard Oriental Series in 1905, is attributed to a King Shudraka and is a very different play: ten acts of city life, with gamblers, thieves, a storm, a political revolution and a murder trial. Its hero, Charudatta, is a Brahman merchant who has lost his fortune; its heroine, Vasantasena, is a courtesan who loves him. The title comes from a small moment in Act 6. Charudatta's little son is unhappy because he has only a clay cart to play with, and Vasantasena fills it with her jewels so he can buy a golden one. A play that holds a revolution and a trial is named for a child's toy.

A living tradition: Kutiyattam

Sanskrit drama is not only a subject for libraries. In Kerala, in southwest India, a form called Kutiyattam still performs it. UNESCO, which inscribed it on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008 (it had been proclaimed a masterpiece in 2001), calls it "one of India's oldest living theatrical traditions." UNESCO's description reads like a commentary on this lesson. In Kutiyattam's "stylized and codified theatrical language," neta abhinaya, eye expression, and hasta abhinaya, the language of gestures, are prominent. Actors train for ten to fifteen years. A single act may take days to perform, and a complete performance may last up to forty days. The plays are traditionally staged in temple theatres called kuttampalams, with an oil lamp onstage to signify a divine presence.

The rasa exercise

Try the eight rasas in your own body, in three stages, in front of a mirror or a phone camera.

1. Face and eyes. Sit or stand in neutral (Lesson 2). Take each of the eight rasas in turn for ten seconds, using only the face and especially the eyes, then return to neutral. Notice which come easily and which feel false.
2. The determinant. Now do it the Natyashastra's way. For each rasa, picture a specific cause first: a friend you love walking in, a ridiculous hat, a broken toy, an insult, a challenge you mean to meet, a sound in a dark house, a smell from the trash, a sky full of shooting stars. Let the face and eyes answer the cause, rather than making a face from nothing. Compare the recording with stage 1.
3. The line. Say one neutral sentence, "Look, the rain has started," in each of the eight rasas, with its cause in mind. The words stay the same; the flavor changes.

Then play the bee. Stand where you have room, imagine the jasmine vine, and let an invisible bee find you: track it with your eyes, strike at it, step away, look around for help. Say Shakuntala's lines from Ryder's translation. If someone can watch, ask them which rasa they tasted.

Common misconceptions

• Rasa is what the actor feels. In the Natyashastra, rasa is tasted by the audience. The actor presents causes, signs and passing states with precision.
• There are nine rasas in the Natyashastra. The text names eight. Later writers added shanta, peace, as a ninth.
• The Natyashastra is about dance only. It covers the whole of theatre: playhouse, music, dance, gesture, speech, costume, plot and acting.
• Sanskrit theatre is extinct. Kutiyattam, recognized by UNESCO, has kept Sanskrit drama alive in performance in Kerala.
• Classical Indian drama is all solemn. The Little Clay Cart is full of gamblers, comic servants and a trial, and the comic rasa is one of the eight.

The short version

• The Natyashastra, attributed to Bharata, is a vast treatise on performance; UNESCO added a manuscript of it to the Memory of the World Register in 2025.
• Rasa, the audience's "taste" of a performance, is produced from determinants, consequents and transitory states, as a flavor comes from spices.
• The eight rasas are the erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrible, odious and marvellous; later writers added peace.
• Abhinaya is fourfold: gesture (angika), words (vacika), costume and make-up (aharya) and involuntary inner signs (sattvika).
• Kalidasa's Shakuntala and Shudraka's The Little Clay Cart show the range of Sanskrit drama; Kutiyattam keeps it alive today.
• Play a rasa from its cause: imagine the determinant and let the consequents follow.

Sources

1. UNESCO. (2025). Manuscript of the Natyasastra of Bharatamuni: A seminal text of Indian performing art. Memory of the World Register. UNESCO.
2. UNESCO. (2008). Kutiyattam, Sanskrit theatre. Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
3. Kalidasa. (1912). Translations of Shakuntala and other works (A. W. Ryder, Trans.; Everyman's Library). J. M. Dent. Project Gutenberg.
4. Shudraka (attributed). (1905). The little clay cart (A. W. Ryder, Trans.; Harvard Oriental Series, Vol. 9). Harvard University. Project Gutenberg.
5. Bharata (attributed). (1950). The Natyasastra: A treatise on Hindu dramaturgy and histrionics (M. Ghosh, Trans.; Vol. 1, chapters 6 and 8). Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal.

A boy of twelve and a shogun

Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the third shogun of Japan's Muromachi shogunate, once watched a performance by a troupe of sarugaku players led by an actor named Kan'ami. The Japan Arts Council, which runs Japan's national theatres, tells what happened next: Yoshimitsu "took a great liking for the performances of this father-son pair" and gave generous patronage to Kan'ami (1333-1384) and his son Zeami, who was still twelve years old. With the shogun behind him, Zeami studied classical literature, brought elegance into the performances and created the drama of song and dance we call noh, writing treatises on the art that are still studied.

More than two centuries later, a woman called Okuni was dancing in Kyoto in a new style the crowds called kabuki. In China, meanwhile, a family of sung theatres had been developing for centuries, and one of them, kunqu, was already old. This lesson compares the three great stylized theatres of East Asia side by side, then asks your body to try the way each one walks, stops and tells.

The three traditions at a glance

Read the table across each row and two things stand out. All three are built from codes an audience learns to read, and none of them hides the theatre in a realistic room. Then read down each column, and the differences are as large as the likenesses: noh strips everything away, kabuki piles on spectacle, and Chinese opera turns an empty stage into a horse, a door or a boat with a single gesture.

Noh: the empty stage and the ghost

The noh stage is a planked platform that, in the Japan Arts Council's words, "protrudes out into the audience," with a roof on pillars and "neither walls nor a curtain separating the stage from the audience." A corridor called the hashigakari links it to backstage; it is used for entrances and exits and also, the Council explains, to represent "a path linking the real and spiritual worlds." At its far end is the mirror room, where the main actor puts on his mask in front of a large mirror and enters his role. The Council sums up the shape of a performance in one sentence: "The play begins when a performer enters an empty space, and ends when the stage becomes an empty space again."

The main actor is the shite, who mostly appears masked and in many plays is an unworldly being: a deity, a spirit, a ghost, an ogre. Opposite him is the waki, usually a man of this world, such as a traveling monk, and generally unmasked. In the kind of noh called mugen, dream noh, the whole story is treated as a dream or vision of the waki, in which the shite remembers the past. A chorus sits to the side and sings the scene and the characters' inner states, and the comic plays called kyogen, UNESCO notes, are performed in the same space.

Noh's rhythm has a name. Konparu Kunio, a noh actor and scholar, calls jo-ha-kyu "the most important aesthetic concept in Noh": "jo means beginning or preparation, ha means breaking, and kyu means rapid or urgent." It governs a program of plays, a single play, a dance and even a single step: each starts quietly, opens out and drives to a conclusion.

Remember: Noh is a theatre of the empty stage: a masked shite, usually from another world, meets an unmasked waki from this one, and everything moves in the slow-opening rhythm of jo-ha-kyu.

Kabuki: the townspeople's spectacle

The Japan Arts Council traces kabuki to the start of the Edo period, when Okuni, "a woman who referred to herself as a shrine maiden from Izumo Taisha shrine," performed a new dance, the kabuki-odori, in Kyoto. It borrowed the strange clothes and odd movements of the kabukimono, the eccentric dandies of the day, and its scenes of women dressed as men visiting teahouses drew commoners, samurai and nobles alike. Women's kabuki spread across Japan, and the shogunate eventually banned it for corrupting public morals. Young men's kabuki followed and was banned too. Adult men took over, and UNESCO notes that "only male actors" have performed kabuki since, a tradition that remains to this day. Men who specialize in women's roles are called onnagata.

Kabuki is theatre for everyone, and it shows. UNESCO lists revolving stages and trapdoors "through which the actors can appear and disappear," and above all the hanamichi, a walkway that runs from the stage through the audience, which the Japan Arts Council dates to the later Edo period. Its acting is built from contrasts, such as the bold aragoto "rough style" and the gentle wagoto "soft style," and from the mie, in which, in UNESCO's description, "the actor holds a characteristic pose to establish his character." A burst of movement, a sudden freeze, eyes wide and fixed: the pose stamps the moment on the audience's memory.

Chinese opera: four skills and an empty stage

Chinese opera, xiqu, is a family of many regional forms. UNESCO describes kunqu, which developed under the Ming dynasty in Kunshan near Suzhou, as "one of the oldest forms of Chinese opera still performed today," famous for pieces such as The Peony Pavilion and influential on later forms including Peking opera. Peking opera, UNESCO says, "is a performance art incorporating singing, reciting, acting, martial arts." Its style is "formulaic and symbolic," with "established choreography for movements of hands, eyes, torsos, and feet," while "stage settings and props are kept to a minimum," costumes are flamboyant, and facial make-up "uses concise symbols, colours and patterns to portray characters' personalities and social identities."

A. E. Zucker's The Chinese Theater (1925), written from years of watching performances in Peking, lists the fixed character types: the dignified older men and young scholars and warriors of the sheng roles, the female dan roles (which he spells tan), the painted-face roles whose character "is indicated by the style of face-painting he wears," and the chou (ch'ou), the clown, whose part "consists largely of improvisation." Zucker also records the conventions that let a bare stage become anything. A man on horseback is shown by a riding whip: "When he mounts he takes the whip and raises one leg," and when he dismounts he hands the whip to an attendant. Crossing a doorsill is shown by lifting the feet as you step; opening a door, by miming a bolt drawn back; a boat, by actors paddling the air with oars.

The point: Chinese opera combines singing, reciting, acting and martial arts on a nearly empty stage; role types and painted faces tell the audience who a character is, and gesture supplies the horse, the door and the boat.

What the comparison shows

Put the three side by side and some Western assumptions fall away. None of these theatres tries to persuade you that you are looking into a real room; each asks you to read a code and rewards you for it. All three join music, movement and speech, as the Natyashastra's theatre did in Lesson 14, rather than separating play, opera and ballet. All three depend on long apprenticeships, often within families or master-student lines. And each solves the problem of making the invisible visible differently: noh by stripping the stage to an empty space for ghosts, kabuki by flooding it with spectacle, Chinese opera by letting a whip become a horse.

Walking and stillness: three exercises

Work in a cleared space on a floor that is not slippery: bare feet or flat shoes, never socks on a polished floor.

1. The noh walk, in jo-ha-kyu. The Japan Arts Council describes the basic stance, kamae, as standing with "the knees slightly bent, the center of gravity placed on the hips," and the basic walk, hakobi, as sliding the feet with the soles on the floor, "without raising your heels," so the body glides without rising or falling. Walk the length of the room this way. Begin very slowly (jo), let the walk open and steady (ha), and let it drive faster toward the far wall (kyu), then stop in perfect stillness. Notice whether your head bobbed: in hakobi it should not.
2. The kabuki mie. Take three strong steps, as though arriving at a decisive moment, then snap into a held pose: feet planted, arms set, eyes wide and fixed on a point. Hold it for a slow count of five and release. The power comes from the contrast between the burst and the freeze, not from strain; keep your neck and jaw free.
3. The Chinese opera horse and door. Take a ruler or wooden spoon as a riding whip. Mime opening a door by drawing back a bolt, step over the doorsill with a raised foot, then "mount": take the whip and lift one knee as though rising into the saddle, without jumping. Ride across the room with the whip held high, dismount, and hand the whip to a partner who leads the horse away, or lay it down as if passing the reins.

Common misconceptions

• Noh and kabuki are the same thing. Noh took shape under shogun patronage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and is spare and masked; kabuki grew from townspeople's entertainment in the seventeenth century and is spectacular and made up.
• Chinese opera is like Western opera. UNESCO describes Peking opera as singing, reciting, acting and martial arts together, on a stage with very few sets or props.
• Stylized means unemotional. Codified gesture is how these forms carry feeling to an audience trained to read it, as abhinaya does in Kutiyattam.
• Kabuki was always male. It began with Okuni, a woman, and women's kabuki was popular before the shogunate banned it.
• Masks and painted faces hide the character. In noh the mask defines the role, and in Peking opera the face-painting announces personality and status the moment the actor enters.

What to remember

• Kan'ami and his son Zeami, with the shogun Yoshimitsu's patronage, turned sarugaku into noh; Zeami's treatises still guide it.
• Noh: a roofed stage jutting into the audience, a hashigakari bridgeway, a masked shite from another world and an unmasked waki from this one; the rhythm of jo-ha-kyu.
• Kabuki: begun by Okuni in early seventeenth-century Kyoto; all-male after bans on women's and young men's kabuki; onnagata, hanamichi, aragoto and wagoto, and the mie.
• Chinese opera: many regional forms, including kunqu and Peking opera; singing, reciting, acting and martial arts; role types, painted faces and symbolic props on a bare stage.
• All three are stylized, codified and learned through long training; UNESCO lists nogaku, kabuki, kunqu and Peking opera as intangible cultural heritage.

Sources

1. Japan Arts Council. (2018). Invitation to Nohgaku: History (Ascent to greatness), Stage and performance, and Plays and characters. Japan Arts Council.
2. Japan Arts Council. (n.d.). Invitation to Kabuki: History (The beginning) and Stage. Japan Arts Council.
3. UNESCO. (2008). Nogaku theatre and Kabuki theatre. Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. UNESCO; UNESCO.
4. UNESCO. (2008, 2010). Kun Qu opera and Peking opera. Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. UNESCO; UNESCO.
5. Zucker, A. E. (1925). The Chinese theater. Little, Brown. Internet Archive.
6. Konparu, K. (1983). The noh theater: Principles and perspectives. Weatherhill/Tankosha.

Breeches on fire, 29 June 1613

On 2 July 1613, the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton wrote to his nephew with some news "from the Bank's side." The King's players had a new play, "called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII," staged with great pomp. When King Henry made his entrance to a masque at Cardinal Wolsey's house, small cannon were shot off, and "some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch." At first it seemed "but an idle smoke," and everyone's eyes were on the show, so it "kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds." Wotton adds that nothing perished "but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks," except that one man's breeches caught fire, and he "put it out with bottle ale."

The house that burned was the Globe, Shakespeare's playhouse. This lesson follows English theatre from the streets of medieval York, where the stage was a wagon, to that wooden playhouse on the south bank of the Thames, and asks what its shape did to the way actors spoke. It ends with you doing what Shakespeare's actors did every afternoon: talking to an audience you can see.

York: a city that performed the Bible

Two centuries before the Globe, the great drama of England belonged to its towns. At York, on the feast of Corpus Christi, the city performed the story of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgment. Lucy Toulmin Smith, who first printed the York plays in 1885, found the earliest notice of them in the city records in 1378. The town clerk Roger Burton wrote out a list of the plays and the crafts assigned to them in 1415, and the surviving manuscript contains forty-eight plays.

The performers were the city's craft guilds, the "crafts or mysteries" of York, each responsible for one episode and its costs. The Shipwrights performed the Building of the Ark; the Mercers the Last Judgment. Each play was performed on its own movable stage, and Toulmin Smith notes that at York "the word pageant was used both for the travelling scaffold on which the play was performed, and for the representation" itself. The pageants were real vehicles: in 1500 the cartwrights were ordered to make four new wheels for one of them. They moved through the streets and performed in turn at a series of stations, where banners with the city arms had been set out the evening before, so that a spectator who stayed in one place could watch the whole history of the world roll past.

In short: Medieval York's Corpus Christi plays were civic theatre: craft guilds performed Bible episodes on pageant wagons that stopped to play at stations through the city.

From wagon to playhouse: the Theatre, 1576

The professional London theatre began with buildings. Shakespeare's Globe, the modern theatre on Bankside, records that in 1576 John Brayne and James Burbage built the Theatre "just outside the city walls," and that the Curtain followed nearby in 1577. Why outside? The officials who ran the City of London thought playhouses noisy and disruptive, attracting thieves and other "undesirable" people, so builders chose sites beyond the city's control.

The Theatre stood on land leased from a landlord called Allen. In 1597, the Globe's history explains, Allen refused to renew the lease, but the Burbages owned the building, because the lease said they owned anything built on the land. So they took it down while Allen was away over Christmas, stored the timber, and offered five members of their company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, "including Shakespeare, the chance to become part-owners of the new theatre for £10 each." With that money they leased land on the south bank, near the Rose, and in 1599 the Globe opened.

Inside the Globe

The Globe's own description of an outdoor playhouse lists its working parts:

The Globe estimates that by 1600 London theatres could hold up to 3000 people for the most popular plays, with several theatres offering plays "most afternoons." That word matters. Plays were performed in daylight. There was no darkened auditorium: the actors could see every face, and the audience could see one another.

All the actors were men and boys. Shakespeare jokes about it in Hamlet, when the prince welcomes a traveling company and teases the boy who plays its women: "What, my young lady and mistress! By 'r Lady, your Ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine," a platform shoe. "Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring." The boy has grown, and if his voice breaks his career in women's parts is over. The Globe's account of audiences confirms how unusual actresses would have seemed: in 1629 a visiting French company was hissed and "pippin-pelted" from a London stage, probably because it used women actors.

The fire, and the Globe again

The company built a second Globe on the brick foundations of the first, the same size and shape but, the theatre notes, more extravagantly decorated, and this time with a tiled roof instead of thatch. The Globe that stands on Bankside today is a third: a modern reconstruction, which the theatre notes was completed and officially opened in 1997. It keeps the open yard, the thrust stage and the galleries, but not everything could be copied. Modern health and safety rules meant more exits than the original, fire doors and stewards on duty, and modern comfort meant numbered bench seats. Its builders learned the lesson of Wotton's letter.

Daylight and direct address

Put the pieces together: a stage pushed into a standing crowd, an audience on three sides and above, everyone in daylight. In such a space, an actor speaking alone does not have to pretend the audience is absent. Soliloquies and asides can be spoken to people the actor can see and answer. The Chorus of Henry V makes the relationship explicit. He apologizes for "this cockpit" and "this wooden O," then turns the audience into collaborators:

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' th' receiving earth.

That is an actor asking for help from a crowd he can look in the eye. Compare it with the York pageant, where the same intimacy happened in the street, and with the realist theatre of the next lesson, which will put the audience in the dark and build a fourth wall.

Speaking to an audience you can see

To feel the difference, perform with the lights on. Arrange an audience on three sides of a small space, family members if you can, or a few chairs and cushions if you are alone, and speak the lines above to them. Do not perform at a general "audience." Choose one face, or one chair, for each line, and wait for a reaction before you move on: a nod, a laugh, a puzzled look. On "Think, when we talk of horses," point to an empty patch of floor and watch your listeners actually look. That is the Globe's contract: the actor offers, and the audience completes the picture.

Common misconceptions

• Medieval drama was performed by priests inside churches. The York cycle was performed by the city's craft guilds, outdoors, on pageant wagons moving through the streets.
• Shakespeare's audience sat quietly in the dark. They stood or sat in daylight, could see one another and the actors, and could buy food and drink during the show.
• The Globe had a roof like a modern theatre. Only the stage and galleries were covered; the yard was open to the sky.
• Women played women's parts. In Shakespeare's companies boys did; Hamlet's joke about the boy player's voice depends on it.
• Today's Globe is an exact copy. It is a careful reconstruction, but modern rules required extra exits, fire doors, stewards and numbered seats.

Where this leaves us

• At York the craft guilds staged a cycle of Bible plays on pageant wagons, recorded from 1378; the manuscript holds forty-eight plays.
• In 1576 Brayne and Burbage built the Theatre outside the city walls; its timber, taken down over Christmas after the lease dispute, helped build the Globe on Bankside in 1599.
• The Globe had an open yard, a thrust stage under "the heavens," a tiring house and galleries; plays ran in daylight, and boys played the women.
• A cannon's wadding set the thatch alight during Henry VIII on 29 June 1613; the reconstructed Globe opened in 1997 with modern safety additions.
• Daylight and a surrounding crowd made direct address natural: the actor speaks to people he can see and asks them to piece out the play with their thoughts.

Sources

1. Wotton, H. (1907). Letter 222, to Sir Edmund Bacon, July 2, 1613. In L. P. Smith (Ed.), The life and letters of Sir Henry Wotton (Vol. 2, pp. 32-33). Clarendon Press. Internet Archive.
2. Smith, L. T. (Ed.). (1885). York plays: The plays performed by the crafts or mysteries of York on the day of Corpus Christi. Clarendon Press. Internet Archive.
3. Shakespeare's Globe. (n.d.). The Globe, Playhouses, Audiences and The third Globe. Shakespeare's Globe.
4. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Hamlet (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 2, scene 2). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.
5. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Henry V (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Prologue). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.

An ending Ibsen called barbaric

On 17 February 1880, Henrik Ibsen wrote from Munich to the Copenhagen newspaper Nationaltidende to correct a report. A theatre in Flensburg, in northern Germany, had staged A Doll's House with a different ending, and the paper had said the change was made on Ibsen's orders. Not so, he wrote. When his German translator warned him that an "adaptation" with a happier ending was about to be published, Ibsen had sent, "for use in case of absolute necessity," a draft of an altered last scene "according to which Nora does not leave the house, but is forcibly led by Helmer to the door of the children's bedroom; a short dialogue takes place, Nora sinks down at the door, and the curtain falls." He had described that change, he said, as "barbaric violence" done to the play. German law gave Scandinavian authors no protection, so "I prefer, taught by experience, to commit the act of violence myself."

That letter is a small trial of realism. The play had shown an ordinary marriage, in an ordinary room, ending in a way life sometimes ends and plays then did not. Managers and some audiences wanted it changed. This lesson takes realism to court twice: once over Ibsen's door, and once, at greater length, over the question of whether Chekhov's last play is a comedy or a tragedy, a dispute in which the playwright and his greatest director took opposite sides.

The room with one wall missing

Realist drama depends on a picture: a real room with three walls, doors that open and furniture that is used. You saw it in Ibsen's first stage direction in Lessons 2 and 10, with its doors, window, porcelain stove and "what-not with china." Designers call this a box set. The audience watches through the missing side of the box, the fourth wall, as if it were invisible. Stanislavski's Tortsov even teaches actors where to look when they gaze at "this non-existent fourth wall": at an imaginary object close by, not at someone in the audience.

When the Moscow Art Theatre celebrated a jubilee, Stanislavski recalls in My Life in Art, a famous lawyer staged a mock prosecution of him and his co-founder Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. The charge: they had murdered "routine," "broken out the fourth wall and have shown the intimate life of men to the crowd; they have destroyed theatrical lies and have put in their stead truth." Compare that with Lesson 16. At the Globe, the actor spoke to people he could see; in the realist theatre, the audience sits in the dark looking into a private room.

The upshot: Realism stages ordinary life in a box set seen through an invisible fourth wall. Its ideal, in its own supporters' words, was to replace "theatrical lies" with truth, and that ideal could make endings audiences did not want.

The Seagull: a failure and a rescue

Chekhov's plays nearly did not survive realism's theatres. Constance Garnett's 1920 edition of his letters records that in 1896 The Seagull was performed at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg and "was a fiasco": the actors did not know their parts, and the house was full of "a strained condition of boredom and bewilderment." Two years later the new Moscow Art Theatre, which had opened on 14 October 1898, took the play on. Stanislavski describes the first night, 17 December 1898: business was so bad there were "only six hundred rubles in the box office"; Chekhov, ill in Yalta, was thought too fragile to survive another failure. After the first act came "a gravelike silence," and the actress Olga Knipper fainted onstage. Then "there was a roar in the auditorium," and the curtain rose and fell again and again on actors too stunned to bow.

The dispute: comedy or tragedy?

Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard, opened at the Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904. A family of landowners, unable to face their debts, loses its estate and its famous orchard to a merchant whose father was their serf. Is that a comedy? Two of the people closest to the play answered differently, and each answer has evidence behind it.

What would settle it? Not a single quotation. Chekhov's intention is strong evidence; he wrote the play and named its genre. But a script is also a set of events that actors must play, and the ending, with Firs alone in a locked house, is hard to play for laughs. One way through is to look for the place where the two meet: characters who take themselves entirely seriously, as Bergson's comic characters do in Lesson 9, and an audience that laughs and is moved, sometimes in the same minute. The way to test a reading is the way Stanislavski himself kept testing his: in rehearsal, against the text, in front of people.

Play it two ways: Gaev and the bookcase

Here is a moment from Act 1 in Garnett's translation of 1923. The family has just come home from Paris. Gaev, Madame Ranevsky's brother, discovers the date branded on an old bookcase.

GAEV: Do you know, Lyuba, how old that bookcase is? Last week I pulled out the bottom drawer and there I found the date branded on it. The bookcase was made just a hundred years ago. What do you say to that? We might have celebrated its jubilee. Though it's an inanimate object, still it is a book case.

PISHTCHIK (amazed): A hundred years! Fancy that now.

GAEV: Yes.... It is a thing.... (feeling the bookcase) Dear, honoured, bookcase! Hail to thee who for more than a hundred years hast served the pure ideals of good and justice; thy silent call to fruitful labour has never flagged in those hundred years, maintaining (in tears) in the generations of man, courage and faith in a brighter future and fostering in us ideals of good and social consciousness (a pause).

LOPAHIN: Yes....

LYUBOV: You are just the same as ever, Leonid.

GAEV (a little embarrassed): Cannon off the right into the pocket!

Reading one, Stanislavski's: the bookcase is Gaev's childhood. The tears are real; he is saying goodbye to a world he cannot save, and the others' silence is respect. Play it slowly, with the pause after "social consciousness" heavy with grief. Reading two, Chekhov's: a grown man is making a public speech to a piece of furniture, in an inflated style, and cries at his own words. The others do not know where to look. Lopakhin's "Yes" is the driest line in the act, Lyubov's "just the same as ever" is a gentle put-down, and Gaev escapes into billiards jargon. Play it straight, with complete seriousness, and let the audience laugh.

Notice that the text supports both. The stage direction "(in tears)" is there; so is the embarrassment and the billiard shot. That is the dispute in miniature, and the reason productions keep finding new balances.

Common misconceptions

• Ibsen wanted the softer ending. He wrote it under protest to stop worse adaptations and called it "barbaric violence" done to the play.
• Realism means no style. The box set and the fourth wall are conventions as deliberate as a noh stage or a Globe yard, and actors are trained to play inside them.
• Chekhov's plays are simply gloomy. Chekhov called The Cherry Orchard a comedy and parts of it farce, and the text is full of comic business.
• The author's label settles everything. Chekhov's word is strong evidence, but a production must also play what the text shows; the strongest productions test both readings.
• The fourth wall means ignoring the audience. Actors still play for the house: Tortsov teaches them to focus on imaginary objects on that wall so their faces stay open, and they must still be heard.

Putting it together

• In 1880 Ibsen drafted an altered ending for A Doll's House under protest, to stop worse adaptations, and called it barbaric violence done to the play.
• Realism builds a box set and plays behind an invisible fourth wall; its supporters saw it as replacing theatrical lies with truth.
• The Seagull failed in Petersburg in 1896 and triumphed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898.
• Chekhov called The Cherry Orchard a comedy, in parts a farce; Stanislavski called it a tragedy; the text holds evidence for both.
• Test a disputed reading in rehearsal: play the characters with complete seriousness and see what the audience laughs at and what moves them.

Sources

1. Ibsen, H. (1905). Letter 142, to the Nationaltidende, 17 February 1880, and Letter 143, to Heinrich Laube. In Letters of Henrik Ibsen (J. N. Laurvik and M. Morison, Trans.). Fox, Duffield. Internet Archive.
2. Chekhov, A. (1920). Letters of Anton Chekhov to his family and friends (C. Garnett, Trans.; letter to Madame Stanislavsky, 15 September 1903, and biographical sketch). Macmillan. Project Gutenberg.
3. Chekhov, A. (1923). The cherry orchard: A comedy in four acts. In The cherry orchard and other plays (C. Garnett, Trans.). Chatto and Windus. Internet Archive.
4. Stanislavsky, C. (1924). My life in art (J. J. Robbins, Trans.; chapters on The Seagull, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, and list of productions). Little, Brown. Internet Archive.
5. Stanislavski, C. (1958). Stanislavski's legacy (E. R. Hapgood, Ed. and Trans.; letter to Chekhov on The Cherry Orchard). Theatre Arts Books.
6. Peace, R. (1983). Chekhov: A study of the four major plays. Yale University Press.

A placard after a riot

In the summer of 1822, after a riot at his theatre in New York City, a manager named William Alexander Brown is said to have posted a placard declaring: "White people do not know how to behave at entertainments designed for ladies and gentlemen of colour." The historian Marvin McAllister made those words the title of his 2003 history of Brown's company. Notice how he introduces the story, though: "according to legend." A careful historian labels even a favorite story with how sure we can be of it.

Brown's African Theatre was, in the words of the scholar Terry F. Robinson, "the first to feature an all-Black acting troupe and the first created for the entertainment of New York's Black community." It staged Shakespeare, opera, pantomime and the first known play by a Black American. Within three seasons it was gone.

Here is the problem this lesson works on. Some of the surviving descriptions of Brown's company were written by people who were hostile to it: a newspaper that mocked it and a comedian who caricatured its star. Its chief rival, meanwhile, paid men to break up its shows. How can you find a true history in sources like these? Historians have worked out careful answers, and the method is useful to anyone who reads about the past.

The problem: a theatre seen through hostile eyes

The Folger Shakespeare Library's 2007 volume Shakespeare in American Life, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, notes that Brown's theater "became the subject of vicious lampoons" in M. M. Noah's newspaper, the National Advocate, "which misrepresented productions as farcical minstrel shows." The same passage lists those lampoons, along with riots, police surveillance, political attack and the growing pull of blackface minstrelsy on the marketplace, among the forces that contributed to the theater's closing.

A lampoon is writing designed to make its target look ridiculous. That makes it tricky evidence. It may get some facts right, such as which play was on and who starred, while distorting what the performance looked like and what it meant to the people who came. Other kinds of evidence survive too, each made for its own purpose. A playbill existed to sell tickets, so it may flatter a show, but it had to tell the public what was playing and when. A newspaper notice announced what was coming. A drawing shows how one artist chose to picture a performer. The historian's job is to ask of every document who made it, why and for whom, and then to test its claims against other evidence. That last step is called corroboration.

What the evidence shows

Robinson, an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, summarized the documented history in 2024 for the British Association for Romantic Studies, drawing on George A. Thompson's A Documentary History of the African Theatre (1998), the theatre historian Errol G. Hill and Bernth Lindfors's biography of Ira Aldridge. Here is what Robinson reports, with the source given for each point.

Robinson also quotes Hill's summary of the company's predicament: "Company members and Brown himself were harassed by police, physically assaulted by white roughnecks during performance, and victimized without compensatory redress in law courts." A 2020 article for Shakespeare's Globe by the scholar Vanessa I. Corredera adds the best-known episode. When the Park Theatre staged Richard III, the African Company staged its own Richard III in the hall next door on the same night, and Price responded by hiring a mob to "riot" so that the police would shut the company down. The playwright Carlyle Brown later dramatized the rivalry in The African Company Presents Richard III.

Reading the documents like a historian

Three puzzles from this history show the method at work.

A playbill with the wrong year. The playbill for Hewlett's last known show announces a performance of "Matthews At Home" on "Monday even'g, Jan. 19," and someone has penned in the year 1827. Robinson checks the calendar: January 19 fell on a Friday in 1827, but on a Monday in 1818, 1824 and 1829. The bill mentions the Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821, so 1818 is out, and the African Theatre at Mercer Street was no longer active after 1824, so 1829 is out. That leaves 1824. A note written on a document is evidence too, and it can be wrong.

When did it end? The Folger volume dates the theater's closure to 1822. The Globe article says that after 1823 there are no more records of the company. Robinson points to the playbill of January 1824. These need not be careless errors. Brown moved the theatre several times after its first season, often under pressure, so "the theatre" can mean a building or a company, and each writer may be marking a different ending. When accounts disagree, first ask what each one is counting.

Lear or Richard? Columbia University's teaching site Mapping the African American Past opens its entry with a vivid sentence: "On Mercer Street in the fall of 1821, King Lear limped out onto stage and the audience went wild." That does not fit the other evidence. Robinson and the Globe article both say the first season opened with Richard III, and it is Richard, not Lear, whom Shakespeare makes limp: dogs bark at him, he says, "as I halt by them." The Globe article lists King Lear among the plays that followed, which may be where the mix-up began. Even a reliable site can slip, and tracing a claim back toward the documents is how you catch it.

So what?: Read every source for who made it, why and for whom. Hostile sources can still confirm facts such as titles and dates; a note added to a document can be wrong; and when modern accounts disagree, find out what each one is counting and trace the claim back toward the documents.

James Hewlett

The company's star, James Hewlett, was, in Corredera's words, "the first professional African-American Shakespearean actor." He played Richard III on the first night, and a surviving drawing is titled Mr. Hewlett in Richard the third in imitation of Mr. Kean. Hewlett built a career performing dramatic excerpts and imitations of prominent actors and singers, among them Edmund Kean, the actor whom Aldridge would later replace as Othello at Covent Garden. When the comedian Charles Mathews presented A Trip to America (1824), with caricatures of Black Americans and, Robinson writes, "a scathing depiction of Hewlett's acting," Hewlett left for London, possibly to confront him, and came home the same year without meeting him. He also answered Mathews in a letter that McAllister reads as contesting "both racial and national prejudice."

Ira Aldridge: from the African Free School to Europe

The company's most famous graduate is Ira Aldridge (1807-1867). He was born in New York and studied at the African Free School, which the New York Manumission Society opened for the children of free and enslaved Black New Yorkers. Columbia's Mapping the African American Past notes that its students "learned the art of public speaking." The Globe article calls the African Company the "training ground for a young Ira Aldridge," and Robinson writes that he was likely attending its performances and acting there.

English Heritage, which marks his later London home with a blue plaque, writes that he left for Britain at seventeen, when it had become obvious that as an African American he would be unable to pursue an acting career in the United States. His London debut came in 1825. Robinson dates it to 11 May at the Royalty Theatre, as Othello. English Heritage begins instead with the Royal Coburg Theatre that October, where he played Oroonoko in The Revolt of Surinam. That looks like a conflict until you read Lindfors, who writes that Aldridge debuted in London in 1825 "playing Othello and other black roles in two metropolitan theatres in a combined run that lasted six months." Both accounts can be right: they start the story at different theatres.

For the next eight years he toured the British provinces, billed as "the African Roscius," after Roscius, the famous actor of ancient Rome whose name stood for the best actor of all. In April 1833 he was chosen to replace the mortally ill Edmund Kean as Othello at Covent Garden, the first time, English Heritage notes, that a Black actor had played Othello on a West End stage. The audience applauded both of his performances, but the critics, failing to overcome their racial prejudices, savaged him, and the theatre cancelled the rest of his engagements. He went back to touring, and over the following years, in wigs and white makeup, added roles such as Macbeth, Shylock and King Lear.

In the 1850s, English Heritage records, he won "rapturous receptions" on a three-year tour through Belgium, Prussia and Austria-Hungary, then toured Sweden and Russia, where he became the first actor to perform Shakespeare in the Russian provinces. He became a British citizen in 1863, and, Northumberland Archives notes, he died on tour in Poland in 1867. Robinson calls him "one of the most celebrated Shakespearean actors of all time" and sums up what the short-lived company achieved: "in Aldridge, the legacy of Brown, Hewlett, and the African Theatre lived on."

The point: The African Theatre lasted only about three seasons, but its people carried its work forward: Hewlett in his solo performances, and Aldridge on the stages of Britain and Europe.

Speak it: Othello before the Senate

Aldridge's most famous role, Northumberland Archives notes, was Othello, the part he played at his London debut and again at Covent Garden. In Act 1, scene 3, Othello is summoned before the Venetian Senate and accused of using witchcraft to win Desdemona. He answers:

Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors,
My very noble and approved good masters:
That I have ta'en away this old man's daughter,
It is most true; true I have married her.
The very head and front of my offending
Hath this extent, no more. Rude am I in my speech,
And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace;
...
Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnished tale deliver
Of my whole course of love.

Use the tools of earlier lessons. The given circumstances (Lesson 6): it is night, the Senate is in emergency session over a war, and the father of Othello's new wife has just accused him of witchcraft. The action (Lesson 7): not to plead, but to command the room with calm. Notice the irony the verse builds in (Lesson 8): Othello claims to be "Rude... in my speech" in some of the most controlled verse of the play. Speak it standing, to a row of chairs or family members as the Senate, and let "It is most true; true I have married her" land with the stillness of a man who has nothing to hide.

Common misconceptions

• Black theatre in America began in the twentieth century. Brown's company was performing Shakespeare in New York in 1821.
• A hostile source is useless. A lampoon can confirm which plays were staged and that the company drew attention, even while misrepresenting it; the skill is to separate fact from mockery.
• When two sources disagree, one of them must be wrong. Robinson's Royalty Theatre and English Heritage's Royal Coburg turn out to be two parts of the same 1825 debut run. Ask what each source is counting before you choose.
• The company simply faded away. The record shows a fight to survive: forced moves after noise complaints, arrests, attacks, a rival manager's hired mob and courts that gave no redress.
• Ira Aldridge played only Black characters. Over the years he added roles such as Macbeth, Shylock and King Lear, and he took Shakespeare as far as the Russian provinces.

The takeaway

• William Alexander Brown's African Theatre grew from the African Grove tea garden and gave its first performance in New York on 17 September 1821: Richard III, starring James Hewlett.
• Brown's lost Drama of King Shotaway, about the Garifuna leader Joseph Chatoyer, is the first known play by a Black American.
• The company was harassed by police and by a mob hired by a rival manager; its last known performance, on a playbill dated by the calendar, was in January 1824.
• Some surviving descriptions come from hostile writers. Read each source for its purpose, and test its claims against playbills and other evidence.
• Ira Aldridge, educated at the African Free School, debuted in London in 1825, played Othello at Covent Garden in 1833 and toured Europe until he died on tour in Poland in 1867.

Sources

1. Robinson, T. F. (2024, January 22). On this day in 1824: The African Theatre and Ira Aldridge. BARS Blog, British Association for Romantic Studies. BARS.
2. Corredera, V. I. (2020, October 22). Pleasure and pain in Black Shakespearean performance history. Shakespeare's Globe. Shakespeare's Globe.
3. Curriculum Concepts International. (n.d.). African Grove Theater. Mapping the African American Past, Columbia University. MAAP.
4. Curriculum Concepts International. (n.d.). African Free School. Mapping the African American Past, Columbia University. MAAP.
5. English Heritage. (n.d.). Ira Aldridge (1807-1867). Blue Plaques. English Heritage.
6. Northumberland Archives. (n.d.). Picture of Ira Aldridge in Othello costume, mid-1800s. Learn: Black History. Northumberland Archives.
7. Lindfors, B. (2012). The lost life of Ira Daniel Aldridge (Part 1). Text Matters, 2(2). Text Matters.
8. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Othello (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 1, scene 3). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.
9. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Richard III (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 1, scene 1). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.
10. McAllister, M. E. (2003). White people do not know how to behave at entertainments designed for ladies and gentlemen of colour: William Brown's African and American theater. University of North Carolina Press.
11. Vaughan, V. M., and Vaughan, A. T. (Eds.). (2007). Shakespeare in American life. Folger Shakespeare Library.

"Is he a Communist?"

On Tuesday, December 6, 1938, in Washington, the national director of the Federal Theatre Project, Hallie Flanagan, sat before the House of Representatives' Special Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Martin Dies of Texas. Representative Joe Starnes of Alabama had been reading aloud from an article she had published in Theatre Arts Monthly in November 1931, about theatres run by workers' groups. The passage he read ended by saying that their ambition gave them "a certain Marlowesque madness." The printed record of the hearing, published by the Government Printing Office, goes on:

MR. STARNES. You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?
MRS. FLANAGAN. I am very sorry. I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.
MR. STARNES. Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all that we want to do.
MRS. FLANAGAN. Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare, immediately preceding Shakespeare.
MR. STARNES. Put that in the record, because the charge has been made that this article of yours is entirely communistic, and we want to help you.

Read the exchange once as a congressman who has never heard of Marlowe, and once as a congressman scoring a point with a straight face. The words on the page support both readings. That is the first lesson of this hearing: a transcript records what was said, not how it was meant, and actors and historians alike have to decide what the words were doing.

Behind the exchange lay a serious dispute that returns whenever a government pays for art. Was the Federal Theatre a relief program that happened to make remarkable theatre, or a propaganda machine paid for by taxpayers? This lesson lays out both cases with the evidence each rests on, and then asks what would settle the question.

A relief program with a stage

The Federal Theatre Project was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the New Deal agency that created jobs during the Great Depression. Flanagan told the committee under oath that the project was set up on August 29, 1935, and that she had been appointed by the WPA's head, Harry Hopkins. She came from Vassar College, where she ran the Experimental Theatre. According to the college's own encyclopedia, she had been the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she spent studying the modern theatre across Europe. She was most impressed by the Russian theatre, a connection that later brought her suspicion.

Asked the project's "primary purpose," she answered: "to put back to work the unemployed professional people; to put them back to work and rehabilitate them and conserve their skills." The rules followed from that purpose. A unit could be set up in any city where 25 or more theatre professionals were found on the relief rolls, which is why the biggest centers were New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Flanagan opened her statement with a pointed joke: since August 1935, she said, she had been "combating un-American inactivity."

The scale was enormous. Vassar's account says that by late 1936 the project had hired 12,500 people across 28 states and the District of Columbia, and that in New York City alone it played, at reduced prices, to weekly audiences of 350,000, many of whom had never seen live theatre before. Flanagan gave the committee a recorded total audience of "something like 25,000,000 people." A Folger Shakespeare Library article sums up the economics: "It was a relief program, not a money-making venture."

Four productions that made its name

The Cradle Will Rock shows how theatre can turn an obstacle into a form. Actors' Equity had ruled that its members could not perform on the new theatre's stage without the approval of the original producer, and the original producer was the federal government. The musicians' union, too, refused to play unless the full salaries were paid. So Blitzstein began the show alone at the piano, the actress Olive Stanton, who played Moll, joined him from the audience, and the other actors performed the whole musical from the house. When the show went on to a privately backed run, John Houseman kept the arrangement, saying it solved the old question of how to make a labor show's audience feel part of the performance.

Key idea: The Federal Theatre was set up to employ people, and its art grew out of that job: a city qualified by its unemployed, not by its theatres.

The Living Newspaper: theatre made from the news

The Living Newspaper was the project's most original form. Instead of a plot built around a few characters, it dramatized a current issue taken from the news in a string of short scenes. A loudspeaker voice, sometimes called the Voice of the Living Newspaper, announced dates and facts and linked the scenes together. The subjects were the arguments of the day: a Supreme Court ruling against the Agricultural Adjustment Act in Triple-A Plowed Under, electric power and who should own it in Power, labor in the courts in Injunction Granted, and housing in One-Third of a Nation, whose title echoes Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural address of January 20, 1937: "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."

Here is a short model of the form, written for this course. Everything in it is invented.

VOICE: March 3. The town council votes to close the Elm Street
       library on Saturdays. Savings: forty-two thousand dollars a year.
       (Light up on a COUNCIL MEMBER at a podium.)
COUNCIL MEMBER: Every department has to share the pain.
VOICE: Saturday visitors last year: eleven thousand.
       (A GIRL with a stack of books stops at a locked door.)
GIRL: It says Monday to Friday. I have school Monday to Friday.
VOICE: The library's computers are the only free internet within two miles.
       (A MAN in work clothes tries the door, checks his phone, turns away.)
COUNCIL MEMBER: We welcome public comment at our next meeting.
VOICE: Next meeting: Tuesday, 2 p.m.
       (The GIRL and the MAN look at each other. Blackout.)

Notice how much arguing the scene does without anyone making a speech. The facts the Voice chooses, and the order it puts them in, make the case. That is exactly why critics called the form propaganda and why its makers called it education.

The case against: propaganda on the public payroll

The critics' case was more than name-calling. Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, a member of the committee, called the project "one more link in the vast and unparalleled New Deal propaganda machine," as the historian Jane De Hart Mathews records. At the hearing, the chairman put the principle plainly:

THE CHAIRMAN. ... do you not think it improper that the Federal Theater, using the taxpayers' money, should present a play to the audience which champions one side of a controversy?
MRS. FLANAGAN. No, Congressman Dies; I do not consider it improper.
...
THE CHAIRMAN. Who is to determine what is a forward-looking tendency?
MRS. FLANAGAN. Why, our play policy board chooses these plays.

Between those lines, Flanagan had said that about 10 percent of the plays held "a brief for a certain cause in accord with general forward-looking tendencies," which is what prompted Dies's question. The critics could point to more evidence. Flanagan's 1931 article had described workers' theatres that meant to "shape the life of this country, socially, politically, and industrially." She told the committee, "I could not say that we never did a propaganda play," and she agreed that One-Third of a Nation was propaganda "for better housing for American citizens." Asked about Power, she first said it "portrayed as effectively as possible both sides of that controversy," and later, pressed by the chairman, granted that it "does speak highly for the public ownership of power." The Folger article adds that the committee also accused the project of encouraging racial integration, a reminder that not every objection was about economics or propaganda.

The case for: relief that became an art theatre

Flanagan's defense used the record too. Of the 924 plays the project had produced by then, Starnes himself said, "only 26, as I recall, were in question." She drew a line between kinds of propaganda: "we have never done a play which was propaganda for communism, but we have done plays which were propaganda for democracy, propaganda for better housing." Propaganda, she argued, "is education focused on certain things," and every play still had to pass a first test: "the play must be good, it must have the power to hold people in the audience." She also told the committee that the project had returned some 2,000 people to private industry, her evidence that relief remained the main goal.

Her defenders also point to what the project made possible: the Harlem Macbeth; Negro Units that, in the words of the drama scholar Anthony D. Hill, provided "much-needed employment and apprenticeships to hundreds of black actors, directors, theatre technicians, and playwrights"; touring and low prices for audiences who had never seen a play; and a start for later leaders of American theatre such as John Houseman, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Orson Welles. Even It Can't Happen Here, staged in 23 theatres at once, drew fire from every direction. Flanagan later recalled that some thought it "proved Federal Theatre was communistic; others that it was New Deal; others that it was subconsciously fascist." A play accused of everything at once, her defenders argue, is hard to call a party pamphlet.

What would settle it?

Part of this dispute is about facts, and facts can be checked. The Federal Theatre's scripts, programs and records survive in archives such as the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, so you can read Power or Injunction Granted and judge whether it argues one side; and the hearing record lets you test the charges against the committee's own count of 26 plays out of 924. Part of it is about values: whether public money should ever pay for theatre that takes a side, and who decides which side is "forward-looking." No archive can settle that for you, but evidence can keep the argument honest. Notice how the hearing itself handled evidence: the Marlowe exchange began with a congressman reading a passage from a seven-year-old magazine article as proof of what a national theatre was doing.

Worth holding on to: The Federal Theatre dispute had a factual side (what the plays said, how many were in question, whom the project employed) and a values side (whether public money should fund theatre that argues). Evidence can settle the first and inform the second, but it cannot settle the second on its own.

How it ended

Flanagan never finished her defense. At a quarter past one, the chairman called a recess for lunch. "Do I understand that this concludes my testimony?" she asked. "We will see about it after lunch," Dies answered, and he gave the same answer when she asked to make a final statement. After lunch the committee went on to the director of the Federal Writers' Project, and Flanagan does not appear as a witness again in the printed volume.

Congress then removed the project's funding, and on June 30, 1939, the Federal Theatre Project ended, the first of the WPA projects to close. Vassar's chronicle notes that by then it had become unpopular not only with Communist-hunting congressmen but with union leaders and budget officials too, largely because of its success in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. For many of its artists the end was hard. The Folger article notes that Black actors were again pushed into mostly stereotyped roles and that Black theatre technicians were barred from theatrical trade unions.

Perform the record

The hearing transcript is a public document, so you can stage it, much as the Living Newspaper staged the news. With a partner, stand and read the Marlowe exchange twice: first with Starnes sincerely puzzled, then with Starnes mocking Flanagan while keeping a straight face. Flanagan should speak the same lines both times; notice how her lines change meaning when his intention changes. Then read the chairman's question about "one side of a controversy" and her answer, once as a defiant reply and once as a patient one. Stay standing: a hearing is formal, and the distance between a witness and a committee is part of the scene.

Common misconceptions

• The Federal Theatre was mainly an arts program. Its director testified that its primary purpose was to put unemployed theatre professionals back to work; the art grew out of the relief.
• The hearing showed that most of the project's plays were Communist. The hearing aired charges against a small share of the work: by Starnes's own count, 26 of 924 plays were in question.
• Everyone agrees The Cradle Will Rock was closed for its politics. The WPA cited budget cuts; many believed it was censorship. Both claims are on the record, and the question is still argued.
• A Living Newspaper was a real newspaper. It was a play: short scenes built from the news and linked by a loudspeaker voice.
• Propaganda simply means lies. Flanagan's definition, education focused on certain things, shows why the word was so hard to pin down: a play can be accurate and still argue for one side.

Looking back

• The Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939) was a WPA relief program, directed by Hallie Flanagan, that put unemployed theatre workers back to work in cities across the country.
• Its landmarks include the Living Newspapers, the Harlem Macbeth of April 1936, the 23-theatre opening of It Can't Happen Here in October 1936 and the padlocked Cradle Will Rock of June 1937.
• On December 6, 1938, the Dies Committee questioned Flanagan about propaganda; the dispute turned on whether a taxpayer-funded theatre may argue one side of a controversy.
• Congress removed its funding, and the project ended on June 30, 1939.
• A transcript records words, not intentions; performing the record is one way to test what the words were doing.

Sources

1. U.S. House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities. (1939). Investigation of un-American propaganda activities in the United States: Hearings on H. Res. 282 (Vol. 4, testimony of Hallie Flanagan, December 6, 1938, pp. 2838-2885). U.S. Government Printing Office. Internet Archive.
2. Vassar College. (n.d.). Hallie Flanagan Davis. Vassar Encyclopedia. Vassar College.
3. Vassar College. (n.d.). June 30, 1939. A Documentary Chronicle of Vassar College. Vassar College.
4. Shakespeare & Beyond. (2021, February 16). Up close: The voodoo Macbeth that generated jobs for Black Americans during the Great Depression. Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare Library.
5. Hill, A. D. (2008, February 6). Federal Theatre Project (Negro Units). BlackPast. BlackPast.
6. Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism. (2021, October 7). This month in theatre history. American Theatre. American Theatre.
7. University of Washington School of Drama. (n.d.). The Cradle Will Rock: The story behind the original production [Program note]. University of Washington.
8. Click, K. M. (2009). Federal Theatre Project. The First Amendment Encyclopedia, Middle Tennessee State University. The First Amendment Encyclopedia.
9. Roosevelt, F. D. (1937, January 20). Second inaugural address. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Avalon Project.
10. New York Public Library. (n.d.). Complete working script of Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Negro version, staged by Orson Welles: Opened on April 14, 1936 at Lafayette Theatre [Catalog record]. Performing Arts Research Collections.
11. Mathews, J. D. (1967). The Federal Theatre, 1935-1939: Plays, relief, and politics. Princeton University Press.
12. O'Connor, J., and Brown, L. (1978). Free, adult, uncensored: The living history of the Federal Theatre Project. New Republic Books.

A silent curtain at the Ziegfeld

On December 27, 1927, crowds filed into the Ziegfeld Theatre on 54th Street in New York for the newest show from the producer Florenz Ziegfeld. When the curtain came down on Show Boat, there were no curtain calls, and for a moment the house was silent. Then came polite applause, and the audience went out into the winter night. According to the Rodgers & Hammerstein organization's history of the production, the show's librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II, did not realize he had a hit until the rave review appeared the next day. Show Boat ran 572 performances, opened in London the following spring and has returned to Broadway again and again. It also changed what a musical could be.

Before the story: revue and musical comedy

To see what changed, start with what Broadway audiences usually got. The theatre historian Laurence Maslon describes the tradition Hammerstein inherited as "largely a non-narrative one": revues and loosely constructed vehicles for singers, dancers and comedians. A revue strings together songs, sketches and dances without a continuing story, and Ziegfeld's annual Follies was its gold standard. Musical comedy had a plot, but a loose one, shaped around its stars and their specialty turns. Many songwriters, as the scholars Masi Asare and Todd Decker put it, were writing "numbers that were easily interchangeable from one show to the next." Hammerstein himself recalled the rule that, soon after the curtain rose, the audience should be shown "pretty girls in pretty clothes."

None of that is wrong in itself. A revue can be a wonderful night out. But a song that can be moved to any show belongs to no one in particular, and that is what Show Boat set out to change.

Show Boat: songs that belong to characters

Show Boat, with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Hammerstein, adapted Edna Ferber's bestselling novel. It follows the performers of a Mississippi River show boat, the Cotton Blossom, and their families across some forty years, from the river to Chicago to Broadway. Asare and Decker point to what Hammerstein did differently: he "began to write deeply from the perspectives of individual characters with their hopes, regrets and longings." A song written that way is hard to move to another show, because it belongs to one person in one situation.

Watch one song do story work. Julie, the show boat's leading lady, sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" to young Magnolia early in the show. Years later, in Chicago, Julie is a down-on-her-luck singer rehearsing at a club when she overhears Magnolia auditioning with the very song she once taught her. Julie quietly gives up her own job so that Magnolia can have the chance. The song carries the memory of their friendship, and when it returns, the audience understands Julie's sacrifice without a speech. Other numbers belong just as firmly to their singers. "Ol' Man River," sung by the stevedore Joe, was written with the voice of Paul Robeson in mind, though Jules Bledsoe first played the role; Asare and Decker call it "the show's greatest star."

Show Boat also brought a Black ensemble and a white ensemble onto the same stage, a step that, Asare and Decker note, had "very little theatrical precedent." The same scholars call the show "enduringly relevant and enduringly problematic." Its opening number in 1927 began with a racial slur, which Black audiences, critics and performers protested from the start; some Black chorus members refused to sing the word, and later productions changed the lyric. Joe's wife, Queenie, was first played by a white performer in blackface. Julie, a Black woman passing as white, can never find lasting happiness in the story, which repeats an old stereotype of the tragic mixed-race woman even as the role asks for the audience's sympathy. A landmark can change the form and still carry the prejudices of its time; studying it honestly means seeing both.

Nor did Show Boat tell its story without detours. Maslon notes that Ziegfeld, who held the purse strings, made the authors add song-and-dance and bigger production numbers that strayed from the main story, and that Hammerstein wrestled with the long second act in later productions for years.

Oklahoma!: a musical that cut its showstopper

Sixteen years later, Hammerstein had a new partner, the composer Richard Rodgers. The Theatre Guild, which had produced Lynn Riggs's play Green Grow the Lilacs in 1931, was in danger of folding and hoped a musical version would save it. It could not afford stars or spectacle. Oklahoma!, the first Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration, opened at the St. James Theatre on March 31, 1943.

The authors broke the rules from the first moment. Instead of a chorus line, the show began with a cowboy's song heard offstage, "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," continued as a serenade to a woman working at a butter churn on her porch. Hammerstein said they had agreed "to start our story in the real and natural way in which it seemed to want to be told." Maslon points out that the first scene alone takes up about 40 percent of the show and introduces more than half its songs, and that nearly every song is interrupted or carried along by dialogue, so the characters move between talking and singing without a break in the story.

Then came the hardest test. At the tryout in New Haven, the dancer George Church performed a tap solo in the middle of the title song, and the audience loved it so much that it stopped the show. That, Maslon explains, was exactly the problem, and the creators cut it. Anything that pulled the audience out of the story, however entertaining, had become an obstacle.

The dream ballet

The choreographer Agnes de Mille pushed the idea further. Hammerstein had sketched a playful, circus-themed ballet to end Act One. De Mille persuaded him to make it a dream instead. Laurey, unsure whether to go to the box social with Curly or with the menacing farmhand Jud, dreams of her wedding to Curly, is carried off by Jud into a nightmare dance hall and sees Curly "killed." When she wakes, the real Jud arrives to take her to the social, and the act ends on a question. Maslon explains why this mattered. Earlier dream ballets, such as one in Pal Joey, only showed the audience what it already knew. In "Laurey Makes Up Her Mind," dance reveals something the character does not yet know about herself.

Oklahoma! ran 2,212 performances, held the record as Broadway's longest-running musical for 15 years and received a special Pulitzer Prize in its first year.

The core of it: A musical tells its story when every song and dance does a job the scene needs: revealing a character, moving the plot or changing a relationship. Show Boat showed that songs could belong to characters; Oklahoma! showed that a show would cut even a showstopper to protect its story.

"Integration" and its limits

Since the 1950s, critics have called shows like Oklahoma! "integrated" musicals, meaning that book, music, lyrics and dance work together to tell one story. Maslon prefers the term "narrative musical" and finds "integrated" no longer helpful, and he notes that very successful shows since 1943, such as Cats and Chicago, still win audiences over with specialty dance numbers. Telling the story through song is a choice, not a law. The useful question to ask of any number is simple: what job is it doing for this story right now?

After Oklahoma!: two landmarks

The sound of the musical keeps changing, from Kern's melodies to Miranda's rap, and new shows open every season. But the test that Show Boat and Oklahoma! set has held: the songs have to carry the story.

Make a dream ballet

Try de Mille's idea on your feet, with no words and no music you need to buy. Invent a character facing a choice, for example a girl deciding whether to tell a friend a secret that will hurt. Clear a space and, in about one minute of wordless movement, dance her dream: what she hopes will happen, what she fears, and one image she does not expect, something the dream shows her about herself. Use walking, stillness, reaching and turning away; no jumps, lifts or falls are needed. Then perform it for a friend or family member and ask what they think she decided.

Common misconceptions

• Oklahoma! was the first musical to tell a story. Operettas and musical comedies had plots for decades, and Show Boat, Of Thee I Sing and Pal Joey used songs to advance the plot before 1943. What Oklahoma! did was cut away whatever got in the story's way.
• A story-driven musical has no big numbers. Oklahoma! still had spectacular dances; the test was whether a number served the story, not whether it was big.
• The dream ballet was invented for Oklahoma! Earlier shows had dream ballets; de Mille's was new because it showed what the character did not know about herself.
• A landmark show is a model in every way. Show Boat changed the form and also carried racial stereotypes that later productions have had to confront.

What you now know

• Before Show Boat, Broadway musicals were mostly revues and loosely built star vehicles, with songs that could move from show to show.
• Show Boat (Ziegfeld Theatre, December 27, 1927), by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote songs from inside particular characters; its record on race is both pioneering and troubling.
• Oklahoma! (St. James Theatre, March 31, 1943), the first Rodgers and Hammerstein show, began quietly, wove songs into dialogue, cut a showstopper that broke the story and ended Act One with Agnes de Mille's dream ballet.
• Integrated, or narrative, musicals make every number do story work; later landmarks such as West Side Story (1957) and Hamilton (2015) kept that test while changing the sound.

Sources

1. Rodgers & Hammerstein. (n.d.). Show Boat: 1927 original Broadway production. Rodgers & Hammerstein.
2. Asare, M., and Decker, T. (n.d.). The enduring relevance of Show Boat. Rodgers & Hammerstein. Rodgers & Hammerstein.
3. Rodgers & Hammerstein. (n.d.). Oklahoma!: 1943 original Broadway production. Rodgers & Hammerstein.
4. Maslon, L. (n.d.). It's not just what they did, it's what they didn't do: Oklahoma! and musical narrative. Rodgers & Hammerstein. Rodgers & Hammerstein.
5. Maslon, L. (n.d.). Out of my dreams: The psychological canvas of choreographer Agnes de Mille. Rodgers & Hammerstein. Rodgers & Hammerstein.
6. Museum of the City of New York. (2017, September 26). When love comes so strong. Museum of the City of New York.
7. Franklin, M. J. (2020, August 6). Celebrate 5 years of Hamilton on Broadway. Playbill. Playbill.
8. The American Theatre Wing's Tony Awards. (n.d.). 2016: 70th annual Tony Awards. Tony Awards.

A conductor's confession

In 1967 the conductor Lehman Engel published The American Musical Theater: A Consideration, a close study of how Broadway musicals work. In his classification of song types he admitted to inventing one of the names himself. He called it the "charm song," a term "which I believe I have made up," for a song with "generally delicate, optimistic, and rhythmic music, and lyrics of light though not comedic subject matter." Among the most perfect examples, he wrote, was "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" from Oklahoma!. Engel's point was practical. Songs in a well-made musical are not interchangeable; each kind does a particular job, and the writers, directors and performers who can name the job can do it better.

This lesson is a procedure for taking any song apart and putting it back together as a performance: first the parts of a musical, then the jobs songs do, then the acting, the voice and the rules for working from a recording.

Step 1: Know who makes what

The jobs can overlap. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the book, music and lyrics of Hamilton, while most shows divide the work among two or three writers. During rehearsals, as Jan Greenberg's guide to theatre careers explains, only piano arrangements are used; the orchestrator then sets the music for the various instruments of the orchestra. When the cast of Oklahoma! recorded its songs in 1943, the Rodgers & Hammerstein history notes, they used the original orchestrations, so listeners at home heard the songs as the theatre audience did.

Step 2: Name the job the song does

Writers on musicals have noticed that most shows follow what Jack Viertel, in The Secret Life of the American Musical (2016), calls "a surprisingly consistent diagram." Broadway writers, he explains, learned to "erect an opening number, introduce a hero or heroine whose burning passion would drive the plot," and carry the story on to a finale. These are the common jobs:

Not every show uses every type. Viertel himself notes that not every show has an I Want song or a conditional love song, "but most do, or a reasonable facsimile thereof." The labels are tools for asking one question: what is this song doing for the story?

Key idea: Before you sing a note, name the song's job. A song you can label as an I Want song or a conditional love song already tells you what the character is trying to do.

Step 3: Speak the lyric before you sing it

Joanna Merlin, in her guide to auditioning, advises singers to think of the lyrics as a monologue first and then to learn the music and lyrics together; she warns against learning the music before you know what the song is about. Treat the lyric exactly as you treated Nora's speeches in Lesson 7. To whom are you speaking? What do you want from them? What stands in your way? Which tactics do you try, and where does each new beat begin?

Here is an original lyric written for this course; no published song is reproduced in this lesson. Nell, fifteen, lives in a mill town on one side of a river. Across the bridge is a youth theatre she has never dared to enter. Her song is an I Want song.

NELL:
Seven-ten, the same old bus,
same old seat and the same old fuss,
past the diner, past the mill,
past the church on Weaver Hill.
Every day the river goes
the same brown way it always goes.

Over there, across the bridge,
there's a theatre with a painted door,
where a girl could stand in a pool of light
and be someone she's never been before.

(Spoken.) The sign in the window said auditions Saturday.
(A beat.) Saturday is tomorrow.

So I'll take the early bus,
not the seven-ten.
I'll walk across that bridge
and not come back the same again.

Now score it as you would a scene.

The turn is the most important moment to find in any song. Something must be different at the end than at the beginning, or the song is standing still. In Nell's song the turn is two plain spoken sentences. In a published song it might be a change of key, a held note or a single word. Find it, then play it as a new beat with a new tactic, just as you did in Lesson 7.

Step 4: Sing it safely

The habits from Lesson 1 matter even more when you sing. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders advises avoiding speaking or singing when your voice is hoarse or tired, avoiding the extremes of your range such as screaming or whispering, and supporting your voice with breath rather than relying on your throat alone. It lists losing the ability to hit some high notes when singing among the signs of a voice problem worth a doctor's attention. Warm up gently first, as in Lesson 1. Choose a key that sits comfortably in your voice rather than forcing the key of a recording. If anything hurts, stop. Volume should come from breath and resonance, never from pushing.

Step 5: Work from a recording, not from copied lyrics

Cast albums are the easiest way to study a musical, and libraries and streaming services make many of them available legally. But a song's lyrics are part of a copyrighted musical work. The U.S. Copyright Office explains that copyright owners hold the exclusive rights to reproduce a work and to perform it publicly, and that titles, names and short phrases are not protected by copyright. That is why this course names songs but never prints their lyrics, and why your written work should do the same: describe what a song does, in your own words. Singing along at home to learn a song is ordinary private study; performing it for the public is a different matter that involves the rights holders, as Lesson 29 explains.

Bottom line: Name the song's job, speak its lyric as a monologue, find its turn, and sing it with breath, not force. The music makes the feeling bigger, but the acting still comes from wanting something.

Common misconceptions

• The composer writes everything. Most musicals divide the book, music and lyrics among different writers, and the orchestrator shapes how the music finally sounds in the pit.
• A song is a break from the acting. In a story-driven musical the song is the scene at its highest pressure, and you still play an objective.
• Singing louder shows more feeling. Pushing for volume strains the voice; the feeling comes from what you want, and the volume from breath.
• If I own the album, I can print the lyrics. Owning a recording does not give you the right to reproduce the words. Name the song and describe it instead.

Recap

• A musical's book, score, lyrics and orchestrations are separate crafts, often by different people: Hammerstein wrote book and lyrics, Kern and Rodgers the music, and an orchestrator scores it for the pit.
• Songs do recognizable jobs: opening number, I Want song, charm song (Engel's term), conditional love song, eleven o'clock number and finale.
• Speak a lyric as a monologue before you sing it, find the objective and the beats, and play the turn.
• Sing with breath support, avoid singing when hoarse or tired, and never force volume.
• Study from legal recordings and describe songs in your own words: titles can be named, but lyrics should not be copied.

Sources

1. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. (2025, June 11). Taking care of your voice. National Institutes of Health. NIDCD.
2. U.S. Copyright Office. (n.d.). What is copyright? U.S. Copyright Office.
3. Rodgers & Hammerstein. (n.d.). Oklahoma!: 1943 original Broadway production. Rodgers & Hammerstein.
4. Rodgers & Hammerstein. (n.d.). Carousel: Songs. Rodgers & Hammerstein.
5. Engel, L. (1967). The American musical theater: A consideration. CBS Legacy Collection; Macmillan.
6. Viertel, J. (2016). The secret life of the American musical: How classic Broadway shows are built. Sarah Crichton Books.
7. Merlin, J. (2001). Auditioning: An actor-friendly guide. Vintage Books.
8. Greenberg, J. W. (1983). Theater careers: A comprehensive guide to non-acting careers in the theater. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

A kitchen for thirteen dollars

The first stage Trifles ever stood on was tiny. In her memoir The Road to the Temple (1927), Susan Glaspell describes how the Provincetown Players turned an old fish-house into the Wharf Theater, "a place where ninety people could see a play, if they didn't mind sitting close together on wooden benches with no backs. The stage, ten feet by twelve, was in four sections, so we could have different levels." Money was just as short. "A production need not cost a lot of money, Jig would say," Glaspell writes of her husband, George Cram Cook. "The most expensive set at the Wharf Theater cost thirteen dollars." Cook liked to remember a production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle at Stanford "where a book could indicate one house and a bottle another. Sometimes the audience liked to make its own set."

That is your problem in this lesson. You have a space about the size of a classroom, almost no money and a play whose plot depends on a kitchen. Every clue the two women find has to be on the set, working and visible. How do you design it?

The problem: a set that holds evidence

In Lesson 6 you read the Wright kitchen like a detective. Now read it like a designer. In Trifles the set is not background; it is the evidence. The rocker must rock on its own: when Mrs. Hale nearly sits in it and then steps back, the stage direction says, "The chair which she has touched rocks back and forth." The cupboard must have a shelf high enough that Mrs. Hale "Gets up on the chair" to reach the jars of fruit. The bird-cage needs a door that can be swung on its broken hinge while "both women watch it." The big table must be half clean and half messy. If any of these fails, the story fails with it.

Why this matters: A designer's first loyalty is to the story. Before you think about how the kitchen looks, find out what it has to do.

Step 1: Break down the script

Christopher Boltz, in his open textbook Technical Theatre Practicum, explains that every designer starts with a breakdown: a list of the scenery the script requires, with the exact page where each item appears, so anyone can go back to the words. He adds a caution. In many recent acting editions the stage directions were written or at least edited by the stage manager of the first production, so later designers must sort the playwright's requirements from the first production team's choices; anything the dialogue mentions, though, must be accounted for. Here is a breakdown of Trifles, using Glaspell's text.

Step 2: Research, then thumbnails

Look at photographs of rural Midwestern farm kitchens from the early twentieth century in a library or a museum's online collection, and note what a real one held: the stove, the sink, the shelves, the chairs. Then sketch. A Utah Shakespeare Festival lesson for students describes thumbnails as "literally sketches or doodles of the Designer's ideas": each should take only a couple of minutes, and they do not need to relate to one another. Draw six or eight, each a different idea: a full realistic kitchen, a kitchen of only the objects in the breakdown, a kitchen of bare walls and one window, a kitchen built around the stove. The same lesson reminds designers that audiences willingly suspend their disbelief: one telling object, such as a cross for a church, can tell them where they are without building a whole room. That is Cook's book-and-bottle idea again.

Step 3: Draw the ground plan to scale

Boltz picks out four of the set designer's drawings that every technician needs to read: the ground plan, the elevation, the section and the rendering. The rendering is a perspective picture of the finished set and is not drawn to scale; the other three are. The ground plan, usually the first drawing made and the one used most, shows the stage from directly above. Doors are drawn in an open position, furniture appears as simple symbols, and two circles at the ends of the front row mark the sightline seats.

Scale makes the drawing measurable. At half-inch scale, half an inch on paper equals one foot on stage, so the drawing is 1/24 of life size; at quarter-inch scale it is 1/48. The University of Windsor's scenic design standards recommend half-inch scale for plans and elevations. Try the arithmetic on the Wharf Theater's stage: ten feet by twelve becomes five inches by six at half-inch scale, or two and a half inches by three at quarter-inch scale. Work out the other direction for your shoebox too. A box 12 inches wide represents a stage 24 feet wide at half-inch scale.

Here is one possible ground plan for the Wright kitchen, using the layout from Lesson 10: outer door up center, stair door on the left, door to the front room on the right, stove down right and rocker down left. Remember that on a plan drawn with the audience at the bottom, stage left is on the right side of the page.

Positions that Glaspell fixes are the outer door at the rear, the steps and stair door at the left, the door at the right, the small table in the left rear corner and the big table at center. Everything else on this plan is a designer's choice, and yours may differ.

Step 4: Check the sightlines

Boltz explains that the two sightline seats are the seats with the best view into the backstage areas, so marking them shows the crew how far offstage they must stay to avoid being seen. Use them the other way too: sit, in your imagination, in each end seat and ask what you can and cannot see. The dashed lines on the plan show each end seat looking across to the opposite upstage corner. From the end seat on the audience's right, can you still see the rocker, or does the stove block it? Can the audience on the other side see into the stair doorway, where actors wait before they enter? A designer moves furniture, angles walls or adds a masking flat until every important object can be seen from every seat and nothing unimportant shows.

Step 5: Build the shoebox model

A model lets a director, actors and builders see the space in three dimensions before anything is built. You need a shoebox with one long side cut away (the open side is the curtain line), cardboard from a cereal box, paper, glue, a pencil, a ruler and scissors. If you use a craft knife, ask an adult to help and cut on a protected surface, pulling the blade away from your fingers.

1. Choose your scale from the size of the box and write it on the box: half-inch scale if the box allows, quarter-inch if not.
2. Draw the ground plan full size on the floor of the box.
3. Stand up the walls you have chosen. Cut doorways where the plan puts them.
4. Make the furniture from folded cardboard, measuring each piece at scale. Measure a real table at home: if it is 30 inches high, that is two and a half feet, so at half-inch scale your model table stands an inch and a quarter tall.
5. Add a scale figure. The University of Windsor standards say human figures scaled to the drawing or model should always be part of a design presentation, at standard heights of six feet and five feet six inches. At half-inch scale those are 3 inches and 2.75 inches tall. Boltz notes that figures let anyone judge sizes at a glance without a scale ruler.
6. Look through the open side from the left end, the center and the right end, as your sightline seats would.

Then decide, piece by piece, between literal and suggested. Does the kitchen need three walls, or would one rear wall with the outer door and a window, plus the objects from the breakdown, tell the story? The Wharf Theater's audiences, Glaspell wrote, sometimes "liked to make its own set." Give yours the clues and let them build the rest.

Walk the plan

Get on your feet. In a room at home, mark the main pieces of your ground plan at full size with masking tape or with objects: a strip of tape for each wall, a chair for the rocker, a box for the stove. Professionals do the same thing with spike tape in the rehearsal room, a step Boltz calls a tape out, because most companies do not rehearse on the real set until just before the first performance. Then walk the opening of the play: enter through the outer door as the men, cross to the stove, and stop where Hale points to the rocker. Do the distances feel like a kitchen? Is there room to get around the big table? Adjust the plan until the walk feels right.

Common misconceptions

• A realistic play needs a complete realistic room. The first Trifles played on a ten-by-twelve stage in a theatre whose most expensive set cost thirteen dollars. The story needs its working objects; the rest can be suggested.
• The rendering is the plan. A rendering shows how the set will look but is not to scale; builders work from the ground plan, elevations and sections.
• Design for the best seat in the house. Check the worst seats, the ends of the front row, because they see the most offstage and the least of some corners.
• Every stage direction must be built exactly as printed. Account for everything the dialogue requires, and treat other printed directions as information to weigh.

Pulling it together

• Glaspell's Wharf Theater had a ten-by-twelve-foot stage, and its costliest set cost thirteen dollars: good design starts from what the story needs, not from money.
• A script breakdown lists every required item with the page where it appears; in Trifles the set is the evidence, so the rocker must rock and the bird-cage door must swing.
• Thumbnails explore ideas quickly; the ground plan, elevation and section are drawn to scale, while the rendering is not.
• At half-inch scale, half an inch equals one foot; sightline seats at the ends of the front row show what the audience can and cannot see.
• A shoebox model with a scale figure tests the design in three dimensions, and taping the plan on a floor tests it on your feet.

Sources

1. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.5, Scenery). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
2. Utah Shakespeare Festival. (n.d.). Scenic design: Lesson 2. Utah Shakespeare Festival.
3. University of Windsor School of Dramatic Art. (n.d.). University of Windsor scenic design standards. University of Windsor.
4. Glaspell, S. (1920). Trifles. In Plays. Small, Maynard. Project Gutenberg.
5. Glaspell, S. (1927). The road to the temple (on the Wharf Theater, pp. 253-255). Frederick A. Stokes. Internet Archive.

A palette for the lighting designer

In 1932 the New York publisher Theatre Arts brought out a short book by Stanley McCandless called A Method of Lighting the Stage. It went through several revised editions, and the theatre historian Richard Palmer later wrote that there was a time when it was "the virtual bible for lighting design in educational theatre." McCandless himself was modest about it. "This plan prepares the palette, as it were, of the lighting designer," he wrote in the 1947 edition, but it "does not pretend to guarantee the final results"; those depend "upon the eye and taste of the designer." He was also writing with beginners in mind: "One great hope of the modern theatre lies in the development of amateur production." This lesson follows his method step by step and uses it to light the Wright kitchen from Lesson 22.

Step 1: Know what the light is for

McCandless starts with a priority: "the primary function of lighting is to give visibility," and that requirement "influences all its other functions." Once the actors can be seen, light can establish "a definite effect of time of day and locality," give the stage picture its composition, and create "that intangible dramatic essence called mood." The University of California's safety guidance for its campus theatres describes the same jobs in plain terms: lighting lets the audience see what is happening, focuses attention on a person or area, and sets the tone or mood of a scene.

Step 2: Divide the stage into acting areas

McCandless explains that the ground plan of the set establishes "the possible acting areas," which "should be specially lighted to give emphasis and visibility to the actor." One huge lamp cannot do this from a good angle, so he divides the stage "into a number of sections (generally six)," each small enough to be covered by the spread of its own instruments. Separate areas also let the designer brighten one part of the stage and dim another. For the Trifles ground plan from Lesson 22, six areas work well: down right (the stove), down center, down left (the rocker), up right (the cupboard and the door to the front room), up center (the outer door and the big table) and up left (the sink, the small table and the stair door).

Step 3: Light each area from two diagonals, warm against cool

Next comes the angle. Light from directly overhead, McCandless observes, causes deep shadows on the face, and light from straight in front, at the center of the balcony, tends "to eliminate all form by allowing no highlights and shadows." He found that "plasticity," his word for the sense of solid form, "is best achieved when the direction of the light is at 45° in plan and elevation along a diagonal drawn between the extreme corners of a cube." In other words, each light comes in about 45 degrees to the side and about 45 degrees above the actor.

One diagonal is not enough, because actors turn. So "it has been found wise to light each area from the two diagonals," one from each side of the audience. To keep some of the modeling that two lights would otherwise wash out, he colors them differently: "If warm color is used from one side, cool color can be used from the other, just as the cool blue of daylight appears in the shadows caused by the warm rays from the sun." The colors should be tints "just off white," such as ambers, pinks, lavenders or steel blues, not pure colors that distort faces. The side that matches the scene's source of light, its motivating light, gets that source's color and more intensity.

For Trifles the motivating light is the cold morning daylight from the window. McCandless notes that "Daylight is the general cool light coming in all directions from the sky," so the diagonals from the window's side of the stage get a pale steel blue at the higher intensity, and the diagonals from the other side get a pale amber at lower intensity, which also hints at the fire in the stove and keeps the faces warm enough to read.

Key idea: Divide the stage into acting areas, light each from both diagonals at about 45 degrees, and make one side warm and the other cool, with the brighter side matching the scene's motivating light.

Step 4: Draw the plot and the instrument schedule

Christopher Boltz's open textbook describes the light plot as a scale drawing, laid out like the ground plan, on which every instrument is drawn as a symbol, with a key explaining the symbols and a legend explaining the numbers written around each one. Around a symbol you may find its focus (where it hits the stage), its color (the brand and catalog number of the color filter), any gobo (a metal pattern that throws a shadow shape), its channel (the number the lighting desk uses to control it) and its dimmer or address. Only one item appears on every plot: the unit number, unique to each instrument on its position, so that anyone can name a particular light. An instrument schedule puts the same information into a table. Here is a first schedule for Trifles.

Step 5: Write the cues

Boltz defines a lighting cue as the place where a lighting change happens, what changes and how long it takes. The designer plans each cue against the script after watching rehearsals, then records them with a programmer into the lighting desk, often with stage management helpers standing where the actors will be. Times are written in seconds, called counts. A first cue list for Trifles:

Try it with phone lights

You can test the whole method in a dark room with two phones and a partner. Phone flashlights are LEDs that stay cool, which is why they are safe for this; never put paper or colored plastic over a hot bulb. Do not shine the light straight into anyone's eyes from close up.

1. Hold one phone straight in front of your partner's face at eye level. Notice how flat the face looks.
2. Hold it directly overhead, then down low pointing up. Notice the deep shadows in the eyes, then the spooky shadows from below.
3. Now hold two phones, one on each side, each about 45 degrees out to the side and 45 degrees up. Notice how the face looks solid and both sides stay visible as your partner turns.
4. Cover one phone with a thin layer of orange or yellow cellophane or tissue and the other with blue. Brighten the blue side: a cold morning. Brighten the orange side: a warm evening by a fire.
5. Have your partner walk slowly through the taped ground plan from Lesson 22 while you follow with both lights, keeping the angles. That is acting area lighting in miniature.

Why adults run the real instruments

Theatre lighting instruments are heavy, hot and electrical, which is why a lesson like this teaches design, not hanging or wiring. The University of California's guidance for its theatres warns that lighting equipment "may burn hot," that the lenses "can magnify the heat," and that heat sources must be kept "well clear of anything that could ignite," including paper, plastic and draperies; even unapproved color materials can start a fire. It warns that the risk of electric shock is high and that even a slight tingle from an instrument or cable means something is wrong. It describes falls from catwalks, ladders and lifts, and requires every light to be double-checked and tethered to its pipe with a safety cable, with no one standing underneath during overhead work. In a school, all of this is done by trained adults or under their direct supervision. Your work is the plan, the color choices and the cues, and that is the designer's work anyway.

Common misconceptions

• More light is better light. Visibility comes first, but flat, even light from every direction erases form; McCandless's whole method is about controlling direction, color and intensity.
• Light from straight in front is best for faces. McCandless found that straight-on light from the center front tends to eliminate form; the diagonals model the face better.
• Stage colors should be strong. For faces in acting areas he recommends tints just off white; strong colors are kept for special effects.
• The light plot is a picture of the lights. It is a scale drawing full of symbols, read with its key and legend, with a unique unit number for every instrument.

What to carry forward

• Stanley McCandless's A Method of Lighting the Stage (1932) made visibility the first function of light, followed by time and place, composition and mood.
• Divide the stage into acting areas, generally six, and light each from both diagonals, about 45 degrees to the side and 45 degrees up.
• Use a warm tint from one side and a cool tint from the other, with the brighter side matching the motivating light, such as cold daylight from the Wrights' window.
• A light plot shows each instrument as a symbol with its focus, color, channel and unique unit number; the instrument schedule lists the same information as a table.
• A cue is a planned change: where it happens, what changes and how long it takes.
• Real instruments are hot, heavy and electrical; hanging, wiring and focusing them is adult, trained work.

Sources

1. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.7, Stage lighting). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
2. University of California Office of the President, Safety and Loss Prevention. (n.d.). Performing arts: Lighting. University of California.
3. Glaspell, S. (1920). Trifles. In Plays. Small, Maynard. Project Gutenberg.
4. McCandless, S. (1947). A method of lighting the stage (3rd ed.; first published 1932). Theatre Arts.
5. Palmer, R. H. (1985). The lighting art: The aesthetics of stage lighting design. Prentice-Hall.

A doorknob that failed

It is the first technical rehearsal of a school production of Trifles. Near the end of the play, Glaspell's stage direction reads: "Sound of a knob turning in the other room." The moment matters. Mrs. Peters has just failed to hide the box with the dead bird, and that small sound tells both women the men are about to walk in. The student sound designer found a doorknob sound in a video online, put it on a laptop and plugged the laptop into the theatre's main speakers. The stage manager calls "Go." For a second nothing happens. Then a sharp click and a loud creak come from somewhere above the audience's heads, after the actors have already moved. The director stops the rehearsal.

This is a plausible way to build a cue, and it fails in almost every way a cue can fail. The useful thing about a failure like this is that each fault has its own cause, and you can find them one at a time.

Trace the failure, one cause at a time

Notice the method. The designer did not simply turn everything up or throw the cue out. Each symptom points to one link in a chain: the file, the edit, the playback, the speaker, the level, the timing and the rights. Fix one link, test again, then move to the next, so you know which change worked.

The point: A sound cue is not just pressing play. It is a file, an edit, a speaker, a level and a moment, and any one of them can break it.

What sound design does

Christopher Boltz's open textbook Technical Theatre Practicum says that sound in the theatre "communicates with the audience, creates atmosphere, supports the script, and supports the performer." Often it is the first design element the audience meets, as preshow music or the announcement about phones and emergency exits; most venues keep a live microphone ready so trained staff can make emergency announcements. During the play Boltz separates two kinds of effects. Environmental sound sets a place and an atmosphere, such as wind in a desolate field, often as a long, seamless loop. Specific sounds, such as a doorbell or the knob in Trifles, must come at an exact moment, through the cueing process.

Most effects today are prerecorded and played back from a computer whose software stores each cue's level and which speakers it plays through, so it sounds the same at every performance. But Boltz also describes live effects that are still used, including small offstage door units with a working knob that "gives the impression of a door being opened or shut." For effects like these, he notes, the stage manager may call the standby while the crew member responsible watches the action to time the sound exactly, and a backup recording can be ready in case the live effect fails. For the knob in Trifles, a real doorknob turned offstage by someone who can see Mrs. Hale is often the best answer of all.

Read the play again and you will find that almost every sound it asks for is human: the women "listen to the men's steps on the stairs"; "footsteps are heard in the room above"; "Footsteps have been heard coming down the stairs"; "Steps are heard outside"; and finally the knob. Footsteps on stairs can be made live by actors walking on a solid offstage platform. A designer might add one environmental cue, a gust of cold wind when the outer door opens, to tell the audience how bitter the morning is.

Record it yourself

Your phone's voice recorder is enough to start. Record in the quietest room you can find, with the phone close to the source. Say the name of each sound before you record it, so you can find it later. Record several takes: heavy steps, light steps, steps on a wooden stair, a doorknob turned slowly and quickly. Often the real thing does not sound right through a speaker, and something else does; that is part of the experiment. Recording your own sounds also solves the rights problem, because you are the author of what you record.

Edit it in Audacity

Audacity, according to its developers, is a free, open source audio editor and recorder. A first edit of a cue needs only a few steps:

1. Open or import your recording, and play it through once at a moderate volume.
2. Select the silence before the sound and delete it, so the sound starts the instant the cue is played.
3. Select the first fraction of a second and apply a short fade-in (Effect, then Fade In), and do the same with a fade-out at the end, so there are no clicks.
4. Use Normalize, which the manual describes as setting the peak amplitude of a track or selection; applied to every cue, it gives each file a consistent starting level.
5. Export the result as a separate file and name it with its cue number, for example "SQ 8 knob.wav".

If you use sounds made by others, read the license. Freesound, a large collaborative library, lets uploaders choose CC0, Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC). Its own summary: with CC0 "you can do pretty much what you want with the sound," though you cannot claim to be its author; with attribution "you should always mention the original creators"; and noncommercial works like attribution but without earning money. Creative Commons explains that every CC BY license requires that credit be given to the creator. Freesound even gives a model credit for a theatre piece: the sound's name, its creator, a link and the license.

Build the cue list

Boltz recommends organizing a sound breakdown by act, scene and page, with what each cue is and how it is made, live or playback. Long environmental sounds are usually built longer than needed and faded out at a set moment, and that fade is a cue of its own. Above all, he reminds designers that operators read cue sheets in dim light under the stress of a show, so "simplicity and clarity" are the guiding principles. Here is a first list for Trifles.

Protect your hearing

Sound designers spend hours listening, often on headphones, so treat your ears as equipment. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders explains that sounds at or below 70 A-weighted decibels (dBA) are unlikely to cause hearing loss even after long exposure, but that long or repeated exposure at or above 85 dBA can; music through headphones at maximum volume reaches about 94 to 110 dBA. Its rule of thumb is to avoid noises that are "too loud, too close, or last too long." Edit at a moderate volume, take breaks, and never put your ear close to a speaker to check a loud cue.

Perform the knob live

Get on your feet with a partner. Your partner reads Mrs. Hale's and the County Attorney's last moments aloud while you stand at a real door nearby, out of sight but able to see your partner through the doorway. Turn the knob exactly when the moment comes, three times: too early, too late, and right on time. Then switch roles. You will feel in your body why Boltz says the crew member responsible for a live door effect watches the action.

Common misconceptions

• If it is online, it is free to use. A sound copied from a video has an owner you do not know. Record your own, or use a sound whose license you have read, and credit it as required.
• Recorded is always better than live. For a door or a footstep, a live effect timed by someone watching the actors is often more precise and more varied.
• Louder cues read better. A cue must sit with the actors' voices, and loud listening for long periods harms hearing.
• When a cue fails, change everything. Change one thing at a time, so you know which fix worked.

The short version

• Sound communicates with the audience, creates atmosphere, supports the script and supports the performer.
• Environmental sound sets place and mood behind a scene; specific effects must land at an exact moment.
• Debug a failed cue one link at a time: file, edit, playback, speaker, level, timing and rights.
• In a free editor such as Audacity, trim the silence, add short fades to prevent clicks, normalize and export each cue as a numbered file.
• Use your own recordings or properly licensed sounds, such as CC0 or CC BY with credit.
• Keep listening levels moderate: long or repeated exposure at or above 85 dBA can damage hearing.

Sources

1. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.9, Sound). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
2. Audacity Team. (n.d.). Fades and crossfades. Audacity Manual. Audacity Manual.
3. Audacity Team. (n.d.). Normalize. Audacity Manual. Audacity Manual.
4. Audacity Team. (n.d.). Audacity: Free, open source audio editor and recorder. Audacity.
5. Freesound. (n.d.). Frequently asked questions. Freesound.
6. Creative Commons. (n.d.). About CC licenses. Creative Commons.
7. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. (2025, April 16). Noise-induced hearing loss. National Institutes of Health. NIDCD.
8. Glaspell, S. (1920). Trifles. In Plays. Small, Maynard. Project Gutenberg.

A pocket that carries the ending

Look closely at the last moments of Trifles. Mrs. Peters "tries to put the box in the bag she is wearing. It is too big." Then comes the sound of the knob, and "Mrs. Hale snatches the box and puts it in the pocket of her big coat." The County Attorney walks in, makes his joke about the quilt, and Mrs. Hale answers him with her "hand against her pocket." The whole ending rests on two costume decisions. Mrs. Peters's bag must be too small, and Mrs. Hale's coat must have a pocket big enough and deep enough to hide the box from the men.

That is where a costume designer starts. Costumes tell the audience who people are, and they also do jobs the story needs. This lesson compares three ways to costume one character, Mrs. Hale, and then builds the paperwork and the drawing that turn a design into clothes.

What the script tells the designer

A tippet, as Webster's dictionary defined it in 1913, three years before the play, is "a cape, or scarflike garment for covering the neck, or the neck and shoulders," usually "made of fur, cloth, or other warm material." Looking up words like this is part of the job.

Research: fashion and real life

MIT's course in beginning costume design, taught by Leslie Cocuzzo Held, describes how designs "emerge through a process of character analysis, based on the script and directorial concept," supported by period research. Its course page puts the purpose simply: costume design uses the texture, color, style and other properties of clothing to express a character's personality and lifestyle.

Period research has a trap. Fashion sources show what was new and expensive. The Phoenix Art Museum notes that by the mid-1910s hemlines had moved up to the calf, in a style sometimes called the "war crinoline." But the women of Trifles are farm wives in a play full of hard times: Mrs. Hale says that Mr. Wright "was close," meaning stingy, and that Mrs. Wright felt shabby. A good designer looks for photographs of ordinary rural women from around 1916, not only fashion plates, and asks how old a farm wife's good coat might be.

Three ways to costume Mrs. Hale

What matters here: Every approach must still do what the script requires: bundled at the entrance, coats that unbutton on cue, a tippet that comes off and hangs on a hook, a bag too small for the box and a pocket big enough to hide it.

The costume plot

Christopher Boltz's open textbook describes the costume breakdown that designers use to plan: each character is listed along the top, with act, scene and page down the left side, so the designer can see who is onstage when and spot any costume changes. Here is a simplified plot for Trifles, a single continuous scene, organized by moments.

The plot shows that Trifles has no quick changes; its changes happen in front of the audience. Many plays are not so kind. Boltz defines a quick change as a major costume change in very little time, usually just offstage or behind the set, which takes preparation and rehearsal: fastenings undone in advance, a dresser ready, and the change run several times. He adds a detail that matters for Trifles: props left in pockets must be returned to the prop crew. After every performance, someone checks Mrs. Hale's coat for the box.

Draw the rendering

A rendering is a drawing of the character in costume. You do not need to draw beautifully; you need to be clear. In MIT's course, final designs were "fully rendered and swatched," that is, drawn in color with small samples of the real fabric attached, and students practiced how a dominant vertical, horizontal or diagonal line changes the effect of a garment. Work in this order:

1. Lightly draw a standing figure in a pose the character might take; Mrs. Hale's weight and stillness are part of the design.
2. Draw the silhouette, the overall outline of the figure in its clothes: the length of the skirt, the bulk of the coat.
3. Add the garments, then color and texture with colored pencils.
4. Attach swatches cut from old clothes or scraps, with permission.
5. Label the drawing with the character's name, the moment in the play and working notes, such as the pocket's size.

Pull it from the closet

Most of us will never build a costume from scratch, and we do not need to. MIT's course included a thrift-store transformation workshop, in which teams recreated a period image using secondhand purchases, and an exercise in pulling a costume from stock for a character. With permission, look through the closets at home and the racks of a secondhand store for your Mrs. Hale: a long skirt, a plain blouse or cardigan, a heavy coat with deep pockets, a scarf.

Wear it and move

Now test the costume on your feet. Put it on and play the moments the script demands: enter bundled against the cold and go straight to an imagined stove; unbutton the coat; sit and sew at a table; and, at the end, take a small box from a partner and slide it into your pocket in one smooth move, without looking down. If you rehearse Mrs. Hale climbing on a chair to reach the jars, use a sturdy chair, have someone hold it steady, and check that the skirt length is safe. Anything the costume will not let you do safely, the design must change.

Common misconceptions

• Costumes are about looking good. They show who a character is and do jobs the plot needs, such as the pocket in Mrs. Hale's coat.
• A period play needs exact period clothes. Suggested period and design concepts both work if they are consistent and the story's needs are met.
• Fashion sources show what everyone wore. They show what was fashionable; ordinary and rural people often wore plainer, older clothes, so research real people too.
• A rendering must be a beautiful drawing. It must be clear, colored, swatched and labeled.

Summing up

• Read the script for what costumes must say and do: in Trifles, coats that unbutton, a tippet that comes off, a bag too small and a pocket big enough to hide the box.
• Designs grow from character analysis, the director's concept and period research that includes ordinary people, not only fashion.
• Period realism, suggested period and a design concept each have strengths and risks; all must serve the story.
• A costume plot lists characters across the top and moments down the side, and reveals changes; quick changes need preparation and rehearsal.
• A rendering is a clear, colored, swatched and labeled drawing; a costume pulled from a closet must be tested by moving in it.

Sources

1. Glaspell, S. (1920). Trifles. In Plays. Small, Maynard. Project Gutenberg.
2. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.8, Costumes). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
3. Held, L. C. (2008). Beginning costume design and construction (Course 21M.732). MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT OpenCourseWare.
4. Phoenix Art Museum. (2020, November 12). A brief look at the evolution of women's fashion. Phoenix Art Museum.
5. Webster's revised unabridged dictionary (1913 ed., entry "Tippet"). Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg.

A matinee in Chicago

On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 30, 1903, the new Iroquois Theater in Chicago was packed for a holiday matinee of the scenic extravaganza Mr. Bluebeard, starring the comedian Eddie Foy. A book rushed into print in 1904, Marshall Everett's The Great Chicago Theater Disaster, describes "a typical holiday matinee crowd, composed mostly of women and children." The theater had opened "not a month before," and it "had been heralded abroad as a 'fireproof structure,' with more than enough exits."

During a song, the stage was darkened and a spotlight high above the stage threw a moonlight effect. Everett writes that a spark "communicated to the rough edge of the heavy cloth drape." The coroner's jury later put it plainly: the cause was "Grand drapery coming in contact with electric flood or arc light, situated on iron platform on the right hand of stage." Stagehands tried to beat out the flames; the orchestra kept playing; Eddie Foy came to the front of the stage to ask the audience to stay calm. But the fire raced across the proscenium and up into the rigging above the stage, burning debris began to fall, and the audience ran for the exits. Nearly 600 people died, by the count published in 1904.

What went wrong

The coroner's jury, whose verdict Everett printed, found failure after failure. City ordinances on fire-alarm boxes, fire equipment, and dampers or flues over the stage and fly galleries had not been followed, nor had the rules for fireproofing scenery and woodwork on the stage. The asbestos curtain meant to close off the stage was "wholly inadequate, considering the highly inflammable nature of all stage fittings," was "totally destroyed," and had been "hung on wooden bottoms." Exit signs and fire equipment were missing in the upper levels, and a wide stair that looked like an exit led instead to a locked door, a mistake the jury blamed for fifty to sixty deaths. A 2019 brief from Underwriters Laboratories sums up what made the crowd's escape so deadly: "locked doors, inward swinging openings and blocked exits."

What changed

The jury's recommendations read like a list of rules you still see in theatres: all scenery on the stage should be fireproof, asbestos curtains should be reinforced by steel curtains held by steel cables, and every theatre should have firemen on duty. Underwriters Laboratories traces two lasting results to the fire. Laws began to require that doors on the path out of a building swing outward, in the direction people are moving, and two Indianapolis inventors, Carl Prinzler and Henry DuPont, created the push bar, or panic hardware, that lets a locked door open instantly from inside. Over the next decades the National Fire Protection Association published guidance on exits in 1912, 1916 and 1918, and then the first edition of its Life Safety Code in 1927. Every glowing exit sign and push-bar door in your school's auditorium is part of that story.

Remember: Theatres became safe because people learned from disasters and wrote the lessons into rules. The rules backstage are not red tape; each one stands for someone who was hurt.

The hazards backstage today

A stage is a workplace with heavy objects overhead, electricity everywhere, open edges in the dark and very little time. The University of California's Performing Arts Safety Manual and the Texas Education Agency's school Guidelines for Theatre Safety describe the main hazards. This lesson is for awareness only: it explains what the dangers are and what everyone must do around them, not how to rig, wire or climb.

Warning calls

Because so much happens overhead and in the dark, theatres agree on spoken warnings in advance. The UC code for counterweight fly systems requires each theatre to set up "warnings and work phrases" for everyone on stage and on the grid, to train cast and crew in them, and to use them even when no one seems to be there. The words differ from theatre to theatre. In the Texas guidelines, the call that warns of a batten, scenery or line coming in under control is "Heads up!", and the emergency call for falling objects is "Clear the stage!" The same guidelines ask for complete silence on stage while a batten is coming in, and for only the technical director or crew head to call instructions to the crew above. Learn the calls of the theatre you are in on your first day, and obey them instantly, without stopping to look up.

The crew and its chain of command

Christopher Boltz's open textbook describes the people who keep a production safe and running. The technical director oversees all of a show's technical elements and is concerned with the safety of every performer and technician. The master carpenter leads the crew that builds and moves scenery, and the master electrician leads the electricians who hang, focus and maintain the lights. The stage manager carries information between the rehearsal room and everyone else and, once performances begin, calls every cue. In a school, a teacher supervises all of it. The rule for a student crew member is simple: work only on what you have been trained and assigned to do, report anything that looks wrong to your crew head or supervising teacher, and never "just fix" rigging or electrical equipment yourself.

Practice the safe responses

You can practice the parts of safety that belong to everyone. Do these on your feet, at school or at home.

1. Find two ways out. The next time you are in an auditorium, or right now in your home, stand where you would sit and walk to the two nearest exits, counting your steps. Notice which way each door swings.
2. Answer the call. With a partner, agree on two calls: one that means something is coming down under control, and one that means danger from above. As you walk around a room, your partner calls one or the other without warning. For the first, stop and stay clear of the marked spot; for the second, move quickly away from the center of the room while covering your head with your arms. Never look up first.
3. Mark an edge. In a dim room, mark the edge of a step or a rug with a strip of light-colored tape, and notice how much easier it is to find in the dark. That is what glow tape does on a stage.

Common misconceptions

• A fireproof building cannot burn. The Iroquois was advertised as fireproof; its scenery, drapes and curtain burned, and locked, inward-opening exits did the rest.
• Safety rules slow down the art. Rules exist so that the show can happen at all; most were written after someone was hurt.
• If something starts to fall, try to catch it. The UC code says never try to stop a runaway line set: shout a warning, get clear and take cover.
• Anyone careful can climb a ladder backstage. Theatre ladders and catwalks call for training, supervision and, above certain heights, fall protection.

What to remember

• On December 30, 1903, a light ignited drapery at the new Iroquois Theater in Chicago during a matinee of Mr. Bluebeard; nearly 600 people died.
• The coroner's jury found ignored ordinances, a wholly inadequate asbestos curtain, missing fire equipment and exit signs, and a locked door at the end of a misleading stair.
• Outward-swinging exit doors and panic hardware grew from the lessons of the fire, and exit rules were later gathered into the NFPA's Life Safety Code (1927).
• Fire, heights, hot and heavy lights, electricity, fly systems, traps and edges are the main backstage hazards; rigging, wiring and climbing are trained, supervised work.
• Theatres agree on warning calls in advance; when you hear one, move to safety first and never look up or try to stop a falling load.
• The technical director oversees technical safety, crew heads lead crews, and the stage manager calls the show.

Sources

1. Everett, M. (1904). The great Chicago theater disaster: The complete story told by the survivors. Publishers Union of America. Internet Archive.
2. Underwriters Laboratories. (2019). UL 303: Panic hardware [Code authorities brief]. UL.
3. University of California. (2015). Performing arts safety manual. Regents of the University of California. University of California.
4. University of California Office of the President, Safety and Loss Prevention. (n.d.). Performing arts: Set construction. University of California.
5. Wheetley, K. (2016). Guidelines for theatre safety (Texas Education Agency text, revised 2009 by E. Friend; adapted for Whitman College). Whitman College.
6. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.1, Jobs in technical theatre). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.

A box that will not fit

It is the sixth rehearsal of a school production of Trifles. In the final moments, the actor playing Mrs. Hale snatches the box with the dead bird and tries to slide it into her coat pocket. It sticks. She pushes, the pocket tears, and the director laughs and says, "Let's fix that." The director moves on. Who makes sure the fix happens?

The stage manager does. Tonight's rehearsal report will carry a note to the costume designer (the pocket must hold the box and survive being torn at every performance) and the same note to props (the box must fit the pocket). Christopher Boltz's open textbook uses almost exactly this example: information that affects two departments, "such as a particular prop needing to fit into a pocket of a costume," must appear in the notes for each. This lesson walks through the stage manager's tools in the order a production needs them.

Step 1: Build the prompt book

The prompt book, or prompt script, is the stage manager's master copy of the show. Boltz describes how to prepare it. Photocopy the script on one side of each page only, so there is room for notes and the original stays clean, and copy the ground plan onto the blank back of each page, so that when the book lies open you see the text on one side and the stage on the other. Write a key of symbols at the front: a box around each character's initials, numbers for doors and entrances, abbreviations such as SL and DC. During rehearsals, number each piece of action in the text and describe it on the facing page, then draw the moves as arrows on the small ground plan. You practiced this kind of notation in Lesson 10.

Boltz explains why this matters so much. Designers rarely sit in rehearsal, so they ask the stage manager where a moment happens or what an actor does in a costume. In long-running professional productions, the stage management team, not the director, teaches the staging to replacement actors and understudies, using the prompt book. And the prompt book belongs to the producer, who can use it to recreate the production on tour or in a revival. Later, the same book becomes the cueing script.

Step 2: Run the call board and the sign-in sheet

Daniel Ionazzi's handbook defines the call board as the bulletin board used by stage managers; it is where the company finds schedules, rehearsal calls and changes. Lawrence Stern's stage management guidebook suggests dividing it into three areas, permanent, temporary and urgent, and placing the sign-in sheet beside it, so that everyone who signs in is close enough to read the urgent notices. Keep it uncluttered, or new notices will be missed.

The sign-in sheet is how the stage manager knows the whole company has arrived. Boltz's rules are simple: when you arrive, sign in, and do not leave until the show is over; never sign someone else in, and never ask someone to sign for you. Stern adds that if anyone has not signed in by the half-hour call, the stage manager must check the dressing rooms.

Step 3: Write the rehearsal report

Directors, actors and the stage manager are in the rehearsal room; designers, builders and producers usually are not. The rehearsal report, Boltz explains, keeps them all informed, and in professional productions it also serves as the actors' time card. Every report should have the same layout every day. Boltz's checklist includes: a header with the production, the date and the stage manager's name; the plan for the rehearsal; actual start, end and break times; who was called; who was late or absent; what was accomplished; the next rehearsal; notes by department, with "no notes" written for any department that has none; general notes; accidents and incidents; and the distribution list. Sensitive personal information about a cast member never goes on a report; it is shared privately with the people who need it.

Here is a short report written for this course, for an imaginary rehearsal.

TRIFLES  Rehearsal Report #6   Thursday   Stage manager: J. Ortiz
Plan:          Work the ending (Mrs. Peters finds the box to curtain)
Times:         Start 3:30   Break 4:45-4:55   End 5:30
Called:        Full cast
Late/absent:   Hale arrived 3:40 (bus)
Accomplished:  Ending worked twice and run three times
Next:          Monday 3:30, run of the whole play
NOTES
Director:      None
Scenery:       Rocker squeaks when it rocks; can it be quieter?
Props:         The box must fit Mrs. Hale's coat pocket (see Costumes).
               Please provide a rehearsal box of the final size.
Costumes:      The coat pocket must hold the box (see Props) and
               survive a quick, rough entry every night.
Lighting:      No notes
Sound:         Knob cue now happens as Mrs. Peters stands helpless;
               the live knob operator needs a sightline to her.
General:       Strong work on the final silence.
Incidents:     None

In short: A report is useful only if it is consistent, complete and specific. Put every note where the people who must act on it will look, and write "no notes" rather than leaving a department out.

Step 4: Mark the cueing script

At a "paper tech," Boltz explains, the stage manager talks through every cue with the director and designers before technical rehearsals, and each cue is named and placed in the script, always in pencil, because cues move. Light cues are usually numbered and sound cues often lettered, though each production agrees on its own labels, and abbreviations such as LQ and SQ show which is which. The script is then marked with three kinds of calls. A warning tells technicians a cue is approaching, which is useful after a long gap or before a hard sequence. A standby means the cue will be called imminently and the operator is ready. The cue itself, the Go, is marked on an exact word or action. Cues taken together are called together, "Light 15 and Sound D ... GO," and cues taken separately but close together are called one at a time.

Here is the ending of Trifles as a cueing script might mark it, using the light and sound cues from Lessons 23 and 24. The knob is a live effect: as Boltz describes for door effects, the stage manager calls its standby, and the crew member watching the actors takes it.

Step 5: Performance night

Before each performance, stage management gives the company its calls. In Ionazzi's handbook, the half-hour call requires the actors to arrive at the theatre half an hour before the curtain, and the usual calls that follow are fifteen minutes, five minutes and places. Boltz adds the company's side of the bargain: arrive a few minutes before your call time, ready to work, and whenever stage management tells you how many minutes remain, the correct answer is "thank you."

During the show, the headset system, or com, has rules of its own. Boltz lists them: only the stage manager says "Go"; after a standby, everyone stops talking so the operators can hear; and anything said on com may be heard by people it was not meant for, so keep it to the show. After the performance comes the performance report, which records call times, act times and the total running time, who was late or absent, the house count from the house manager, and any incidents.

Call the cues

Try it on your feet with two or three people. One of you is the stage manager, with a copy of the last page of Trifles marked in pencil. One is the light operator, standing by a room's light switch; one is the knob operator, standing by a door with a view of the actors. Read the last page aloud, with the actors' lines spoken by whoever is free, and call the sequence above: warning, standbys and Go. The light operator switches the light off only on "Go." Run it three times, then switch jobs. You will discover how much a stage manager must look ahead in the script while still listening to every word.

Common misconceptions

• The stage manager is the director's assistant. The stage manager is the hub of information during rehearsals and runs every performance once the show opens.
• A rehearsal report only needs the problems. It records times, attendance, accomplishments and next steps too, and a department with no notes is still listed.
• A standby is the cue. A standby means "be ready"; nothing happens until the stage manager says "Go."
• Signing in for a friend is harmless. The sign-in sheet tells the stage manager who is in the building; a false signature can hide a missing actor until it is too late.

Putting it together

• The prompt book holds the blocking, with symbols, numbered actions and a ground plan on facing pages; it trains replacements and becomes the cueing script.
• The call board, divided into permanent, temporary and urgent areas, and the sign-in sheet keep the whole company informed and accounted for.
• A rehearsal report follows the same checklist every day, with notes by department, cross-department notes repeated where needed and "no notes" written out.
• Cues are marked in pencil and called with warnings, standbys and an exact "Go," which only the stage manager says.
• The half-hour call means the company is in the theatre half an hour before curtain; fifteen, five and places follow, and the answer to each is "thank you."

Sources

1. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.10, Blocking notation). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
2. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.11, Production reports). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
3. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.12, Cueing scripts). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
4. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.3, Performance etiquette). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
5. Ionazzi, D. A. (1992). The stage management handbook. Betterway Publications.
6. Stern, L. (1982). Stage management: A guidebook of practical techniques. Allyn and Bacon.

Three minutes and one chair

The Educational Theatre Association publishes exact rules for a solo acting entry in its International Thespian Excellence Awards, the Thespys. Prepare "two (2) contrasting monologues" from published plays or musicals that "do not exceed three (3) minutes in combined length." Each must be "composed of only one character's lines." You may use one chair, safely, and nothing else: no costumes, no makeup, no props, and simple dark clothes, so that the focus stays on the work. Go over the time limit and you may be disqualified.

Most school auditions are less formal, but they pose the same problem. In a few minutes, with almost nothing, you must show a stranger who you are as an actor, and then you may well hear "no." This lesson works on both halves of the problem: what to do in the room, and what to do afterward.

Choose the right material

The Thespys rules define "contrasting" as "different in period, style, mood, etc.," and they list what adjudicators look for, including the "Ability to create a believable character" and the "Communication of objective, tactics, and relationships." That is the whole acting method of this course. Choose pieces in which your character wants something from someone and tries more than one way to get it, so there is something to play. Choose characters you can believably play now. Never stitch together lines from several characters. For competitions that require published work, check the rights rules too; public-domain plays are always safe to use.

You already know several public-domain pieces from this course: Viola's speech after Malvolio returns the ring (Twelfth Night 2.2, Lesson 8); Othello's answer to the Senate (Lesson 18); Nora's lines to Krogstad from Archer's translation of A Doll's House (Lesson 7); and Mrs. Hale's confession in Trifles that begins "I could've come. I stayed away because it weren't cheerful" (Lesson 6). Each needs trimming to one character's lines and a sensible length.

Two monologues written for this course

These two pieces are original to this course and may be used freely. They contrast in mood: one comic, one serious.

DEV (16, to the school librarian)
Before you say anything, I want you to know that I have
brought the book. Most of the book. The parts of the book that
matter. Chapter one is here. Chapter three is here. Chapter two
is in a better place. My grandmother has a goat. His name is
Pastor Jim. I don't know why. Pastor Jim does not respect
literature. I put the book on the porch for one minute, one, to
tie my shoe, and when I turned around, Pastor Jim was reading it.
With his mouth. (Beat.) I know what you're thinking. "Dev, a
goat cannot read." That's what I said! And then I saw his face,
and Ms. Patel, I swear, he looked moved. (Beat.) So here's my
offer. I pay for the book. I volunteer on Saturdays. And I bring
Pastor Jim in for story time, because honestly? He's the only
one in my family who's finished a book this year.

MAYA (15, to her best friend Jess, who has turned away)
You don't have to look at me. Just don't walk away yet. Thirty
seconds. I counted on the bus: it takes thirty seconds to say
it, if I don't cry, which I'm not going to. (Beat.) I didn't say
it. I know what Tori told you, and I know it sounded like me,
because it was the kind of thing I'd say about anybody except
you. But I didn't. (Beat.) Remember fourth grade, when you fell
off the monkey bars and everybody laughed, and I didn't? I sat
in the nurse's office with you for the whole of recess and missed
kickball, and I was really good at kickball. That's who I am.
I'm the one who misses kickball. (Beat.) You can be angry. You
can be angry for a week. But be angry at the right person.
(Beat.) That was thirty seconds. (She doesn't move.) I'm still
here.

Score each one as you scored Nora and Nell. Dev wants Ms. Patel to forgive the fine; his tactics run from confessing to charming to bargaining. Maya wants Jess to believe her; she bargains for time, denies the rumor, reminds Jess of a shared memory and then challenges her. Maya's turn comes when her thirty seconds run out and she does not leave: she stops persuading and simply stays.

The slate and the first moment

Every audition begins with a slate. The Thespys rules explain that the slate "is not part of the performance, but is simply an informative introduction to the piece," a chance "to be themselves and address the adjudicators in a comfortable, polite, and brief manner": your name, the selection and the playwright. For example: "Hello, my name is Ana Ruiz, and I'll be performing Viola's speech from Act Two, Scene Two of Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare." Then take a breath, let yourself become the character, and begin. In the Thespys, time starts after the slate, "with the first word or acting beat," and the adjudicators watch your transitions into and out of character, your final moment and your exit. Land the last line, hold for a beat, step out of the character, say "thank you" and leave.

The upshot: An audition is judged on choices you can prepare: a clear slate, an objective you play from the first beat, a turn, and a clean final moment.

Cold readings and sides

Many auditions also ask you to read from the play. Florida Atlantic University's theatre department, whose casting protocols are typical of a college program, says auditions "may consist of interviews, readings, presentations of prepared materials, improvisation, singing, movement," and promises that "Required materials (sides)," that is, pages from the script, "will be provided at the audition/callback." It also requires students to read the play before auditions. That is the first secret of cold reading: there is less cold about it if you have read the play. When the sides are in your hand, find three things fast: who you are talking to, what you want from them and where the turn comes. Then look up from the page as much as you can, and listen to your reading partner as you practiced in Lesson 3. A clear choice played simply is worth more than a perfect reading of the words.

Callbacks and casting

A callback is a further audition for the actors still being considered. You may read different sides, or read with other actors so the director can see how you work together. FAU's protocols limit callbacks to four hours and promise that any required materials will be provided.

How is the decision made? FAU's published criteria include the quality of the audition, "especially with regard to the student's demonstrated preparedness and connection with the material performed"; the student's skills and talent; the student's "preparedness to function effectively within an ensemble and meet the demands of the production"; the student's commitment; and "availability and ability to meet the rehearsal and performance demands." In other words, a director is building a whole company for one particular production. Height, voice, how two actors look together, who else was cast and who is free on the rehearsal nights can all matter, and none of them is a verdict on your worth.

What you may expect from them

Auditions run both ways. FAU's protocols list what its department owes the people who audition: notices that say which roles are open, what will be asked of you and whether the play involves stage combat or other high-risk activity; a safe, clean, well-lit space; no request to perform violence or sexual contact without warning in the notice; any physical contact required "disclosed and choreographed"; and recording only with notice and assurance of private use. Those are good standards to expect anywhere. If something at an audition feels unsafe, you may say no and tell a trusted adult.

Handling a no

You will not be cast in most of the things you audition for; that is true of almost every actor. When it happens, give yourself a day to be disappointed. Then write down three things you did well and one thing you will change next time. If the production invites it, ask politely for a note. Join the show another way if you can, on crew or in the house; Lessons 22 to 27 showed how much of theatre happens offstage. And keep your two monologues ready.

Common misconceptions

• The slate is part of the performance. It is an introduction, as yourself; the performance and its timing begin after it.
• A longer audition shows more. Time limits are strict, and in the Thespys going over can disqualify you. A short piece played fully is stronger.
• You can build a monologue from several characters' lines. The rules forbid it; a monologue is one character's lines.
• Not being cast means you were bad. Casting weighs the ensemble, the production's demands and availability as well as the audition itself.

Where this leaves us

• Prepare two contrasting monologues, different in period, style or mood, each made of one character's lines and played with an objective, tactics and a turn.
• The slate is a brief, polite introduction as yourself: your name, the piece and the playwright; the performance begins after it.
• At a cold reading, find who you are talking to, what you want and where the turn is, then look up and listen; read the play beforehand whenever you can.
• Callbacks let directors see you again and with other actors; casting weighs preparedness, skill, ensemble, the production's demands and availability.
• Expect safe, honest auditions, and treat a no as information about one production, not a judgment of you.

Sources

1. Educational Theatre Association. (n.d.). Acting [Thespys rules for solo, duet and group acting]. Educational Theatre Association.
2. Florida Atlantic University Department of Theatre and Dance. (2026). Auditions and casting protocols and procedures. Florida Atlantic University.
3. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Twelfth night (B. Mowat and P. Werstine, Eds.; Act 2, scene 2). Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare.
4. Glaspell, S. (1920). Trifles. In Plays. Small, Maynard. Project Gutenberg.
5. Ibsen, H. (1907). A doll's house (W. Archer, Trans.). In The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Vol. 7). William Heinemann. (Original work published 1879). Project Gutenberg.

Ten days to a play

In the summer of 1916 the Provincetown Players moved fast. Susan Glaspell's memoir records it: "Ten days after the director said he had announced my play, there was a reading at Mary Heaton Vorse's. I was late to the meeting, home revising the play. But when I got there the crowd liked 'Trifles,' and voted to put it in rehearsal next day." The printed play records the result: first performance by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre, August 8, 1916, with Glaspell herself as Mrs. Hale.

You will probably have more than a few weeks, and far more to coordinate. This final lesson is a procedure for planning your own production of Trifles, from the rights to the post-mortem, using everything the course has built. At the end you will assemble a production book.

Step 1: Secure the rights

Before anything else, make sure you may perform the play. Trifles is in the public domain in the United States: Cornell University Library's copyright chart, updated for 2026, shows that works first published in the U.S. before 1931 are "In the public domain due to copyright expiration." The text you have used all course, from Glaspell's Plays of 1920, is free to copy and perform.

Most plays are not. A copyrighted play needs a performance license from the company that handles its rights, arranged before auditions are announced. Dramatic Publishing, one of the companies that license plays to schools, explains that a performance before an audience whose members are not part of your acting class or drama troupe "is subject to royalties" whether or not admission is charged, because "Regardless of whether you are charging for performances, the author must be compensated." The same applies to songs from musicals (Lesson 21).

Step 2: Make a budget

Glaspell remembered that the most expensive set at the Wharf Theater cost thirteen dollars (Lesson 22). A school Trifles can stay close to that spirit. Here is a sample budget; your numbers will differ.

The University of California's Performing Arts Safety Manual makes a point that surprises many beginners: the strike plan should be made at the design stage, so that its costs, including recycling and storage, are part of the budget.

Step 3: Build the calendar backward

Start from opening night and work backward, so every phase gets the time it needs. A sample six-week calendar:

Step 4: Rehearse in phases

Each phase uses tools you have practiced. Read the play aloud around a table and agree on the given circumstances. Block it and record the blocking. Work each scene beat by beat, playing actions rather than feelings. Get off book and run the play whole, again and again. Near the end of rehearsals, hold a designer run. In Michael Lenehan's account of a summer at a repertory company, this is the rehearsal at which the pieces of the play are "strung together into a whole play," giving the lighting designer, the composer and the set and costume designers a chance to see it before tech.

Step 5: Tech week

Technical rehearsals put the design and the acting together, one layer at a time.

1. Paper tech. As Boltz describes, the stage manager, director and designers talk through every cue and place it in the script, in pencil (Lesson 27).
2. Dry tech. Thomas Kelly's Back Stage Guide to Stage Management calls this "a purely technical rehearsal" that gives the stage managers and crew a chance to work the technical elements, such as scene changes, without actors.
3. Cue-to-cue. Kelly describes going "cue-to-cue" as taking each cue or technical event and working it before going on; the company jumps from one cue to the next rather than playing every scene in full.
4. Tech runs and dress rehearsals. The whole play with every cue, then with costumes, as close to performance conditions as possible, with the stage manager calling the show.

Safety rules from Lesson 26 matter most this week, when everyone is tired and the stage is full of new equipment.

Step 6: Opening and the run

Once the play opens, the stage manager is in charge of the performance. Boltz writes that from then on the stage manager calls all the cues and maintains the director's and designers' vision throughout the run. Each night follows the same pattern: sign-in, the half-hour call, fifteen, five, places, the show, a performance report with the running time, the house count and any incidents (Lesson 27). Actors keep the performance fresh by playing their actions anew each night, not by changing the staging.

Step 7: Closing night and strike

The UC safety manual calls the strike "busy, loud, and, to the untrained, confusing," and says safety "starts with a plan": what will be taken down, how, when, by whom and in what order, and what will be reused, recycled or thrown away. Its sample sequence includes guarding the edges of the stage, then removing props, electrical fixtures, sound equipment, soft goods and the set, with the battens near the end. It also notes that more injuries happen on night shifts and during long or unusual hours, so scheduling strike for the morning after the last performance reduces fatigue-related injuries; when strike must start right after the final bow, rest breaks and food matter even more.

Step 8: The post-mortem

Within a few days of strike, gather the company for a post-mortem: a meeting to review what worked and what to change next time, while memories are fresh. Go department by department, as a rehearsal report does. Keep it about the work, not about blame, and write down three lessons to hand to the next production.

Bottom line: A production is a chain of plans, each built on the one before: rights, budget, calendar, rehearsal, tech, performance, strike and review. Planned backward from opening night, even a thirteen-dollar Trifles can be done well and safely.

Your production book

Gather the work of this course into one folder, paper or digital:

• A rights note and budget, and your six-week calendar.
• An audition notice and your two audition monologues (Lesson 28).
• Your script breakdown, ground plan and a photograph of your model (Lesson 22).
• Your light plot, instrument schedule and cue list (Lesson 23) and your sound cue list (Lesson 24).
• Your costume plot and rendering (Lesson 25) and your safety notes (Lesson 26).
• Prompt-book pages and a rehearsal report (Lesson 27).

A miniature production

Finish on your feet. Gather three to five friends or family members and read Trifles aloud around a table, start to finish. Then run a cue-to-cue of the last page, with one person on a light switch and one on a doorknob, the stage manager calling the cues. Finally, strike your taped ground plan from Lesson 22: peel the tape, return the furniture, and leave the room as you found it. Then hold a five-minute post-mortem: what worked, and what would you change?

Common misconceptions

• If we do not charge admission, we do not need a license. For a copyrighted play, licensing companies such as Dramatic Publishing charge royalties for performances before outside audiences whether or not admission is charged. Trifles is free because it is in the public domain.
• Tech week is when the acting gets fixed. Tech week belongs to the technical elements; the acting must be ready before it starts.
• Strike is the easy part. It is one of the riskiest times in a production, because people are tired, rushed and taking apart heavy things; it needs its own plan.
• When the show closes, the work is over. The post-mortem turns one production's lessons into the next one's plan.

Looking back

• Trifles went from announcement to rehearsal in about ten days in 1916; a modern school production plans the same work over several weeks.
• Trifles is in the U.S. public domain because it was published before 1931; copyrighted plays need a license, even without admission charges.
• Build the budget and the calendar backward from opening night, and plan the strike at the design stage.
• Rehearsals move through table work, blocking, beat work, runs and a designer run; tech week moves through paper tech, dry tech, cue-to-cue, tech runs and dress rehearsals.
• During the run the stage manager calls the show and keeps the director's and designers' vision; after closing night come a planned strike and a post-mortem.

Sources

1. Glaspell, S. (1927). The road to the temple (on the first reading of Trifles, p. 256). Frederick A. Stokes. Internet Archive.
2. Glaspell, S. (1920). Trifles. In Plays. Small, Maynard. Project Gutenberg.
3. Cornell University Library. (2026, January 1). Copyright term and the public domain. Cornell University Library.
4. Dramatic Publishing. (n.d.). Frequently asked questions about licensing and royalties. Dramatic Publishing.
5. University of California. (2015). Performing arts safety manual (Set deconstruction: Strike). Regents of the University of California. University of California.
6. Boltz, C. R. (2020). Technical theatre practicum (Section 1.1, Jobs in technical theatre). LibreTexts. LibreTexts.
7. Kelly, T. A. (1991). The back stage guide to stage management. Back Stage Books.
8. Lenehan, M. (2016). Much ado: A summer with a repertory theater company. Agate Midway.