Scenes and Strasberg

As each student has been presenting her theorist in order to expose the class to more theatrical aspects, our instructor gave us an exercise after half of the students had presented. In this exercise one person in each group of two was to perform a brief section of the monologue according to a specific theorist's ideas. Since I hadn't presented, I paired up with Kavita who had researched about Lee Strasberg and his theories. Strasberg believed that actors should perform more naturally on stage by taking their given scene/situation and applying their own personal experience to this scene. According to Strasberg, he believed that actors could portray more natural rather than artificial emotions if they could somehow relate to the scene at hand.

And so the scene that we were given was of a girl who was scolding her sister for having stolen something from her friend. The ironic thing is that the sister who is doing the scolding has stolen her friend's bracelet before to show that she is a hypocritical character. And the character that I play is the sister who feels that she is being scolded at unfairly. At first when Kavita was directing me she had me substitute the sister's name with my own sister's name and the bracelet with a cellphone. Kavita told me to imagine my sister scolding and accusing me for something that I hadn't done so that I could portray this feeling of betrayal in my performance. Even after telling me this I was still holding back my emotions and was unable to convey this anger. And instead she had me imagine someone that I dislike and had me explain why I disliked him. In doing this I somehow started to feel irritated and angry which fared well for my performance.

There were multiple interpretations for this particular scene, and each interpretation was different based on each drama theorist. I performed with a more angry, irritated emotion whereas another group used this tone of blackmail. And since there were different interpretations for the different theorists, each group prepared in a different way. For example, one group used Meyerhold's theories of how the director had full control over the performance. According to Meyerhold, the actor wasn't supposed to put too much of himself into the character and not to put too much of the character in the performance. Instead, the actor needed to find this middle ground. As a result, our instructor brought up a point about how there isn't just one correct interpretation.