Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 169
feet, as the theatrical jargon puts it, is usually the first
step in allowing the actors to experience the full human
vitality of the playwright’s characters, both in the actions
they take and the words they utter.
Theatre does not always happen in a theatre. Sir Kenneth Branagh
codirects (with Rob Ashford) and also plays the title role of Macbeth in this
production, which originated in a rain-filled and mud-floored deconsecrated
church in Manchester, England, in 2013, as seen here, before coming to
New York’s Park Avenue Armory the following year. © Johan Persson
among the rehearsal inventions to determine what will
become a part of the finished performance. When this
determination is made, bits of business become part of
the blocking plan.
Staging, then, in the broadest sense, includes both hidden
and bold blocking effects, specialized movements,
and small idiosyncratic behaviors, all combined into a
complex pattern that creates meaning, impact, and style.
From a subtle nervous tic to a grand entrance on a flying
trapeze, every movement on stage counts as staging—
and all ultimately result from the director’s decisions.
Skillful staging unites the design elements of a production
with the acting, creating an omni-dynamic spatial
interaction between actors, costumes, scenery, and audience,
infusing the stage with life. Getting a play on its
Actor-Coaching The director is the actor’s coach who
initiates and leads the various activities—discussions,
improvisations, games, exercises, lectures, research,
blocking, polishing—that will occupy the actors during
each rehearsal. Like an athletic coach, the director seeks
to stimulate proactive teamwork among the players, as
well as develop their individual craft excellence and artistry.
Because the work of the theatre inevitably demands
of the actor a good measure of emotional, psychological,
and even spiritual investment, the director has an opportunity
(if not an obligation) to provide an atmosphere
in which actors can feel free to liberate their powers of
sensitivity and creativity. Good directors lead their casts;
great directors inspire them.
Guiding the actors through the script may be important
in the early stages of rehearsal, particularly if the
language is complex, the historical period unfamiliar, or
the play’s characters unlike persons known to the actors
themselves. Sometimes the director will invite the dramaturg,
if one is on the artistic team, to provide appropriate
research or give a company lecture on the more
elusive points of the text. The director may also ask voice
coaches, dance and fight choreographers, and others to
provide assistance where specialized performance techniques
are desired.
The ways that directors coach actors are various and
probably more dependent on personality than on planning.
Some directors are largely passive; they either
“block and run,” in the jargon of commercial theatre, or
function primarily as a sounding board for actors’ decisions
about intention, action, or business. Conversely,
there are directors closer to the popular stereotype, fanatics
whose approaches at times turn them into dictators:
they cajole, bully, plead, storm, and rage at their actors;
involve themselves in every detail of motive and characterization;
and turn every rehearsal into a mixture of
acting class, group therapy session, and religious experience.
Both methods, as experience teaches, can produce
theatrical wizardry, and both can fail utterly. Probably
the determining factors either way are the strength of the
director’s ideas and the extent to which the cast is willing
to accept his or her directorial authority.
Too little direction can be as stultifying to an actor as
too much. The passive director runs the risk of defeating
an actor’s performance by withholding constructive
response. Similarly, the extremely active director may,