ON ACTING: "Build"

A build in a scene arises because the truth of each character's life requires more and more effort to hold down* as the scene progresses, and the onslaught from each character's conflictual efforts increases, ripping away each contestant's defenses.

*(Underlying this, of course, is the belief that a person's truth is only unwillingly and most often umwittingly revealed in life, preferred by most humans to be contained, repressed and supresed until the last possible, necessary moment.)

When I was a child, I loved to play with my yellow plastic ducks in the bathtub. My favorite game was to submerge the ducks underwater, then release them and watch them jump out of the water. I remember the activity very vividly after all these years: the deeper the ducks were submerged prior to release, the higher the ducks jumped in the air when they surfaced. The same in acting: as we are forced to dig into deeper and deeper personal layers of truth to defeat the opponent, these truths emerge from the increasing depths of our personality with greater and increasing intensity: hence, bulid.

A REMINDER: The good actor doesn't play a 'build'. It is automatically and proportionally forced on each actor/character as they are truthfully, honestly and emotionally engaged in a real character-conficted scene.

It is a truth of life; hence, of good acting.