ON ACTING: Giving the Audience Their Money's Worth

Audiences are emotional consumers; they are prudent-buyers of feeling. They want their money’s worth.

They expect a ten course meal of emotions when entering a theatre and/or witnessing a performance. To satisfy them, a director can either hire several actors in one scene to serve up one emotional a dish at a time: i.e., cast one actor to do an angry character, one actor to do a sad character, one actor to do a sexy character, etc. Or the director can hire one actor who can serve up a full course meal of emotions all by himself, on a single plate, in a single scene.

So when approaching a role in a scene, I encourage the good actor to look for the widest array of character-emotion possibilities in the scene, to consider turning any single performance or any single scene into a star-turn, a ten event decathlon, a meal of multi-dished emotional possibilities.