Acting 1-Clear intentions

This semester is flying by so fast and acting class is going to be over way too soon! We have now finished our final performances for our second monologues. It has been so fun finding ways to improve and working on my craft. Something that I noticed this last time around was how important it is to have very specific and clear intentions with what you are acting. Just about anyone can memorize some lines and say recite them to a group of people. We all did that as kids when they had us memorize a poem and forced us to enter the poetry competition. Remember that? I always detested that by the way. I felt like everyone was judging me and waiting to catch me if I said a word wrong, which I always seemed to do. Interesting how this experience was so torturous and yet I absolutely LOVE acting now. Why is that, you ask? Well I think it's because the intention was not there and therefore, it was not acting at all. Not even close. Memorizing and reciting a bunch of lines is stressful, scary, and not fun at all. However, acting out those lines, becoming the one who says those lines as if they were your own with a CLEAR intention...now that is exhilarating!

For my monologue this time around, I chose a piece from a short one-act play written by David E. Rodriguez called I'm not Stupid. It was bit of a depressing play, but intellectually exciting and I was drawn in from the start. I had a difficult time figuring out what the intentions were at first. I decided to portray the role of the mother who had just killed her son and was then talking to her son's psych, who didn't know what she had just done, explaining that she loved her son as someone would love a dog. At first I could only look at her and say, "she is crazy, she has no intention!" However, as I really delved deeper into why she was telling him what she was, I realized that she was trying to justify what she had just done. Yes she was crazy, but her reality was that she was in the right and she needed the psychiatrist to see that. With this in mind I decided to play my intentions to that effect. I needed him to understand, I needed him to feel bad for me, to be on my side. Even with this prior work, the first time I performed I was still caught up trying to remember all the words and it felt a tiny bit like those elementary school poems I had to memorize. By the second time however, I was able to play around with intentions a bit more and really portray what she would be trying to accomplish with her speech. Things made a huge turnaround after that. All of the sudden it became acting and it was fun and exciting!

Intentions really are what should be driving us in anything, acting or life. Wouldn't life be so much simpler if everyone spoke and acted with clear intentions? Probably a lot more fun as well!