Thinking = Subtext

The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival will take place in Los Angeles in early February.  Colleges from across our region will be bring students who have been nominated for Irene Ryan awards to downtown LA to compete to go to Washington, DC, for the national festival.  I have the honor of working with two very talented young men who are in the competition.  They have chosen as one of their selections a scene from Bent.  Bent is the story of two gay men in a Nazi concentration camp.  It is a challenging play and the scene they have selected is an extraordinarily emotional piece.  Yesterday, after they went through it once, we talked about the importance of the inner monologue, the subtext, that colors the written words of a play.  In other words, the thinking.

I've been cogitating a lot about thinking as it pertains to acting.  And I've come to the conclusion that what we are thinking when we speak is as important, if not more important, than what we say when we speak.

I don't know about you, but I always have an inner monologue running when I'm in conversation.  I may be unusual, but I don't think so...oops, there's that word again.  We've all had conversations where underneath we've thought, "I can't believe I'm saying this."  Or again, "I wish I could change the subject."  We all preview what we are going to respond to what the other person's saying.  Our likes and our dislikes run under our dialogue.  This inner monologue enriches a character we are portraying when we act.  The subtext shows when our characters are having difficult conversations, when we are revealing secrets, when we are telling truths.

This inner monologue is especially important when you are acting for the camera.  The camera reads a person's eyes.  Eyes that are thinking are much more interesting than eyes that are just remembering written lines.  Your face speaks volumes even when you don't have any words.  For the camera, you are what you think.

As someone who has trouble turning off her mind, thinking is not a problem for me.  Going for the hard "think," the inner voice that is confronting the things I don't want to think about is usually my challenge.  And it is the hard "think" that most drama is about, those hard truths that we'd rather hide from ourselves.  The "dark corners" we would rather not shine a light on.

So for my students, as we work on Bent, I am going to challenge them to think, to take that thinking to the hard places.  They have the ability and the talent.  I can't wait to see where they go.