Anyone I’ve ever known, including myself, who’s taken any kind of acting class: whether it be a performance class, a public speaking class, an audition class, cold reading class, or an improv class, has always said it was the best thing they ever did. You might include in this category, classes in: any type of dance, hip hop, ballet, elocution lessons, even general movement classes such as Feldenkrais, Yoga, or Alexander Technique.

Taking an acting class helps you open up in ways you never thought possible, and it’s my opinion, that everyone, at one time or another in life, should be required to take an acting class. Let’s face it, in business, sales, politics, and teaching, most people act at one time or another. Why not actually learn some short cuts to make it all easier?

One of the most important …

For the last several years, I’ve been writing a novel. I’m now trying to get it published. The novel started as a reaction to a year-long period in my life which I could call now, “My Dark YEAR of the Soul.” I couldn’t find any film or teaching work in LA, my father was dying of alcoholism back in Kansas City, I had gained fifty pounds, was feeling middle aged, (having just turned forty), and I was more broke than I’d ever been. It was a terrible time. My husband and friends had no clue how to help me. And I struggled each day, just to get out of bed.

One morning, sick of it all, I sat down at my computer and started to write. Since I couldn’t think of one single profound thing to say, I just wrote about …

What is The Dark Night of the Soul? It’s a feeling most of us have at three in the morning (or even, for weeks and months at a time) when we feel totally alone. When we feel unbearably lost. When we ask, or pray, and do not hear any reply. It can be a period where just getting out of bed to do our daily tasks seems like the hardest thing to do. Brushing our teeth hurts. Taking a shower is painful. Sending out one more headshot or calling one more agent, or having one more conversation about “who we want to be” and “what we really want to do with our lives” feels like someone sticking a hot poker up our backs! It’s those periods in life when all we’d rather do is pull the covers back over …

A great tool I learned about in one of my favorite Method classes was using “substitutions”. Using a substitution isn’t only for creating realistic emotions in a scene (which I have described in another post) – it’s also a simple, easy way, to break yourself out of pre-learned vocal patterns, and keep your lines sounding real and fresh. They can be great too, for delivering lines in classic drama, lines you’ve heard a million times (like the famous Hamlet monologue!)

What’s so fun, and so fascinating about using random substitutions, is that they’ll often give you ideas about how you can deliver lines in ways you’d never even thought. How do you do this? Well, let me try and give you an example.I learned that going back and forth with how I was feeling, in between some boring lines I wasn’t connecting …

The more traditional way to use substitutions to create realistic moments in scenes and monologues is to remember a similar conversation you may have had, from your past, which had the same kinds of emotions and feelings, and then go from that conversation, to your lines.

For example: If I was going to play Hamlet, and had to say the famous, “To be, or not to be” speech, I’d work very hard at trying to find a time in my life when I was wondering what life was all about. I’d try to remember how I, myself, would talk about living and dying, about the possibility that life can be crazy, that maybe it would be better just to end it.It’s important to just totally forget how you’ve heard other famous actors say these words…I’d study the famous speech, and try and not only re-write it …

All actors want to keep it fresh, as if every line we say has just come off the top of our heads, (like we do in real life), and hasn’t been something we’ve been thinking about during our scene partner’s previous line. Let’s face it. This is a basic element of good acting, and it’s one of the hardest things to do.

One of the main problems I always had, as an actor, was saying the lines exactly the same way, time after time. I found that once I’d memorized my lines in a particular rhythm, I had a hard time saying them any other way. It didn’t matter how the other actor delivered his or her lines to me, or even if they changed them, made their lines more angry, more sad, or said them more quickly, or softly – no matter how …