This week, Milton talks about how building different moments in your characters past reveals new information about them, and the importance of knowing exactly what that information is. We must ask the question: What does this moment I’m building tell me about my character? Your answer will clarify a new dimension of this human being. Then, we must integrate every character-discovery, so that you have a process where each piece builds on the next, or in the words of Stephen Sondheim: “the art of making art is putting it together, bit by bit.”

As we approach a play and begin letting the facts simmer in our imagination, we can begin to ask questions, as though we are interviewing our character. There are no right or wrong questions and no two actors will ask the same ones. Your own personal exploration becomes part of your signature on the role. But here’s the rub: we cannot answer these questions based on our own limited personal experience, or from the cliches we have absorbed from film and television. We need to do research. What does that look like? Watching interviews and documentaries, or even better: talking to real people who share your character’s attributes and circumstances. The joy of research is that it opens us up to worlds beyond our own where we can shop for choices that feed us and help us build a 3-dimensional human.

We often run into trouble when we try to recreate a performance. This is because the action “to do what I did yesterday” is different from the action that made you DO what you did yesterday. But there are ways to avoid falling into this trap. In this episode, Milton gives examples of adjustments you can make so that the circumstances keep feeding you and the performance stays alive.

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It can often be overwhelming if you think about the massive responsibility we have as actors and all the many pieces we must fully own before it all comes together to create an illusion that looks and sounds like the truth. We can’t master everything at once and if we try to, we’ll become paralyzed like the centipede who forgot how to walk when he realized each leg was doing something different. Therefore, we must focus on one thing at a time, layering each element onto the one before it, like the bricks that make up a house. “And then all of sudden, one day,” Milton says, “this fantasy happens where you don’t know where you end and the character begins. And you begin to see the world in that particular way. But slow and steady wins the race.”

This week, Milton talks about resisting the urge to play an effect, or a result. Often if we receive an “effect direction” such as: “it’s too big” or “it’s too small,” we will then overcompensate in the opposite direction. By doing so, we’re playing an effect, focused on our behavior as opposed to what creates that behavior. Part of being an intelligent actor is having the ability to translate an “effect direction” into something actable or doable. For instance: can I get more specific so that this feeds me more? Why am I saying this? What’s happening in the scene? What is the big idea?

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This episode is the third in our trilogy about making everything something. This week Milton gives us a strategy for this. Using his “Why I Love the Theater” exercise as an example, he discusses how to building one thing at a time by talking it out, making sure it feeds you and adding more, little by little. “We are after moments so that nothing sound pedestrian, so that every single thing has a life to it.”

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This week’s episode is a continuation of last week’s topic. Milton talks about the importance of treating every fact and every element as if it’s important. Even those facts that seem to be incidental plot points cannot be skipped over in rehearsal. If they are, the lie that is your play will not sound like the truth. They are facts that give us the opportunity to go deeper into character, into the given circumstances, into the idea that the writer is intending to communicate. The more specific we are when building each fact, the more confidence we have to let go and let the play play us.

In this episode, Milton takes a question from Benjamin in Canada who asked him to clarify an idea from our episode The Biggest Sin: beginning your work on a play as if you know nothing. Another way to say that is: begin your work with a mindset of assuming nothing. If you assume you already know about a fact of your character or the circumstances of the play, you’ll neglect to dig deeper and end up just throwing it away, thus making your performance cliche or 2-dimensional. Nothing is inconsequential. Every single fact is an opportunity to ask yourself: what does that really mean? How do I feel about it? The deeper we dig into the facts, and the more specific we get, the more they will feed us, and bring us to life.

Last episode we talked about theme. This week, we continue that conversation but make the distinction between truly big ideas and everything else. Big ideas affect all of us, they shape civilization. As actors, our understanding of a big idea has to go beyond our own personal relationship to it in order for us to communicate the idea that the writer intended. This is what is meant by “raising ourselves up to the size of the idea,” as opposed to bringing it down to our limited human experience.

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In every play, there’s a big, universal, cosmic idea, (or theme.) It’s what the writer wants to communicate. As actors we must know what this big idea is. We won’t know what it is right away- our rehearsal process is our discovery process. But eventually, in order to play the part, we have to reach this understanding. Once we do, we must raise ourselves up to the size of the idea, making sure that all of our choices feed into it.