Why would anyone writing an acting book want to talk about geometry?
Triangles have saved my ass so many times, I cannot tell you. In acting, in my staging, in my
thinking and in my directing.
The best teacher of triangles is our incredibly difficult but intensely beloved theater, A Red Orchid
Theater, 1531 N. Wells, 70 seats in an unfortunately elongated back storeroom, with nine foot
ceilings. This impossible space has caused so many problems and these problems have been some of the greatest gifts in the artistic life of the space. Because it is so unusually shaped, designers and directors are forced to be extra creative. Gone is the luxury of a proscenium, gone is a barrier of audience/actor, gone is any sense of mystery of depth and height which you might find in a normal theater.
You may be wondering, what the hell is dado talking about, why is a proscenium luxurious?
I will tell you. A proscenium is a visual signpost that bifurcates a performance space and is often used to visually and physically separate these areas. Simply put, it is a frame. A director or a designer can choose to adhere to this, or to violate it, or incorporate it, or what have you. A wonderful propensity of options arises from this particular architectural feature which is very popular in most buildings that are designated theaters.
A Red Orchid has no proscenium, and so this notion is simply eradicated from the start, it does not exist. You cannot violate rules of a proscenium or follow them if there is not one there to begin with. In fact, A Red Orchid’s stage and audience are all sort of smushed together because the space is so shallow. It’s rather like a bigger sized hallway. And so, A Red Orchid right away presents an entire flattening of all of the exciting problems and choices that a
space with a proscenium, even a small one, presents.
One way that I have learned both on and off stage to activate the stage at A Red Orchid was by
using triangles. I learned this both as a director and as an actor. Here is what I mean.
There is not much visually interesting of two people standing directly across from the middle plane of seats in our space. These kinds of scenes immediately flatten themselves and go dead. I learned to create angles in the staging for visibility purposes and by creating relationships to the architecture (or implied architecture) in the room. In other words, if a scene has two people in it talking, I will most likely triangulate them with a piece of furniture of some kind.
So many times, I have seen a scene go dead or awry, and on my checklist of things is always
triangles. Can this scene be triangulated better? It gets harder with more and more people, and
more objects, but there is a math to it, and these triangles can also operate vertically in a 9 foot
space!
I learned to not be afraid to put pieces of the set in the audience and put the audience where I
wanted them. Our seats are not bolted to the ground so if you need to move seats around, you can actually do that, which is a great feature of a space with these kinds of limitations.
And then I quickly realized that this problem is just as inherent in a proscenium house. And that
there are many many ways to activate a room with people or objects or architecture, and it is all
about how you use the triangle to do it!
Actors are trained to connect to each other and react. This is a good thing. It is really important for the vitality of that connection to keep information in a scene moving. However, more often than not, a scene can be rendered completely inert when two people are talking to each other's faces for too long, no matter how connected they are to one another and to what they are saying. I find that a lot of the time, in an acting class, my job will be to find ways to best triangulate the scene, to pry the actors off of each other’s faces so that their performances can reach the most pivotal and critical piece of the triangle, and that would be US, THE AUDIENCE.
Just because you are not looking at someone does not mean that you are not connected to them. Trust me on this. The audience must be triangulated. This is easy to do in a proscenium, much harder to do at 1531 N. Wells, because the audience is most often already seated in a triangular shape around the actors. And this is what has made many of my directorial choices so dynamic and this is what has taught me to activate any proscenium space in a way that keeps the audience very visually energized.
The audience shaped around us at A Red Orchid has caused me to build very dynamically energized choices when it comes to staging a play or an installation.
A great example of this is when Guy Van Swearingen had me direct The Sea Horse by Edward J.
Moore. The Sea Horse is a two hander and Guy was in it with Kirsten Fitzgerald. We had to find a
set designer, and we hired a young chap who had not yet graduated from Columbia College. We
hired him because in his interview, he claimed that for an extra nominal fee he would build the set as well as design it. This was the clincher for me, because I did not want Guy, who was the artistic director at the time and who was always building the sets as well, working on this set. This role was an emotional mother fucker and I needed him to focus on his lines. So we hired the young chap, whose name was Grant Sabin. And what Grant did changed my relationship to theater forever. He basically built a raked stage and a massive bar, modeled after O’Rourke’s, the now gone but still famous bar on Halsted across from Steppenwolf. Our original plan had been to get the bar out of Steppenwolf, which is where it was stored after O’Rourke’s was torn down, but it wouldn’t fit through AROT’s doors, it was so huge. Grant built it, instead, and slanted it so that the apex of the bar penetrated the space, and basically the bar looked as if a huge ship had wrecked in through our back wall and was dangerously close to impaling the audience. The bar looked like the bow of a ship had exploded into the theater. This all made such great psychic sense because the character Guy was playing was a sailor and the bar is an old leaky place with water dripping from the ceilings and it is pretty much raining outside for the entirety of the play.
This play had the intimate danger of becoming very, very flat, and Grant basically prevented me and the two actors from making any flat decisions whatsoever by driving his massive shipwreck of a set through the back wall of our theater. No one could stand in a straight line and talk to the other one without a huge bar in the way. The angles were implicit. It was a hell of an instructive lesson for me to learn and I will never forget it.
How do you use triangles as an actor? I would say, look around you, and don’t forget where you are
when you are in a scene. Do not tunnel vision your scene into your partner. You are making yourself work way too hard when you do that. I am not saying by any means to disconnect from your scene partner. Rehearse your scene. Say the words. Say them to each other, find your bearings with each other. And when you feel the scene has legs, then you can begin to find the triangles. The most important triangle is the audience, so you have to identify where they are or will be right away. And then you can make as many triangles as you need or want from there.
Let’s say you are in a scene from Glass Menagerie, and you are playing Laura. And the actor
playing the Gentleman Caller is across from you on a pillow and the room is darker from candlelight and from Laura’s mother not paying the electric bill, so there’s not a lot of room to move around. You are sitting across from each other the scene is very profile oriented and you can feel the scene starting to go dead a little bit. What should you do? You can do a couple of things. Use your objectives (objectives are discussed in other chapters) to instigate actions (also discussed in other chapters) that will open up or triangulate the scene. If you are Laura and your objective is to sustain Jim’s attention, or draw it to you, you can move the candelabra slightly out of concern for wax on the rug or some other logistical thing, to save the yearbook that is pored over in the scene from wax, or you can fixate on the Victrola which you are afraid to get up and walk over to, lest the Gentleman Caller notice your limp. You can find ways to orient yourself towards the objects that give you comfort. Now what if you are the Gentleman Caller in the same scene? Let’s say you are very entranced with Laura’s unique disposition and you want to stare at her. Maybe your objective is to kiss her. What should you do? You can move your pillow in such a way that you are closer or further away from her but can see her better from a different angle. You could find ways to physically activate your restlessness as your attraction to Laura deepens. You could also simply find a way to see or not see the door behind which Tom, Laura’s brother, and Amanda, are standing while they clean up the dinner and argue in the background.
It helps a great deal to have a third eye, a director or a trusted friend, help you with triangles when
you are working on a scene. So don’t beat yourself up if you can’t do it right away, it does take a lot
of time, and it takes experience to find them and keep them activated. However, I believe it is
important to have an awareness of them, because oftentimes we blame ourselves and our
relationship to the scene and sometimes it is just as simple as finding the right triangle to keep things from flattening out.
I will often find myself disengaged if I watch a play with two people standing across from each other talking for a long time without ever changing the plane on which they stand, so that the audience is presented with an elongated view of their profiles, and the emotional content of the scene is moving only between them. I can think that they are great actors, and that they are very connected to their scene and making great choices etc, but I am not a part of this content. I’m left out; I am not part of the experience. These scenes can sometimes survive inside of a play, but it is not usually the case.
A play is a communal experience, and the audience is meant to be included.
Triangles lend themselves to all aspects of theater and design. They are handy in all areas of life as well. They can help you get dressed! They can help you arrange a room. They can help you learn your lines. There are a lot more threes in the world than there are twos. They are harder to see but they are there! It’s our job to find them and put them to work.
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