How to Kill Actors

You might not realize it from all the geekiness that I display, but I was once a theatre major. I did all sorts of things in the theatre in middle, high school, and college including:

• Acting
• Singing
• Playwriting
• Directing
• Technical Direction – (including un-counterbalanced flying of cubes and whatnot, those who know what this is should shutter a bit.)
• Direction
• Stage Management

I was good at some of this, and I sucked at other parts of it. I never got and still don’t get acting, even though I did a fair amount of it. In theory its simple: folks get up there and pretend to be someone else. Thats like saying all there is to programming is figuring out all the ifs and thens that you have to write out, and failing to mention all the stuff about data management, memory management, debugging, and optimization. (I once suggested to the professor of my acting for non-acting majors class that I should audition for the local professional theatre, she looked at me like I had 17 heads, needless to say I got the message and didn’t audition.)

Directing a play is even trickier, many actors become directors, because they understand actors and how to coax what they’d like from the actors and artists around them. I on the other hand more likely treated actors and designers as puppets of sorts: Please give me X, Y, and Z. Thank you. I’d like a white dress for the actress in this scene, it should be beautiful and simple.

Treating actors like puppets is the surest way to kill them. (Not literally of course, or maybe literally, I don’t know really, actors are interesting people, treating them like puppets might kill them.)

A theatre professor and director that I worked with for a while told me of a time that she needed a character to be in a white dress for a scene. She wrote a whole paragraph on that white dress for the costume designer. I don’t remember every bit of what she shared with me but over ten years later I still recall that it included describing the dress as if it was an vanilla ice cream cone on a sweltering hot summer day. Not only did she get exactly what she wanted from the costume designer, but the description empowered and drove the costume designer to embrace the director’s vision.

You kill an actor or designer by asking for exactly what you want. You empower and drive them by sharing your vision and challenging them.