The winter of our discontent: digging deep into your character's dark places.

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

Here we are in the middle of the Big Dark, Seattle's annual festival of SAD and human hibernation.

What better time to consider the darker areas of your character's psyche?

In Uta Hagen's Nine Questions, we are to ask: "What are my relationships?"

The obvious answers come to mind when we begin working on this question as far as a given script: a mother, a sister, a child, a co-worker, a neighbor, etc.

But when we dig into these relationships, we begin to understand the true nature of the question: what about the apparent fear and resentment I have for my mother? How does my character deal with the lack of trust and suspicions about my sister? When did I grow to depend so much on my own child for comfort or support, and what are the repercussions of this? Who can I trust at work, and is that co-worker really an ally? Why am I attracted to that neighbor who so clearly dislikes me?

We need to get all the evidence to support our understanding of relationships from the text, which is sometimes hard to do, especially if our character on the surface seems to have a healthy relationship with someone. Usually the truth will out; old resentments and betrayals will come pouring out in crisis moments.

The question for the actor is how to weave those existing truths into places earlier or less evident in order to create layered richness in the relationship early on.

It doesn't take a lot to see that much like our own complicated relationships with people close to us, there are contradictions and dissonances in dramatic relationships. Borrowing from our own lived experience can be a useful way of bringing those complexities to life onstage.

Great playwrights offer us characters who seem to be a bundle of contradictions. They seem to punish who they love, resent the ones they care for the most, hold back those they should be supporting and engage in a host of seemingly contradictory actions towards those around them, even when they are not in overt conflict with them.

Mine the text, detail the evidence, explore the relationships in rehearsal and remember that interesting humans are complicated beings. Embrace the complications and explore the contradictions to create rich characters.