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The second benefit of reading aloud is that this can begin thc

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process of owning the characters. Just as each actor must "own" his

own character, the director must own each of the characters, seprrately. At this point you have not yet begun figuring out what thc
words mean. You are allowing them to find breath and voice in your'
own body. You are beginning to take them off the page.

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Then you can start putting their lines into your own words. Docs
this sound a bit radical? I don't know. This idea is based on a vcry
effective exercise I use in my classes. I ask the student to say the lincs
of a monologue she has learned. Then I ask her to tell me what is
going on in the speech, what she understands about the charactcr
from it, starting with the words "This is a character who..." I tell hcr'
that her paraphrase can be any length: it can be much longer than thc
speech or much shorter; it can go far afield; in effect, she can say
anything that pops into her head"/ After this I tell her to do the sanrt:
thing again
again putting the'speech in her own words, allowirr4
her impulses- to take her wherever they go
only changing the pro- character.
noun from "she" to "I" when she speaks ofthe

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The purpose here is nlt rewriting the script, but "owning" thc
characters and accessing your intuition about them. Ideas often sur*

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face that you didn't even know you had.

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Let's take one of Stephen's speeches on page 4:

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"Hey, look, I'11 be gone in a minute. I mean

if it's too much to ask if I have a cigarette
and a cup a coffee in peace, for chrissake,
just say so. A person's supposed to
unwind for bwo minutes a day, in case you
ain't read the latest medical report. If it's
too much to'ask to just lemme sit here in
peace for two minutes, then say so. I

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the magic "as if." The actor

Facts are very powerful for actors
himself to believe them,
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For the purcircumstances'
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and then functions as if he were
poses of this exercise we will treat the scene from "When You Comin'
Back, Red Ryder?" as if it were a complete script. If we were making
this movie, planning a rehearsal of this scene, we would of course
examine the full script for facts. Working on one scene as if it is a full
script is an exercise to teach you script analysis techniques which in

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the real world would be applied to a whole script.

will be clear; others we will deduce. We're not going

to insist that the writer spell everything out; instead we'll look for
evidence and follow clues. But we're not going to pretend to have
any facts that we don't actually have. We're not going to make
Some facts

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assumptions, judgments, or jump to conclusions; we're going to stick

to facti. This is detective work. In a way we'll use some of the rules
of court. For instance, hearsay is not admissible; just because a character says something is true, we won't automatically call it a fact. Wc

will look for circumstantial evidence to back it up.

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"Facts" are events that have happened or circumstances that are

the character's situation. "Events" arc
ffue before the scene starts
things that happen in the scene, but once they have happened thcy
become facts. For instance, Stephen eats a donut; that's an event ill
this scene. For the scene following this one, "stephen has had breakfast" would be a Fact.

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Sometimes students suggest as a fact for this scene, "Angel likcs

Stephen." That's not a fact. I'm not sayrng that the role couldn't llc
played with that cboice, but anything that has to do with a charactcr'.s
state of mind is not a fact. It is a choice or interpretation.

Often, the first thing students say when I ask them for the facts
of this scene is, "stephen wants to leave." This is not a fact eithcl'.
Besides describing a state of mind, this statement is contradicted lry

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Actors and writers often write biographies of their characters.

These are fncts that are not in the script. Since they are not in the
script, they are only facts if they work, if they stimulate the imaginations of the actors and catapult them into their sense of belief in
the moment.
the tool that gets us to imaginative backstory. For
instance, after deducing that Stephen and Angel work in the same
diner, we might ask how long they have known each other. They may
have met on the job, or they have known each other all their lives.
There is nothing in the scene that proves one theory or the other.
Even if we read the whole play, there may be no evidence proving one
idea or the other.
Questions are

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Was it the popular crowd? Were their families acquainted? What

were tieir impressions of each other? Is it possible that they ever had
anything like a date? If so, what happened?

What if Angel used to let Stephen copy her homework? That

would be an example of an imaginative backstory choice. It's not in
the script, but there is nothing in the script that makes it impossible,
either. It's framed as a "what ifi" because it's not an actual fact, it's a
the idea is to generate behavior in the actors. It could also
choice
be called an adjustment (Column ). Actors do not have to agree on
each other's imaginative backstory. If the actor playing Angel is
working with a backstory choice that she used to let Stephen copy
her homework in high school (this could be either a suggestion from
the director or her own idea), the actor playrng Stephen does not
have to agree that this ever took place, or even to know that she has
made this choice.

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If they

have known each other, are they the same age? Were they
in the same grade? Were they good students? Was either of them
ever kept back a grade? What kind of friends did each hang out with?

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scene. we want to find out what the scene is about, and its central
emotional event.

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in figuring our beats is first to identifi, every

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subject, no marter how brief. But evenrually we want to
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three major beats: beginning, middle, and end. it isn't always

three
sometimes there are t*o oi four major beats
but usualiy
there -are three. In addition to their usefulness in undersranding
the
structure of the script, the major beats are useful as rehearsal units.
!f th. way, people often ask whether the beat can change for different characters at different times. The answer is yes.

column 1 of chart 4 is a place to identi$r the beat and key it in

some way to the script. You could write ((Beat one" and *"ik th.
section
in the script with a line and a "one" next ro it. or you could
write a description, e.g., "page I, line 1 to page 2,line 6.,,
column 2 is the subject of that beat (some people call it the title
of the beat); column 3 is rre name of the character who brings that
subject up. I always need to go through a scene several times'before
I discern its strucrure. on the first pais, I look only for the information in Columns 1 through 3.

- T!.1 I go back, linking things up by looking for the information

from columns 4 and 5. Tfre p.r.por of column 4 is to srart noricing
how the beats relate to each other. often they are connecred by smali
events or issues (column 5). Going back through rhe scene noticing
these transitions and uncovering these connective events should lea
us to ideas about the event of the scene, or what the scene is about
(Column ).
Before reading on, you might want to take a look at the "Red
Ryder" scene and break down its beats on your own.

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Beat 1: to the line "...in my spare time, ain't it?" Subject:

Angel's lateness. Angel brings it up.