The "Sacred" Text

One of the things actors are taught is that the text of a stage play is sacred. Actors are free to ignore stage directions (and often do), but neither the actors nor the director may change the spoken text of the play.

This is the ideal, of course. At the non-union level, where I work, actors often don't achieve the word-for-word accuracy I would expect at, say, a professional repertory house. But they're supposed to try.

And having the playwright there is one hell of a motivation to get it right.

Tuesday night was the first "off-book" rehearsal for Community Property, meaning actors didn't have the script in their hands. And, well, my actors were everywhere. Adding lines, deleting lines, changing lines. And by the looks of things, they were feeling really bad about having this happen in front of me.

Of course, this is exactly what I would expect at this point. And it was so silly that I couldn't help but laugh through the entire rehearsal.

One of the things I was taught by my playwriting instructor was to tell my actors that they're doing a good job. Actors cannot tell if they're doing well or not, so a reassuring word from the playwright about a performance goes a long way. So at the end of the evening I made sure to tell them that I was really happy with how rehearsals are going. I reminded them that I am an actor as well and that I understood where they were in the rehearsal process.

They looked visibly relieved.