While directing a Tennessee Williams one-act play festival, I decided to use side coaches in the rehearsal process for six short plays. The festival provided the perfect opportunity for the student actors to experience what it is like to utilize side coaches as a technique for bringing their scene scores into immediate action. Each short play had small casts of two or three characters, and side coaches could be actors from one of the other short plays.
In the play, Hello from Bertha, we had an actor who has trained in the Alba Emoting technique playing the lead role of Bertha, an aging and deathly ill prostitute who would not leave her room at the brothel, much to her fellow housemates’ frustration. Two other prostitutes keep entering Bertha’s room and try to convince her to leave, so they can make her room more profitable to the brothel.
The actor made the decision that Bertha was dying of syphilis, and after researching the symptoms of the disease and applying a physical approach to the role, incorporating the specific pains and behaviors of people in states of delirium, she was ready to add the layer of emotional tactics. The actor realized that with the character confined to a bed through most of the play, most of the tactics would be emotional. She also realized that the play was written with extremely quick shifts in emotional tone, climaxing to a point in the play where the character escapes into her delirious nostalgic memories of her long lost beau, Charlie.
In order to embody these emotional colors and tactics she scored her script using the Alba Emoting basic emotions. This was a wise decision for her as the actor, as well as for the depiction of this role considering (1) the emotional shifts happened very quickly with this character, so she could use the Alba Emoting technique as a quick and reliable embodiment method, and (2) it was important to recognize that a character is such an extreme stage of decline and desperation would probably express much of her emotional life in these primary emotional states. She also chose another student who studied Alba Emoting to be her side coach, so he would fully understand what he was calling out to her from the side-lines and be able to call continued corrective coaching if he noticed she was not fully embodying the emotional choice.
The side coaching of the basic emotions worked perfectly for this role. Her coach crouched down near the bed she was lying in and quietly, yet insistently, called out each emotion quickly as she shifted from one extreme to the next. As the actor approached the climax of the scene, her coach not only called out the basic emotions in her beats, but also coached her to go to higher levels of the emotion in order to reach and punctuate the arc of the play. It only took a couple rehearsals with this side coaching process for this actor to retain these dynamic shifts throughout this exhausting play. Eventually her side coach simply watched and took notes, and the two would confer after each run through so he could share any places she was forgetting to apply specific choices, and she would additionally make any changes in her scoring she felt might be better choices for the next rehearsal.
This process was mesmerizing to witness, and the final performance this actor produced had audiences riveted all the way to the end of this tour-de-force role!
If you are interested in learning Alba Emoting, click on the Workshop Tab on this site and learn about an upcoming workshop in July, 2011.
