Annoyance Level Two – Week Two

So class started off today with all of us hopping up and performing some completely open two-person scenes to warm-up.

After we had all gotten a few scenes under our belts, Rich paused us and gave us only one caveat for the next round of two person scenes: Everyone had to play different types of Assholes. This was a lot of fun (cause all too often people’s characters on stage default to being overtly nice because of the idea of yes and, you can still follow that idea though and be a dick about it) though there were a few scenes that simply devolved into arguments. However over all the scenes went fairly well, because since we were all focused on experimenting with as many different types of Assholes as we could think of – it lead to us finding more subtle ways of being a dick as opposed to being confrontational.

After a number of these scenes Rich paused us again and told us we were making a change: now instead of Assholes everyone had to play different types of Retarded people in scenes – again as many different variations of retarded as we could think of.
At first glance of course that might seem like an odd request – it almost sounds like someone might do if they were parodying a terrible improv troupe – though again with everyone doing it we had some great scenes (though some less than stellar scenes definitely surfaced).

After we had run the retarded character gambit in a number of scenes – Rich sat us all down and asked:
“Why did we do this?”
(Besides it being hilarious for him to watch).

He ended up answering his own question:
First off he wanted to get in our heads that we should be free to take on ugly characters (characters who are impolite, mean, cruel racist, offensive, etc.)

We played Assholes because he knew as Assholes we’d be less likely to drop our shit/POV.

We played retards because “Those people need to be taken down.”
Seriously though it allowed us to play much more with physicality and more opportunities to find very simple patterns in our scenes and exchanges.

Over all the exercise forced us to concentrate on creating characters instead of premises.

Next Rich had everyone stay seated and asked for two people to ho up on stage. We started doing two person scenes like this with the focus on starting immediately and snapping into characters from the get go.

To do this – he had the two players up start a scene and then he’d yell switch (usually right after the initiation) – when that happens the actors must instantly start a new scene (snapping into new characters). Eventually he would let one of these run for a minute or so and then the next pair would go.
This was a great exercise and I love anything like this that forces you to snap into multiple characters fast as it always leads me to finding some of my most unique choices and really altering my physicality.