1. An objective is one of the three fundamental concepts of acting theory. Simply put, it is the thing the actor wants or is trying to make happen. An objective should be as specific as possible and observable. The objective, “I want her to feel bad,” is not very good. What does, “feel bad,” look like? A better objective is, “I want her to cry.” While every beat of every scene utilizes objectives, they were especially useful in “Dinner with Friends.” Towards the beginning, Gabe and Karen are constantly talking about their trip to Italy while Beth is barely responding. Instead of just talking at her, we created objectives for how we wanted Beth to react. These included, “Make Beth say ‘I want to meet that woman,’” and “Make Beth laugh.” Since…show more content… Indicating is a presentational form of behavior seeking to tell the audience what is happening, unlike acting, where the actor imagines the given circumstances of a story and represents the behavior of his or her character in that story. Uta Hagen further adds in Respect for Acting that if an actor plays a particular type of person and doesn’t think any part of them is like that character, then they will only be indicating what they would do. In class, we avoided indicating unless our character was indicating for another, such as Karen mimicking her kids in “Dinner with Friend” or Claire mimicking the physicists in “Proof.” The contemporary and 20th century realism in prose we focused on lacked indication by nature, unlike Shakespeare’s works or commedia dell’arte. Chavez Ravine, however, acknowledged the audience and used colorful costumes, big hair, loud voices, and larger than life characters to show their…show more content… A beat literally means, “bit” with a Russian accent. It is also known as an event or moment, and is a subsection of the text. A new beat often occurs when the objective, tactic, or obstacle changes. Beats give the text eventfulness and are a great time for movement. It is important to have specific choices and commit to them for each beat. While each scene is composed of many distinct beats, “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” was full of very strong ones. One significant beat was when Abdull’s character, the translator, saw the gun used to kill Uday Hussein. The scene shifts from Augustine’s character, the marine, showing off a cool gun to the translator having a nervous breakdown. The next event is the marine reacting to the breakdown and pulling out his gun. The translator then needed to shift from having a mental breakdown to pulling himself together. The marine, clearly distraught, put on his armor to leave. Before leaving, there is one final moment where the marine changes from fearful to trying to pump himself and the translator up. These are all a series of mini events, each caused by the one before it, and causing the one after
