Okay. So the actor's job is to move through the artificial world of the text in a completely natural state. Above is my glorious Wunderhund, Calypso, in a completely natural state. In other words, relaxed, no consciousness of self and at ease in her environment.
The problem for the actor is that the world of the script is not, has never been and will never be real. Therefore, the lack of self-consciousness the actor feels going through real, every day life is compromised when dealing with dramatic text. How, you might ask? Good question.
The fact is - in the script there are no stimuli. The writer, hopefully, has created a lush, imagined environment - rife with hints about what the world might be like if it were real. But in our reality, all we have, when reading the script for the first time, are words on paper. Even glorious words are still just that - words.
So, in order for the actor to be in a natural state, he/she must find all the stimuli needed to enable natural response. Or,in other words - to make the fantasy world of the script real enough to believe in as real. For the curious or uninitiated, the process of stimulus identification is one aspect of the process called, rehearsal.
It's been called plenty of other things since that bad boy, Thespis, stepped out of a Greek Chorus some 2500 years ago, give or take a century or two. But until another word is invented, rehearsal will do. When I taught in the Actor Training Program at The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill - there was a curious phrase that everyone from the lighting guy to the leading actors kept repeating:
"Play Practice tonight - Y'all come if you can!" Guess I've learned over the years - that's not quite right.
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