Answer . . .please. . .

A man walked into a bar . . . No. Sorry. You’re in a bar with a pal, burbling away – or shouting away – depending on the ambience and, as usually happens, nothing of importance is transmitted in either direction. So it’s not a matter of life and death if your pal ignores your question and responds with an equally unimportant question of her own. It’s a bar for chrissake and you’ve done this thousands of times and this is the 6th time you’ve seen each other today, so chill! Fair enough.

But, as I’ve mentioned many times before, dramatic text ain’t real life. Each situation, every scene is fraught. That’s right, fraught. There’s something at issue, something that needs to be accomplished, a conflict, people working at cross-purposes. Fraught. The text is structured that way. Otherwise, folks, we wouldn’t be interested in watching it play out.

So for every question asked in a scene, be it from from a play or movie, the answer to the question is important to forwarding the action. Moving it along. Unfortunately, many actors don’t ask questions to which they really want the answer. Or they fail to check to see if a point they’ve just made has hit home. Instead, they make declarative statements which don’t demand a response from other characters in a scene. This is unnatural and, therefore, not real. It’s also unfortunate.

If you don’t invite response from others, or are not interested in how they react to important things you’ve offered up, you cut off communication. Cut off communication, the audience loses the thread. Lose the audience, game over. Another example of what we do naturally in a real life situation that’s fraught (becoming my favorite word) that we often fail to do in a fantasy scenario that’s equally fraught. And they all are. Simple enough. “You get it? Answer me . . .please.”