React, don’t act. Be open and spontaneous to what happens next in the scene. Don’t anticipate action or your performance won’t be realistic. A good actor simply reacts to the events occurring in the scene, in much the same way that we all react to events in everyday life. I don’t know when the doorbell will ring, so when it does, I REACT accordingly.
A play, story, or movie is nothing more than a short glimpse of a part of a character’s life in a moment of conflict. The audience does not have the luxury of knowing the character from birth, so personality and behavioral traits, quirks, likes and dislikes, and temperaments must be derived during the short time the audience watches the character in action. An actor who plays a character must understand the character’s life up to the point the story takes place. This is called the “backstory.”
Backstory is critical to a performance because people operate on many levels, each level determined by our past. For example, a man may react when provoked in a bar fi ght differently if:
1. He grew up in a poor neighborhood in a single-parent family. His father is in prison for murder and his mother is a drug addict who has resorted to a life of crime to support the family, or . . .
2. He grew up in a wealthy house where money was no object. His father is an attorney and his mother a congresswoman.
