PROOF

PROOF

'Proof', a play by David Auburn.

I play the character of Claire, the elder sister. She seems to be the one that needs to oversee everything happening in her house since her father got ill. She has gone back home, after being absent for many years, because her father has passed away. Mainly she wants to look after her younger sister who cared for their father during the last years of his life.

Does Claire really want to look after her sister?

Is she a good sister?

Is she scared of anything?

What are her real intentions?

WORKING ON MY CHARACTER CLAIRE: MY PROCESS

As an actor, the first thing that we have about our character is the script. The first read of the script is particularly important. I took my time, and I chose a special place to read the play PROOF quietly and peacefully.

For this project at the EAST LONDON UNIVERSITY as part of my MA ACTING FOR STAGE AND SCREEN, my Acting for Stage teacher, Professor Tony Bell, chose a particular scene. In this scene my character meets her sister Catherine in the kitchen of the family house. It takes place after the celebration of the funeral for her father. She finally tells her sister that she would like her to move to New York with her.

I took various approaches to play the character of Claire in this scene, as I wanted to experiment and see what felt more truthful for me.

In my first approach I played it as a caring elder sister who wants the best for her younger, mentally unstable, sister.  She feels under pressure by the constrictions of society and thus guilty for leaving her sister alone with her father while she lived out her live in New York. In the after party, she comes straight home from partying hard with some of the guests. She let herself go at the party, drinking and for once letting go of all the responsibilities she has.

I tried a different approach on the first day we did a rehearsal with costumes. I wanted to play the cynical, egotistic sister, who does not really care about anyone else but herself.

Some footage of these preparations before the final performance can be found here.

What steps I took to work on my character and the scene:

1. The scene. I divided the scene in units and looked at my objectives in each unit as well as my super objective- my main objective in the scene. I also looked at the objectives of my partner in the scene- her objectives in each unit and her main super objective. BEATS indicated me when a new unit started. I also looked at the obstacles that my character had in order to obtain her target.
2. The script. I looked at the subtext; what my character is thinking rather than saying which helped me act out her thoughts rather than the text.
3. The space. When we were rehearsing, I worked with the space; to show the contrast of both the distance and closeness of the two characters and to show both the affection and effects of the words from her sister to her. I decided that my character would always be distant to her sister, always keeping a space in between them, showing the truthful lack of connection between the characters. The table would be the limit in between the space of each character and only once I approached the table by my sister ‘by the table on my side of the space’ to show the ownership of the house (there is a moment in the script where my character gets offended when she feels forgotten about having the same share of that house like her sister). I purposely moved in straight lines marking an imaginary triangle with my movements and taking sharp turns whenever I moved to address my sister. With these precise movements I intended to show the coldness and manipulative character of my character Claire. The idea of those sharp movements came about from an exercise I did in class, consisting of moving at the pace of the thought and only changing direction when the thought changed- in a sharp movement to indicate a change of thought. This example inspired by one of the exercises in the Viewpoints that Anne Bogart and Tina Landau mention in their book ‘The Viewpoints Guide to Viewpoints and Composition.’1
4. ‘I feel’ Exercise. Having external musical stimuli playing while holding the eyes closed and holding the hands of my partner in the scene, I would start by saying how I feel and then move into the script or improv. I chose some songs that would put me in the same state of mind as if my character’s Claire. This exercise is explained by Stephen Wangh in his book ‘An Acrobat on the Heart; a physical approach to acting inspired by the work of Jerzy Grotowski.’
5. ‘No, there’s me, there’s you and there’s the space.’i1 My partner and I would repeat at intervals this same sentence, before moving to improv or to the script, once we knew it. This exercise is a repetition exercise created by Meisner.2
6. Biography of the character. Firstly, I wrote down the facts about my character that I found in the script from the full play and not from only the scene I played. I wrote the facts about my partner in the scene. I did a timeline of the events that appeared in the scene. I wrote what my character says about others and what others say about my character in the scene. With that information I worked on the appearance of my character: her way of talking, sitting, moving, walking, her sense of fashion, etc. For this approach, I applied different techniques: The FOUR LIST technique, FACT and QUESTIONS technique, the EVENT TIMELINE technique and the Stanislavski's SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS technique.

My final performance can be found here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bogart, Anne and Tina Landau. The Viewpoints Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. Theatre Communications Group. New York, 2005

Donnellan, Declan. The Actor and the Target. Nic Hern Books, 2005

Meisner, Sanford, and Dennis Longwell. Sanford Meisner on acting. A Vintage Original. New York, 1987

Merlin, Bella. The complete Stanislavsky Toolkit. Nick Hern Books. London, 2007

Wangh, Stephen. An Acrobat on the Heart: a physical approach to acting inspired by the work of Jerzy Grotowski. A Vintage Original. New York, 202

* This is a project for my MA Acting for Stage and Screen at UEL, London (2021)

** Original image to create my main image is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(play)