Acting Tips | 3 Questions to Increase Your Understanding of Character

Get your message across to your audience by using questioning technique to fully know the character you’re playing.

Before you dive into rehearsal, make sure to do some of pre-work to bring out the message and meaning of your piece.

I love staging a theatrical piece. 

The act of blocking, and piecing together how your theatrical piece is going to look, sound and feel on the stage with your actors, is one of the most exciting aspects of the creative process.  

As a director, this is an opportunity to take all of the research and background work and turn words, theories and ideas into action.  As an arts educator, it’s important to build to this moment in the rehearsal process with the students.   

I call it the - do you know what you are saying - check-in. 

Sometimes, as artists, we get really excited about staging our that we forget to do the work required to properly communicate the playwright’s message to our audience.

Whether you are staging a monologue or a massive musical theatre production, it’s so important to “know what you are saying” with your theatrical work.  It starts with the basic plot and grows to themes and metaphors depending on what message you would like to convey to the audience. 

So, before you start rehearsing, make sure that you have an firm understanding of the following three things:

1. the plot of the piece, including themes, time periods, and storyline

2. an understanding of WHY the piece is relevant to audiences today

3. a clear understanding of your character’s objectives and tactics.  Objectives are the character’s goals or aspirations. Tactics are things the characters are willing to do to reach their goals.  Doing a detailed character biography can help to align your character’s objectives and tactics with the overall themes and messages of your show.  

Remember:  People like watching performances because they are full of action. Audiences want  you to show the struggle, the conflict and what motivates the characters to do what they do.  Showing this will allow the audience to go on the journey with your character, emphasizing, agreeing and disagreeing with them as they conquer their goals. 

So, my artist friends, before you jump into staging, don’t forget about doing this very important work to make your performance the best that it can be! 

Happy Creating! 

How To Create a Character Biography

Template and activities for creating a detailed, three-dimensional character biography.

A character biography is a detailed, three-dimensional breakdown of your character’s physical, emotional and spiritual world.

There are multiple entry points into creating a character biography, including:

• question/answer organizers

• creating a visual lookbook/slide deck

• first person, free writing

• hot seating improv game (i.e. answering questions verbally)

Regardless of the approach, a compelling character biography includes questions to guide deep analysis of the “whys” behind the character’s thoughts and actions.

Creativity rooted in textual analysis will help create a character biography that is truly authentic and grounded.  

Here is a sample template that uses the question-and-answer approach to creating a character biography.

The sample template supports the critical thinking prompts found in the Character Biographies: Questions to Create Authentic Characters video.

I encourage my students to use first person voice when completing character biography activities.

Some of the most insightful character biography categories include (but are not limited to):

• cultural and social contexts and situations

• family history

• physical and spiritual characteristics

• philosophies

• health and wellness

• relationships

• wants, desires and annoyances

When creating a character biography, please go beyond the basic facts. Although it is essential to know your character's age, the real work comes from diving into your character's personality, conflicts, and rationale for doing the things they do. Humans are complex beings full of experiences and details. Your characters should be that way too. 

Click here to purchase an editable Google Doc of the Character Biography Worksheet.

Back to Resources For Educators

Active Reflection Linked to Authentic Need, Not Dictated Activities

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How many of us explicitly use reflection tasks to link professional development to our school/classroom goals? Take the 3-2-1 comments from the exit card and apply those comments to daily work in the classroom?

What if we flipped and incorporated these reflection tools into our pedagogy and not as a “check the box activity” or for performance appraisal purposes? But to make explicit links through our reflection tasks on how their daily practices are addressing the school’s goals and urgent student learning needs.

A good place to start is through professional development. After identifying the key learning from the professional development, ask:

1. How do you take the theory and/or examples and then turn them into action?  

2. How do you drive the learning forward in away that will not only uphold strong pedagogy, but address the learning needs of the students in your classroom?

3. What else do you need to keep learning as an educator while addressing the learning needs of your students?

4. How will you monitor the impact on student learning through the work?

Through my experience leading activities on school improvement, quite often hear (or read on feedback forms) that a barrier to completing this work is “not enough time.” The teams needed more time to talk, more time to gather data, more time to reflect. In fact, “more time” was the number one requested resource.

Let’s just face it, there will never be enough time.

What if we switched it around, made time and structured reflective conversations that aligned with our professional development into our long range planning time? Instead of “pop reflections” where we pose a question and encourage five minutes or focused discussion, encourage educators to bring data to frame the conversation. Build on that data to create next steps and then apply those next steps in the classroom.

In order for this to be truly successful we need monitoring systems that work for the individual teacher. Methods where the teacher doesn’t only collect the data, but uses their own framework to analyze the data and plan next steps. In this framework, the teacher can synthesize all of the observations/conversations and funnel them into actionable next steps.

Create a sustainable monitoring system that works for you. There are lots of options - from running log using a Google Doc to physical portfolio of student work. Pick one that works for you and set aside some time to link your professional development with addressing the student learning needs.

I encourage educators to start moving away from “pop reflections” and reflecting when someone tells you to do so. Being explicit, and setting goals the merge your professional development, data and student learning needs, will have great, positive impact not only on student learning, but your own pedagogical development.