SOLO THEATRE PIECE

IB THEATRE ARTS HL

PAGE COUNT: 6
WORD COUNT: 2900
Table of Contents
Theorist ..................................................................................................................................................... 2
Theory ....................................................................................................................................................... 3
Aspect of Theory ....................................................................................................................................... 4
Chosen Aspect ........................................................................................................................................... 4
Behind the Show .................................................................................................................................... 4-5
Performance & Intentions ........................................................................................................................ 5
Evaluation of show ................................................................................................................................. 5-6
Reflection on Piece.................................................................................................................................... 6

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THEORIST:
For my Solo Theatre Piece, the theorist that I chose was Russian Theatre practitioner
Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski (1863 – 1938). He was born to a wealthy clan, his father a
wealthy merchant/manufacturer, and his mother a French-Russian, the daughter of a famous
French actress. His family had a rich relationship with theatre, owning an amateur stage and group
of their own called the Alekseyev Circle, and it was here that young Konstantin first appeared and
performed on at the age of fourteen. (Moore, 2019) As most performers do, he started off as
awkward and untrained, however he obsessively began to work on his shortcomings, working on
his voice, movements, and diction. When not working on himself, he could be found occupying
himself with the production and technical aspects of the group. His obsessive dedication to betting
himself for the craft gradually led to him becoming the circle’s central figure. As his passion and
love for theatre grew, it began to become the focus of his life, and he would often involve himself
and perform with other companies, officially adopting the stage name and pseudonym of
“Stanislavsky” in 1885. In 1888 he would marry Maria Perevoshchikova, the woman who became
his devoted lifelong partner, and would later become one of his star actresses going by the stage
name of, “Lilina.”
Stanislavski’s love and passion for theatre led him on to believing that it was an art of
social significance, with a powerful influence on people. (Moore, 2019) In the same year of his
marriage, he would go on to found the society of Art and Literature, ensuring overall acting quality
and skill. With his talent for the art, the prominence and reach of his theatre body began to grow,
garnering international praise from actors and playwrights alike, with Stanislavsky himself getting
constant invitations to perform alongside famous Russian actors/actresses and companies. In 1897
he and fellow playwright/director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko would go on to found the
Moscow Art Theatre, which was intended to be an alternative to theatrical aesthetics of the time.
(Biography.com, 2014) The company would open with their first official production in 1898,
however it was their second production, The Seagull became their first landmark achievement, so
much so that the play’s writer, Anton Checkov reignited his writing career and began to craft plays
specifically tailored for Stanislavski’s company, and his developing method. (Biography.com,
2014) The Moscow Art Theatre would only continue to grow in fame and popularity, and along
with it was further developed Stanislavski’s method of method acting.

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THEORY:
Stanislavski’s method has simply become known as “The Stanislavski Method,” developed
in the early 1900’s and has been continued to be used ever since. His method was created with the
aim of helping actors to better understand the characters they are portraying, and to better help
them build connections with the characters themselves, for if an actor can’t relate with the character
they are meant to be, how can the audience be expected to so? In its simplest form, his method can
be broken down into seven big steps, or questions.
1. Who am I? The actor should, at the very least, know their character’s name, and what it is
their character does. If these are not given it is up to the actor to answer these questions
and choose their own character’s name and profession. By doing this the character is
immediately more humanized and gives reason for the actor to begin showing interest into
their character.
2. Where am I? To better perform one’s role, one must understand the setting described in
the script. Characters are not simply “on the stage” when they are on-stage. Depending on
the script they are somewhere specific, whether it be in the middle of an enchanted forest,
a bustling marketplace, an in or in the great camp of an army.
3. When is it? Another aspect to building one’s character is also to have un understanding of
the time period, as this itself can also have an influence over the way your character acts.
Is it the medieval ages, or is it a bustling modern metropolis?
4. What do I want? After establishing the who, where, and when, the next question one should
ask themselves is “what?” Let’s say in the show you are in you play the role of Charles, a
mechanical engineer in a bar in the present day. Why are you there? Establish your
character’s want in relation to the facts you already know from the script.
5. Why do I want it? Now you must figure out exactly why it is your character wants to
achieve or do whatever it was you decided. Again, this builds off the previous questions,
and determining the why also helps determine how you will act out the character. A “why”
determines every action.
6. How will I get it? The character has been sorted out, next comes the how. Knowing who
your character is and where they come from, how do you think they would act as they go
about achieving whatever task they have on stage/set?
7. What do I need to overcome? Every good character has an arc to their story, or a
challenge/problem they must face which results in the character changing afterwards,
whether that change be for better or worse. The struggle your character goes through may
be dictated in the script, but it is up to the actor to take that guideline further and apply it
into the character.
By recreating one’s character’s thoughts in one’s head, an actor is better able to portray
and produce realistic emotions, expressions and actions to sell to the audience. It is an actor’s job
to believable in situations otherwise unbelievable, and one can not do this without first believing
in their own character as stated before. (Section heavily inspired from dramaclasses.biz)

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ASPECT OF THEORY:
“Never lose yourself on the stage. Always act in your own person, as an artist. The moment
you lose yourself on the stage marks the departure from truly living your part and the beginning
of exaggerated false acting. Therefore, no matter how much you act, how many parts you take,
you should never allow yourself any exception to the rule of using your own feelings. To break that
rule is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a
palpitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part” - Konstantin Stanislavski
One of Stanislavski’s defining acting principals that stands out is his insistence/belief that
all actors draw from and use their own personal experiences, emotions, and thoughts to truly bring
out their characters. It is unrealistic to assume that all actors have experienced or will experience
in their own lives the things the scripts say their characters have, however, every character in every
script ever written has a unifying set of traits: the fact that they were written by another human.
What this means is that buried into each character and story is a very real set of human emotion
and thought process. “Everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. Only the dead have
no sensations.” - Konstantin Stanislavski. His method requires the actor to look within themselves
and draw out their own personal experiences and emotion and adapt them around their characters,
intertwining the reality of their lives with the reality presented in the script so that it is every bit as
real and alive as the actor’s memory is. Each of us goes through our own journeys, filled with
times of joy and love, horror and sadness, barbaric anger at times and in others, regretful and
pained sorrows. An actor’s life may be completely different, uneventful, and boring compared to
the one their character is described having, but the emotions are all real.

CHOSEN ASPECT:
The aspect that I chose to adapt from Stanislavski’s method was the adaptability of
imagination and emotion. However, I did not fully incorporate his method exactly as he described
it, rather, I incorporated the essence of his method and adapted it into my own. Ironically enough,
this variation from his method and adapting it is something Stanislavski himself encouraged.
“Create your own method. Don't depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will
work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.”

BEHIND THE SHOW:

It quickly dawned on me that this solo theatre piece would be the last bit of
acting/performance that I would ever do for the IB Theatre Arts class, and this left me wanting to
put on one last big show, a “grand exit” of sorts, a farewell to the class. As preparation for this I
looked back at some of the work I had done for the class and happened to stumble upon a video of
my first ever IB Theatre Arts performance, a rendition of Morgan Jones’ Monologue from AMC’s
The Walking Dead and suddenly had an idea. That was my first ever performance with the course,
it felt poetic and right to me that it should be my last as well. This time I wanted to really
personalize the monologue, meaning that I made several changes to its script to make it more

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applicable in my own context, and changed the scenario. One thing that I wanted to incorporate
was an element of Victor Frankl’s philosophy, specifically the quote:
“At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of
his existence.”
In a nutshell, Frankl’s philosophy is that when faced with a desperate situation people will
search for the meaning of life to give fuel to the will to survive. Not in the broad sense of trying to
work out how and why humanity and life came to be, rather in small, isolated measures that give
us reason to go on. I wanted to show what would happen to a man pushed to the edge, one who
lost all will to keep pushing.
WHAT ARE YOU PERFORMING & INTENTIONS?
Whereas in the original the man delivering the monologue survives and goes on to continue
surviving after the monologue despite the pain and mourning he feels I took a drastic turn. I decided
that the monologue would start literally seconds after I, as the character, am forced to kill the very
reason I was surviving. In my context I decided that this would be my daughter. The show starts
with the sounds of the undead hoard breaking into our safe-house, and me yelling at my daughter
to get ready to escape, which quickly transitioned into pained screams from me and the sounds of
a zombie sinking its teeth into flesh followed by gunshots in quick succession. The lights would
open to the sight of me on my knees, a gun on my hands, shocked expression on my face, blood
dripping from a bite on my wrist and my dead daughter at my feet. Only then does the monologue
begin. In his grief and shock my character starts talking into the camera, projecting his guilt and
anger outwards to the sounds of the hoard as he steadily loses blood to the wound on his wrist, his
final act being to put his gun in his mouth as the sounds of the hoard breaking through the walls
plays, and the stage goes dark.
My intention was not to give the audience a clear and concrete backstory to the character,
rather they are given glimpses and clues to what his character could be, and enough information
for the audience to empathize with him enough to put themselves into his shoes. “Who or what
would become your biggest reason for your will to overcome your surroundings and keep you
alive?” “How would you react if your entire reason to keep pushing was suddenly and abruptly
taken from you, and it was your fault why?” I wanted two things: to show to the audience a man
who has completely lost all reason to keep pushing in a helpless situation, (surrounded, bit,) and
to get them to empathize and humanize with the character.

EVALUATION OF SHOW:
Personally, I think I achieved in getting the audience to empathize with my character at
least to some degree, however, looking back when it came to my own acting, I am honestly
disappointed with myself. I could sit here and list as many excuses as I can think of as to why I
wasn’t performing as well as I know I can, but the fact of the matter is that I left it so late, and was
still deciding to make changes quite literally until the point of performing. Ironically enough, I was
the first in my class to perform the STP, stating that I was ready for it, and in hindsight I was,

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however I was unprepared for it. Do I think that I was able to act enough that the audience
understood the general emotions of my character? Yes, because one of the comments I did get was
that, “The emotions were there and were identifiable and relatable, however at times they felt
rushed or out of place, as if the wrong emotions were being used.” Though admittedly however a
character will respond to something is up to the actor to interpret and portray and the audience to
see, this comment meant that at times I failed to properly humanize my character enough that the
audience would too, meaning that I failed to completely utilize my aspect from Stanislavski’s
method.
I will mention that my set design, lighting, and prop choices were well-commended by my
audience, which, “showed that (my) character had been surviving and on the move.” Which was
something I wanted the audience to understand through the props and context. As my set design
ability is a skill I wanted to improve, the opportunity to perform a solo, small, intimate performance
gave me absolute free reign over my stage, and I utilized this to the max, bringing literal suitcases
and bags full of props, the body of my “daughter,” pots, cans, knives, lamps, and all other bits and
bobs a survivor would have. Objectively speaking I believe it is fair of me to say that my solo
theatre piece had the best set design, however the objective of this performance was not simply to
have the best set.

REFLECTION ON PIECE:
Though it is true that I knew what I wanted to perform, as I had done it previously and
wished to do it again, but improved, I still did not devote enough time to properly set it all up, as
I was still struggling with the actual plotline I wanted to show on set, and this in turn affected my
overall performance. I need to learn adaptability. As an actor adaptability and the skill of being
able to roll with scenes and remain in character, whether events happening are planned is an
essential part of the job, however making sudden changes and decisions constantly is not a good
practice to have. Taking my show as an example if I had decided to follow what the original
monologue was more closely, it would have been so much simpler and easier to perform, as I
would only be adapting the aspect from Stanislavski to a monologue I practically know by heart
and can adlib to, however by constantly trying to push it to something amazing and out-of-the-
box, I did the exact opposite. Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this performance is: elegance in
simplicity.
The desire to go out with a memorable exit is one I understand completely. As an actor,
when it comes to the end of our roles we all wish to make it a memorable goodbye, however we
must not focus ourselves solely on the act of extravagance. As Stanislavski said, “Love art in
yourself, and not yourself in art.” I was given the opportunity to re-take my performance, however
I decided not to do this. I know for a fact that I could have re-done the performance and done it
better, but to me this felt wrong. It was my own fault and my fault alone that my initial performance
was not up to par with my usual, and as such I should be responsible enough to own this fact. My
grades may suffer, and I might not be happy with the overall end result, but the blame is solely
mine, and I have grown better as performer through this “failure” better than I would have with a
re-shoot and better grades with no repercussions or responsibility for my error.

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