The actors may get the onstage plaudits, but without the crew, a play would just be a group of people yelling at each other in a dark theatre. Greenleaf, who has been with Pull-Tight for 16 years, said he loves coordinating so many moving parts backstage to create a seamless show for audience members. And Greenleaf, has arguably the most stressful job on show days, works in tech support at TriStar Centennial Medical Center. He is the author of several acting texts and co-author, with Rocco Dal Vera, of Voice: Onstage and Off. He has performed in most of the plays of Shakespeare and has directed half of them, including playing the title role in a PBS production of Hamlet. Kieffner is a guidance counselor at Father Ryan Academy. Robert Barton is professor emeritus of acting and continues to teach at the University of Oregon. Her husband, fellow set construction chief Sean Aiello, is an attorney and a Williamson County commissioner. "So we're not only making sure that the actors are in their spots and the props are in their spots, but the show has a lot of different components with falling set pieces, with water, with things that come off the walls, with hidden entrances."īy day, Aiello is a Williamson County Schools technology coach. "When things 'go wrong,' you have to be extra careful with safety," said Savannah Aiello, one of two set crew chiefs. Recently: Nashville Ballet ends its season with performances at BelmontĮxclusive: A first look at Woolworth Theatre's renovation of historic buildingĬrucially, they also created props that wouldn't actually harm actors, which was especially important in a show where an entire wall slams down to the stage. When the actor stepped on the rung, it shattered easily. To make it look like the rungs of a ladder collapsed, the prop team replaced two of the rungs with Styrofoam painted to match the wood ladder. Paintings and wall decorations were held up by magnets, allowing crew members to make them fall (and later put them back up) with little effort. The onstage mishaps - from the collapsing set and the mistimed dramatic music cues to the onstage collisions that seemingly incapacitated actors - were carefully designed and executed by an all-volunteer production crew. The mistakes were all part of "The Play That Goes Wrong," a farcical parody of 1920s murder mystery plays in which a beleaguered company of actors struggled through a performance where everything failed constantly. And the stage crew - creators of the doomed set - smiled in satisfaction.Įverything was going exactly according to plan. The beam toppled to the ground, causing the second-story floor to collapse with a loud cracking noise. The actors flubbed lines, cringing as they struggled to pronounce high school vocabulary words like "façade" or "morose." The props were constantly misplaced, leading to awkward moments where the lead actor was forced to use a vase as a notebook.ĭuring what should have been a shockingly dramatic moment in the second act, an actor leaned up against a conspicuously placed support beam toward the back of the set. It is a brilliant tool for those who need to buff up their theater history.Every possible mistake that could be made unfolded onstage during Thursday evening's theatrical production in Franklin. Zinn manages to weave the history of performance and acting together with a historical continuum of understanding in human psychology it is a tall order that Zinn pulls off with easeĪctors and directors who are hungry of a scientific understanding and approach to the craft should stop here first, if only in so far as Zinn provides a guidepost and map to what seems like every branch of performance that has existed, from proto-rituals around the campfire to the Greeks to Shakespeare to Chekhov to Breaking Bad Robert Barton is University of Oregon Professor Emeritus of Acting, whose publications include the books: Acting: Onstage and Off (Wadsworth Cengage). There are so many different lenses with which to read and use this book, whether as an actor, director, teacher, audience member, psychologist - or for anyone interested in tracing a massive and broad sweep of human culture and thought "The existential actor is a tour-de-force survey of acting and theater history, contextualized and explicated with the deep body of experimental research into existential psychology For me, it is a welcome relief." ~ Robert Brustein
This is a metaphysics of acting, not a practical approach such as the Stanislavsky System or the Strasberg Method. Possibly the most philosophical work yet to be published on the subject. His theory of everything is simple and revelatory"Įxtremely well-written and well-researched. He knows it as an actor, director, teacher, and thinker This book is for the actor who thinks about craft and influence,who thinks about the relationship of performance to living, who thinks about doing and what that doing meansĪcting is a metaphor and it's a mirror, and, so, a theory of acting, if true, shows us to ourselves The best actors bring it all together body, heart, spirit, and mind
"This is a book for the thinking actor, and the finest actors I've known are just that