How theatre turns close observation of human behavior into movement, character, and a world that feels real onstage.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

I tell my actors they’ll never notice as much about another person as when they hate their guts or are madly in love with them. In either case, we become students of nuance, noticing the hesitation before an answer, a change in posture, or the almost imperceptible shift in someone’s tone. Actors and directors have to train themselves to notice those things all the time.

Entrances and exits are a good place to start. One of the quickest ways I can tell whether I am watching the work of a good director is by looking at how characters in a play enter and leave a room.

A character who simply walks into a room usually looks like an actor who has been told to enter. A character who simply crosses to the door and walks out looks like someone completing a piece of blocking. The movement may be perfectly natural in the most technical sense. People do, after all, walk through doors. Onstage, though, a clean entrance or exit often feels strangely artificial.

So I break them up.

An actor leaving might cross toward the door, stop to straighten his tie, then continue out. Someone entering might hesitate just inside the doorway and look around before coming farther into the room. She might drop something. He might remember that he needs to close the door behind him. Someone leaving an office might get halfway to the door, remember the coat hanging over the back of the chair, double back for it, then leave.

The particular action hardly matters. What matters is that something happens.

Real life has very little respect for efficient blocking.

Think about what happens when you come home. You walk through the door carrying your bag and your keys. You put the bag down. You reach for the hook where the keys belong and miss it. The keys fall. You pick them up and try again. Maybe you kick the door shut while you are doing it. Maybe the mail is still in your other hand. Maybe the cat has appeared and is now standing exactly where you need to step.

None of this feels remarkable because none of it is. It’s simply what bodies do while moving through the world.

Onstage, those small complications create the sensation of life.

This is also why I like to put props into actors’ hands as early in rehearsal as possible.

A prop introduced late in the process almost always looks like a prop. The actor picks it up because the script requires it, carries it carefully because it belongs to the theatre, uses it at the appropriate moment, and puts it back where it belongs. Everyone can see the machinery.

Give that same object to an actor on the first day, though, and something begins to happen.

She learns its weight. She discovers how it feels in her hand. After a while, she stops thinking about how to hold it. Then she starts doing things with it that nobody necessarily planned.

A mug becomes more than a mug.

One character may wrap both hands around it whenever she sits down. Another may hold it loosely by the handle and forget to drink from it. Someone who is uncomfortable might raise the mug toward her mouth without ever taking a sip. An actor who has lived with that object through weeks of rehearsal may suddenly set it down differently after hearing a particular line, and the audience will understand something has changed before the character says another word.

A scarf can do the same thing. So can a lighter, a purse, a newspaper, or a pair of glasses.

The question is never simply where the prop goes.

How does she hold it?

When does she reach for it?

What if he sips from the glass after she leaves?

Does she fold the scarf carefully before putting it down or pull it from her neck and leave it crumpled on the chair? Does she use it to cover her mouth as she leaves the room? Does he place the lighter back into the drawer or throw it there? Does someone who has been absentmindedly turning a ring around her finger suddenly stop?

Those choices help tell the story.

Actors sometimes think character exists primarily in the lines. Directors can make the same mistake. We spend enormous amounts of time talking about objectives, relationships, backstory, and intention, all of which are useful, while some of the most convincing information about a person may be sitting in the way she picks up her coat.

The audience watches bodies even when it thinks it is listening to words. 

This is one of the reasons stage movement has to be motivated with such precision. An actor crossing the room because the director needs him on the other side of the stage creates a very different impression from a man crossing the room because he cannot bear to remain seated while hearing what someone is telling him. 

The distance is identical.

The action is different.

Good blocking gives the actor a reason to move. Good physical life gives the actor something to encounter along the way.

That distinction becomes particularly visible during entrances and exits because the mechanics of theatre are exposed there. Everyone knows the actor has been waiting in the wings. Everyone knows someone has to walk through the door before the next part of the scene can begin. The director’s job is to make us forget that.

The character has to arrive from somewhere.

He has been living before we see him. The “moment before” is written all over him, or should be, just as it’s written all over any of us when we enter any place in real life.

Perhaps a man was arguing with someone in the hallway. Perhaps he’s late. Perhaps he’s come into the room looking for one person and found another. Perhaps he is carrying something awkward. Perhaps he almost decided not to come in at all. Perhaps he knocked on someone’s door looking for the woman he loves only to realize it was the wrong door, so now he has to run across the street and, breathlessly, knock on hers.

The same is true when he leaves. He’s going somewhere. His life does not end in the wings.

This is where directing can make you a slightly strange person to have around in public.

We watch how people actually do things.

Someone at the next table gets up to leave a restaurant, then pats his pockets. Phone. Wallet. Keys. He looks back at the chair, pushes it in, notices his water glass, takes one last drink, and only then walks away. A woman waiting for someone keeps rearranging the same objects on the table. Someone listening to bad news begins folding a paper napkin into smaller and smaller squares. A man who says he is perfectly comfortable has been ruffling the back of his hair for the last five minutes.

None of them knows they’re giving you blocking. But they are.

That is the level of attention I encourage actors to bring into rehearsal. Not a collection of interesting gestures pasted onto a character, but an understanding that physical behavior comes from circumstance. If she reaches for the mug, there’s a reason. If he crosses the room, something made him need to be closer to the speaker. If she stops at the door, she has to see or hear something inside the room that interrupts her forward movement.

By the time a production opens, the imaginary circumstances have become ordinary to the actors. The purse has been picked up a hundred times. The coat has been buttoned and unbuttoned. The mug has developed a history. The actor knows which drawer sticks and where the chair catches the edge of the rug. She no longer has to remember how her character lives in the room because she’s lived there before.

We spend weeks deciding exactly how someone enters a room so that, on opening night, nobody watches her enter and thinks, What a well-directed entrance.

They simply believe she has come from somewhere.