I Don't Need an Acting Class

What do you actually do with an interesting character choice? In this episode, Milton and the class explore an actress’s approach to Annie in  Misery : the idea that she is “priest-like.” Taking time to investigate the nature of that choice leads to behavior, attitudes, and impulses the actress can use—and to the powerful possibility, “I speak for God.” The discussion moves from finding an actable...

What can actors learn from Gustavo Dudamel? After hearing him conduct Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic, Milton explores what made the performance extraordinary: Dudamel’s personal connection to the music, the way he included the orchestra, and how that connection reached the audience. That same expanding circle is essential to acting. This week’s discussion looks at connectin...

How do you respond to the circumstances as the character? This week, we explore how script analysis helps us discover the character’s nature—and turn that understanding into specific behavior. We discuss how a profession shapes a person, what observing others can teach us, and Stella Adler’s exercise of taking the character into situations outside the play. The work begins with recognizing how you...

What happens when an actor really looks at the person they’re speaking to? This week, I use Edgar Degas’s painting  L’Absinthe  to help the class build a relationship with a partner. We begin with what we notice about the woman in the painting, then explore how those observations can become a personal attitude toward her—and an impulse to speak. One actor’s response takes us somewhere unexpected....

This week’s episode is a little different. Using the opening monologue from Jack Heifner’s  A Wide Place in the Road , Milton invites the class into the kind of conversation actors might have at the first rehearsal of a play. Rather than beginning with the character, the dialogue, or how to deliver the monologue, the class begins with a larger question:  What is the play about? The discussion move...

Recorded while working with an actress in a class in Paris, this episode explores one of the most common problems in acting: actors don’t start acting until they start talking. Beginning with the discovery that a character is impulsive, we explore how to turn analysis into experience—imagining the character’s behavior outside the play, creating specific circumstances, and beginning to live as the...

This week, we explore the actor’s preparation: how to get beyond vague ideas and find something specific that actually feeds you; why we need to shop more widely for choices instead of settling for the first thing that works; and what happens when you return to a choice that worked before. We also look at repetition—how to do the work again without trying to recreate the previous result, how prepa...

This week's episode is about learning to trust that acting can be built a little at a time – and recognizing when what you've built is already enough.

Picking up where last week’s episode left off, we dig a little deeper into what it actually takes to make a great acting choice. What makes a choice come alive? In this episode, Milton works with actors on cutting through the explanations, descriptions and unnecessary details that can kill a moment.  Stop trying so hard to perform .  Stop decorating the work, stop explaining it, stop trying to be...

What does it mean to make a great acting choice? This week, we challenge the current obsession with being “authentic” and look instead at what Stella Adler demanded: choices that are appropriate to the play, that require the actor to pay a price, and—importantly—that make good theater. From  A Doll’s House  to  NCIS , we explore why actors have to understand the world and form of the material they...

Actors often do wonderful preparation—and then abandon it the moment they begin speaking. This episode explores how to trust your work, stop explaining the plot, and let your preparation carry you naturally into the life of the scene.

Rushing to make choices means we miss great acting opportunities. In this episode Milton works with one of his students who's going into rehearsals for a play soon.

There's a tendency to complicate our choices by inventing elaborate plots, when simplifying to something specific will bring us to life. Also being more specific allows you to dig deeper.

Building a solid relationship with the partner gives you grounding. Knowing who I'm talking to and what my attitude is towards them opens up what's going on in a scene.

In this video Milton works with Rashaud as he prepares a monologue from The Laramie Project.

Not just unexperienced facts can deaden our work as actors, the need to explain or report the facts can get in the way of our most creative work. Digging down specifically can help this problem.

It's not just enough to be functional or accurate or good enough. There's a road in to our actor work that helps us find extraordinary choices and frees us up to do our best work.

If you think of the play as a continuation of what has already happened, it gives you a sense of how much work you have to do in order to earn the play. Excerpted from my New York class, we continue our work on the Frank Gilroy play, The Subject Was Roses.

Continuing work on the Frank Gilroy play, The Subject Was Roses , this expert from Milton's in-person class begins to explore the road in to building a character with more depth.

Working on a play begins to give actors the foundation of working on any text they get. These are excerpts from my Script Analysis class at The Actor Lab in New York.

We're combining two exercises in this class. (1) Seeing someone 'on the street' and being able to make decisions about who they are, based on their behavio and (2) building an attitude towards them.

Making choices that really bring you to life seems to be a constant struggle. Maybe it's because we're relieved that we can come up with any choice, but the choices must be worth it. They can't be passive.

Actively building an attitude to your partner can open you up to the action of the scene.

We need to really be careful about the vocabulary of acting. There are concepts that keep working their way and it can dangerously lead actors to a kind of passivity that lessens the power of experiencing.

After I vent about the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, where they yelled at the audience for three hours, we look at the necessity of not just making great choices, but believing them. Not just performing them.