Guidepost 5: Opposites - Major Notes

 Guidepost 5: Opposites - Major Notes

Overview  Michael Shurtleff writes, "Consistency is the heart of dull acting." Therefore, it is the actor's job to find or create the opposites that occur in each monologue or scene. One moment, the actor may be laughing hysterically, and the next the character might be painfully distraught. That inconsistency (which occurs in real life all the time) is exactly what captivates audience to keep watching.


Major Notes

• Whatever you decide is your motivation in a scene, the opposite is also true and should also be in it.

• What fascinates us about other human beings is their inconsistency, their use of opposites.
• Since these extremities do exist in all of us, then they must also exist in each character in each scene.
• It is the actor’s creation of opposites that develops conflict.
• It is the process of dealing with pain the actor must put on stage, not the fact of having solved it.
• The more extreme the opposites the actor chooses for a scene, the more everything in between is likely to occur instinctively, naturally.

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