Don't Laugh Frances

Today was a full run of the show with notes at the end. Sean Lightfoot sat in on the second Act to help provide an audience so the actors can learn not to break character. I have made a lot of connections between Emily and myself since I have known her. Some of her acting habits I share as well. One of which is accidentally breaking character when the audience laughs. I have always been one of those people who would laugh at my own jokes when I would tell them to people. Therefore, I would also be one of the people that would accidentally laugh on stage when people would laugh at one of my lines. Emily is the same way. When we laugh or giggle at things that she says, she tends to break character and either smile really big or laugh. One of our inside jokes that we have between the cast, is “Don’t laugh Frances.” It actually was a pretty good idea to have that be a joke between us, because it actually did start working. We have been saying it for a while. We are not trying to desensitize her from reactions, but we are trying to help her not focus on distractions. It was actually quite hilarious when in Roxanne’s Acting II class earlier today, John Weaver and I were performing our scene, and we were doing an improv, and when he made me get a key off a keyring since he could not do it, I added the line, “It’s not that hard.” I tried to stay in character as long as I could, but when Roxanne started laughing, I started losing it. I then completely lost it when Amanda yelled, “Don’t laugh Frances!” It was a very ‘touché’ moment. Sean Lightfoot also makes a great audience member. He laughed at a lot of lines that Ryan and I have stopped laughing at. One of the lines he laughed at the hardest was Lydia’s line “He had the hairiest hands I had ever seen. He just loved sticking them in my mouth.” I could tell that the cast was having more fun with someone actually laughing at them, it gave them a little bit more confidence. I know that as actors, we should not have to rely on an audience. We should have enough confidence in ourselves. However, Theatre at its minimum, is one actor, and one audience member. So every once in a while, it helps to have an audience. It feels good when people enjoy your work, and they know that Ryan and I love them, but we can only do so much for them. Even when one of us does laugh a little bit harder than normal, you can see their energy go up and they light up just little brighter. What we need to definitely start working on, is having them gain their energy from each other. Feeding off one another will help them much more than feeding off people laughing at them. It would actually be so much easier for them to laugh at each other.