Yelling in Theatre

Hey.

Saw a great deal of theatre last week, and I wanted to talk about a far too common practice which happens onstage.

Yelling.

It's a flare gun, people.  Do it once, quickly and in an unexpected place, and it is riveting.  As a spectator, your hair will rustle from the back of your head with fright and that primordial cocktail of adrenaline served upon our steady neurotransmitters will crackle inside us.

But keep yelling for an extended period of time, or yell over and over again throughout a play, and it's just painful.  Squeezing and grasping the trigger for a weapon that's spent. And you end up breaking the tool. Wind up with Hamlets who sound like gym coaches.

Why do actors yell?

1)They don't trust the space.  In New York City, a majority of the theatres (if we're talking Off and Off-Off Broadway) are black box in nature. Now, I started out in Los Angeles, and there were plenty of actors there who only possessed film training and would whisper during a play, their efforts awaiting a kindly boom operator who would never appear.  But that's not the case with NY actors. It's the opposite problem. If you're working a 45-seat house, you can trust the audience to hear you if you have sufficient vocal training.

2)They want to be "real".  Yes, in the real world, people yell.  And, when they do, we tend to tune them out after a time. Any subway rider can tell you that. It's a coping mechanism we've adopted to shut down when faced with constant yelling.  Besides, theatre isn't real. You're not really a king or getting murdered on stage.  Theatre is the human experience ideally and artificially expressed.  People responding in an articulate, complicated fashion.

3)They don't have a wide enough variety of tactics to play in a scene.  This is the big one.  This is why acting is different than real life.  In real life, I only utilize about four tactics when interacting with people before I give up:

 - to tease
- to comfort
 -to compliment
 -to charm

But me in a role?  That's the time when I can seduce or punish or devastate or bleed someone dry or mock or betray or reconcile with them or annoy or stab them with only the words I say. 

Verbs. Devour them like crazy.  Don't hide behind adjectives in any medium - acting, songwriting, stories, poems, whatever. Verbs used with passion and play deliver powerful art.  And if an actor doesn't feel supported by their choices, (and I'm speaking from painful experience in my twenties here), one quick fix is to yell. 

Don't use the quick fix. Challenge yourself to explore tactics in rehearsal and performance, especially ones which frighten you.