The Director Sector

One thing I’ve always wanted from my friends and co-workers that I never receive is honest-to-God constructive criticism.  It’s just so hard to get people to tell you what they think of the shows that I’ve done.  No one will give a straight answer when all is said and done.

Your parents will always love your performance, no matter what. And even if they didn’t, they’d never tell you.
Your friends and castmates don’t want to hurt your feelings (or ruin future networking ops).
Your director doesn’t want to lower morale and/or admit that he/she screwed up in casting you.
Any random audience member is going to say SOMETHING positive to your face.
Critics’ reviews, if any, are generally going to focus on the show as a whole rather than individual things you can do to improve your own performance.

When I took my first Directing class and had to direct a one-act, one thing that Doc told us was that we were not allowed to perform in our own show.  His reasoning was simple:  you can’t see yourself on-stage

In film and TV, you often have directors making cameos or even starring in their own shows.  This works because of the simple fact that they can see themselves on screen and see if it works or not.  An actor on stage can’t do that.

As an actor, I rely on someone else to tell me what I can do to better my performance.  Not a show has gone by where I haven’t asked the director on multiple occasions what I could do better — ESPECIALLY on nights when he doesn’t give me notes at all.  It’s imperative to me that each performance be better than the last, and there’s no note that I hate worse than “You’re fine”.

Fine? That doesn’t help me at all.  First of all, the entire performance can’t be “fine”.  There’s always, always room for improvement.  So what parts are “fine”, what parts are “good” and what parts are “not-so-good”?  Help me out here, man.

As a director, I strive to provide as much honest criticism to my cast and crew as possible.  If I’m not happy with the way something is going, I speak up.  If someone is talking too fast, I slow them down.  If someone keeps changing the blocking, I put them back on track.  If someone is seriously misinterpreting a character or doesn’t understand a punch line or is simply reciting his lines or seems to stumble over her lines, I’ll speak up.  I’m not going to be rude about it, but I’m going to be firm.

“Matt, you need to slow down.”
“Okay.”

(later)

“Matt, you need to slow down.”
“Okay.”
“No, listen.  Your character is setting up all of Zoe and Adam’s punch lines, so the audience needs to be able to understand you.  You’re speaking so fast that nobody will get the punch lines, because they didn’t understand the joke.  Make sense?”
“Ohhhh, i see.”
“Yeah.  Slow down.”

The above example is a true story from my last show.  I had to tell his one guy to slow down every five minutes.  It was insane.  Opening night, he was still a little fast, but he had slowed down considerably — enough for the audience members who paid attention to get almost all of the jokes.  He often came to me after rehearsals and said “How am I doing?”

I refused to answer with just “You’re fine.”  On the nights when he did well, I told him so.  “You were a lot slower tonight, which is good.  You didn’t miss very many lines at all, which is good.  You’ve got the personality of the character down pat, although he’s a little more sarcastic and a little less nice.  Overall, good job.  I have some specific notes that i”ll give you tomorrow.”

I’m pretty sure he appreciated my candor.

I want YOU to be the best actors you can be.  I’m going to do everything in my power to make that happen.

So why doesn’t anyone else do the same for me?