The Actor’s Real Role on the Production Team

The primary purpose of this chapter is to show how the actor's job of bringing the scripted events of a drama to vibrant life onstage is necessarily a creative endeavor. A detailed analysis of the acting process will reveal that, from the first reading to the final public performance, an actor must create the "live" aspect of the play in terms of amplifying and communicating the deep meaning he or she finds behind the literal words. This communication is accomplished by the actor's emotional conviction, vocal inflection, body language, and all other channels of communication. The training methods used in higher education, designed to produce this ability, are herein described along with some methodological variations. A secondary purpose of this chapter is to review some theories of creativity offered by a number of prominent researchers and to show how precisely these theories can be applied to the main elements of the acting process.