by Chris Peterson
A scene can die while everyone is still talking.
The actors may know exactly what they’re saying. But nobody is doing anything except standing in a semicircle and waiting for the next person to speak.
You can feel the audience slipping away.
This is usually when a director starts moving people around. Cross to the couch. Get up on that line. Walk behind the table. Pour yourself a drink, even though the character apparently has no interest in drinking it.
Now the scene has movement, but it still doesn’t have life. It just has actors wandering around.
Before I block a scene, I need to know what everybody wants. Who is trying to take control? Who wants to get closer to someone but is terrified of making that obvious? Until I understand that, I have no business sending an actor across the room.
People move for reasons.
You step closer because you want an answer. You back away because the answer scares you. You sit because your legs suddenly don’t feel trustworthy. You stay planted because moving would show everyone how badly you’ve been rattled.
That gives a director something to work with.
I also want to see what the actors do before I start dictating every step. Put the scene on its feet. Let them stumble through it. Watch where they naturally move and where they seem uncomfortable. An actor may turn away at the perfect moment without having any idea why they did it. They just felt something shift.
Keep it.
Of course, actors will sometimes make choices that are completely useless. They’ll drift upstage, cover one another or slowly back themselves into a corner for reasons known only to them. That’s where the director starts shaping what is happening.
But I don’t want actors memorizing a travel itinerary.
Cross downstage on this word. Sit on that word. Stand three lines later. Walk to the window because we haven’t used that part of the set recently.
That kind of blocking may be easy to write in a notebook, but it looks mechanical because it is mechanical. The actor remembers where to go without understanding why the character would go there.
Every movement should be tied to something happening in the scene. Maybe the power changed hands. Maybe someone heard the one thing they hoped they wouldn’t hear. Maybe staying in the room became unbearable.
And sometimes nobody should move.
Directors can get nervous about stillness. We start imagining people in the audience checking their phones because an actor has remained in the same chair for thirty seconds. So we add another cross and hope that activity will create energy.
It won’t.
An actor who refuses to move can command the entire stage. Someone standing perfectly still while everybody else scrambles around them can tell us exactly who holds the power. Stillness is only boring when nothing is happening underneath it.
Sightlines still matter. So does making sure an actor isn’t delivering the biggest line of the scene to the wallpaper. I’m not suggesting we ignore the audience and call it truth.
Find the honest choice first. Then adjust it so people can see the actor’s face.
And directors, get out of the chair.
Walk into the space. Stand where the actors are standing. See how far apart they actually are. That intimate conversation you staged from the tenth row may feel absurd when the actors are twelve feet away from each other. The threatening entrance may lose everything because the actor has to navigate around a coffee table, two chairs and a decorative plant.
You won’t catch all of that from behind your notebook.
Blocking is trial and error. Some choices will look ridiculous the second you try them. Change them. An actor will miss a cross and accidentally find something better. Keep that too.
The stage doesn’t need to remain in constant motion. The people on it need to be affected by one another.
Once that starts happening, you usually don’t have to search very hard for the movement.