Spoon River Exercise EXPLAINED (Part I) by Katherine Schreiber
As an actor, you’re faced with the task of embodying someone else’s physicality, demeanor, voice, emotional range (and depth), fears, hopes, wishes, and dreams. (Amongst other elements that make up a character.) To accomplish this you’ll need to get comfy transitioning from your own skin to the skin of the person you’re attempted to portray. You’ll also need to make the role you’re playing feel as real and genuine to you as possible (so that the audience feels the same). And so you’ll need some means of honing your characterization skills. Here’s where the Spoon River exercise comes in.nnDeveloped from Sanford Mesiner’s original model, T. Schreiber’s very own Terry Schreiber (redundant much?) incorporates this exercise into his class with a bit of his own flair. Students select a poem to memorize from a collection of fictionalized epitaphs written by Edgar Lee Masters in TKYR. They choose one five basic emotions (love, anger, fear, joy, or sadness) to inject into the piece’s last two lines. Then they do a fair bit of background work, creating a hypothetical life the speaker of the poem would have lead. (Warning: all epitaphs come from individuals who lived in the 19th century. So students are asked to leave modern day technology, twentieth century references, and modern customs aside.)
Schreiber recommends the biography — which students ultimately present to the class —include where their characters’ ancestors originated from, where their characters’ parents met and did for a living (whether their characters’ mothers worked) whether the characters had brothers and sisters, how far they went in school, if they went to college, what they did for a living, whether they married, had children, died young or old, and what they died of.
nnKeep in mind, however, that the whole biography “should be leading you to what you named as your emotion,” says Schreiber. “The goal is to create a psychological and emotional center for your poem. If you picked joy, don’t end on telling us that your wife and kids burned to death in a barn.” (That is, unless you didn’t like them much.) Next step: Create a parallel dialogue to complement the actual text of the poem. (And by that we mean subtext.) Either rewrite the poem in your words or substitute names and places the character mentions with names and places from your own life. Schreiber gives the example here of one student who, in the place of the character putting her life on hold to have kids, swapped in her experience of postponing an acting career to care for ailing grandparents.nnOnce students get their poems, bios, and subtexts down pat, they get the chance to present their chosen poem (with all its chosen emotion) to the class. And by “the class” Schreiber means “one person — real or imaginary — the student would like to tell the poem to.” Schreiber has students decide whether they want to give or get something from this person. (“Get is often a stronger choice than give,” he notes.) This is just the beginning, of course: Part one of the Spoon River exercise. (We like to explain it to you in digestible bites.) Stay tuned for the second half of Terry’s signature exercise, slated for January 11th, 2013.