It may not have everything, but not for lack of trying

[amykhar]

One of my character flaws is that I’ve always assumed that I am capable of doing something until experience proves me wrong. This too often puts me into situations that are over my head. Thankfully, I had good teachers and parents who made sure I knew how to read, how to find a book, and how to find either the bookstore or a library. Books have scooped me out of more fires than an encyclopedia has pages to burn.

Several years ago, I decided I would go beyond being a box office volunteer and start to get more active in community theater. I did some tech stuff, acted in a show, and generally helped out administratively. For some strange reason, I felt this gave me sufficient experience to direct a show. The local group seemed to agree and I found myself slated to direct an Agatha Christie play with a huge cast.

Thankfully, this was announced a year before my play was due to open so I had time to do a little preparation. One of the many books that I picked up was Robert L. Lee’s Everything About Theatre! The guidebook of theatre fundamentals.

Had I read the introduction carefully before purchasing the book, I would have discovered that this was a book geared to high school students. I’m rather glad I didn’t as the simplistic overview turned out to be much more helpful to me than the more complex, theory-filled books published by Stanislavski and his ilk. It would yet be a few years before I was ready to digest the more advanced books on theatrical arts.

Surveying the Content

While this book presented everything at a somewhat basic level, it also presented it on very practical terms. Lee wrote his book so that people could be better at the arts and crafts of the stage when they were done with it. The chapters are designed to build on each other, with the fascination chapters on the history of theater spread throughout the book under titles, Family Album.

Each chapter begins with a whimsical quote or clip art and ends with a box filled with two to ten exercise ideas. These ideas include writing papers, touring stages, developing scenes, drawing a costume design, and building a set model.

Chapter One: Learning Your Way Around

The book opens with a chapter on theater basics. It defines all those terms you hear experienced theater folk banding about: theater-in-the-round, prosceniums, flies, thrust stage, scene house. It includes plenty of helpful diagrams to support the explanations.

Chapter Two: Introduction to Acting

This chapter opens by making a distinction between celebrities and actors and laments that the overabundance of television and movies has given people misleading ideas about the art of acting. Lee points out that people confuse being a celebrity with being an actor and then says, “Hollywood, of course, does its best to keep this confusion strong because celebrities sell tickets—whether or not they can act. This confusion not only reduces our critical skills, making it difficult for us to evaluate the worth of a particular performance, it leads too many people to the conclusion that knowledge, skills, training, and rehearsal are not necessary, that they are, in fact, a waste of time.”

He then goes on to say that he will introduce action gently and gradually, but that the student should never think that acting is easy. So how does he begin the explanation on how to act? By defining terms again. He explains stage geography (up stage, center stage, down left, and crosses). He explains body positions and what a director means when she says, “open up.” He then provides a short glossary of terms.

Chapter Three: Theatre’s Family Album: Ancient Theatre

I found the family album chapters to be among the most fascinating ones. He spends a fair amount of time justifying why a student should study the history of theater. For those of us who were already convinced, the rest of the chapter picks up as he discussed Greek drama, stages, and some of the major playwrights.

Chapter Four: Improvisation

I’ve always found improvisation to be the most frightening of the theatrical arts to perform. I like having a script, I like being told what to say. Improv takes all of that away. This chapter gives a foundation on which to prepare and build improvisational routines. Probably the most important part of this chapter is the exercises he gives at the end to help students get started and actually practice what they’ve just read about.


Chapter Five: Basic Stagecraft

This is the chapter that really started increasing my understanding of what was taking place on a stage. To me, the set always appeared by magic. I had little understanding of what tools were needed or even what a flat was. This chapter not only listed the tools and defined a flat, it explained how to build one.

Chapter Six: Your Vocal Instrument


In a quick 10 pages, Lee provides a survey of one of the two most important tools that an actor has: the voice (the other tool is the body). He explains how the voice works, the processes of speech, the properties of tone, and accents and dialects.


I felt like cheering when I got to the last page and read, “Sometimes an actor must sacrifice authenticity in a dialect in order to be understood by the audience. An absolutely true, authentic Cockney accent, for example, can be difficult to understand—the actor must soften the dialect a bit so that the character still has a Cockney sound but can be enjoyed by the audience.” This was a concept I applied liberally when directing a British show.

Chapter Seven: Reading the Wrighting

It’s a truism that plays are meant to be seen and not read. Yet, the actor must be able to read the play if he or she is going to perform it. This chapter provides the basics on how to read a play. There are tips for reading, a short discussion of the element and structure of drama and an explanation of the types and styles of plays,

Chapter Eight: Meeting the Monologue

No actor will go long in a career (whether the career is volunteer or professional) without having the occasion to deliver a monologue. This chapter gives the basics of finding one, choosing one, rehearsing it, and performing it.


Chapter Nine: Family Album, Part II: Medieval and Renaissance Theatre

Back to the history, this time Lee explores Roman theater, medieval theater, and the renaissance in Italy and Spain.

Chapter Ten: Stage Lighting

For a non-tech person like myself, the chapter on lighting was an eye-opener. It began by explaining the four functions of stage lighting: visibility, plausibility, composition, and mood. It explained the properties of light and even went into the scientific explanations of color in lights and how it can be manipulated to provide different effects on stage. He had several pages on basic electricity that made me wish I’d taken physics class.


Finally, he began talking about the lighting instruments of the stage, providing (thankfully) several illustrations of lamps, lens, and reflectors. He then went into the theories of lighting design and how to provide cross-lighting, cool colors, and warm colors. Even more helpful for the director, he explained how to create lighting plot and instrument schedule and how it is used during a show.

At 22 pages, this chapter was one of the longest in the books, but it is also one that I have referred to many times.

Chapter Eleven: Doing the Duo

While monologues are common for auditions, dialogue is where most plays are at. This was a chapter that I had some difficulty with. Whereas most of the other chapters were very practical, his explanation of the rehearsal process for performing a duo seemed tortuous and unnecessary. Indeed, I think some of his suggestions might make performances later rather difficult—especially when he says that an actor shouldn’t deliver a line in rehearsal until his or her partner is making eye contact with him or her. If every scene is rehearsed that way, the director will later pull out his or her hair getting the actors to look at the audience.

Chapter Twelve: Family Album, part III Elizabethan and French Neoclassic theater

This history chapter explores the Renaissance in England and France, Elizabethan playhouses, performances, major playwrights and plays (and yes, he talks about people other than Shakespeare and does define blank verse), Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s plays, and theater of the French Renaissance.

Chapter Thirteen: Theatrical Makeup


I was surprised at the depth and technicality of a chapter on theatrical makeup. The workshops that I had attended on theater makeup in the past had focused on how to apply makeup to make a person look older, younger, tired, or vibrant. This chapter went into detail I didn’t know existed.


He began with character analysis using the mnemonic device hearth:


Heredity
Environment
Age
Race
Temperament
Health

He then gets into facial anatomy complete with detailed illustrations of a skull and the technical names for each depression and prominence. By this point I was starting to think that the author lived in a state where it was mandated drama classes be interdisciplinary studies, for we’d gone from physics to anatomy. He then discussed physiognomy—the practice of judging a person’s character by looking at his or her facial features.

After a discussion on creating illusions with makeup to depict different facial shapes, he then goes into the business of applying makeup. This isn’t discussion you’d see at a Mary Kay party, though. At least, I never knew a demonstrator who would discuss by naso-labial folds or tell me how to create crow’s feet and broken noses with makeup.

Chapter Fourteen: Directing for the Stage

I’ll confess, when I first bought this book, I skipped right to this chapter. However, since it built on every other chapter, I quickly found myself flipping backwards until I finally gave up and just read the whole book.

Right away, though, the chapter gave me confidence that perhaps I wasn’t in over my head. He wrote:

Becoming a good director is a lifelong process. It involves knowing as much as possible about as many things as you can—not only things theatrical but things in general. The more you know about everything, the more you bring to the challenging and rewarding task of directing a play. History, music, psychology, literature, science, philosophy, art, math, woodworking, dance—knowledge in all these areas and others will ad to your effectiveness as a director.

I knew that liberal arts education would come in handy some day!

He did not try to teach everything that would make a good director. Instead, he focused on three specifics: interpreting the script, planning the action, and conducting rehearsals.

Chapter 15: Scene Design and Painting

Once again, this supposed survey book went into a great deal of practical and helpful detail about how to design a set and paint it. He begins by telling the set designer that he or she should read the script at least three times. It’s a statement I’ve repeated many times to set designers who want to be told what to do without ever opening the pages of the script.

He then discusses basic sketching and design, elements of design (including lines, mass, space, composition, sight lines, doors, and off-stage realities), and painting scenery.

Chapter 16: Family Album, Part IV Romanticism to Realism

The final chapter on history takes us from romanticism through realism. He discusses the new theories of staging, realism in acting, the new star system (wherein actors became more important than their roles), the rise of the director, and some notable plays and playwrights.

Chapter 17: Props, Costume and Sound

I will admit that after the detailed treatment every other topic received, I was disappointed that these three crucial areas were crammed together. It was here that it became evident this was a classroom book and the content had to be curtailed to the restrictions of a semester. He spends only six pages on these topics and simply treats the organization of these elements for a show. He spends little to no time on the design, authenticity or creation of props, costume, or sounds.


Chapter 18: Getting to Work

Consider this the career development part of the book. In a chapter very much geared toward high school students, it explains how to make a living in theater.


The author

The author, Robert L. Lee, is a drama teacher who taught theater arts at the high school level for more than 25 years. He was the Arizona State Director of the International Thespian Society and has worked as an actor, designer, technician, and director. He is a member of the Screen Actors’ Guild who has appeared in television movies and series.

“I love the theater,” he says, “but more than that I love teaching. Students need to know that they can and should be responsible for a great deal of their own success as learners. That’s partly why I wrote this book—to encourage students to become better readers and ‘studiers,’ skills which will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives, even if they never take another drama course.”


It is this very goal of his that makes this an outstanding textbook for any high school theater class. For the high school student, this book is a fantastic introduction to theater that can continue to serve as a reference book for as long as the student is involved in theater.

If you can ignore the references to teenagers and high schools, then this book is a useful survey for anyone else who is interested in volunteering for the theater. Indeed it is a book I would encourage anyone to read—for there is certainly a place for everyone in community theater, no matter what your talents are.