Doing a table read with The Actors' Society

I hope today's post was worth the wait! This week, I participated in The Actors' Society's monthly Actors' Jam - a virtual table read organized in response to the heightened measures to curb the second wave of COVID-19. I had already received the email from TAS a while back and ignored it (as usual), but it appeared on my Instagram feed and this time I was intrigued. Feeling restless from a lack of actor training and intellectual stimulation in general, I decided that it was time to put the S$30 I spent on my TAS membership to good use.

I filled up the registration form and sent in my curriculum vitae - which by the way has just one real in-person training credit (sigh, thanks COVID.) and hoped for the best. Sure enough, I got my confirmation email the very next day. It was a live meeting on Zoom, and I would be assigned a script to read with a scene partner.

I got the script four days before the table read, and after checking with my scene partner to make sure that she was onboard with my choice of characters, I delved straight into the preparation process. We were supposed to read a scene from Normal by Faith Ng, a powerful play about the far-reaching impacts of a meritocratic education system that is hailed as one of the best in the world. The play examines if we have been judging our students way too harshly and prematurely through the lenses of teenagers who have through one way or another fallen through the cracks.

The very first thing I noticed about this script was that it was very different from the way I typically speak. Despite the fact that I'm Singaporean, I rarely use Singlish unless I absolutely have to. As a result, the speech patterns in Normal posed an exciting challenge for me and I was eager to jump into it and find my way into this character called Daphne.

Drawing on my past training and experiences, I first explored my given circumstances. Understanding the past traumas that my character has been through - doing badly for her Primary School Leaving Examinations despite studying to the point of near-insanity - helped me to see where she was coming from when she pointedly questioned Ashley's seriousness about her studies. Daphne was a really fun character to work with as her childish humor shone through at the end of the scene where she playfully taunts Ashley with gruesome imagery from their sexuality education classes just to get a rise out of her friend. I picked out possible intentions and mapped out her emotional journey and thought process throughout her conversation with Ashley.

Getting off-book was a way trickier process. I've yet to develop a method that truly works for me, and I'm still struggling to make sense of story in a way that doesn't require rote memorization. For now, I see it as a parallel process where I integrate understanding and learning my lines into a single process. As a result, I worked on annotating my lines and finding story beats in the process of rehearsal while seeing how the objectives and tactics change as the scene progresses, which is still a very messy method, but it did the job. The Meisner workshop which I did online with Steven Ditmyer also helped me worry less about performing reactions - I trusted that placing my focus on my partner and practicing active listening would create the necessary genuine reactions in me. (Speaking of Meisner, I think I'm interested in working on some Meisner at the end of the year. I really like what the method does.)

On the day of the table read, I was actually quite nervous. I had done all my homework and memorized all of my lines, and my fellow theatre kid friends were laughing at me for taking this so seriously. It's just a table read! Well... it's also my first time sharing a space with actors who have decades of experience and performing alongside them, so I didn't want to mess up. I turned up early and waited for the others to file in. I was surprised to connect with a friend I had met in a workshop earlier this year, and more than that, the diversity of experience levels in the room was a refreshing sight. We decided to go first so that we could chill afterwards, and I absolutely did not like my performance (I kept relying on the script just because it was in front of me even though I had it down in my head, damnit!) but apparently they said we have a lot of chemistry especially towards the end... so that's a good thing I hope? I felt like I wasn't into the acting - I have so much more work to do with this. Nevertheless, it was a great experience as I watched the professionals throw around directions like "changing the objective" and "adjusting the pace", because this helped me to see that I have such a long way to go before I can achieve that caliber of acting chops, and seeing it live in front of me was such a valuable learning opportunity. I took the chance to jot down as many notes as I could.

After close to a year of not touching my TAS Actors' Jam emails, I was pleasantly surprised to realize how fun and exhilarating table reads could be. I was encouraged to take risks and to spin in directions that I couldn't have thought of on my own, and to evaluate my own performance on the spot so that I could try alternate objectives and see how each one works differently and how the entire dynamic of the scene changes with just a switch in my objective. While I had done something similar in acting class, it was a relatively brief session and the table read helped me to make sense of what I was doing and solidified my understanding of how the actor can make or break any scene.

Here's to more play time (pun intended) in the near future!