Play Directing, 7th Edition

9

Helping Actors Communicate through Groundplans

 

Chapter 7 was primarily concerned with discussing the nature and process of acting and how directors work with actors. This chapter and Chapters 10 through 13 discuss stage values and how they can help actors communicate with each other and thus to an audience. Some of what is discussed here, particularly as it applies to the single actor, may be taught in your acting classes, but stage values, as a whole, fall into the director’s province of helping two or more actors communicate. Awareness of stage values is an important part of your job.

A groundplan is both a representation of the given circumstances and a tension device for discovering and illustrating the dramatic action of a play in specific ...