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Giving Birth to the Character

Posted by DCA Theater on March 29, 2010 in January-June 2010 Season, INCUBATOR Series: The New Colony

by Andrew Hobgood, The New Colony Artistic Director and Director of That Sordid Little Story

So once again, I’m going to refer you to the story. You have some basic plot elements, minimal description, basic character names, and nearly no backstory for the characters. So you know just as much as the actors did going into their first workshop. They know nothing but what is on that written page. If a detail is not included in the short story, then it’s not available to give them. For example, we know that Caleb and Abby are brother and sister, but we don’t know their last name yet. So that’s up to the actors to decide. When I asked Wes Needham (Caleb) and Caitlin Chuckta (Abby) to decide on a family name, they chose Calhoun. How was this name chosen? Because when Wes lived in Charleston, SC, Calhoun was a very common last name.

This gives you a little insight into how our characters are formed. Before we even see a second of the character on stage, before the actors even work on voice, physicality, etc, they begin with research, personal experience, and story-telling. Their job is to inform the playwrights and the director of who these people are. Every detail that they develop becomes critical to the story.

For example: the story follows Billy (Pat Coakley) on a journey that is inspired by an album he finds. The album tells the story of a kid, much like Billy, who goes out on his own to find the father he never met. Billy decides that the album he heard is proof that his father is out there, most likely with this band, and sets out to find them. However the question that we want to pose to the audience throughout the piece is whether or not Billy’s journey is legitimate. Or is it all in his head? With that in mind, Pat dug into the character to find an explanation as to why he would jump to such a conclusion. What he came up with was that Billy’s mother was tremendously overprotective and he had very little exposure to other kids. To entertain himself, he became obsessed with adventure stories, and longed for his own. When he discovered the album, he was presented with his own adventure. But - is it merely the over-active imagination of a lonely boy seeking adventure? Or is the album truly a message of his future? Without Pat’s contribution, we would still be lacking an emotional/psychological understanding of why this character would take such a leap of faith. But in his small world, adventure novels are his only friends, and thus his reality. Suddenly, the way to present this question to the audience arrived. And entirely through Pat’s own development of the character.