If you are preparing a monologue for an upcoming audition, it is important to remember that it is your job to translate the written word into spoken language and part of that process is breaking the lines into idea units.
These idea units or speech measures are a collection of a few words that form an easily understandable idea or thought. They are also a unit of text that contains a single acting choice. As Scott Kaiser tells us in his great book Mastering Shakespeare: An Acting Class in Seven Scenes, “It’s a unit of sense through which an actor can play a single thought, or image, or action. It’s a vessel of language into which an actor can pour a single moment of human behavior.” A speech measure can be a single word, a phrase, or a sentence “understood by the audience as a single moment of human behavior, and spoken by the actor on a single breath.”
Now while Kaiser is talking about acting Shakespeare, the idea of idea units or speech measures relates to all of your acting. So whether you are working on a classic or contemporary audition piece you need to break your text into idea units that clearly communicate thoughts, character, and the relationship between the two.
It is important to realize that idea units are separated by logical or emotional pauses. Logical pauses are those we use to make intellectual sense of a line, to group the words into easily understandable idea units. Emotional pauses are those that are the result of an emotional response or change triggered by the words, ideas, or relationships.
Speaking for more than just a few seconds is a skill that people can easily develop. It is our job as actors to insure that those words are rich in meaning and subtext and that they are interesting to listen to. To achieve that begin by breaking your lines and monologues into idea units that are understandable and actable moments. Start by inserting the logical pauses and then as you get further along in your preparations, you’ll begin to find those emotional pauses that reveal character, subtext, and intention.
Eric Barr. All rights reserved
