In 1991, I landed my maiden role of Swan #4 in our first-grade presentation of The Ugly Duckling. I remember my mother – younger then than I am now – festooning my little frame in a homemade costume of white posterboards shaped to look like tucked-in wings. The only line I had, “Come on in, the water’s fine!” would be my tour-de-force. I rehearsed and rehearsed. The moment came, and though I triumphed, I still couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I walked off the stage and onto the kickball blacktop, robbing classmates and parents of what would have been nearly a decade of pure transcendence.
Then, at fourteen years old, I emerged from retirement, agreeing to appear as the Wine Steward in my high school’s production of Roger and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. At first, I expected more pomp and circumstance surrounding my comeback. Then, I began to overhear growing murmurs of “Jesus Christ…Is that Swan #4??” It was.
Thinking about all those early rehearsals, I don’t remember much besides a common creative approach involving minimal blocking and a lot of “cheating out.” (And kissing and diners.)
For laypeople who spend leisure time reading essays by acting teachers, cheating out is when actors position themselves at “outward” or downstage angles so the audience can better see their faces. In reality, we don’t argue with people on awkward slants. Indeed, “reality” is what actors are “cheating” when they do this in a play. It’s considered a foundational aspect of stagecraft and encouraged from first grade all the way through university drama programs and beyond.
The two primary purposes of staging (where the actors are asked to move and when) are to ensure that whoever’s talking is adequately seen and to direct the audience’s attention to whatever spot onstage will best help them to follow the story. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that cheating out was such an effective directorial tool back then because none of us had a clue how to move onstage. Asking a ninth grader to cross from stage right to left is like asking a grizzly bear to juggle. It’s challenging enough to get it to stand on its hind legs and put on the funny hat without mauling you. With stagecraft-challenged young’uns, it is safer to stick with the time-honored strategy of “enter, park, cheat out, bark, exit,” rinse and repeat. This way, at least, we can always see their faces.
The problem with teaching actors to keep cheating out into their late teens and twenties is that as long as they do so, they are not being forced to learn how to move around for themselves onstage while also being seen. And it’s not just teachers; this goes for you, too, actors: The longer you default to cheating out, the longer you cheat yourselves out of growth.
The solution is to start all staging rehearsals with actors positioned onstage in problematic and unsustainable ways and then set out to find creative solutions to those problems. A best-case rehearsal scenario would be if the lead actor spends the first two pages of a scene with their back to the audience. By complicating things from the start, they have made blocking a necessity rather than a formality or obligation, giving an invaluable gift to their director. This is as opposed to starting in what I call the “Inside-The-Actor’s-Studio” orientation, which has the actors plopped in two chairs set a coffee table’s width apart, angled forty-five degrees away from one another and towards the audience. They’ll have no problem being seen, and what’s nice is they can sit like that for as long as they want while the audience takes a nap.
When actors cheat out, it creates a domino effect, forcing the directors to create their own problems to solve by arbitrarily “directing traffic.” They move the actors hither and yon until they find something that (sort of) works (…or settle for something that doesn’t). It’s time-consuming and uncreative for both parties. It does nothing to nurture an actor-director relationship based on collaboration, perpetuating one based only on status, and that sucks for everybody. I have watched whole rehearsal processes devolve into bad blood and resentment, all because the actors stood there cheating out, waiting for the director to move their bodies for them, and the director was without the words to ask them for what he needed.
Cheating out was fabulous when we were in high school because, well, we weren’t good. But now, if you’re tired of being shuffled around like valeted cars and want to get better at moving onstage, know it isn’t doing you or your directors any favors. It's so much better to get up there and do something weird.
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