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When I landed the role of Ezekiel Cheever in Arthur Miller's drama The Crucible, I thought that an experience similar to one I encounted in my high school performances awaited me. Instead, I received a thorough wake-up call that opened my eyes to things I could do to enhance my portrayal of Cheever, pointed out what I already executed well on the stage, and showed me various helpful tools that I may use in the future to improve my acting ability.
My ability when I hit the stage the first night of rehearsal should not be classified as mediocre or insignificant, but, rather, talent. What I mean by this is Charles McGaw's definition of the word as "a natural ability to create art of a superior quality" [17, McGaw] from his actors' guidebook Acting is Believing. Coming to the stage with talent certainly helps an actor, but he must cultivate that talent in order to present a fully-developed character to his audience. For example, my talent evidently shone through my delivery of the lines early on, but my physicality failed to live up to the lines' demands; I consistently stood like a statue, talking only with my face and not gesturing with my hands, and did not even bother to look around believably for the poppet when the Proctors refused to acknowledge that they did indeed have one in their home. With gentle prodding from the director and some listening to my body, I slowly started to involve physical action more and more in the play until, about a week before the dress rehearsals began, I felt that I had reached a plateau regarding physicality.
In addition to this discovery of physical motion and releasing my mental inhibitions so that I would follow through with my impulses to move, I found that I could build on several things that my talent brought to the stage for me: concentration, vocal inflection and enunciation, volume, and interaction. Although I routinely made it a point to not let my mind wander in the middle of a scene, I sometimes forgot my actions or lines---which happens---in plays previous to this. Now, I understand that if I do forget something important onstage, my innate ability to concentrate on a long scene allows me room to improvise and adapt ("adjust...[or] abandon the present plan of actions when confronted with the unexpected" [86, McGaw]) if my mind fails to find the scripted behavior. During dress rehearsals, I recalled my ability to project efficiently and enunciate clearly from my several years of being involved with the school choir, where those two properties are vital. Lastly, about a month into the play, I drew upon the collective energy of the actors around me as I began to know and understand them better out of character and incorporated those interactions with them---sometimes even anticipating their actions or volume based on past experiences with their personalities---into my own reactions.
Thirdly, I added to my repertoire a series of pre-performance rituals that, similar to the observations of the actors' behavior off of the stage, helped me bring Cheever to life on the stage. For example, I warmed up my body physically by stretching each part of the body that I could possibly find to allow for greater range of motion. Drawing upon my singing experience, I performed simple vocal exercises (singing tongue twisters in simple melodic patterns, moving up and down the vocal scale with different vowel sounds issued with each note, blowing raspberries to warm up the lips, et cetera) to allow the voice to ready itself for action. Lastly, I made sure to evoke inner images---"mental pictures that flash across your mind as you speak" [90, McGaw]---before each night of the performance; for example, I recalled memories of a cold, drafty courtroom and images of court scribes to try and bring forth an appropriate picture of Cheever's appearance and how he moved.
As each night passed with new feedback from my director, I gradually found Ezekiel Cheever within me. He started as a youthful, slightly given to emotion, quiet man and burgeoned into an authoritative, middle-aged, duty-bound Puritan man determined to move up in society but bewildered at what that might cost him in the long run. Without discovering physical action, confidence through concentration, and rediscovering warm-ups, I could never have succeeded in bringing forth what I believe to have been a solid, round, well-developed character that the audience understood, sympathized with, and despised all at the same time.
Charles McGaw. Acting is Believing. Belmont, CA, United States: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007. Arthur Miller. The Crucible. New York, NY, United States: Dramatists Play Services, Inc., 1982.

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