Acting Basics
This is the character that an actor plays in a performance.
What is Role?
💡 Fun Fact: In theatre, one actor can sometimes play several roles in the same production by changing their voice, movement, costume, and behavior.
This means using a capital letter where it is required, such as at the beginning of a sentence or for a proper name.
What is Capitalization?
💡 Fun Fact: The actual reason "I" is capitalized was because a medieval formatting accident. In Old and Middle English, the word for "I" was actually "ic" or "ich". Over time, people stopped pronouncing the "ch" sound, and the word shrank to just a single, lowercase letter i.
This is the way an actor holds and positions their body while performing.
What is Posture?
💡 Fun Fact: Actors can completely change how a character appears simply by changing their posture even before they say a single word.
This type of communication uses spoken words to express thoughts, information, or emotions during a performance.
What is Verbal Communication?
💡 Fun Fact: A performer can change the meaning of the exact same words just by changing their tone, volume, speed, or emphasis.
A young girl is swept away from home and finds herself in a colorful world where she meets a scarecrow, a tin man, and a lion.
What is The Wizard of Oz 🌈
💡 Fun Fact: The famous ruby slippers were originally silver in L. Frank Baum’s book.
This is the person who performs a character in a play, movie, or other production.
What is Actor?
💡 Fun Fact: The word actor comes from the Latin agere, meaning “to do” or “to act.” The word originally referred more broadly to someone who performs an action.
These marks are used in writing to show pauses, questions, excitement, or where sentences end.
What is Punctuation?
💡 Fun Fact: For centuries, ancient Greeks and Romans used absolutely no punctuation, no lowercase letters, and no spaces between words (a style called scriptura continua).
These are physical actions an actor uses to communicate something while performing.
What are Gestures?
💡 Fun Fact: Gestures can have completely different meanings in different cultures, so actors sometimes have to research them carefully when playing characters from another culture.
This is the physical art of communicating an idea, action, or situation without actually speaking.
What is Pantomime?
💡 Fun Fact: Pantomime became especially important in early silent films because performers had to make characters’ actions and emotions understandable without recorded dialogue.
A teenager wakes up trapped in a strange situation where the same day keeps happening again and again, forcing him to confront both the situation and himself.
Groundhog Day 🕰️
💡 Fun Fact: The movie’s time loop is never given a definite scientific explanation—the story focuses more on how the experience changes the main character.
This means learning lines or information well enough to remember them without looking at the script.
Answer: What is Memorize?
💡 Fun Fact: In Elizabethan theatre, actors often didn’t receive a complete script. They could receive their own lines and their cue lines, meaning the words that told them when it was their turn to speak.
This means saying or doing the same word, phrase, action, or idea more than once.
What is Repetition?
💡 Fun Fact: Repetition can make an audience notice something without the writer directly saying, “This is important.” Playwrights can repeat a word or action to create a pattern.
These are changes in an actor’s face that communicate emotions or reactions without requiring spoken words.
What are Facial Expressions?
💡 Fun Fact: Audiences can often recognize basic emotions from facial expressions extremely quickly, even when an actor’s face is only visible for a brief moment.
Before performing, an actor may do this to prepare their body and voice, helping increase flexibility and readiness.
What is stretch?
💡 Fun Fact: Some performers use stretches that target very specific muscles because even a small amount of unnecessary tension can affect how freely they move or project their voice.
Two families are divided by an old conflict, but two young people become determined to be together despite everything standing between them.
What is Romeo and Juliet 🌹
💡 Fun Fact: Shakespeare never actually tells us the exact reason the two families hate each other—the feud itself is left unexplained.
This means recognizing or figuring out what something is. Actors use it when figuring out details about a character or situation.
What is Identify?
💡 Fun Fact: Actors sometimes create an entire “backstory” for their character(even details that never appear in the script) to help them decide how the character would behave.🔎
This means speaking words so that they can be heard rather than only reading them silently.
What is Aloud?
💡 Fun Fact: Reading a script aloud can reveal problems that are almost invisible on the page, because awkward sentences or unnatural wording become much easier to hear.
This form of communication conveys meaning without relying on spoken or written words, using things such as body position, facial expressions, gestures, and movement.
What is Nonverbal Communication?
💡 Fun Fact: An actor can deliberately make their body language contradict their dialogue for example, saying they’re confident while physically appearing nervous to reveal something the character isn’t admitting.
An actor is speaking quickly, but the audience cannot understand several of the words. Which skill should the actor improve so that each sound and word is pronounced distinctly?
What is Articulate?
💡 Fun Fact: Professional actors sometimes practice exaggerated mouth movements during warm-ups because clearly forming consonants can make speech easier to understand, especially in a large theatre.
A young man discovers that the world around him isn’t quite what it seems, and the people closest to him are hiding something enormous.
What is The Truman Show 📺
💡 Fun Fact: The movie’s fictional television program has been running Truman’s entire life without him knowing he’s the star.
This is the reason behind an actor’s action, a character’s behavior, or something happening in a scene.
What is Purpose?
💡 Fun Fact: A character can have a hidden purpose that the audience doesn’t discover until later. Playwrights use this to create surprises, suspense, and dramatic irony.
In written performance material, this refers to the system of marks that determines how a reader should interpret the structure, pauses, questions, or emphasis of what is written.
What is Punctuation?
💡 Fun Fact: Some playwrights intentionally leave out or manipulate punctuation because changing a single comma, dash, or period can alter the rhythm and meaning an actor brings to a line.
An actor intentionally enlarges a physical action, facial reaction, or vocal behavior beyond what would normally occur in everyday life so that its meaning remains recognizable to an audience, particularly when performing at a distance.
What is Exaggeration?
💡 Fun Fact: Before microphones became common, exaggerated physical and vocal choices were essential in many theatres because actors had to make their emotions readable to people sitting far away from the stage.
An actor uses only physical actions, facial expressions, and gestures to communicate a situation or story while deliberately leaving out spoken words.
What is Mime?
💡 Fun Fact: Professional mime artists can create the illusion of interacting with invisible objects like walls, ropes, or boxes by carefully controlling their movements and body positioning.
In a small Southern community, a group of women form a close bond while navigating friendship, family, love, and difficult changes in their lives.
Steel Magnolias 💐
💡 Fun Fact: Steel Magnolias began as a play by Robert Harling before becoming a famous 1989 movie, and the story was inspired by the death of Harling’s sister.