First off: Congratulations to my friends Karen and Mike. They got engaged on Sunday night during our rehearsal! Woo Hoo! I am so happy for you guys!

I am starting a new category of my musings on acting. Sometimes I start thinking about my craft and I want to jot things down...what better place than a blog? Today I want to talk about Trust. Trust is big part of how teams function.Trust is also crucial for a cast. I remember when I was a wee actress back in high school and we played a ton of "trust games". They call them team-building for you business types. Activities designed to make people work together in an effort to strengthen relationships and increase communication effectiveness...stuff like that. As theater kids, we just thought they were fun. They made us feel like part of a very special group. These games were incorporated into every rehearsal from high school through college. I learned a ton about people, but the real connection happened through the work we did in rehearsal. Very rarely did a game really bond a cast together.

Trust is the feeling between people gives a sense of feeling safe. Acting a character onstage requires a high level of trust people others. If you think someone will hold it against you when you act like a villain, you will have difficulty bringing life to the character. If you are in stage fight and you don't trust that your partner will be in the right space, then someone will get seriously injured. Trust is so vital to an ensemble and yet we don't dissect it to make sure it happens. I see actors all the time crossing the line and breaking trust for the sake of "being in character" when they are really unraveling the trust built withe group.

This came up in rehearsal because I had an incident years ago with another actor. I won't give too many details since we are finally able to work together again. During an invited dress (dress rehearsal with a small, invited audience for all you non-actors) he acted out onstage according to his character. I was the closest to him onstage so I got the focus of his anger. It completely changed the energy. It just felt different. I remember I was shaking because I was honestly scared. For that brief moment, I felt very threatened. My body and emotions couldn't tell if I was threatened by the character or by the actor. I just felt that I was in a very unsafe situation. Unfortunately, I had a very long time before I could confront this young man, which gave me plenty of time to stew. Let's just say I explained my feelings VERY clearly during intermission. (Another friend said that he only heard half of my screaming since the decibels I reached could not be heard by most human ears.) He thought he was digging deep into his character. That may be true...but in the process trust was broken because he was unpredictable and his partner/teammate felt unsafe.

There are three foundations of trust in teams. Good actors and strong ensembles function using the highest level called identification-based trust. That foundation incorporates mutual understanding and emotional bond between the cast. Average groups can still have pretty good results with the mid-level knowledge based trust, which highlights predictable behavior and consistency. However, the higher trust level gives everyone plenty of room to explore the full range of emotions onstage.(I won't even talk about calculus-based trust, the lowest level. It has NO place in theater.)

My advice to other actors is to do more than work out your own motivations and character development. Get to know your other actors and strive to form connections and build trust if you want your play to great. Doing so gives you the added bonus of having even more room to explore a character and bring your performance to whole new level.