In a play an actor must always play multiple characters. A character isn't (shouldn't be) 2-dimensional. In day-to-day life a person must put on all kinds of masks, use various sorts of voices to match prior schema -- pre-determined actions for certain social situations. Exempli gratia, consider you're having a conversation in a public place, say, a popular study spot (any study spot that is also popular probably isn't very apt for the task of study, but that's beside the point). Your friend is very concerned about his relationship with somebody, so that's what's at hand. Eventually, some other person comes over and joins the conversation. Woah! What just happened? Was there a noticeable shift in how you continued conversing? Hint: there was.
When you and your friend were talking alone, you were both more or less natural with your speech and manner. Here's the kicker: if interaction is observed, it becomes performance. And the great thing is, there doesn't even have to be a physical audience for such performance to begin; the performer merely has to imagine one. In psychology, we call this the imaginary audience (quel suprise). It's what happens to teenagers when they're worried about looking cool and fearing embarrassment around every turn. There's also something psychologists call the spotlight effect, which is almost the same thing.
A quote from my Statistics textbook: "The spotlight effect refers to overestimating the extent to which others notice your appearance or behavior, especially when you commit a faux pas. Effectively, you feel as if you are suddenly standing in a spotlight with everyone watching. In one demonstration of this phenomenon, Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky (2000) asked college students to put on a Barry Manilow T-shirt that fellow students had previously judged to be embarrassing. The participants were then led into a room in which other students were already participating in an experiment. After a few minutes, the participant was led back out of the room and was allowed to remove the shirt [thank goodness]. Later, each participant was asked to estimate how many people in the room had noticed the shirt. The individuals in the room were also asked whether they noticed the shirt. In the study, the participants significantly overestimated the actual number of people who had noticed." (From "Essentials of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences," by Frederick J. Gravetter and Larry B. Wallnau, 2011)
I'm going to write a self-help book with a title that I know will sell a million copies. I'll call it, "Nobody Cares: Empowering Yourself by Eliminating the Imaginary Audience." Half Joking. Give it ten years.
Part of what the class Actor as Thinker is about is how to internalize cognitive processes so that you're actually thinking as your character would, and not as someone standing on the stage worrying about what the audience is thinking. Forgetting the audience is difficult; to do so one must interact with the other characters onstage and have a vested interest in what they have to say. You have to listen to them, otherwise your next line has no motivation. The chemistry and emotional interactions of the actors is just as important as the script. Sure, you can have one without the other, but you'd end up with either a book on tape or a silent film (both are reasonable pastimes, but they're not theatre).
The mind is complex, and getting in touch with it onstage takes some time. I'll leave you with a dramatic exercise of the mind: emotional scales. Close your eyes and think of a time in your life when you were neutral -- no sadness, not really happy -- just content. This is 5. Now think of a time when you were a little miffed about something. You were just less than content. This is 4. Think of individual memories to take the places of 3 down to 0, with 0 being incredibly depressed and angry. Come back up to 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, becoming less angry and more okay with things. The next memory, for 6, is one where you were just a little happier than content. 7 is happier, and so on to 10, which is the happiest moment you can remember. Come back down one step at a time until you're again resting at 5. Checking in with emotional memories from time to time can give you the necessary tools to feel what your character's supposed to feel in the scene, because your character has as many characters inside him/her as you do. Spooky.
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