Given Circumstances in Acting: How to Get Into Character

Given circumstances are the who, what, when, where, and why of any character you plan to take on for a role. They serve as a backdrop for a character’s personal situation, informing how an actor should perform the emotional and physical actions of the play in light of the character’s past fictional history.

Utilizing these given circumstances to more fully create and inhabit a character is an essential aspect of the Stanislavski system of acting, named for Konstantin Stanislavski (the Russian acting teacher and author of the book An Actor Prepares).

Konstantin Stanislavski was a Russian theater practitioner and acting coach who lived from 1863–1938. As founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavski developed a cohesive system for performers to act to the best of their ability (featuring such concepts as given circumstances, the magic if, and affective memory).

Stanislavski’s system influences the performing arts to this day, informing the method acting approach of some of today’s most successful performers. His teaching approach heavily influenced other prominent acting coaches, including Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg.

When you take on a new role, sit down to ponder about your character. To do so, keep these given circumstances in mind:

• What they want: Give your character a clear motivation, informed by what you can deduce about them through the script itself. A clear idea of what your character wants, what they’ll do to get it, and why they want it is as important as hewing closely to stage directions and blocking instructions. Use the play’s script as the main source of inspiration for this, but remember you can also introduce some personalized elements into your character as well.
• When it is: Human beings have faced very different circumstances depending on the time period in which they lived. The previous actions in any given person’s life greatly inform how they might behave in the future. For that matter, the time of day can even lead a person to act in a different way than they might have just an hour before. Consider all this temporal information when it comes to crafting an identity for your character.
• Where they’re from: Keep the world of the play in mind as you start to plot out your performance. Think about your character’s literal environment (i.e., where they’re from geographically) and their social environment (i.e., where they’re from culturally, socioeconomically, and so on). Map out your character’s relationships to other people in the play, as well as to the overall landscape in which they find themselves.
• Who they are: Use all the given circumstances of a character’s time, place, relationships, and motivations to come to terms with who they are holistically. Try following questions about your character through to their logical conclusion if you can’t find something specific about them in the text. Make a list of core attributes your character possesses as a distinct individual and strive to embody them.

There are various ways to arrive at the given circumstances for a specific character. Utilize these three exercises to supplement your theater education:

1. 1. Improvise a scene. While an actor’s work might primarily be in performing scripted content, improvisation can help you better understand how to create a character from a few given circumstances in a limited time. Ask for scene suggestions, as well as a who, what, when, where, and why for all characters involved. Improvise a short drama with your scene partners with these circumstances in mind.
2. 2. Read a monologue repetitively. Try to find a relatively neutral monologue, in the sense the character speaking could be from a variety of different backgrounds. For instance, suppose you find a monologue about someone leaving their hometown. Try to perform the monologue as if you’re a graduating high school student, then as someone who’s lived in the same town for their entire life. This will help illustrate how drastically acting techniques might need to shift just because of a few circumstantial character elements.
3. 3. Think of a famous character. Draw upon famous characters in drama, fiction, or real life and analyze their situational conditions. Think of how Alice’s background in Victorian England might have influenced how she behaved in Wonderland. Ask why Hamlet’s past in the royal family of Denmark led him to seek his revenge against Claudius in the way he did. Seek out a wide variety of characters in general and see how different circumstances propel people to behave and act differently.

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