During my semester in a Shakespeare class we had two assignments. They were to see two Shakespeare plays performed, on field trips. One was down in Cedar City during the Shakespeare festival: Winter's Tale. The second one we went to see was at the University of Utah: The Tempest. I was impressed by these plays and the great quality of acting in them. Overall in my class everyone thought that Winter's Tale was better played. I enjoyed the Tempest a lot, but as I look back I realize that Winter's Tale did have something to it that the Tempest was missing.
Today my mother was helping my sister out with her acting skills (and her skills are good, too). She explained that adding an emotional involvement to the performance made people notice an increase in value of the performance. When you add the energy of what you are doing into your performance then people can tell that what you are performing is important to you and they instinctively find it more interesting and emotionally involving to watch.
What was missing from The Tempest was that deep caring, the emotion that went with the character. It could have been that it wasn't magnified enough and we were sitting in the back. But the emotion rang through the whole theatre when we went to see Winter's Tale. The characters were so believable as real people and you could tell that they were feeling those emotions that they were portraying. That was what was missing. This one little detail can make a performance or break it. You can either become emotionally involved or stay sitting in your audience-member seat.
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