One of my favorite things about teaching and directing is when students or actors finally put the pieces together and you get those “lightbulb moments” when all of a sudden something clicks for them.

This happened to one of my sophomores last week. He is in my Acting 1 class and is also playing Sky Masterson in “Guys and Dolls”.

We were working on most of the Sky/ Sarah scenes one afternoon and I was trying to explain that it looked like they were power walking down the street in “My Time of Day” when it was supposed to be a leisurely walk, a mosey, a meander, if you will. We tried it again and the same thing happened so I did an exaggerated version of what they were doing and then showed them the slower approach and talked about intentions and that they needed to think about what their purpose was, and not just power walk through the scene.

I watched him think about it for a second before he said, “Oh! Is this why we do random walk in class and you give us the scenarios?”

Finally! A connection.

I replied, “Yes! The things we do in acting class should be applied in rehearsals.”

The student, “That makes so much sense, can we try again?”

They got it. One small victory at a time… I’ll take it.