Reading Rehearsals: a Key to Acting Heaven

Reading Rehearsals added intensity to Peter Pan by shedding light on its themes

When the goal is to build the beloved community, directing a musical involves a lot more attention to the actors than it does to the eventual audience. Building community throughout the whole process will create a magic in the cast that eventually touches the hearts of those who pay to watch. It will also impact those cast members’ lives in a way that lasts long after closing night. However, the impact won’t just be about the community. It will also be about the personal development in each of the actors.

There’s a particular weight for actor development that falls on school and community directors who double as drama coaches to cast members that may be new to playing a character onstage. This is exciting and it can also be intimidating, especially for amateur directors like me, finding our way through the competing schools of thought about training actors. Do you focus on the mechanics: projection, enunciation, posture and other techniques that ensure the audience understands the dialogue and story? How much of the method approach can you use to help them really connect with their part?  And what’s the line at which method acting becomes too much? Even professionals can go to such extremes in pursuit of their character that they disrupt community rather than build it. For example, Emmy and Golden Globe winner Jeremy Strong isolated himself from everyone else on the set of “Succession”, showed up to work tipsy, and behaved with a reckless abandon that wound up fracturing his foot, all in an effort to become Kendall Roy, the ambitious and deeply-troubled character he played in the show. 

Jeremy Strong isolated himself in order to produce award-winning performances as Kendall Roy

These are important questions,  which is why I’m deeply grateful to Manuel Leybas for his willingness to share the fundamentals of another school of acting that prioritizes the growth of the actor. 

Mr. Leybas has dedicated the last 47 years of his life to the theatre. He emphasized theatre, speech and psychology for both his bachelors and masters degrees in education, has taught theatre arts at every level from homeschool to university, and has directed 117 productions. He took a mostly traditional approach to directing until 1983, when he attended a workshop by Dr. Jerry L. Crawford on something entirely new: Organic Acting. 

Mr. Leybas was galvanized by what he learned there. Not so for many of the others in attendance, who found this new approach so threatening that they walked out before the workshop ended. But for Mr. Leybas, Organic Acting invited him to brush his ego aside and center the needs of the cast, both individually and as a whole, in a way that opens the door to the deep authenticity onstage that can pull in an audience, every time. Here is his own introduction to the approach, edited for length and clarity:

“Dr. Crawford [was] a mentor who transformed my understanding of acting and directing. He taught that the true responsibility of theatre artists lies not in applause or recognition, but in the personal and educational growth found in the rehearsal process. One of his phrases has stayed with me for over forty years: ‘Since man often prefers the hunt to the capture, learn to prefer rehearsal to performance, art to success.’

“Organic Acting itself is a methodology that bridges the classical and method approaches. It emphasizes deep psychological exploration of character while maintaining the clarity, projection, and audience awareness demanded by classical techniques. At its core are the ‘Seven Steps to Heaven,’ with ‘Heaven’ symbolizing the transcendence an actor can achieve. Intensive reading rehearsals—the first step—demand extraordinary focus and patience, providing actors the opportunity to explore every nuance of the playwright’s text. When practiced faithfully, the remaining steps cultivate authenticity both inside and out, delivering the emotional depth of method acting while avoiding its common pitfalls.”

For example, when Mr. Leybas directed a cast of high-school students in a musical adaptation of Peter Pan, the teenaged cast discovered a darker side to the show during their intensive reading rehearsals. They came to see Peter’s refusal to grow up, which is central to the plot, as “a form of arrested development… emotional stunting or a tragic avoidance of adult reality.” They were struck by how “the musical… frames this more as an appealing, “lighter-than-air” pursuit of freedom and youth—a joyous escape rather than a psychological pathology. It was remarkable how these young people arrived at such profound discoveries.” 

The teens “wept over the script’s themes of loss and abandonment” with the lost boys being babies who fell out of their carriages and were never recovered by their families, all of which was downplayed by the musical. They were troubled by the preoccupation with violent “play” involving life and death stakes, that was portrayed as merely adventurous. They even came to the conclusion that Peter had early onset dementia. 

When at last they brought all this to the stage, the audience was struck by the intensity they brought to their roles. More important than that, though, was that the actors had developed a deeper understanding of how they wanted to pursue their own lives. That experience of personal growth brought many of them back to the stage, again and again. “The actress portraying Peter went on to appear in several serious dramatic plays before she graduated. Peter Pan was her first theatrical experience. What an amazing actress that young woman became.”

For myself, this story really resonates because my own struggles with the Peter Pan story inspired me to co-write an alternate adaptation with themes I wanted my children to explore. Meanwhile, my recent experience with a community theatre production of Fiddler on the Roof highlights the value of intensive reading rehearsals. One of our actors did his own study of the nuances of the script. He was playing a supporting character, Mendel, that is not usually memorable but provides some comic relief. Only, his reading of his character brought out an overlooked subplot that gave deeper meaning to the larger story, changed who we put onstage for one of the scenes, and transformed Mendel into a very memorable character. 

I find myself longing to do intensive reading rehearsals, to explore together with the cast the complexities of theme and the relationships between cast members, and how the fictional stories connect with their own lives. It would be time consuming, but the pay-offs in personal and community development, and in performances that feel authentic, would be huge. I’m reminded of how Do Good Theater's deep study of the themes in Les Miserables helped their youthful cast put on a show that an audience member preferred to the touring Broadway production the previous month because the youth “seemed to know what they were singing about.” It also created an experience that was life-changing for the youth involved. 

I’m looking forward to peppering Mr. Leybas with questions about Organic Acting. Please comment here with any questions you’d like to ask as well. I plan to return to this topic on a monthly basis until we’ve explored all seven of the organic steps to acting heaven. 

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