teen acting program – LATTE Theater

Why Should Teens do Full-Length Plays in a Challenging Environment?

It’s all about stretching. It’s more than building your stage resume, and beyond forging friendships, self-confidence, and learning how to develop as a teen player. Not only do teens learn to value how other people think and respect diversity, but in programs like LATTE where teens who take on full-length plays as acting intensives learn how to read and learn emotional tells. They develop the emotional and physical stamina to stay actively in character for 2 hours, and, in the right program, to deal with the unexpected.

Live Theater can have a plethora of things go wrong, and the show “must go on”, so you learn to trust your wits, your team, and your contingency plan. In a challenging program, you learn as I always say in LATTE, “Prepare for the worst and expect the best”. Teens can learn healthy project management that allows them to be part of the planning process. When you involve teens in the decision-making process of developing blocking, adlibs, and looking for opportunities to use their ideas, then you get a stronger show. And when teens are empowered on stage to support other cast members as scene partners – as equals, the ego gets taken out of the equation, and what we have left is gorgeous theater worthy of standing ovations!

Challenges to Percolate for Directors … or Teens that want to be Directors:

Look at the blocking for a scene through different lenses. That of each of the characters. How would the blocking change depending on which character you would want to highlight at any given moment?

How can you strengthen the moving action of the scene?

What blocking can you add to make sure each character on stage gets to shine – while adding intrigue, suspense, and animation to the scene.

Choosing an Acting Program with your Teen – The Developing Brain and Stage

Acting in the teen years can be an incredible experience. Otherwise, I never would have created the LATTE Theater Company or the Empathy Movement Method to help young actresses and actors thrive. So let’s take a beat and talk about why teens need additional safety around their stage experience and character creation.

Teens are exploring and defining who they are. Trying to do this hard enough in this age of tech and social media. When you are on stage you are creating a character that has its own separate emotional responses, physicality and personality. That is complex to any age, let alone when the brain has not hardwired (till the mid to late twenties).To make things all the more challenging, often acting schools teach method acting or fail to teach the teen to approach character development as a healthy exercise with aesthetic distance.

Look at the cautionary tale of Heath Ledger and how he lost himself in the character. Look at actors and actresses who fall in love – with each other’s characters, unaware in that moment that they aren’t falling in love with each other. If adults easily have fallen into these pitfalls, don’t we owe it to teens to give them a safe and nourishing framework to thrive on stage – and off?

Thoughts to percolate:

As you choose a program that will in influence your teen, ask how they help the teen grow on stage and off. How do they protect the psyche of the teen as they bring a show to the spotlights?