Define Your Character Spine / Super Objective / Super Task / Through Line of Action

Описание: Character Spine / Super Objective / Super Task / Grain / Core / Kernel / Heart / Essence / Through Line of Action is a term used by Method actors, directors, writers, and teachers to interpret plays and characters.

The Spine captures what the play is about and what the character wants or needs, which will define motivation.

The Spine has been interpreted or defined in various ways: In Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood translated the term as super-objective, while Jean Benedetti translated the term as super-task in An Actor’s Work.

Other terms taken from Stanislavski include the through line of action as well as grain.

The latter is akin to a germ or a seed, suggesting the essence of a character.

These terms characterize and aim to unlock the central theme or motivating force that drives a play and a character, and the discovery of either helps an actor in the quest to find truth and authenticity.

The term Spine was passed down from Boleslavsky, who learned about it at the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theater under Yevgeny Vakhtangov.

Boleslavsky preferred the use of the term spine because he liked the suggestion of the backbone of a skeleton being an analogy to the theme of a play.

He taught and used the concept in his work in New York at the American Laboratory Theater, which was continued at The Group Theater, founded by Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford in 1931.

In a short essay entitled Style and Spine, Elia Kazan commented on the term: The study of the script should result in a simple formulation that sums up the play in one phrase, a phrase that will be a guide for everything the director does.

He begins with the simple words: For me, this play is about…

The phrase should delineate the essence of the action that transpires on the stage; it should reflect what is happening, what the characters are doing.

It must imply effort, progression, transition, movement.

The concept must suggest not only the events, but the play’s mood and color, its emotional landscape and form.

It is to serve as the key to the production, what will give it unity.

It’s essential to identify the spine of a play first as all the individual spines of characters grow directly out of the play’s spine.

Learning how to define and use the term spine is essential when working on the Character Exercises.

The way to do this is to decide whether you think your character is for or against the central theme or motivating action that drives the play.

Discovering the spine for a character also helps you to form a personal, emotional connection and identification with your role.

When I’m critiquing scenes in my classes I ask the actors to tell me what they intended to do, so as to reveal the character’s’ underlying purpose and fundamental nature.

Below are examples of spines for both plays and characters including examples of character spines written to give you an idea of the wide variety of choices and combinations that are available.

Group Theater and Method Director Harold Clurman included spines for a number of plays he directed, and you can find them in his book On Directing.

You will find others in Elia Kazan’s Kazan on Directing.

I advise my students to read their favorite plays and screenplays to practice creating a spine for the whole story and for the characters individually.

Below are a few character spines that I’ve created to give you the idea.

Some of them are deliberately contradictory, as not all spines are clear and straightforward.
The examples should be read to complete the sentence: My character’s spine is…

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