Base Needs/Drives in Commedia vs Acting Objectives

When I was in college studying Theatre Arts and Acting, I had a problem: I was not great at objectives. I knew what I wanted, but I always got WAY TOO HEADY about what I was playing at to help me meet that objective. I was always trying to turn a performance into a puzzle.

That changed when I went to study Commedia. 

Commedia characters do not have objectives the way traditional acting classes talk about them, they have base needs, or drives. They follow these drives in everything they do. Those needs are how they move through the world. 

AND, what really helped me, there were only a few options - Hunger, Sex, Power, Money.

That meant those drives were not a complicated labyrinth of desires and competing internal wants. They were straightforward. I got that.  And those drives made sense to me. I mean, I have been hungry. I have been hangry. I have felt powerless. I have been horny. And money is a constant in our world. I KNOW how those needs can make you do things you never thought possible. 

And the more I looked around at other characters in TV shows, movies, plays… I noticed that a number of them followed these base needs, drives. If you boiled it down, suddenly, a lot of the things people did in stories were related to one of these drives. 

So I decided to throw out my complicated layered objectives and think in terms of these base needs, or drives for then on. 

It hasn’t failed me since. 

- Patrick