8. The city or state has finished some great project. Speak upon its significance.

9. Address an audience of girls or women upon their right to vote.

10. Speak in approval of some recently elected official in your community.

11. Choose some single event in the history of your immediate locality. Speak upon it.

12. Deliver a commemorative address suitable for the next holiday.

13. Bring into prominence some man or woman connected with the past of your community.

14. An unheralded hero.

15. "They also serve who only stand and wait."

16. "Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war."

17. Deliver the speech to accompany the presentation of a set of books.

18. Present to your community some needed memorial park, building, or other monument.

19. Accept the gift for the community.

20. Challenge another cla.s.s to debate.

21. Urge upon some organization support of some civic measure.

22. As a representative of the students present some request to the authorities.

23. A meeting has been called to hear you because of your a.s.sociation with some organization or movement. Deliver the speech.

24. Some measure or movement is not being supported as it should be. A meeting of people likely to be interested has been called. Address the meeting.

25. Appeal to your immediate a.s.sociates to support some charitable work.

26. Some organization has recently started a new project. Speak to it upon its task.

27. An organization has successfully accomplished a new project.

Congratulate it.

28. Some early a.s.sociate of yours has won recognition or success or fame away from home. He is about to return. Speak to your companions showing why they should honor him.

29. Choose some person or event worthy of commemoration. Arrange a series of detailed topics and distribute them among members of the cla.s.s. Set a day for their presentation.

30. Choose a chairman. On the appointed day have him introduce the topic and the speakers.

CHAPTER XIV

DRAMATICS

Difference between Public Speaking and Acting. In practically all the aspects of public speaking you deliver your own thoughts in your own words. In dramatic presentation you deliver the words already written by some one else; and in addition, while you are delivering these remarks you speak as though you were no longer yourself, but a totally different person. This is the chief distinction between speaking in public and acting. While you must memorize the lines you deliver when you try to act like a character other than yourself, speeches in dramatic production are not like usual memorized selections. Usually a memorized selection does not express the feelings or opinions of a certain character, but is likely to be descriptive or narrative. Both prose and verse pa.s.sages contain more than the uttered words of a single person.

As preparation for exercise in dramatics, whether simple or elaborate, training in memorizing and practice in speaking are extremely valuable. Memorizing may make the material grow so familiar that it loses its interest for the speaker. Pupils frequently recite committed material so listlessly that they merely bore hearers. Such a disposition to monotony should be neutralized by the ability to speak well in public.

Naturalness and Sincerity. When you speak lines from a play inject as much naturalness and sincerity into your delivery as you can command.

Speak the words as though they really express your own ideas and feelings. If you feel that you must exaggerate slightly because of the impression the remark is intended to make, rely more upon emphasis than upon any other device to secure an effect. Never slip into an affected manner of delivering any speech. No matter what kind of acting you have seen upon amateur or professional stage, you must remember that moderation is the first essential of the best acting.

Recall what Shakespeare had Hamlet say to the players.

Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus: but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your pa.s.sion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a pa.s.sion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise.

Character Delineation. In taking part in a play you must do more than simply recite words spoken by some one other than yourself. You must really act like that person. This adds to the simple delivery of speeches all those other traits by which persons in real life are different from one another. Such complete identification of your personality with that of the person you are trying to represent in a play is termed character delineation, or characterization.

You may believe that you cannot represent an Indian chief or a British queen, or an Egyptian slave, or a secret service agent, but if you will recall your childish pastime of day-dreaming you will see at once that you have quite frequently identified yourself with some one else, and in that other character you have made yourself experience the strangest and most thrilling adventures. When you study a role in a scene or play, use your imagination in that same manner. In a short time it will be easy for you to think as that other character would.

Then you have become identified with him. The first step in your delineation has been taken.

Visualize in your mind's eye--your imagination--the circ.u.mstances in which that character is placed in the play. See yourself looking, moving, acting as he would. Then talk as that character would in those circ.u.mstances. Make him react as he would naturally in the situations in which the dramatist has placed him.

Let us try to make this more definite. Suppose a boy is chosen to act the part of an old man. An old man does not speak as rapidly as a boy does. He will have to change the speed of his speech. But suppose the old man is moved to wrath, would his words come slowly? Would he speak distinctly or would he almost choke?

The girl who is delineating a foreign woman must picture her accent and hesitation in speaking English. She would give to her face the rather vacant questioning look such a woman would have as the English speech flits about her, too quickly for her to comprehend all of it.

The girl who tries to present a British queen in a Shakespeare play must not act as a pupil does in the school corridor. Yet if that queen is stricken in her feelings as a mother, might not all the royal dignity melt away, and her Majesty act like any sorrowing woman?

EXERCISES

You are sitting at a table or desk. The telephone rings. You pick up the receiver. A person at the other end invites you to dinner. Deliver your part of the conversation.

1. Speak in your own character.

2. Speak as a busy, quick-tempered old man in his disordered office.

3. Speak as a tired wife who hasn't had a relief for weeks from the drudgery of house-work.

4. Speak as a young debutante who has been entertained every day for weeks.

5. Speak as the office boy.

6. Speak as an over-polite foreigner.

7. Delineate some other kind of person.

Improvisations are here given first because such exercises depend upon the pupil's original interpretation of a character. The pupil is required to do so much clear thinking about the character he represents that he really creates it.