The predominant approach to working on a script for actors today is called script analysis. It’s based on the idea that you can pull a scene or role apart while applying your intellect to find its essential pieces, then put it back together again and let it all go at the moment of performance, forgetting what you’ve worked on and living it out truthfully in an unanticipated way. But for many actors utilizing this approach, the happy day where you return to the scene with your full creative freedom intact to live it all out like a spontaneous human experience never seems to fully arrive. The reason for this is relatively simple: concept is sticky.

The moment you create concepts and ideas about your role or the scene you’re playing, the moment you formulate notions about what “should” be there, you’re in danger of leaving your actual experiencing self behind. That experiencing faculty, the part of you tasked with actually living out the situation (i.e. acting it) is hamstrung and trapped by all the ideas you’ve created about it. It may then become very difficult not to fall into the trap of showing the results of your work, showing your ideas of what you think ought to be there. This same trap can befall experienced actors as well as new ones. Your work might run the risk of appearing competent or slick but a bit dead, losing that sense of “really living-ness” that truly spontaneous, experienced, surprising acting has. Concept is a seductive thing.

And yet, we do have to use our minds when we work on scripts, don’t we? We shouldn’t be afraid to apply our native intelligence to the roles we play or scripts we work on. The question is and has always been: “How can I do this in a way that is intuitive, impulsive, and experiential without over-engaging my analytical mind?” As actors, we don’t have to write a Ph.D about our role—we have to live it out. This is the chief obligation of an experiential actor, our actual job description. Is there a way to work on the script that actually mirrors the way we live through the part?

Our breakthrough at The Folster Studio in this major area of the actors work is the creation of a procedure called Script Inquiry®. Relying heavily on the process of Taking It Off the Page he originally learned from Harold Guskin and fortified through what Stella Adler referred to as Gathering Impressions, Sean grew those approaches into an organic, flowing process that allows the actor to live out the script as an experience from the first time they read it out loud, right through homework and rehearsals, all the way to performance. The process is fluid, adaptable to whatever is happening in the rehearsal process, and yet at the same time allows the actor to work from themselves and their intuitive response to the text moment to unanticipated moment. At more advanced levels, tools such as Emotional Paraphrasing, Actioning and Inner Imaging are activated not through analysis but by in-the-moment, intuitive Inquiry; not by imposing what “should” be there from the outside but through discovering it from the inside. The nine levels of this process unfold to comprise the bulk of our way of working in the Studio, as actors tackle each progressive layer through exercises, monologues, scenes and roles.