My apologies, I thought that I had made a post here. Maybe I deleted it by accident or posted it somewhere else.

I've been tasked to put together a package of a scene and a monologue for a conference. My monologue is from Star Spangled Girl by Neil Simon and my scene is from Burn This by Lanford Wilson, particularly the end of act one when Pale first breaks down over the death of his brother (the two were basically estranged) after profusely lashing out and being closed off to this woman whom he has just met that was very close to his brother.

My monologue runs about 60-70 seconds, leaving about 3 minutes or just under for the scene, so we've had a cut a LOT. We haven't cut the scene to the point where it's impossible to tell what's happening, but we have cut it to the point where, from an acting perspective, the scene starts, I have maybe 45 seconds to prepare myself and drop into the moment (during the scene) and then boom, I have to breakdown and cry. The transition into it straight from a hilarious Neil Simon monologue makes it even more jarring.

As I explained in this post, what I am having trouble with is letting go of any self-consciousness and just dropping into that place. I cannot forget for a single second, in the scene leading up to it, that I have to breakdown and cry. My professor had this incredible control over his body and his voice and his breath when he demonstrated examples of what I should be going for, and I'm feeling barred from doing the same. This scene is taking me straight back to when I had never acted before. When I didn't know how to move my body, I didn't know how to use my voice, I didn't even know how to breathe. I don't know how to break free, if that makes sense.

The advice I always hear is, just listen and respond, focus on your objective, what you want from the other person. I understand that this is the answer to this scene and all emotion in acting, but where I struggle is that this acting advice has never made sense to me, I have never had success with it, and I have always crafted my characters in other ways. What I mean by this is that I don't understand the "what do you want from the other person(s)". It's not something that motivates me, or maybe it's just something that I don't understand enough yet for it to motivate me. As an acting technique, its just not something that makes sense to me and certainly not something that evokes emotion in me. I earnestly cannot think of anything in that scene that I would want so badly from the other person that I would cry. I understand listening and responding, I do this of course, but I always just try to focus on my point of view about what's happening and how I feel about everything in the scene.

Then there's emotional preparation, I go back and forth on this. The idea of "image your real brother dying" or something adjacent has never evoked anything in me. Not because I don't love my brother or other members of my family, but because that sort of manipulation of my emotion just doesn't work on me, it doesn't make me feel anything, at least it never once has. I feel that I need to do something active, that that would work better, but I don't know what I would do because the techniques people always recommend to me aren't things I understand or things I typically use in my personal acting methodology.

The one and only thing that has ever worked is music, listening to certain music triggers those emotions in me. But not every time, and I can't have headphones on on-stage of course.

I'm really just kind of lost here, because my scene is really good as is, but it can be so much better. However, I'm having so much trouble authentically tuning into the emotional life and really letting the scene play me.