Emotional Family

Ask the audience for an emotion – eg, happy. Then present a scene with the Happy family.

It can be effective to choose a situation which contrasts with the emotion. For example, the Happy family might be immersed in a terrible situation, but where everybody responds to it with joy.

MRS HAPPY: (Laughing) Is that a body I see in the back yard.

CINDY: Oh look! It’s old Mr Wadsworth from next door.

MR HAPPY: Okay, which of you loveable rascals has killed the neighbour?

Cindy starts tickling Mikey.

MIKEY: Hahahaha. It was me, it was me! He was being a big grumpy face!

MR HAPPY: Well, it looks like someone’s going to prison!

All laugh.

Conversely, the Angry Family might celebrate a birthday, giving gifts and expressing good wishes in the angriest way possible.

If the emotion is Lust, it doesn’t have to be directed to other players on stage (you probably don’t want the Incest family). Family members may be quivering with lust as they look at the roast turkey – “Breast or thigh?”

If you are given “fear” (or some variation), don’t let it make the characters inactive. Have the terrified characters confront the thing they fear, so you can play the fear to the utmost.

There’s no reason to have all the family on the stage at once. Have entrances and exits. This allows one person to play several members of the family, like a grandparent, or the family dog, or an outsider like the neighbourhood police officer.

It’s easy to get stuck in a fixed emotional mask. Vary the intensity of the emotions (as with Emotional Symphony) and layer in a second emotion as you react to the lines of others. If you’re playing the Angry family, you might go from anger + suspicion, to anger + amusement, to anger + fear.