See, Matt, now you've got me started. After yesterday's comment I was thinking this morning of the early days of learning acting. I started in Jr. College and had no technique and they told me I was pretty bad. Then I spent a summer at ACT in S.F. and learned to play objectives religiously. I came back to Jr. and they told me it was great improvement. Then little by little the objectives started failing me. They worked with some characters and not others, some scenes and not others. One teacher told me I was very wooden when I had all my objectives carefully lined up and that I was the one student in class that probably shouldn't play them (this was Ed Hooks by the way and told me to read The Inner Game of Tennis, which was fascinating for the acting art). I tried a couple of other techniques but was still hit and miss at best. Couldn't figure out why a technique wouldn't work for everything. I then studied with Milton Katselas at the Beverly Hills playhouse who told me of something I had suspected: Objectives are valid but only for the type of character that would have his actions mapped out in advance or the type of situation where you would. Most people play the opposite of an objective as they don't want to be obvious or they are just plain not sure in a situation what they want or what to do (he always said, be a person, only actors know what to do, people don't). He worked more on what was happening in the scene and how you would behave in that situation. I became much better at discovering behavior and investigating that and just learning how to be a person with each character and situation. It loosened me up a lot and I became much more successful much more often and reached new heights in my work. I came to realize that no single technique can work for all characters and all situations. Learn them all, forget them and like I said in the last post, always be creating with each new part.