of Williams' play which I saw had some actors who were able to portray their characters with realism, but some were not. If all of the actors had been able to take advantage of the Method, their performances would have been much more realistic and the play overall would have been more involving.
Unfortunately, the college production of the play I saw was poorly done, mainly because the actors were not comfortable and realistic expressing the emotions of their characters. This makes the audience aware that they are watching actors act, rather than characters feel. Williams' play calls for the actors to show a lot of emotion. However, if the emotion is not real, it seems as if the actors are faking what they are saying, how they are saying it, how they are moving, etc.
A person gets pleasure from watching a play because he forgets that he is watching a play and begins to feel that the actors are real people. This only happens if the actors are able to act as if the emotions they are showing are real. But if it is obvious that they are only "acting," then the audience will not be able to forget that they are watching a play, and it will be a waste of time. For too much of the play I saw, this is exactly what happened. The actors were trying to show emotion, and what showed was their trying rather than their emotions or the emotions of the characters. When Amanda is giving her speech to Laura about "What are we going to do now, honey, the rest of our lives?" (Williams 128), the actor playing Amanda acted as if she were the strongest woman in the world, instead of truly worried about the future. The actor made the mistake of seeing Amanda as a strong woman all the time. She is a strong woman at times, but the actor cannot think of a character as only having one emotional reality. Every character has several lasers of emotions. When Amanda is portrayed as being strong in this speech, the audience wonders why she is upset at all, bec...