An Actor Prepares

As the class is rehearsing on the stage, they are suddenly distracted when someone raises the curtain, exposing the auditorium. As they are intimidated by imagining the audience, Tortsov gives them a highly dramatic, tragic scenario to act out, in order to overpower their focus on the audience. In the scene, a young husband is counting large amounts of his employer’s money while his wife bathes their newborn baby in the next room. When the wife calls her husband to help, her intellectually-disabled brother begins to burn the money in the stove. The husband re-enters and hits his brother-in-law with a heavy object, potentially killing him. The wife comes in to see what the noise is about, and the baby drowns in the bathtub. Tortsov lowers the curtain.

The students begin the exercise well but Kostya finds himself forcing emotions halfway through. Tortsov suggests that their issue is not the audience, but their poor concentration. At the next lesson, the curtain is raised and Tortsov asks the actors who has lost a heel from their shoe. After, they take a moment to look at each other’s shoes, Tortsov points out that no one even noticed that his secretary had entered and left again.