Uta Hagen’s Six Steps for my Trigorin from Chekhov’s Seagull

Uta Hagen’s Six Steps (PDF towards end of this post) come in handy whenever I prepare to play a character. Professor Jennifer Chang – a key role model in my growth as an actor – made me understand, through work in my Chekhov Acting class, the real-life magic that the Six Steps can create. My portrayal of Trigorin from Anton Chekhov‘s play The Seagull was stronger than I could have ever imagined, as a result.

This course started with brief scene-work from Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (who I played, and have a separate document of Six Steps for). We then aimed to enact the entirety of The Seagull. Pretty ambitious for a course on the quarter system, but it worked out well once Professor Chang decided who to give all of Trigorin’s dialogues to – including his nefariously verbose monologues. ME.
In retrospect, all this feels surreal because I never would have thought that I could pull that off. However, I did. Pretty successfully too, apparently.

Anyway, I will now get to my responses of the Six Steps. If you are someone else playing Trigorin, I strongly advise you to proceed with caution. My responses are highly specific to my personality and might cloud your judgment and keep your true potential from yourself… because we aren’t emotional clones. The only advice I would give in general is to not hold back: put as much detail as you need to truly understand who you are, as the actor. The Six Steps are a personal tool, so copying my work won’t fool anybody because it will not show in your acting. It’s all about putting the work in…
Whether it’s by: attempting to construct an entire backstory from scratch; designing a book cover (image at end of this post) to later paste over another novel’s cover; planning drunk rehearsals; drawing from traits of a Siberian Husky you studied at the dog park for half-a-day; carrying around an old pocket-watch everywhere; or anything else… just do what you gotta do. With this style of acting, I found it best to stop pantomiming and pretending and faking things around myself. Making it all real – both in my head and out – made me even more confident that I truly was Trigorin.

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