5.  Let this stenographer tell the telephone girl about this.

6.  Show how a younger sister might talk at a baseball or football game to her slightly older brother who was coerced into bringing her with him.

7.  Show a fastidious woman at a dress goods counter, and the tired, but courteous clerk.  Do not caricature, but try to give an air of reality to this.

8.  Show how two young friends who have not seen each other for weeks might talk when they meet again.

9.  Deliver the thoughts of a pupil at eleven o’clock at night trying to choose the topic for an English composition due the next morning.  Have him talk to his mother, or father, or older brother, or sister.

10.  A foreign woman speaking and understanding little English, with a ticket to Springfield, has by mistake boarded a through train which does not stop there.  The conductor, a man, and woman try to explain to her what she must do.

11.  Let three different pairs of pupils represent the girl and the fruit seller cited in the paragraphs preceding these exercises.

12.  A young man takes a girl riding in a new automobile.  Reproduce parts of the ride.

13.  Two graduates of your school meet after many years in a distant place.  Reproduce their reminiscenses.

14.  A woman in a car or coach has lost or misplaced her transfer or ticket.  Give the conversation between her and the conductor.

15.  Let various pairs of pupils reproduce the conversations of patrons of moving pictures.

16.  Suggest other characters in appropriate situations.  Present them before the class.

Characters Conceived by Others.  In all the preceding exercises you have been quite unrestricted in your interpretation.  You have been able to make up entirely the character you presented.  Except for a few stated details of sex, age, occupation, nature, no suggestions were given of the person indicated.  Delineation is fairly easy to construct when you are given such a free choice of all possibilities.  The next kind of exercise will involve a restriction to make the acting a little more like the acting of a role in a regular play.  Even here, however, a great deal is left to the pupil’s thought and decision.

How much chance there may be for such individual thought and decision in a finished play written by a careful dramatist may be illustrated by Fame and the Poet by Lord Dunsany.  One of the characters is a Lieutenant-Major who calls upon a poet in London.  Nothing is said about his costume.  In one city an actor asked the British consul.  He said officers of the army do not wear their uniforms except when in active service, but on the British stage one great actor had by his example created the convention of wearing the uniform.  In another city at exactly the same time the author himself was asked the same question.  He said that by no means should the actor wear a uniform.