ABSTRACT

Projection is a technical term, which means you speak differently onstage than we do when speaking to a person in real life. There are actors who bellow their lines, and yet are hard to understand. The real difference is that we want the audience to share our thoughts, and so projection is really about sharing, not shouting. This is what the author intended anyway, and it addresses the one truth of the whole evening, that there is an audience out there, that the actor knows it is there, and so talking to it is quite natural. This can be a major solution to those difficult monologues, such as Firs' death speech, in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, where the character is dying and so should be speaking softly but the people at the back of the theatre want to hear what he is saying.