Nuclear Bomb Chicken

Dear reader,


I want to share with you this exercise we did on Sunday called "Nuclear Bomb Chicken."


It goes like this: all the players pretend to be chicken for a while.


So far so good.


*Pwkawk!* ( <-- chicken noise)


Then, the leader of the warming-up announces there's a nuclear bomb approaching the earth.


It's still far away.


But it's coming.


We can see it in the sky now.


Closer.


It fills up the sky.


It's huge and blazin'.


You can hear it coming - it flies really fast towards the farm.


BOOM!!!


The nuclear bomb exploded.

Now, during this exercise, while being a chicken, some actors react to what's going on.

Some don't. And, well, these one are right - a chicken has no clue of what's going on before it actually happens.

That, dear reader, is an exercise about reacting to other players' lines during a play. You, as a character, don't know what's coming next. You can't plan a reaction. 

And it's really difficult - to forget the play, to act genuinely surprised, or emotional, or sad or happy or disgusted.

Story goes, while doing this exercise in preparation for a movie, all the actors were going chicken-frantically crazy when the bomb was approaching, while Marlon Brando was laying an egg.