What do they mean by 'ensemble acting'?

The moment when Kim Carson realized the power of the ensemble came during a late rehearsal.

She was playing the title role in People's Light & Theatre Company's 2008 Christmas panto, Cinderella. Two characters were fighting over Cinderella at the palace ball - a funny scene they'd rehearsed repeatedly.

But this time, they couldn't get through it without one of them bursting into laughter. "And I knew," says Carson, "if he was enjoying himself that much, then the audience will, too."

For Benjamin Lloyd, the recognition that an ensemble had jelled came last winter when the Wilma Theater's production of the searing drama Scorched reached its tech rehearsal, when sound, light, and other cues solidify scene by scene as "the actors sit in the audience and watch each other act - and you haven't seen each other act in the play before."

"You begin to be excited by the work the other actors are doing, and it lifts you. You feel - wow! - I want to be a part of those performances," Lloyd said. "We were sitting in the audience and weeping and holding each other."

Both Cinderella and Scorched are Barrymore Award nominees in the category of ensemble acting. Winners of this year's regional professional-theater honors will be announced tomorrow night at the Walnut Street Theatre.

Ensemble acting may seem overly vague. Best musical or play productions? Best leading actress or actor? Best set design? Whether you're a theatergoer or not, those categories are clear.

But ensemble acting - isn't that pretty much the same as best production, and isn't any acting, except in a one-person show, ensemble acting? What do judges look for when they determine which production will get the ensemble award?

Theater artists agree that it comes down to one major concept: uniform high quality across the cast, a sense that one performance among the actors is as well-considered - and, in a straight play, as natural - as any other.

"It may be a strange way to think of it," says Carson, who is also up for a best-musical actress Barrymore for Cinderella, "but to me, ensemble acting means that there is no star.

"It's not a show like Gypsy - the woman who plays Momma Rose is the star, and the rest her supporting ensemble. In Cinderella, it was never intended to be that - it was intended for all of us to work together on an even playing level."

Says Scorched's Lloyd: "In my opinion, when you talk about ensemble acting, there has to be a uniform level of excellence in the performances." He points out that of the five nominees for best supporting actress in a play in this year's Barrymores, four are from the cast of Scorched.

"Interesting, none have been nominated for best lead actress."

An award for ensemble acting - which is not a part of Broadway's Tony honors - has been given at the Barrymores since their inception by the Philadelphia Theatre Alliance in 1995. Beginning in 2001, the ensemble award became two - one for a play, one for a musical.

"There's a lot of trust work that directors go through with actors to create this ensemble feeling," says the Alliance's Karen DiLossi, who oversees the awards ceremony.

Directors say the best solid, uniform group give-and-take results from a process that begins even before line-by-line rehearsals.

In Scorched, Blanka Zizka, the Wilma's co-artistic director and a nominee for her direction of the play, assembled a cast of actors "who are really interested in the subject matter of the play" - in this case, a drama about the perpetuation of fear, cruelty, and revenge in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

"I want the actors to buy into it intellectually and emotionally," Zizka says. "I spend a lot of time around a table, with everyone discussing the play. My first thing is always to start to understand the text collectively. I don't think you can do ensemble acting until you have this kind of understanding."

In fact, discussions about the play, even when rehearsals had begun, continued after hours in an apartment house owned by the Wilma in Center City, where many of the out-of-town actors stayed.

At the Arden, producing artistic director Terrence J. Nolen is nominated for his staging of both Something Intangible and Candide, and both shows are up for the ensemble awards - for play and musical, respectively.

"Making any play is an ongoing process," Nolen says, "and an ensemble develops over the course of it."

At the end of the first week of rehearsals for the Arden's production of The History Boys, which opened Wednesday, Nolen had each cast member give a 20-minute lecture on a historical period mentioned in the show, about a class of boys prepping for college entrance exams.

"I was convinced that they would feel like it was the bad part of school," he says, "but they had a remarkable sense of sharing that helped forge a stronger ensemble."

That sense of sharing is what has to extend itself to the actual performances. "Ensemble acting really does boil down to the actors' trusting one another," says Dean Kern, a director who is head of acting at Temple University's theater department. "From my point of view, it's really about the working relationship between actors. You get the sense that together, they're keeping this delicate ball in the air."

Sanford Robbins, head of the University of Delaware's theater department and artistic director of its professional Resident Ensemble Players, uses a sports analogy: "It's rare that an all-star team is as good as a really good regular team, even though you may pick the best players.

"In ensemble acting, there's a cohesion and harmony in the way the roles are played," he said, "and the sum is more powerful than the parts."