Uta Hagen’s Object Exercises, Explained

Your teacher says, “Bring in an object exercise next week,” and leaves it there. Or you bought Respect for Acting because everyone said to, read the chapter on the basic exercise, and then stood in your kitchen wondering what, exactly, you were supposed to do with a coffee mug.

The exercises look simple on the page. That is the trap. Making toast for two minutes is easy; making toast for two minutes while someone watches, without once showing them you are making toast, is the whole craft in miniature.

Here is the short version. Uta Hagen’s object exercises are short solo scenes built from your own everyday life. Before each one, you answer a set of questions about who you are, where you are, and what you want. Then you rehearse it until the doing is real and the showing is gone. Each exercise adds one problem, such as an entrance, an imagined wall, or an object that has to feel hot when it isn’t. Below is the list, what each exercise trains, and a plan to work through them at home.

Who Uta Hagen was, and why she built these

Hagen was a stage actor first. She won the Tony Award for The Country Girl and again for creating Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, as her Broadway credits on IBDB record. Britannica’s biography covers her stage career and her decades as a teacher.

She taught at HB Studio in New York, the school Herbert Berghof founded in 1945. Berghof invited her to teach there, they later married, and after his death she led the studio.

Her first book, Respect for Acting (1973, written with Haskel Frankel), set the exercises down. Nearly twenty years later, A Challenge for the Actor (1991) reworked them. The aim stayed the same: train the actor to behave truthfully in imaginary circumstances by starting with the circumstances you know best, your own.

The ten object exercises in Respect for Acting

The second part of Respect for Acting is called “The Object Exercises.” The Library of Congress copy of the book’s table of contents gives one chapter to each, in this order:

1. The Basic Object Exercise. Two minutes of your own life, rebuilt and played as if for the first time. Everything else grows from it.
2. Three Entrances. Coming into a room from somewhere, for a reason. It trains the moment before.
3. Immediacy. Doing something you know well as if you don’t know what comes next.
4. The Fourth Wall. Placing real, specific things in the space where the audience sits, so your eyes have somewhere true to go.
5. Endowment. Giving an object qualities it doesn’t have: a cold cup that has to read as scalding, a light suitcase that has to be heavy.
6. Talking to Yourself. The words people say when they are alone, said for a reason.
7. Outdoors. Bringing a place outside, with its air and distance, onto a bare floor.
8. Conditioning Forces. Playing a physical condition, like heat, cold, or tiredness, underneath what you are doing.
9. History. Living in another period, with its clothes, manners, and objects, researched and made your own.
10. Character Action. Carrying the same kind of work into a character who is not you.

A BYU Theatre Education unit teaches the same ten as a sequence for students. Teachers usually take them in order, since each builds on the last.

What changed in A Challenge for the Actor

The later book keeps the idea and renames or replaces most of the steps. Its table of contents lists Physical Destination, The Fourth Side, Changes of Self, Moment to Moment, Re-Creating Physical Sensations, Bringing the Outdoors On Stage, Finding Occupation While Waiting, Talking to Yourself, Talking to the Audience, and Historical Imagination. She also moved from the word “substitution” to “transference” (Backstage’s guide to her technique covers both terms). If your class uses one book, follow that one’s list.

The questions you answer before every exercise

Hagen didn’t want you to start moving until you knew your circumstances. So before each exercise you answer a checklist of questions. It appears as six steps in one of her books and as nine questions in the other, and the wording drifts between teachers. Theatrefolk’s version of the nine is a good one to work from:

• Who am I?
• What time is it?
• Where am I?
• What surrounds me?
• What are the given circumstances?
• What are my relationships?
• What do I want?
• What is in my way?
• What do I do to get what I want?

The first six build the world. The last three make it playable. “I want to drink my coffee” is weak. “I want to finish this coffee before the bus, and the coffee is too hot” gives you a want, an obstacle, and something to do about it. For a deeper look at the first few, see our guide to given circumstances.

Answer the questions in writing, in the first person, with specifics. Not “morning” but “7:40 on a Tuesday, eleven minutes before I have to leave.” Specific answers are what turn a pantomime into behavior.

How to do the basic object exercise at home

The BYU lesson frames the first exercise as rehearsing and performing a 2-minute slice of your own life. Two minutes is shorter than it sounds, which is the point: you can’t hide in it.

1. Pick a real, ordinary task with a need behind it. Making a sandwich because you’re late, looking for a lost earring before a date, folding laundry because a guest is coming. Not an event; a Tuesday.
2. Answer the questions in writing. All of them, as yourself, at a specific time and place.
3. Use your real objects and your real room, at first. You are learning what true behavior feels like before you try to recreate it anywhere else.
4. Do it for real once, and notice. Where your hands go, what you check twice, the small things you do without deciding to.
5. Rehearse it until you stop planning it. The aim is to do, not to show. If you catch yourself checking the clock because the plan says “check the clock,” you’re indicating. Find the reason you’d look.
6. Run it for someone, or for your phone. Watch it back once. Mark the moments that look performed and rework only those.

A common slip is choosing something “interesting.” A breakup phone call or a fire drill pulls you into playing emotion. Hagen’s exercises work because the stakes are small and real, and your attention can go fully to the task.

The questions applied to Masha in The Seagull

Once the exercises feel honest with your own life, the same questions open up a character. Here is the start of Chekhov’s The Seagull, in Constance Garnett’s public-domain translation:

MEDVEDENKO: Why do you always wear black?

MASHA: I am in mourning for my life. I am unhappy.

MEDVEDENKO: Why? I don’t understand. … You are in good health; though your father is not very well off, he has got enough. […]

MASHA: It isn’t money that matters. A poor man may be happy.

Source: Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, Act I, translated by Constance Garnett (Standard Ebooks edition).

Run Masha through the list. Who am I? The steward’s daughter on an estate where nothing happens to me. What time is it? Evening, just before Konstantin’s play begins; a few lines later she says “The play will soon begin,” then that it’s stifling and a storm must be coming. Where am I, and what surrounds me? A park, a makeshift stage, a man who walks miles each day to see me. What do I want? Something Medvedenko can’t give, and right now, mostly for him to stop asking. What’s in my way? He keeps talking about money.

Now you have an object exercise inside the scene. The heat is a conditioning force. Waiting for the play to start is the occupation-while-waiting problem from A Challenge for the Actor. The famous first line stops being a mood to play and becomes an answer she has given before, to a question she’s tired of.

You can read every scene of the play in our Seagull script page, and find speeches to try this on in the monologue library.

A four-week plan for working alone

Hagen’s exercises were made for a class with a teacher watching. At home, your phone camera stands in for the teacher, and a schedule stands in for the class. This starter plan covers six of the ten, one or two a week with a few short sessions each; take the rest in order after it.

• Week 1, the basic exercise. Write the questions, run the two minutes, film it, rework it. Repeat until it looks ordinary.
• Week 2, three entrances and immediacy. Keep the same room. Change only where you’ve come from and what you want next. Then run it again without letting yourself know what happens next.
• Week 3, endowment and conditioning forces. Swap one real object for a stand-in and make it hot, heavy, or fragile. Then play the whole exercise cold, or exhausted.
• Week 4, a character. Take a short scene or monologue, answer the questions as the character, and build an everyday task into it.

Want a full home routine around this, with warm-ups and cold reading? Our guide to practicing acting at home fits these exercises into thirty minutes a day.

Know the words so your hands are free

When you move from your own life to a script, a new obstacle appears: the lines. If half your attention is reaching for the next word, the endowed cup stops being hot and the storm stops coming. The behavior needs your attention free.

So once you know the scene’s circumstances, get the words solid, and let the behavior grow in rehearsal. Offbook helps with that part: upload the scene, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other character while it listens and plays the next cue when you finish your line. Hide your lines as they settle, and your attention is free for the coffee, the heat, and the man who won’t stop talking.

Questions Actors Ask

What are Uta Hagen’s object exercises?

A sequence of ten short solo exercises from Respect for Acting, each built from everyday life, from the basic object exercise to character action. They train truthful behavior with real and imagined objects before you apply it to a role. Her later book, A Challenge for the Actor, revised the list.

Are there six steps or nine questions?

Both, depending on the book and the teacher. One of her books sets out six steps and the other nine questions, and teachers word them differently. The nine cover the same ground in more detail, so they are the easier list to work from at home.

How long should an object exercise be?

The basic exercise is often taught as about two minutes; the BYU unit uses two. Short is better: it keeps you honest and makes every moment count.

Can I do Uta Hagen exercises without a teacher?

Yes, with a camera and some patience. Film each run, watch it once, and look only for moments where you showed instead of did. A class adds an outside eye, which is worth having when you can, but the exercises themselves need only you and a room.