Uta Hagen was a German-born American actor who spent decades teaching at HB Studio in New York, and her two books on acting are still standard reading in classes around the world. The nine questions come from the second of them, A Challenge for the Actor, published in 1991. They are a checklist for building a character's world from the inside, and their great strength is that each one produces something you can actually play.
The questions are short and the answers are where the work is. Below, each question is explained in plain terms and answered for one running example, so you can see how they stack up into a character.
The nine questions
- Who am I?
- What time is it?
- Where am I?
- What surrounds me?
- What are the given circumstances?
- What is my relationship?
- What do I want?
- What is in my way?
- What do I do to get what I want?
Notice two things about the list. First, every question is in the first person. You answer as the character, using "I," which keeps you inside the person and stops you judging them from outside. Second, the order moves from the world inward: identity, time, place and surroundings come first, and want, obstacle and action come last. By the time you reach the questions that drive the scene, the earlier answers have given them weight.
Each question explained, with an example
The running example is Blanche DuBois in the first scene of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche arrives at her younger sister Stella's cramped apartment in New Orleans with a suitcase and nowhere else to go. The facts below come from the play; the first-person answers are the kind of thing Blanche's actor might write.
1. Who am I?
Everything about the character's identity: name, age, job, education, background, beliefs, how they see themselves. Start with what the script gives you and add only what you need. Blanche: "I'm Blanche DuBois, an English teacher from Laurel, Mississippi, the older of two sisters from an old family that once owned a plantation called Belle Reve. I think of myself as a lady, and I need everyone else to think so too."
2. What time is it?
Time at every scale: the year, the season, the day of the week, the hour, and sometimes the minute. Each layer changes behavior. Early morning makes people slow or brisk; a Friday night is different from a Monday morning. Blanche: "It's early May, just getting dark. The late 1940s. Stella isn't home when I arrive, so I have time alone in her place before she comes back."
3. Where am I?
The place, from wide to narrow: country, city, neighborhood, building, room. What kind of place it is and what it means to you. Blanche: "Elysian Fields, a poor street in New Orleans near the river and the railroad tracks. My sister's apartment: two rooms, and only a curtain between them. Nothing like the house we grew up in."
4. What surrounds me?
The immediate environment in detail: objects, light, sound, smell, temperature, weather, other people nearby. These are the things you can touch, look at and use, and they give you behavior. Blanche: "Piano music from a bar around the corner. Neighbors sitting out on the steps. Noise and heat. I'm dressed all in white, far too nicely for this street. Inside, there is a bottle of whiskey, and I find it before my sister gets home."
5. What are the given circumstances?
What has happened, what is happening now, and what is expected to happen: past, present and future events that bear on the scene. For a full treatment, see given circumstances in acting. Blanche: "Belle Reve is gone, and I haven't told Stella yet. I'm telling people I'm on leave from school because of my nerves. The truth is that I've lost my job, and I've come here because there is nowhere left to go. Stella has married a man I've never met."
6. What is my relationship?
Your relationship to everyone in the scene, and also to the place, the objects and the events. Hagen's version of this question is broad on purpose. Blanche: "Stella is my baby sister. I love her, I resent her for leaving me at home to watch everyone die, and I need her more than I can let her see. Her husband, Stanley, is a stranger. This apartment frightens me. The whiskey is the only thing in it I trust."
7. What do I want?
The character's need in the scene, framed as something you can pursue. This is the objective. Make it something the other person can give you, so you can tell whether you are getting it. Blanche: "I want Stella to tell me I can stay."
8. What is in my way?
The obstacle. It can be the other person, the situation, or something inside you. Good scenes usually have more than one. Blanche: "There's no room: two rooms, no door, no privacy. Stella is happy in her marriage, and I'd be in the middle of it. Then there's everything I can't let her find out, and my nerves, and the drink I have to hide."
9. What do I do to get what I want?
The actions. These are what you do to the other person, moment by moment, and they change when one stops working. Physical actions count too. A list of acting action verbs helps here. Blanche: "First I charm her: hugs, fuss, a flood of talk. When I let slip what I think of this place, I cover it with a joke. When she asks about school, I dazzle her with talk of nerves. And when she gets near the subject of Belle Reve, I attack: she left, and I stayed and buried them all."
How to use the nine questions on audition sides
With a full script and weeks of rehearsal, you can answer each question at length, in writing. With three pages of sides and a day's notice, you need a faster version.
Mine the sides first. Read them twice and note every fact. Many of the first six questions are partly answered on the page, especially in the scene heading and the first lines of action.
Answer questions 7 to 9 in full. Want, obstacle and actions are what casting will see. Write each in a sentence.
Answer 1 to 6 quickly and specifically. A line each. Where the sides are silent, choose. "I don't know what time it is" gives you nothing; "it's the end of a double shift" gives you a body.
Check for contradictions. Read the scene once more against your answers. If any answer fights a line in the scene, change the answer.
The whole thing fits on one sheet of paper. With practice, it takes ten to fifteen minutes.
Common mistakes with the nine questions
Answering in general terms. "Where am I? A kitchen." A specific answer gives you behavior: whose kitchen, how clean, whether you feel welcome in it. Hagen's whole approach rests on detail.
Answering in the third person. "She wants Stella to let her stay." The moment you slip into "he," you start describing the character from the outside. Keep it to "I."
Stopping at the facts. Some actors answer the first five thoroughly and run out of energy before the last three, which are the ones that make the scene move. If you are short of time, start with 7 to 9.
Writing a novel. The questions can turn into an excuse for pages of invented biography. Keep what you will use. If an answer does not change how you say a line or what you do with your hands, it can go.
Where the questions fit in the bigger picture
Hagen's questions sit squarely in the tradition that grew out of the Stanislavski system: given circumstances, objectives, obstacles and actions are all ideas Stanislavski developed. What Hagen added was a clear, ordered checklist an actor can use alone, and an insistence on concrete, personal, first-person detail. Her earlier book, Respect for Acting (1973), covers related ground with a shorter set of steps, and the nine questions are a fuller version of the same idea.
They are also only one stage of the work. Once the questions are answered, you still need to get the character into your body and voice and play it against another actor. For how the questions fit into that larger process, see how to build a character.
More questions
What book are Uta Hagen's nine questions in?
A Challenge for the Actor, published in 1991. Her earlier and better-known book, Respect for Acting, published in 1973, covers related ground with a shorter set of steps. Many acting classes teach the nine questions directly, so you may meet them before you read either book.
Why does Hagen ask the questions in the first person?
Because the point is to answer as the character, from inside. Asking what does he want keeps you outside, judging. Asking what do I want puts you in the character's shoes and makes the answers personal and specific, which is what you need to play them.
Do you have to answer all nine questions every time?
For a full role, it is worth working through all nine. For a short audition, the last three (what do I want, what is in my way, what do I do to get it) do most of the work, with quick answers to the others filling in the picture.
Who was Uta Hagen?
A German-born American actor and one of the most influential acting teachers of the twentieth century. She taught for decades at HB Studio in New York, and on Broadway she originated the role of Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Are Uta Hagen's questions the same as Stanislavski's?
They grow from the same tradition. Hagen's questions turn ideas from Stanislavski's system, such as given circumstances, objectives and actions, into a practical checklist an actor can work through on their own. The emphasis on detailed, first-person answers is distinctly hers.