Find the need beneath the face your character presents.
Life and work
Susan Batson is an actor, writer, director, teacher and coach whose book Truth gives you an approach to building character. You begin with a productive contradiction: what your character needs may differ from what they are willing to show. Her framework helps you connect that conflict to playable behavior.
Approach and technique
Batson’s studio statement names three tools: Need, Public Persona and Tragic Flaw. In the description of Truth, Need is an unfulfilled desire; Public Persona is the face that conceals it; Tragic Flaw concerns behavior emerging when the need and that face collide.
For a scene, this gives you questions with different jobs. What does the character need? What do they want other people to believe about them? What action becomes possible when maintaining that appearance becomes difficult? Keep the answers grounded in the text. The same behavior can have different meanings in different relationships.
A book organized around contradiction
You encounter Batson’s teaching in Truth through three linked terms: Need, Public Persona and Tragic Flaw. Those terms ask you to connect what your character wants at a deep level, what they show, and how their behavior becomes destructive when those forces collide. Batson’s work as an actor, director, writer and coach brings the framework into the practical work of interpreting and playing a role.
The framework gives you several layers to investigate without requiring you to play them all visibly at once. Your character’s explanation of an action may differ from the need driving it. Their public manner may be persuasive precisely because it has worked before. You can begin by taking that manner seriously, then examine the pressure that makes it difficult to maintain.
Three tools with different dramatic jobs
You can read Batson’s three terms as a relationship among forces, rather than three adjectives attached to a role. Need concerns the unfulfilled desire. Public Persona concerns the face presented to the world. Tragic Flaw concerns the behavior that emerges under the pressure between them. Each term asks a different question, and the scene becomes more particular when you investigate their interaction.
Public Persona is especially useful because a character’s manner can be persuasive. You do not have to treat the surface as an obviously false mask. Charm, competence or generosity may organize the person’s ordinary dealings and protect something they cannot readily admit. The public behavior can be effective for a long time. Dramatic pressure appears when it no longer obtains what the character needs.
What does the word need add to an immediate objective? You can distinguish the practical thing requested in a scene from the deeper desire that makes its outcome matter. The two may align, or a character may obtain the stated request and remain unsatisfied. That gap can explain why the encounter continues after its apparent problem has been solved. The text determines whether this reading fits a particular role.
The framework also directs you toward consequences. A contradiction becomes dramatic when it changes what your character does to another person. You can analyze the hidden layer extensively, yet the audience receives behavior, language and response. The work of interpretation is to connect those levels without requiring you to signal every analytical discovery.
Batson’s Truth gives you a named vocabulary for organizing that inquiry. You can compare more than one reading of a character and ask which explains the play’s sequence of actions with fewer forced exceptions. A useful interpretation accounts for both the person’s self-presentation and the moments that exceed it. You then have a living contradiction to pursue through the scene, with room for the partner to reveal what your analysis has missed.
Applications for actors
You take character inquiry into objectives, obstacles and behavior. A private need can sharpen what you pursue from a partner. Treat your interpretation as something to test, and choose how personally you connect with it.
Rehearsal exercise
Choose a fictional character who asks for help while trying to appear entirely capable. Write a brief answer to each question: what help is needed, what image must be maintained, and what might the character do when the two collide? Find a line or action in the script that supports each answer.
Play the scene, directing your attention toward getting the help. Avoid adding a second performance that announces the hidden need to the audience. Afterwards, ask your partner when the contradiction became visible. You can work through imagination without disclosing personal experience.
Try a second interpretation of the same character that the script can support. Perhaps appearing capable protects a job in one reading and protects a relationship in another. Play the request again with the same words. Ask what changes in your tactics when the consequence changes. This keeps the three questions active as tools for inquiry. A convincing answer on paper should still leave room for the partner, the circumstances and later scenes to complicate what you thought you understood.
Books and further study
Read Truth for Batson’s developed account of these tools. Consult the studio’s statement for how the three terms are situated in its teaching. Read the framework as a set of character questions, then check what those questions reveal in the particular play you are working on.