TPP1111 – Acting II is a 3-credit continuation of beginning acting, following TPP1110 Acting I. Where the first course establishes fundamentals — relaxation, concentration, sensory work, basic scene study, and the willingness to be watched — the second course moves into sustained work on text: analyzing a script for what a character wants, building a role across a full scene, and working with a partner over time rather than in isolated exercises.
The shift is real and students feel it. Acting I largely asks a student to stop performing and start behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances. Acting II asks them to do that while serving a playwright's text, which introduces constraint: the words are fixed, the given circumstances are the author's, and the work is to make those choices specific, active, and repeatable. Repeatability is itself a major theme — a moment that happened once by accident is not yet craft.
Content covers script and character analysis — given circumstances, objectives, obstacles, tactics, beats, and the through-line; action-based acting — playing a verb rather than an emotion, and the difference between the two; partner work — listening, responding, and moment-to-moment adjustment; scene study — rehearsal process, blocking, and building a scene over weeks; monologue work — selection, analysis, and performance; the actor's instrument — continued vocal and physical training, breath, projection, articulation, and physical characterization; emotional availability and the techniques that support it safely; style and period at an introductory level; rehearsal discipline — preparation, notes, and professional behavior; audition technique — material selection, preparation, and the audition room; and self-evaluation — giving and receiving critique.
Offered at approximately 14 Florida institutions with theatre programs.
Florida's performance market is unusual and larger than its reputation. Orlando is one of the largest markets for live performers in the United States because of the theme parks, which hire actors, character performers, improvisers, singers, and stunt performers year-round with benefits. Add the cruise industry out of Miami and Port Canaveral, a growing film and television presence, and professional regional theatres in Sarasota, Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, and West Palm Beach.
Worth stating precisely, because the numbering is often misread. In Florida's Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit denotes the year in which the course is normally offered — 1 for the first year, 2 for the second, 3 for the third, 4 for the fourth — not how well it transfers.
Separately from transfer, SCNS equivalency is keyed to the course number. A program that requires a specific number is satisfied by that number from any participating institution. A different number with similar content still transfers as credit, but the receiving program decides whether it fills that particular requirement or counts as elective credit. That is a curriculum question to settle with an advisor — not a barrier to the credit transferring.
Florida runs beginning acting under two parallel numbering families, and students transferring between institutions are regularly caught by it:
Both are current, both are "beginning acting," and institutions choose one family or the other. This is the same variation that affects prerequisites for directing (TPP2300C), which accepts either introductory acting number depending on the institution. Both families are lower division and transfer transparently; but a receiving program built on the other family may count TPP1111 as elective credit rather than toward its Acting II requirement, so confirm which numbers your intended program uses. Confirm the articulation before relying on it, and if you have a choice, take the family your intended transfer institution uses.
The central technical idea, and the one that separates Acting II from Acting I. Beginning actors try to produce feelings: to be sad, to be angry. Emotions summoned directly are unreliable, do not repeat, and read as false from the audience. Trained actors instead pursue an objective — something they want from the other person — through tactics, which are verbs: to charm, to threaten, to shame, to seduce, to plead. Emotion arrives as a byproduct of genuinely wanting something and being blocked.
The practical test is diagnostic. If a student cannot state their character's objective as an active infinitive with the partner as the target ("to make her admit she lied," not "to be upset"), the scene will not work no matter how much feeling is applied. Instructors will keep returning to this, and students who adopt it early progress much faster than those who keep trying to manufacture emotion.
The most common practical failure in this course. Scene work is assigned in partnerships, and the work happens in independent rehearsal — typically several hours per scene per week, outside scheduled class time, coordinated between two students with different schedules and jobs.
Two consequences. First, you are accountable to another person: a missed rehearsal harms your partner's grade as well as your own, and unreliability is remembered far beyond the course, because casting decisions in theatre programs are made substantially on reputation for professionalism. Second, be off book early. An actor still holding a script cannot listen, cannot make physical choices, and cannot respond; memorization is not the work, it is the precondition for the work. Instructors typically set an off-book deadline well before performance for exactly this reason.
Acting training asks students to be vulnerable, and the field has substantially revised its practices in recent years. Two things students should know they are entitled to expect.
Intimacy choreography. Scenes involving physical intimacy, kissing, or simulated violence should be staged with the same specificity as a fight call — choreographed, consented to in advance, rehearsed the same way each time, and de-roled afterward. "Just see what happens" is no longer an acceptable approach, and the Intimacy Directors and Coordinators standards are the reference. A student may decline physical contact and propose an alternative staging.
Emotional recall. Techniques that ask an actor to import personal trauma into a scene have fallen out of favor and are considered risky; contemporary training generally prefers imaginative substitution and given circumstances, which are safer and more repeatable. A student who feels an exercise is pushing into personal territory they did not consent to should say so — to the instructor, or to a dean if that is not workable. This is not fragility; it is current professional practice.
Acting classes run on public performance followed by immediate public feedback, which is a genuinely different classroom experience and takes adjustment. The useful reframe: a note is information about the work, delivered so the work can improve, and receiving it well — listening, thanking, trying it rather than explaining why you did what you did — is itself a professional skill that directors evaluate. Students who argue with notes acquire a reputation quickly. The same applies in reverse: learn to give critique that is specific and about choices ("I didn't believe you wanted anything in the second half") rather than evaluative about the person.
Classroom work alone does not develop an actor. Audition for departmental productions, student films, and community theatre from the first year — being cast, rehearsing under a director, and performing for an audience teaches things a studio cannot. Florida offers a specific and underused opportunity here: SETC and the Florida Theatre Conference hold unified auditions where dozens of theatres, theme parks, and cruise lines cast in a single weekend. Students frequently get their first paid work there, and preparing for it is a productive use of the audition unit of this course.
TPP1111 follows TPP1110 and typically precedes intermediate and advanced acting, characterization, and style courses, as well as directing (TPP2300C), for which it or its equivalent is a prerequisite. It is commonly paired with voice and movement training (TPP2110-adjacent numbers vary), and with production participation (TPP2190C Theatre Rehearsal and Performance). Students planning a B.F.A. should know that those programs generally require an audition or portfolio review for admission regardless of coursework, so building audition material now is directly practical.
Generated September 1, 2026 · Updated September 1, 2026