If you speak just one or two phrases from across a room, you will likely start with your jaw, or your voice will get stuck in the throat. The voice might momentarily become louder, but it quickly becomes tight; the jaw is held hard, the shoulders elevate, and the sound comes out of you like the line has lost clarity. Speaking on a stage, however, is not just about projecting your voice to be heard, but using breath, resonance, and diction to send that information forward to the audience.
For actors just beginning their career, this instinct to shout is a common one, but it is not necessarily the correct one. Shouting is a way of projecting that might actually obscure the character’s intent because a loud, shouted line becomes the actor’s one tone and does not differentiate a question from a command, a threat, or a private confession. Breath support, conversely, allows actors to control volume and volume control. By using breath support correctly, your voice can get bigger, smaller, faster, or slower all while staying connected to the scene in front of you.
If you are going to work on projection, look at where you are drawing in your breath before you start speaking. A sharp lift of the chest and elevation of the shoulders can make it difficult to breathe and cause the voice to get stuck high in the body and upper jaw. Try this: Take a silent inhale through the mouth while keeping the ribs and body low and expanded without over-exaggerating any kind of performance. Next, read one sentence out while exhaling. You do not necessarily want to use a big breath for every line, but rather you want to not let the line fall apart because you have finished exhaling.
To practice breathing with a single sentence taken from a monologue, read your script out to a small group, pick one sentence and identify a place on the wall to direct your attention for your scene partner. Speak the sentence one time in a conversational tone, keeping a clear diction. Speak the sentence one more time using a slightly bigger sound and continue to aim at your point of focus. Speak the sentence one more time using a bit more space while you keep your attention directed to your scene partner, keeping your voice from getting too loud and from straining the throat. If the sound of the line is too coarse or too loud, or if the sound of the voice ends in a drop rather than an ascent, then use more breath and a slightly smaller voice.
This diction is important to the idea that projecting is not about volume. It is about diction. If your line does not carry across the room without using volume, that is because you were unable to hear that line, or to understand the meaning, or perhaps both. When an actor speaks through their diction, they have the tendency to stop using final consonants, especially in words that end with consonants such as t, d, k, s, and m. Learning how to articulate your consonants can help you understand the meaning of the scene even with small amounts of volume, and helps actors who use their voice when performing dialogue in order to listen to, and not interrupt, each other.
Speaking is just as much about pacing as breath support. When an actor cannot hear a line, they are going to speak faster to make sure that it gets in their head. Taking just a small pause between your beats to breathe before a line can allow for your meaning to land. If you do not have a pause when a breath is needed, it can cause the actor to rush the line rather than pause as the character. It allows the actor to have an active pause in which the actor is not pausing because they do not know what to do next; they are pausing so that their character can decide, resist, react, choose an action, or simply do something that will be active during the scene.
The best indicator of whether you are doing this properly is not that all your lines sound big but that your voice is steady, and your line is easy to hear without too much strain. When you are doing a rehearsal, note what your body does after you say your lines. Does your throat hurt? Is your jaw stuck? Do your shoulders keep going up? If so, then you are pushing through and your sound will not carry. But if you can use your breath to support a line and keep that line easy to hear and clear with the objective, your sound may reach a bit further but your voice can still belong to your character.