“and I
real?”
was
like…is
this
Jimmy Fallon had one of the heroes of the European train
episode on last night:
It’s a great story, and there’s a lesson there for actors as
well.
Notice what Anthony Sadler says happens as he was waking up:
his friends were ducking down and looking back, and then he
says he looked back and saw the gunman coming in the cabin,
“cocking an AK.” An AK-47 submachine gun, a Kalashnikov, that
is.
And his response, even though his friends were ducking and
looking back: “And I was like…is this real? Is somebody
playing a joke?”
The whole thing seemed unreal. And this sense of unreality was
potent enough that as he and his friends started to move down
the aisle to tackle the gunman, he returned to the question,
to settle it: “Both of them get up, and I just followed them,
so I was like, Ok, I guess this is real.”
Reversal is a fundamental element of drama. It’s what’s
popularly known as “twists and turns” and it basically means
something unexpected is happening. A drama in which everything
that happens is expected is not much a drama. “Predictable” is
not a word used to praise scripts. We expect a good drama to
have some surprises. And that’s what reversals are. Something
that happens that changes everything.
Often, when actors are working on a scene, I see them face
reversals, that is, unexpected radical developments in the
situations of their characters, and take them into stride way
too easily. I may see a moment of “reaction” and then it’s on
to dealing with the new state of affairs. But that’s not
actually the way we take in seismic changes in our reality,
out here in the real world. There’s a reason that the first of
Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grieving is Denial.
The first thing we want to do when we are treated to a radical
departure from what is expected is to pretend it’s not
happening. “Is this real? Is somebody playing a joke?” “You
gotta be shitting me!” But the the key to acting moments like
this, though, is not mere “reactions of disbelief”, because
reactions are not active. What is active is to seek
confirmation. We can do it verbally, with utterances like
those I just spelled out, or non-verbally, with our gaze, and,
yes, with our faces. But these verbal and non-verbal
expressions have to be directed at someone, they are a part of
the effort to gain confirmation from the partner, they are
active and dynamic, not static and merely expressive.
When this step is skipped, it gives the lie to the whole
situation, because if the change is too easily accepted, then
we, the audience, know that it wasn’t much of a change, or
that the actors were anticipating it, or that the actors had
no real expectations about how the situation would play out in
the first place. None of these scenarios are good for the
telling of the story or for the experience of the audience.
It’s often the case that people start to speak or otherwise
take action before they have fully accepted the new state of
affairs. Notice how in the above example, he says he started
to follow his friends after they moved, then he decided that
what was happening was real. Actors are often too ready to
move past the phase of getting confirmation that the new state
of affairs really is what has just been reported, and usually
to their detriment. When confronting a reversal, see how long
you can go after the reversal is announced and not accept, or
not completely accept, its reality. That means, see how long
the script will allow you to continue to seek confirmation of
the new reality. The script may force your hand at some point,
and it may not be possible to continue doubting the new state
of affairs, but find that limit point. See how long you can
maintain the effort to seek confirmation. This will make sure
that you don’t move through it too quickly and thus deny the
reality of the unreality.
the secret of their success
Japan has won three of the last five Little League World
Series.
What’s the secret of their success?
The team practices eight to 10 hours every Saturday and
Sunday. Each morning is devoted just to fielding practice.
The kids field endless bunts, and turn one double play after
another.
Ten hours a day!
“This is the Japanese way of doing sports, the same in karate
as in baseball,” he told me. “It emphasizes what we call
konjo, or grit and tenacity. Repetition is important. You’ve
got to repeat movements until you master them.”
He calls this yakyudo, the “way of baseball,” just as kendo
is the “way of the sword,” or bushido, is the “way of the
warrior.”
They all focus on honing technique until it is flawless and
instinctive. It’s this way that Omae believes led to the
team’s victory two years ago.
“We had no star players,” he says, “but our discipline and
repetition of basic plays made our defense strong and helped
us to finally win.”
Longtime readers of this blog will find these sentiments very
familiar. It’s at the heart of what Josh Waitzkin has to say
in his book The Art of Learning, which I ask everyone who
takes my class to read. Also Guitar Zero. And Malcolm
Gladwell. Betty Davis says you have to love the sweat more
than the lights.
But as many times as I have remarked upon these things, they
bear repeating. A prominent Hollywood acting teacher with a
platform on a major industry website tells students NOT to
rehearse, and says their scene partners would rather be at the
beach anyway. This is a remarkable double-whammy: a teacher
telling students not to rehearse, and then scaring them with
the prospect of social rejection at the hands of their
partners.
Actors are already up against it because the acting they
consume lets them see the lights but not the sweat. The work
is cast, costumed, coiffed, lit and edited for consumption for
an entertainment-starved public. Aspiring actors don’t see the
sacrifice that was required, the sweat that Bette Davis
mentions, behind those lights.
So telling actors not to bother with rehearsing and to worry
about whether or not their partners would rather be at the
beach is, as I have written previously, nothing short of
criminal.
There was a reason Uta Hagen her book Respect for Acting.
Telling people not to rehearse is an act of gross disrespect
for the craft. Taking class, working on scenes, bringing
obsessiveness, grit and tenacity to the class work, embracing
the breadth of challenges that acting involves, and the
difficulty of those challenges, is what respect looks like.
Take it from the Japanese little leaguers.
STOP! in the name of doing it
better
Interesting piece on NPR this morning about a photographer who
has photographed every New Hampshire primary since 1980.
What caught my interest was this:
Cole has a rule he follows when out on assignment: No matter
how crowded the press gaggle gets, he never takes a picture
while he’s touching another photographer. The point is to
force himself to think of a different approach to each shot.
Take, for instance, a campaign appearance by George H.W. Bush
at Nashua Airport in 1988: All of the other photographers
followed the then-vice president on board an airplane.
Vice President George Bush waves from the cockpit of a World
War II B-17 bomber at a quick campaign stop at Boire Field in
Nashua, N.H. on Wednesday, July 15,1987.
Jim Cole/AP
“I stayed outside, and with all the luck in the world, Bush
stuck his head out the pilot’s window and waved to
everybody,” said Cole. (click here to view the picture)
With this rule, which does not allow him to take a picture if
he is touching another reporter, (in other words if he is
stuck in a scrum of reporters all taking the same picture )
Cole is practicing what in the Alexander technique is called
inhibition. While inhibition might not sound like a good
thing, in the context of the Alexander technique, it is. In
the Alexander technique, inhibition is the ability to suppress
one’s habitual response to things in order to open up the
possibility of a different kind of response. Since many of our
physical habits are the results of trauma or other kinds of
negative input, it’s important for actors to engage with their
physical habits and develop new habits that maximize
expressive capacity and presence.
While the Alexander technique works with physical habits, in
class at Andrew Wood, we work in part with mental habits,
particularly the habits that we have involving how we
understand and frame human motivation. Knee-jerk attempts at
stating the motivations of characters often entail negative
judgments and are focused on goals about the future (what we
call plot objective), rather than on the present moment. At
Andrew Wood, we learn to “inhibit” these initial ways of
looking and thinking, and to find ways of understanding and
framing what characters are after that are empathic and
oriented towards the here and now of relationship rather than
the future. Actors are forever enjoined to “be in the moment”,
but aren’t asked to think about motivation in ways that
promote this focus them on the here and now of interpersonal
dynamics.
It’s what makes this kind of difference.
resting bitch face and the
badge of appeasement
Was reading this article on “Resting Bitch Face”, about the
phenomenon where women whose faces seem to express hardness or
harshness when the women in question are in fact merely
pensive or spaced out. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and one
I think I may suffer from, although it’s supposedly only a
female phenomenon. I am often told that I look “serious”. I
guess the point is that women are expected to appear friendly
and reassuring, and when they don’t, well, they get accused of
having Resting Bitch Face.
I have some thoughts about Resting Bitch Face and acting, but
they are still crystallizing, so I think I’ll hold off on
going into them at the moment. But something else in the first
article, above, caught my eye. It was part of a discussion of
how women tend to smile more than men, that they are expected
to smile, so they then get unfairly taken to task for RBF. :
Nancy Henley, a cognitive psychologist, has theorized that
women’s frequent smiling stems from their lower social status
(she called the smile a “badge of appeasement”). Still others
have pointed out that women are more likely to work in the
service sector, where smiling is an asset.
Now, this is a sociological observation about the place of
women in society, and how smiling is a response to that. But
here’s the thing: I see a lot of unhelpful smiling during
scene work in class. Of course, people smile in real life, so
there is no reason they shouldn’t in acting as well, but the
problem arises when the smiling is part of the actor’s
response to the situation of acting a scene, rather than the
character’s response to the evolving circumstances in the
scene.
Stanislavsky famously began with the insight that actors face
self-consciousness: because of the awareness of being watched,
scrutinized, judged and evaluated by an audience, they are
inhibited, sometimes paralyzed, unable to enact what is asked
of them. This situation is complicated by the fact that
scripts call for actors to enter into fraught, charged, or
awkward situations, and to make themselves vulnerable in those
situations. So there is real danger in acting a scene. Often,
what I observe is that actors who are uncomfortable with
confrontation (and this is a lot of us, since acting comes at
least in part from a desire to please, to entertain) will tend
to pull their punches by smiling as they speak. If it happens
once in a while, it is not a concern, but when it happens
chronically, it is. This smiling is actually physical tension
that hardens the face and drains it of responsiveness. Also,
after an actor speaks, she needs to receive off of her
partner: she needs to take in the partner’s response, both
verbal and non-verbal, and she needs to be fully absorbed in
that receiving. Every fiber of her being, every cell, very
nerve, needs to be tuned into the partner. The held smile
means that a part of the actor’s physiognomy is abstaining
from that process of receiving, it is holding back. In the
same way that the smile effectively undermines the process of
sending, what we call “throwing the ball”, it also means that
the actor is not fully entering into receiving either.
In other words, it’s a problem.
But the good news is, it’s usually an easy fix. Once the
actor’s attention is drawn to it, he (and this is a problem
for both sexes, RBF notwithstanding), can usually make the
adjustment pretty easily, and the results can be rather
dramatic.
see what I mean? (eisenberg
vs. segel)
(This post continues my last one.)
Quick: which of these two actors seems more alive to you in
this moment?
If you said Eisenberg, on the left, look again, and this time,
pay attention to what is happening inside of you when you
look.
See what I mean?
I am always astounded at the power of still photographs to
reveal exactly how much an actor has going on.
If you said Eisenberg initially, you may have been attracted
to a certain alertness and sense of expectation in his face.
And none of that is bad (as long as it isn’t preventing
something from happening in a deeper place, which can
sometimes be the case). But what makes an actor compelling,
involving, gripping, what makes their performance sticky, so
that it stays with you and you wake up the next morning and
it’s still there, somehow inside you, is the still-waters-run
-deep quality evident in Segel, on the right.
My belief is that this has to do with mirror neurons: when we
watch someone perform, our nervous system is replicating, for
us, what they are experiencing, in our mirror system. That’s
why the screen kiss is such a phenomenon, we all get to
experience the thrill of the kiss, without any of the baggage
or risk that may come with it.
When an actor is viscerally activated, in his or her core
(visceral means “pertaining to the gut, the belly”, believe it
or not), and we watch him, we get viscerally activated as
well, thanks to our mirror system. So we experience the actor
in a deeper way, and he or show leaves a more lasting
impression than otherwise.
The miracle is how do we know this? We can’t see inside the
actor’s gut. But I believe that we are exquisitely attuned,
through evolution, to recognize this visceral activation, this
vulnerability, perhaps because it signals that someone might
be about to do something unexpected, something totally out-ofcharacter, perhaps something dangerous. How do we recognize
it? Through careful attention to the face, the eyes, and to
the voice, and how it is produced, and where in the body it
comes from. It’s something we learn to do so well because we
were so entirely dependent on our parents as small children,
and pleasing them meant everything. So it’s something we do
without even being aware, when we do it.
Try it. The next time you consume some acting, whether on TV,
at a movie, or even onstage, as you watch the acting, watch
yourself, your core, that space behind your navel where you
get butterflies in the stomach, and see which actors get in
there, and which don’t. It will likely be an eye-opener.
the truth is not what you
think it is
The word “truth” is something actors hear a lot about.
Meisner’s famous formulation that acting is “living truthfully
under imaginary circumstances” is invoked again and again, by
me and many other acting teachers, whether they teach Meisner
or not. Actors come to understand that truth is synonymous
with good acting. But is that really saying anything?
What is truth, anyway?
I think a lot of people equate truth with believability. But
this is begging the question. What makes an audience believe
something?
The answer that I think most people walk around with in their
heads is that a performance has to have the appearance of real
life. It has to look like real life. It has to be life-like.
It has to be natural. It has to appear real.
But let’s think about that for a minute.
A few observations:
I ran into some recent grads from the acting program at
the Yale School of Drama not too long ago. I asked them
about the curriculum there (it’s been a couple of
decades since I walked the hallowed halls there). I was
interested to learn that while they were introduced to a
number of movement modalities during their time there,
the only one that they were required to study for all
three years while they were there was the Alexander
technique. And what is the Alexander technique? Well, in
a nutshell, it’s a practice of bringing an awareness of
the design of the skeleton and muscles to everyday life,
so that as we move through our days, we do so with less
effort and greater ease than we would otherwise employ.
Of course there is a lot more to it than that, but
that’s my nutshell description. Anyway, Yale requires
all actors to study three years of it, and that is the
only movement form that actors are required to study for
three years. Why? Because actors who make use of it are
just better than they would be otherwise. Alexander work
has a dramatic effect on a performer’s work. BUT, in
real life, most people are going through their days
without any awareness of the Alexander technique, so
they are just using their habitual ways of moving, all
of the ways of moving that the Alexander technique
teaches them to leave behind. So how is this life-like?
The Alexander technique helps actors to appear more
“real”, more “natural”, more “life-like” than they
otherwise would, anyone who has witnessed its effect on
actors can attest to that. But yet people in real life
have all of the constricting bad habits that the
Alexander technique is meant to help people to overcome.
Is a puzzlement, as the King of Siam would say.
Perennially, in class, I see people in scenes shift
their weight on to one leg or the other, so that their
hip is “popped”, like a teen-ager. By asking them to
shift their weight so that their weight is evenly
distributed over their two feet, their performance
immediately improves. I could talk about why this is (
the hip-popping is a stepping out of the physical
attitude of engagement and confrontation, that is, of
relationship, it’s a signal that says “I am not a
threat” to their scene partner), but that’s not really
material here. What is material is that standing with
the weight evenly distributed invariably makes their
work better. And yet, people in “real life” sometimes to
pop their hip and shift their weight on to one foot. In
fact, I just recently heard an Alexander teacher explain
to people why that wasn’t a good thing to do. And she
wouldn’t have had to explain it if people didn’t do it.
So what gives? Standing “over the center” makes people
more engaging to watch, as well as, somehow, more real
to watch, and yet people in real life do stand with
their weight not over their center, but rather shifted
to one side.
Another one: eye contact. Actors often want to disengage
visually from their partners before they start to speak.
Often, this is about trying to remember their line (the
eye contact is distracting and makes it harder to
concentrate on recalling the line), and then there is
also the matter that if I am looking into someone else’s
eyes, they are looking into mine, which is scary,
because of that business about the eyes being the window
of the soul, and all that. It’s intimate. So it’s less
scary, in the moment when starting to speak, to express
one’s self, to look away. Here’s the thing: when I stop
said actors from doing this, when I ask them to always
make eye contact with the partner before starting to
speak, and then I insist on it, and stop them every time
they don’t do what I’ve asked and call attention to
that, until they make the shift into eye-contact-when
starting-to-speak, their work gets much better! Again, I
could get into the reasons for this (they are finding
the impulse to speak in the partner by looking at them
when starting to speak), but that’s not really the
point. The point is that they get indisputably better,
more engaging to watch and more authentic, when they
submit to this discipline, and yet, and yet, people in
real life look away when they start to speak. They do it
often! So, again, what gives?
In all three of these cases, a technical, physical adjustment
was requested of actors, and the adjustment made them better,
more engaging, more real. And yet, the habits they were
letting go of were things that people do in real life! How can
that be?
In the history of people thinking about art, there was a
dispute about whether art was like a mirror or a lamp. Prior
to the late eighteenth century, art was (grossly speaking)
understood to be a mirror: it showed you what life was like.
It reflected the surfaces of life. It reproduced life.
But in the era of Romanticism, this was broadly challenged:
the Romantic ethos looked at art as more like a lamp, as
something that was a source of illumination, something that
allowed us to see something not normally visible, something
beneath or behind the surfaces of life, something that the
surfaces ordinarily conceal.
The notion of truth that most people walk around with, I
think, is based on the idea of “believability”. Believability
asks: do I (in the audience) believe this? Does this look
enough like life that I can suspend my disbelief? Has the
actor successfully reproduced the surfaces of life in such a
way that I accept what she is doing? This is the actor as
mirror: have I made my performance look enough like real life
so that it is believed?
But what the examples above suggest is that there is another
criteria for truth, which we might call expressive power. An
actor who can, while reproducing the surfaces of life, also
reveal the depths, has this expressive power. All of the
adjustments I talked about above make it more possible for us,
as the audience, to experience what is happening in the core
of the actor, in ways that we don’t really even realize as we
watch (mirror neurons! ). We can see into the actor. So acting
is not just reproducing the surfaces of life, but doing so
while simultaneously letting us experience the depths. A
friend of mine, a very good actor and a playwright as well,
once said she thought that a good actor was someone who could
make themselves transparent. I remember being surprised by
this at the time, but now I know exactly what she means.
Real people aren’t transparent in everyday life, in the way
that a great actor is in enacting a life prepared by a writer.
The actor is a lamp, not a mirror. He lets us see something
ordinarily invisible.
I think this helps us understand what Stanislavsky meant when
he said that acting is “the life of the human soul receiving
its birth through technique.” Most of us don’t walk around
being aware of our own souls, or anyone else’s, all the time.
That’s what art and spiritual practice help us to recall and
reconnect with. What Stanislavsky was saying is that the actor
is someone who, as she enacts a story, pulls back the curtain
and gives us an experience of her soul. She shines a light.
And that, my friends, is the honest truth.
the trouble with “method” and
emotional memory
Most people, actors or not, I’d venture to guess, are familiar
with the basic idea of emotional memory: an actor tries to
relive an episode from his or her own life in order to conjure
the emotional state called for in a scene or even a moment.
It’s an idea that’s fairly simple to grasp, and seems
intuitively appealing: why shouldn’t the actor be able to make
use of her own experiences in realizing the emotional life of
the role? And in fact it became the basis of the Method, as
evangelized by Lee Strasberg.
One reason, articulated by Stanislavsky and by Stella Adler
and Sanford Meisner, is that the emotional memory takes the
actor out of the present moment of the scene he is attempting
to play. If he is focused on something that happened years
ago, he is not relating to the actors he is in the scene with.
Actors everywhere understand that it’s important to be in the
moment, and so this explanation of why emotional memory is
problematic carries some weight.
I think there is another, very important reason that emotional
memory is problematic. And that is its superficiality. Let me
explain.
We’ve all had the experience of having a fight with someone
close to us. When we’re in the throes of the fight, we can
feel righteous anger coursing through us: this person has
failed us in some absolutely egregious way, and the anger we
feel is vigorous, often overwhelming.
Then, time passes. Some hours. A day. A few days. A week. A
month. We begin to feel something else towards this person: a
mixture of regret at having fought, sadness at feeling
disconnected, and some measure of tenderness towards the
person in question.
Now, if that that moment, someone said to us, “Well, what
about the anger? What happened to that?”, we would likely just
shrug our shoulders and say “I was just mad. It passed.” And
then if we’re asked, “So which is the truer, deeper reflection
of how you really feel about this person, the anger or the
emotions you’re feeling now?”, we would almost certainly say
the feelings we are feeling now are truer and deeper. And I
think we can recognize that the emotions we are feeling now,
some distance from the fight, don’t just feel truer and deeper
because we happen to be feeling them now: they are our
deepest, truest feelings about the person in question.
So what we can see here is that our emotional life has two
layers, or it appears to at least: one, the in-the-moment,
transient emotional states that arise and vanish in the roughand-tumble of a day in the life. And then the deeper layer,
where we can sense the true significance that people have for
us, their true importance for us as ongoing partners in the
pursuit of connection and satisfaction.
Emotional memory deals only with the surface emotional states:
I’m mad, I’m joyful, I’m worried, I’m confused, etc. It
doesn’t touch the deeper layer that is the source of feeling
in the superficial layer. We get mad at someone BECAUSE they
are someone we count on and have been supported by in the
past, but in THIS moment he or she is failing to have our back
or letting us down or betraying us, etc.
The deeper layer is what is known by psychologists as
attachment. We become attached to people as ongoing sources of
good stuff in our lives. We can have a range of emotions about
someone in any given encounter, but none of that changes
deeper way in which we recognize them as important sources of
value for us.
The approach to acting that I teach attempts to bring the
actor into connection with the deep attachment to the partner.
This attachment finds expression through need, or what we call
underlying objective. The actor attempts to be in touch with
the deep need for connection that is the basis of the
attachment. Then, as the partner is encountered in the scene,
and sh*t goes down in the crucible of encounter, a whole host
of feelings can arise and transform from moment to moment in
response to those developments, and they arise organically
from the deep sense of connection we have in the relationships
in our lives.
With emotional memory, the actor has to come up with one
memory for one section of the scene where jealousy is called
for, and another where fear is called for, and another where
arousal is called for, etc. This is an entirely inorganic
process, where the actor is manipulating her own emotional
state based on what she thinks the scene should look like, as
considered from the perspective of the observer. It’s not a
performance that arises organically from the give and take
with the partner or from a connection to the essence of the
relationship itself.
Which brings us to a basic truth about drama: it’s about what
happens between people, not about what happens inside the
actor. Emotional memory focuses entirely on what happens
inside the actor, and disregards relationship as an essential,
defining component of drama.
There may be specific kinds of challenges for which emotional
memory is useful (“He enters, weeping.”), but as the basis of
an actor’s process, it misses the mark. Entirely.
the actor: child AND adult
What draws many of us to acting is the “play-acting” aspect of
it: we like to dress up and pretend to be other people, with
other people who like to do that as well. There is something
wonderfully child-like about all of this, and in fact, Earle
Gister, one of my teachers at the Yale School of Drama, liked
to quote Nietzsche: “Man’s maturity: to have regained the
seriousness that he had as a child at play.” To be able to
abandon ourselves to a world of the imagination, and allow our
inner lives, our moments of triumph and exaltation, and our
moments of devastating grief and loss, to be laid bare in the
process. This process of fearlessly sharing ourselves with
child-like abandon is what draws most of us to this prodigious
pursuit.
However, on the way to being able to do that is an enormous
amount of hard work. The acting we consume on TV and in the
movies has been air-brushed, so to speak, with musical
underscoring, lighting, editing, and all manner of show biz
magic. That’s not to say it isn’t good, but great care has
been taken to make sure that it looks effortless.
Acting isn’t effortless, though, most of the time, and
learning to act is even less so. Learning to act necessarily
means being brought face-to-face with your limitations, so you
can begin to see the need to get beyond them, and to
understand how what is being offered you in acting class helps
you to get beyond them. In any endeavor, acting or otherwise,
this process of being confronted with your current limitations
is difficult but absolutely unavoidable. There is no growth
without this, no matter how you slice it, no matter what
technique you are doing. And not everyone wants to go through
that process, frankly, or at least acting, they learn, is not
the craft for which they wish to subject themselves to this
process.
The ability to face limitations, persevere, and ultimately
move past them is an adult faculty. Children have to do some
of it, as part of the process of growing up, but we tend to
limit the amount of this that we ask children to subject
themselves to, I suppose because growing up is hard enough,
and because we worry that children don’t yet have the
emotional resilience to handle this process.
Facing
limitations,
failing,
and
getting
up
again
and
soldiering on: the ability to do this is something that we
think of as a form of maturity. Whether this is in a martial
art, or in learning a musical instrument, or a foreign
language, or whatever: the tenacity and the ability to keep
going in the face of failure is a hallmark of the grown-up.
The real word is a tough place for anyone lacking some measure
of this.
And there are other ways in which acting, in spite of its
child-like essence of make-believe, asks for adult
characteristics. In a previous post, I wrote about how adults
are more sensitive to context in the way they understand
things than children are. This is very important for actors,
as every scene is embedded in a larger narrative, the full
script, that functions as a context. But beyond that, acting
asks for the readiness to take on a complex task that requires
an array of abilities. We must be able to read closely and
carefully, from the character’s point of view. We must
envision, with all of our senses, the people, places and
things that make up the imaginary world of the role, and
invest in that world, make that world of make-believe matter
to us in the ways it needs to. We have to identify compelling
goals to pursue as the character, that help us to become
absorbed with our whole being, heart, mind, and body, with the
scene at hand. We must identify the major milestones or shifts
in the scene, and understand how we arrive at them and how we
are changed by them. We must have the ability, as we develop a
performance, to maintain the shape of that performance, so
that important parts of it don’t disappear from one rehearsal
to the next (a mentor of mine in graduate school, who had won
awards directing Off-Broadway, said that it was ten years out
of graduate school before she felt she was working with actors
with whom she didn’t have to live in terror of what was going
to deteriorate in any given performance. Ten years! Out of
graduate school!)
There is a breadth and complexity to what I have described
above that requires maturity to undertake and sustain. This is
not child’s play, any more than playing a Mozart Concerto is,
or playing a tournament tennis game.
It’s these “adult” aspects of acting that surprise many
beginning students of the craft. Again, after all, on TV they
make it look so easy.
So we need both: we need never to lose our child-like ability
to abandon ourselves to the present moment of make-believe,
and we also need the very “adult” ability to craft our work.
Both are indispensable.
“Plans are worthless but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight
D. Eisenhower
“The readiness is all.” – Hamlet
do you really want to know?
I write often on my blog about how getting better as an actor
is generally not a matter of tips and tricks, but rather a
matter of learning a craft, something that takes time,
persistence, dedication, and patience.
However, here is a simple thing that can make a difference:
whenever you have a line in a scene that is phrased as a
question, in other words, a sentence that ends in a question
mark, TREAT IT AS A REAL QUESTION! All the time, I see actors
treat lines written as questions as merely rhetorical
questions. This is almost never a good idea.
Why not? Because a rhetorical question is by definition, a
question that is not intended to elicit an answer.
And why is that a problem? Because the poser of a rhetorical
question is assuming that she knows how the person on the
receiving end of the question will answer.
And why is that a problem? Because it’s making a decision
about the UNIMPORTANCE of input from the partner at some point
in the scene. And that is never a good thing to do. Usually,
when actors unconsciously decide to make a question
rhetorical, it’s so that they can get on to the next line
without having to do anything like look for an answer from the
other person, that is, to receive off of them, as we say in my
classes.
But that receiving is what exactly has to be happening at each
moment.
“Treat it as a real question. Wait for an answer.” is a simple
directive that often achieves powerful results very quickly.
Just treating a line written as a question as a real question
is already a good thing to do, but a further next step is to
ask yourself: if this question that my lines include is in
fact a real question, how might that prompt me to reconsider
how I have understood the scene? This can be a powerful
nutcracker for getting at what is really going on in the
scene. Usually the choice to make a question rhetorical gives
aid and comfort to some (unhelpful) assumptions an actor has
made about the scene. The question of how the scene would be
viewed differently if what were taken to be rhetorical
questions were actually treated as real questions has
revolutionary potential in the mind of the actor, but she has
to be open to seeing things differently.
I can hear you thinking: can you give me an example?
Consider this speech of Stanley’s from Streetcar:
“When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common. How
right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the
snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off
them columns and how you loved it, having them colored lights
going! And wasn’t we happy together, wasn’t it all okay till
she showed here?”
The speech ends with a question: “wasn’t it all okay till she
showed here?”
Now do the thought experiment. How would you speak the above
paraphrase as a rhetorical question, which is the way we are
all likely to be tempted to say it? In other words, if you
know that it was all ok until Blanch showed up?
Now — what would it be like to really ask that question as a
real question, to which the answer was important?
Do you see how it changes the scene?
Do you?
By speaking the speech as a real question, Stella’s answer —
to the all-important question of whether the relationship was
sound or not — matters. Which is a much more high-stakes, much
“hotter” way of treating that moment then treating her answer
as a foregone conclusion. That would make the speech veer
perilously close to being a lecture, something that has no
place in a scene like this.
PS While in real life people do ask rhetorical questions, it’s
better to err on the side of caution as an actor and assume a
question is a real one, and then let a director tell you
otherwise if she wants the line delivered as a rhetorical
question. We as actors are tempted to treat questions as
rhetorical, and not for good reasons, so the best rule of
thumb is to always treat questions as real rather than
rhetorical.
contested space, or, getting
out of your head (and into
the room)
Drama is about what happens between people (not about what
happens inside them).
Actors are made to worry a lot about being “in their heads”.
However, anyone who has worked closely with actors for any
length of time, and has some understanding of what good acting
is, knows that actors themselves aren’t very good judges, most
of the time, of whether or not they are in their heads. That’s
why the “outside eye”, whether it’s a director, a teacher, a
coach, or a friend with a discerning eye, is so crucial for
the actor’s work.
One thing actors can do to increase the odds of not being in
their head is to have a *vision* for how the character wants
the scene to unfold. A vision is something like an objective,
only a having a vision means that the actor can actually
picture what it would look like to get their objective. What
would have to happen, in real time, for the objective to be
met. What would be said, what would be done. And the what
would be done part *includes* what would happen *spatially*:
does it mean someone would give ground? vacate the space
entirely? offer a chair? get down on bended knee before you?
what would the accomplishing of said objective look like in
the space in real time?
Knowing what that would look like, *having* said vision is one
thing. It’s equally important that you *play to win*, which
means actively wishing for that vision to become a reality,
and then engaging with the scene partner(s) to make it so, in
a take-no-prisoners kind of way. In other words, like you mean
it.
Another important piece of this is what Uta Hagen calls
*destination*. What she is talking about with destination is
the way that certain movements become *necessary*: for me to
get what I want, it becomes *necessary* that I go sit next to
you on the couch. For me to get what I want, it becomes
*necessary* that I go and look at the bookshelf, so as not to
appear too needy, or too confrontational. Destination means
the way in which physical positions in a space seem to call
out to us, to demand that we move to occupy them. But it’s
also true that physical positions *outside* of a space can
demand movement as well: as it becomes clear that you are not
going to join me on my mission, I may start to feel a
tremendous urge to go to my friend’s place across town, who
may be a more persuadable candidate. The first step of which
is making my way out of your apartment and out onto the
street, where I can get an uber. So if the scene is in your
apartment, then the door to your apartment starts to *call to
me*, it beckons, it extends a kind of tractor beam that pulls
me toward it. This tractor beam may switch on, even at a low
intensity, long before the point in the scene when I actually
go through the door. At the first flicker of a suggestion of a
hint that you might not be the one who is going to join in my
crusade, I may start to feel that tractor beam, but at a very
low intensity. Still, that keeps the door to the apartment
within my “circle of concentration”, as Stanislavsky called
it, within the contours of my awareness. Then, as more signals
emerge, as it starts to seem less and less likely that you are
going to become Robin to my Batman, that destination of the
door “heats up”, the tractor beam becomes stronger, and harder
to resist. It’s only at the moment when you break out into a
rousing a capella rendition of “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, that I
surrender to the tractor beam and walk out the door– (and this
is important:) on my way (hopefully!) to something better.
So here’s the thing: if you have a vision, and/or a
destination is exerting its power over you, and therefore that
destination is on your mind. then you are *not in your head.*
You are *in the space*. Your awareness is on the space and
what should happen in it, or is partly involved with something
outside the space whose siren’s song is calling you to it. But
you are not thinking about what you look like, what emotion
you should have, how you should say a line in order to have
said emotion, etc. You are not *managing your selfpresentation*, which is what being in your head really means.
You are engaged, mentally and physically, with the other
actors and with the space around you. And that physical
engagement is important: to use Uta Hagen’s word, that
physical engagement results in the *animation* of the actor’s
body. The body becomes oriented and engaged with the
circumstances and the unfolding scene, rather than being stiff
or fidgety. The actor becomes a *contender* within the space
of the scene. And that is always something to behold.
Actors perennially want getting out of their heads to be
something that *just happens* if they *focus* and are
determined and want it badly enough. That’s not what it is,
and that’s a good thing, although it may take a while to get
that. In the end, it’s much better that you can identify
things to focus on and then focus on them and have *that* be
the way you get out of your head, rather than having it be a
matter of just wanting it really badly and being determined
and focusing. Because everyone else out there wants it really
badly, and plenty of them have determination, and more than a
few can focus on something. But they don’t all have real
techniques that can help them get the job done.
And that means that if you do what it takes to get those
techniques, which is, admittedly, hard work, but nonetheless,
if you do what it takes to get those techniques, you *can*
distinguish yourself. And that’s a very good thing indeed.