True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (2 page)

I do not assume that the doctor, or the musician or dancer or painter, strives first to bring himself to a “state,” and only then directs his efforts outward. I assume that practitioners of these crafts put their attention
on the legitimate demands of their profession and of their clients; and I, as a client, patient, audience member, do not expect these professionals to burden me with their life story.

The actor is onstage to communicate the play to the audience. That is the beginning and the end of his and her job. To do so the actor needs a strong voice, superb diction, a supple, well-proportioned body, and a rudimentary understanding of the play.

The actor does not need to “become” the character. The phrase, in fact, has no meaning. There
is
no character. There are only lines upon a page. They are lines of dialogue meant to be said by the actor. When he or she says them simply, in an attempt to achieve an object more or less like that suggested by the author, the audience sees an
illusion
of a character upon the stage.

To create this illusion the actor has to undergo nothing whatever. He or she is as free of the necessity of “feeling” as the magician is free of the necessity of actually summoning supernormal powers. The magician creates an illusion in the mind of the audience. So does the actor.

Eisenstein wrote that the true power of film came from the synthesis
in the mind of the viewer
of shot A and shot B: e.g., shot A, a teakettle whistling; shot B, a young woman raises her head from a desk. The viewer is thus given the idea “rising to renewed labors.” If shot A is a black-robed judge being handed an envelope, he opens it, and clears his throat; and shot B is the same as
before—a woman raising her head from a desk—the audience creates the idea “hearing the verdict.”

The action of the woman is the same in each case, her snippet of film is the same. Nothing has changed except the juxtaposition of images, but that juxtaposition gives the audience a completely new idea.

Eisenstein theorizes, and I believe his theory is borne out in example, that the idea so created is
vastly
stronger—i.e., more effective—than simply “following the protagonist around”—i.e., using the
camera
to tell the story rather than using the cut; that this method of storytelling is superior because it is the viewer who creates the idea—who, in effect, tells herself the story.

Similarly, it is the juxtaposition in the mind of the audience between the spoken word of the author and the simple directed-but-uninflected action of the actor which creates the ineluctable idea of character in the mind of the audience.

——

Most acting training is directed at recapitulating the script. Actors are told to learn how to “be happy,” “be sad,” “be distracted,” at those points in the script or performance where it would seem the “character” would so be. Such behavior is not only unnecessary, it is harmful both to the actor and to the audience.

My philosophical bent and thirty years’ experience inform me that nothing in the world is less interesting
than an actor on the stage involved in his or her own emotions. The very act of striving to create an emotional state in oneself takes one out of the play. It is the ultimate self-consciousness, and though it may be self-consciousness in the service of an ideal, it is no less boring for that.

The actor on the stage, looking for or striving to create a “state” in himself can think only one of two things: (a) I have not reached the required state yet; I am deficient and must try harder; or (b) I
have
reached the required state, how proficient I am! (at which point the mind, ever jealous of its prerogatives, will reduce the actor to (a).

Both (a) and (b) take the actor right out of the play. For the mind cannot be forced. It can be suggested, but it cannot be forced. An actor onstage can no more act upon the order “Be happy” than she can upon the order “Do not think of a hippopotamus.”

Our emotional-psychological makeup is such that our only response to an order to think or feel anything is rebellion. Think of the times someone suggested that you “cheer up,” of the perfect young person your friends wanted to fix you up with, of the director who suggested you “relax.” The response to an emotional demand is antagonism and rebellion. There is no exception. If one were truly able to command one’s conscious thoughts, to summon emotion at will, there would be no neurosis, no psychosis, no psychoanalysis, no sadness.

We cannot control our thoughts, nor can we control our emotions. But perhaps “control of emotion” has a special case-specific meaning upon the stage. Indeed it does. It means “pretending.”

I don’t care to see a musician concentrating on what he or she feels while performing. Nor do I care to see an actor do so. As a playwright and as a lover of good writing, I know that the good play does not
need
the support of the actor, in effect, narrating its psychological undertones, and that the bad play will not benefit from it.

“Emotional memory,” “sense memory,” and the tenets of the Method back to and including Stanislavsky’s trilogy are a lot of hogwash. This “method” does not work; it cannot be practiced; it is, in theory, design, and supposed execution supererogatory—it is as useless as teaching pilots to flap their arms while in the cockpit in order to increase the lift of the plane.

The plane is designed to fly; the pilot is trained to direct it. Likewise, the play is designed, if correctly designed, as a series of incidents in which and through which the protagonist struggles toward his or her goal. It is the job of the actor to show up, and use the lines and his or her will and common sense, to attempt to achieve a goal similar to that of the protagonist. And that is the end of the actor’s job.

In “real life” the mother begging for her child’s life, the criminal begging for a pardon, the atoning lover pleading for one last chance—these people give no attention
whatever
to their own state, and all attention to
the state of that person from whom they require their object. This outward-directedness brings the actor in “real life” to a state of magnificent responsiveness and makes his progress thrilling to watch.

On the stage, similarly, it is the progress of the outward-directed actor, who behaves with no regard to his personal state, but with
all
regard for the responses of his antagonists, which thrills the viewers. Great drama, onstage or off, is not the performance of deeds with great emotion, but the performance of great deeds with no emotion whatever.

Now, will the outward-directed actor not be, now and again, “moved”? Certainly, as will anyone in any circumstance, giving all of his or her attention to a task—but this emotion is a by-product, and a trivial by-product, of the performance of the action. It is not the point of the exercise. The bogus politician strives for verisimilitude. Roosevelt, on December 7, 1941, had more important things to do.

——

The simple performance of the great deed, onstage or off, is called “heroism.” The person who will not be swayed, who perseveres no matter what—that hero has the capacity to inspire us, to suggest that we reexamine our self-imposed limitations and try again.

In politics, in sport, at work, or in literature, that hero suggests through selflessness that we can be better
than we are. The liar, the pretender, the self-promoter, the false performer full of crocodile tears, jingoism, cheap patriotism—that person may compel our admiration for a moment, but will subsequently leave us unsure, angry, and degraded.

Similarly, onstage, the Great Actor, capable of bringing herself to tears, may extort our admiration for her “accomplishment,” but she will never leave us stronger; she has made us pay a price, and made us pretend we like it, but we leave the theatre moved only by our capacity to be moved.

Well, then, how did the Method “greats” rise to prominence, if not through their studies?

Through the gifts which God gave them, through experience, and in spite of their studies—to quote Fielding, “Education being proved useless save in those cases where it is almost superfluous.”

Actors almost without exception pursue a course of study. As all have passed through
some
“training,” and as a small but predictable percentage of them will have been graced with a predisposition for the stage, therefore a small percentage will reflect glory on
some
institution. I suggest, though, that there is no cause-and-effect relationship—it is as if Corsica, claiming Napoleon, recommended herself as a training ground for emperors.

And, of course, the Actors’ Studio, in the fifties, arrogated to itself some fine talents. The Studio, however,
chose
them; it did not
make
them. The best actors,
passing through a rigorous and extensive auditioning process, were admitted to the Studio—an admittance deemed a great honor. Why would the Studio, and why should the actor, demean the operations of instruction? Administrative self-interest and filial piety would insure that they would not; but I suggest that they, the accomplished actors, young, vital, talented, and hearty, succeeded and succeed, at the Studio and elsewhere,
in spite of
their training.

Stanislavsky was certainly a master administrator, may have been a brilliant director and/or actor, and was widely heralded as a theoretician. But I say that his contribution as a theoretician was that of a dilettante, and has, since his day, been a lodestone for the theoretical, I will say the
anti
practical, soul. For amateurs. For his theories cannot be put into practice.

Like their coeval harness-mate, psychoanalysis, they can demand fealty and long-term devotion, but they rarely, if ever, show demonstrable results. Again like psychoanalysis, they command the time and attention of many who would otherwise be hard put to fill an idle hour; and, to complete the conceit, they, neither of them, tend toward closure, i.e., a completion of a course of action/study—for such closure would deprive the devotee of an enjoyable occupation.

The professional performs for pay. Her job is to play the piece such that the audience may understand it—the self-respecting person keeps her thoughts and emotions to herself.

The paint-by-numbers dissection of the play into emotional oases is the hobbyhorse of those whom chance or mischance has freed of the necessity to make their living on the stage.

Y
ou readers are of a generation that would like to stay in school. The world is, as usual, a frightening place to enter for all save the precious few impaired by inherited security There was perhaps for a time in this country a fairly secure promise of a career for a small segment of the bourgeoisie, and now even that is gone and good grades and a little family money can no longer assure one of the sinecure in law or medicine. And further, for the player—that is, for the man or woman who is interested in a career on the stage—there never was such a security.

You will encounter in your travels folks of your own age who chose the institutional path, who became the arts administrators rather than the actors, the casting agents rather than the writers. These folks chose to serve an institutional authority in exchange for a paycheck, and these folks are going to be with you for the
rest of your life, and you actors and writers and people who come up off the street, who live without certainty day to day and year to year are going to have to bear with being called children by these institutional types; you will, as Shakespeare tells us, endure “the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.”

It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to a craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.

Part of the requirement of a life in the theatre is to stay out of school. The old joke has the young woman in her bedroom as a visitor at a castle in Transylvania when a vampire appears in the middle of the night. The young lady grabs two spoons off the night table, forms them into a cross and thrusts them at the vampire, who responds,
“Vil gurnisht Helfin,”
which is Yiddish for “It ain’t gonna help.” And the same is true of school.

Past vocal and physical training, and the most rudimentary instruction in script analysis—all of which, by the way, can be acquired piecemeal through observation and practice, through personal tutoring, or through a mixture of the above—such acting training will not help you. Formal education for the player is not only useless, but harmful. It stresses the academic model and denies the primacy of the interchange with the audience.

The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.

Like the belief of the terminally ill in medicine, the belief of the legitimately frightened in the educational process is a comforting lie.

Young people ask if they should go to graduate school in the theatre, as they ask if it is a good idea to go to law school to improve their minds. (A question testing the limits of irony.) Alice, when in Wonderland, asked the caterpillar which road she should take, and the caterpillar responded by asking her where she wanted to end up. That’s a question you might ask yourself.

If you want to be in the theatre, go into the theatre. If you want to have made a valiant effort to go into the theatre before you go into real estate or law school or marry wealth, then perhaps you should stay in school.

The skill of acting is finally a physical skill; it is not a mental exercise, and has nothing whatever to do with the ability to pass a test.

The skill of acting is not the paint-by-numbers ability to amalgamate emotional oases—to string them like pearls into a performance (the Method). Nor is it the mastery of syntax (the academic public speaking model). The skill of acting is like the skill of sport, which is a physical event. And like that endeavor, its difficulty consists to a large extent in being much simpler than it seems. Like sports, the study of acting consists in
the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.