True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (5 page)

The casting agent, and, to the largest extent, the talent agent are unacknowledged adjuncts of the production companies and studios. They reason, and in their place you or I might reason similarly, that the actors come and go but the producers go on forever.

The producers are not interested in discovering the new. Who in their right mind would bet twenty million dollars on an untried actor? They want the old—and if they cannot have it, they want its facsimile.

These gatekeepers understand their job to be this: to supply the appropriate, predictable actor for the part. They base their choice on the actor’s appearance, credits, and quote—as if they were hiring a plumber.

If this sounds tedious, reflect that the actor himself is habituated into the process and endorses it from his first experience of it. And his first experience is the school.

The acting school and its lessons are many times harsh, but their rigor and extent is comfortable and predictable. The lessons of the stage, on the other hand, are often devastating and almost beyond bearing.

The school, like the audition process, has a clear and simple structure of commands and rewards. If, and as long as, the student propitiates the teacher, she may be disappointed but she will rarely be humiliated. To the extent that she internalizes her subscription to the system (“It is harsh, but I know in my heart it is just, or, at the very least, unavoidable”) she can enjoy freedom from anomie. If she never ventures out of the confines of the system, she can live, whether employed or unemployed, free from terror.

Teachers of “audition technique” counsel actors to consider the audition itself the performance, and to gear all one’s hopes and aspirations not toward the actual practice of one’s craft (which takes place in front of an audience or a camera), but toward the possibility of appealing to some functionary. What could be more awful?

For much of the beauty of the theatre, and much of the happiness, is in a communion with the audience. The audience comes to the show prepared to respond as a communal unit. They come prepared (and expecting)
to be surprised and delighted. They are not only willing, but disposed to endorse the unusual, the honest, the piquant. Everything the audition process discards.

Sitting in the auditorium, the audience learns not only—and perhaps not even primarily—from the stage but from one another. We all have had the experience of rehearsing a comedy, of seeing a joke fail there, only to see it later bring down a full house. The members of the audience are informed by and gain enthusiasms from one another—they come to be delighted, and to share that delight with one another.

The talent agent, the casting agent, the producer, sits in a room not to be entertained but to be judgmental. He or she sees the supplicant actor not as a friend bringing potential delight, but as a robber whose lack of skill, looks, or credits is going to deplete the precious coffers of the listener’s time. It is a terrible process, and we learn to subscribe to it in school.

The worst result of this oppression, of this false vision of our role as actors, is that we internalize it. How often have we heard, and how often have we said, on leaving a performance, rehearsal, or audition, “I was
terrible
.… Oh, Lord, I was awful.…”

What is wrong with this? One might think it is a legitimate expression of the wish to improve. But it is not. It is an expression of the wish to have pleased authority. And in these cases where the authority is absent (or, in fact, congratulatory), we elect ourselves the stern taskmaster, and beat ourselves.

Why? Because we are taught, in fraudulent schools, by exploitative “agents” and directors, that we can please only by being abject and subservient to their authority. “There are ten thousand more where you came from, and if you are not correct in your attitude, not only will you not get the part [the place in the class] but you will not even be granted an
audition
to get the part.”

Does this attitude seem familiar?

If we believe these schools, agents, and directors, we, over time, internalize and
become
that “bad parent,” and curse ourselves.

As a member of the audience, I will tell you, it is an insult to come backstage and say to the performer, “You were great tonight,” only to be told, “No, I was terrible. You should have seen me
last
week.…” Any of us who have been so corrected know that it feels like a slap in the face. Reflection would inform the actor that the correct response is “Thank you very much.” The audience didn’t come to watch a
lesson
but to see a play. If they enjoyed it, you, the actor, have done your job.

But suppose you learned something onstage, and that something will instruct or impel you to do something differently at your next performance. Well, one would hope that you learned something onstage. If you are a dedicated actor, dedicated to self-improvement, you
will
learn something. Sometimes that lesson will be simple and easy (I should not eat a meal so close to a performance), sometimes it will be momentous (My voice is a disgrace and I should retire from the stage till
I’ve fixed it), sometimes it will be life-changing (I am in the wrong company, perhaps the wrong profession). Any of these (and the gradients in between) can be acted upon.
None
will be acted upon that find their expression in self-castigating or self-loathing.

Such remarks as “I am a fraud, I am no good, I was terrible tonight” are the opposite of effective self-improvement. They are obeisance to an outside or internalized authority—they are a plea to that authority for pity for your helpless state.

But you are not helpless. You are entitled to learn and to improve and to vary. (Is it rational that each of, say, one hundred performances of a play should be, in all respects, equal?)

You will not please either yourself or others in every aspect of every outing. I have watched long runs over the years, and have heard actors say “Tonight was fine” or “Tonight was atrocious” of performances in which I could find no difference. And I’m speaking of plays which I wrote and directed, and in which I had a great stake—plays and performances I would have improved if I could have. Generally the “I’m garbage” and the “I’m brilliant” performances were the same.

Does this mean the actor is psychotic for feeling a difference? No. Some nights we feel better than others. But the actor is wrong to invest such feeling with magical significance.

The purpose of the performance is to communicate
the play to the audience. If we bear this in mind, we will be less likely to go around berating ourselves. This is a habit caused not by
aesthetic
, but by
economic
, conditions.

There are many people trying to get into the theatre. Stage and screen cannot contain all of them, so some become teachers, agents, casting people, and most of these (just as most actors) seek the real or imagined security of a hierarchical system: “I’m just trying to do my job and to please my employers.”

But the actor does not have employers. The agent and the casting person are not employers, they are, frankly, impediments standing between the actor and the audience. Does that mean they should be ignored? Well, many times they cannot be. There they are. But they, and their job, should be kept in perspective.

One does not have to “like” them, and no amount of toadying will induce them to like
us
. Again, the Stoics say: “Do you want the respect of these people? Are they not the same folk you told me yesterday were idiots and fools? Do you then want the good opinion of idiots and fools?”

Remember it.

Don’t “confess” when you come offstage. If you have gained an insight,
use
it. They say “silence builds a fence for wisdom.” To keep one’s own counsel is difficult. “Oh, how terrible I was.…” How difficult to keep those words in—how comforting they are. In saying them one creates an imaginary group interested in
one’s progress. But give up the comfort of an imaginary group. This “group” that is judging you is not real; you invented it to make yourself feel less alone.

I knew a man who went to Hollywood and languished jobless for a period of years. A talented actor. And he got no work. He came back at the end of the period and lamented, “I would have been all right if they’d just sat me down on day one and explained the rules.”

Well, so would we all. But who are “they”? And what are the rules? There
is
no “they,” and there are no rules. He posited the existence of a rational hierarchical group acting in a reasonable manner.

But show business is and has always been a depraved carnival. Just as it attracts the dedicated, it attracts the rapacious and exploitative, and these parasites can never be pleased, they can only be submitted to. But why would one want to submit to them?

The audience, on the other hand,
can
be pleased. They come to the show to be pleased, and they
will
be pleased by the honest, the straightforward, the unusual, the intuitive—all those things, in short, which dismay both the teacher and the casting agent.

Keep your wits about you. It is not necessary to barter your talent, your self-esteem, and your youth for the
chance
of pleasing your inferiors. It is more frightening
but it is not less productive
to go your own way, to form your own theatre company, to write and stage your
own
plays, to make your
own
films. You have an enormously
greater chance of eventually presenting yourself to, and eventually appealing to, an audience by striking out on your own, by making your
own
plays and films, than by submitting to the industrial model of the school and studio.

But how will you act when you, whether occasionally or frequently, come up against the gatekeepers?

Why not do the best you can, see them as, if you will, an inevitable and preexisting condition, like ants at a picnic, and shrug and enjoy yourself in spite of them.

Do not internalize the industrial model
. You are not one of the myriad of interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you’ve got something to say,
say
it, and think well of yourself while you’re learning to say it better.

T
he only reason to rehearse is to learn to perform the play.

It is not to “explore the meaning of the play”—the play, for the actor,
has
no meaning beyond its performance. It is not to “investigate the life of the character.” There is no character. There are just lines on the page.

A play can be rehearsed quickly, by a group of competent actors who know the lines, and are prepared, with the help of the director, to find the simple actions associated with them and to be arranged into an appropriate stage picture. If this is so, why squander months in rehearsal and years in school? The reason is economic.

Acting has become a profession of amateurs, a profession of the genteel class, and, by approbation, infinitely expansible. If one need not be employed to call
oneself an actor, any number can play; and so “acting” becomes a refuge for the energy and time of the privileged class, like tatting or good works.

Since there is little chance of the vast hordes of amateurs being tested in performance, their “skills” need not be demonstrably useful. They are never to be used. So these “skills,” capable of demanding the maximum of devotion, are the amateur’s friend, since, in their endless study, one can stay and play and never be tested.

I remember a billboard on a Nevada road advertising some new slot machines at a casino. The sign read B
IGGER PAY MEANS
L
ONGER PLAY
and was the most truthful piece of advertising I’ve ever seen. “We admit,” the sign meant, “you do not gamble to win. We announce, in fact, that, as you know, you
will
not win. But we offer you more of that for which you gamble: gambling time.”

The use to which the gambler puts his or her money is “time at the tables.” And the use to which the acting student puts his or her time, money, and faith is “time at the school.” It is an end in itself.

This hobby caste creates not only acolytes but their inevitable companions, priests. The priest caste—the teachers, coaches, managers, etc.—minister to those involved in this “work.” But life in the studio, in “auditioning” classes, in casting offices, is not the work of acting. Acting is bringing the play to the audience.

How can it be learned? Perhaps it cannot. Perhaps
one can but perfect a disposition. Perhaps it must be studied but cannot be taught. It has no point beyond bringing the play to the audience.

The paint-by-numbers mechanical actor judges himself and his performance constantly, and by a preordained checklist, as if acting were like rallye driving and the actor rated by how accurately he hit each checkpoint. And so the audience is robbed of any immediacy, and intimacy, of the unforeseen, of those few things, in short, those sole things capable of rendering a performance of a play superior to a reading of the text.

American schools of acting grew, in the main, from a tradition of acting as a hobby. These schools teach and reward those habits of thought and behavior which fit the student for the leisurely life of the studio, and unfit them for any chance encounter they might have with the real life of the stage—which is to say, with the audience.

The paint-by-numbers analysis of emotion memory, sense memory, character dissection, and so on, is designed for the hobbyist who can take the piece apart at her leisure with never a thought of performance. Its merit is in its potentially endless consumption of time.

Actors must be trained to speak well, easily, and distinctively, to move well and decisively, to stand relaxedly, to observe and act upon the simple, mechanical actions called for by the text. Any play can then be rehearsed in a few weeks at most.

T
he “work” you do “on the script” will make no difference. That work has already been done by a person with a different job title than yours. That person is the author. The lines written for you should be said clearly so that the audience can hear and understand them. Any meaning past that supplied by the author will come from your
intention toward the person to whom they are said
.