True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (6 page)

“Good day,” on- or offstage, can be an invitation, a dismissal, an apology, a rebuke; it can mean anything, in short. Its meaning will come from the intention of the speaker toward the spoken-to. Similarly, onstage, a line’s “meaning”
to the audience
is conveyed immeasurably quicker than, with more finality and force than, and, finally, supplants, any intention at explanation or embellishment on the part of the actor—it is conveyed by the actor’s intention.

The tradition of oral interpretation, text interpretation, etc., may be all well and good for those addicted to the pleasures of the English Department, but these jolly disciplines have nothing whatever to do with the interchange between actor and audience. The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor. If the speaker wants to do
nothing
to or about the other actor but wants only to interpret the text, the audience loses interest in the play. Such a performance at the amateur end of the scale is called stupid and stodgy; at the critically acclaimed end of the food chain, it is called Great Acting, which differs from acting, in the main, by being polite and predictable.

All the “connections” an actor makes between parts of a text are made to fill the time and mind of one with a little too much leisure. If the actor learned the lines and went on that night without the “textual work,” the performance would only improve drastically. The work on the text, finally, shields the actor both from anxiety about his performance and from the necessity of paying attention to his colleagues while onstage.

The watchful, inventive, wary, cunning, brash individual nature intended for the stage is supplanted, in the text-analyzer, by the academic. Who wants to watch that person on the stage?

All of us have had the experience of the teacher who both bores and
knows
that he bores. “Yes,” he says, “this material may be
boring
, but I Have Done the Work,
and I sentence you to hear it.” The actor who devotes herself to a fuller understanding of the textual significance of Madame Ranyevskaya’s references to “Paris” does similarly. Those connections have or have not been made by the author. The author’s contribution is the text. If it’s good, it doesn’t need your help. If it’s lacking, there’s nothing you can do to aid it. Recognize the fact and learn to live with it—
the words and their meaning are not your responsibility
. Wisdom lies in doing
your
job and getting on with it.

Here, again, is your job: learn the lines, find a simple objective like that indicated by the author, speak the lines clearly in an attempt to achieve that objective. Text analysis is simply another attempt by the amateur to gain admittance to our pubs.

Now let us be earnest and sincere and pretend for a moment that a great desire to perform good works is equal to artistic merit. This is the error of those who invest time endeavoring to “believe.” It is not necessary to believe anything in order to act. This delusion is attractive because and only because it allows the deluded to “work hard.”

Historically, the artist has been reviled and feared because his or her job has nothing to do with hard work. There’s nothing you or I could do to enable us to paint like Caravaggio, or to skate like Wayne Gretsky. We could work all day every day for millennia, and we would never achieve that goal. But students are given to
believe that they will be able to act like Fill-in-the-Blank if and when they master the impossible. If, for example, they can just learn to “believe.”

But we cannot control what we believe.

Religions and political creeds which degenerate in that direction demand belief. They receive from their adherents not belief (which cannot be controlled) but a certain more-or-less well-meaning avowal of hypocrisy: “I proclaim that I have mastered that over which I know I have no control, that I am part of that brotherhood which proclaims similarly, and that I am opposed to all who do not so proclaim.”

The strength of these groups is directly proportional to the individual’s knowledge of his own failure to fulfill its goals—it is the individual’s attempt to conceal his shame which binds these groups together. This is the grand adhesive of the acting school. It is the reason for “the fourth wall.” The so-called Fourth Wall is a construction of someone afraid of the audience. Why should we strive to convince ourselves of the patently false?

There is not a wall between the actor and the audience. Such would defeat the very purpose of the theatre, which is communication and communion.

Respect for the audience is the foundation of all legitimate actor training—speak up, speak clearly, open yourself out, relax your body, find a simple objective; practice in these goals is practice in respect for the audience,
and, without respect for the audience, there is no respect for the theatre; there is only self-absorption.

The urge to “believe” grows from a feeling of individual worthlessness. The actor before the curtain, the soldier going into combat, the fighter into the arena, the athlete before the event, may have feelings of self-doubt, fear, or panic. These feelings will or will not appear, and no amount of “work on the self” can eradicate them.

The rational individual will, when the bell rings, go out there anyway to do the job she said she was going to do. This is called courage.

A
director calls and asks, “You have a character in the script say ‘I’ve been in Germany for some years.’ Exactly how many years would that be?” It seems a legitimate question, and, indeed, it is. It is a legitimate desire to know how to play the scene. But the legitimate answer is “I can’t help you.”

First, the playwright does not know “how many years.” The play is a fantasy, it is not a history. The playwright is not
withholding
information, he is
supplying
all the information he knows, which is to say, all the information that is germane. “The character” did not spend any time
at all
in Germany. He never was
in
Germany. There
is
no character, there are just black marks on a white page—it is a line of dialogue.

An actual person who said he had been in Germany would be able to answer the question “For how long?”
You
are an actual person, but the character is just a sketch, a few lines on the page; and to wonder of the
character “How many years might he have spent in Germany?” is as pointless as to say of the subject of a portrait, “I wonder what underwear he has on?”

And no answer the questioner might receive could, finally, be acted upon. “I spent some years in Germany” cannot be acted differently than “I spent twenty years in Germany.” It can only be
delivered
differently.

There is a school of theatrical thought which asks the player to, in effect,
interpret
each line and statement for the audience, as if the line were a word in a dictionary, and the actor’s job was to perform the drawing which appeared next to it—to say the word “love” caressingly, the word “cold” as if shivering. This is not acting. It is Doing Funny Voices. It is the old Delsarte technique of the nineteenth century, come again to comfort us with its schematicism.

The Delsarte books of that bygone day showed photographs of the correct pose to adopt for each emotion and degree thereof: grief, mild grief, severe grief; diversion, amusement, hilarity, and so on. The responsible actor needed only to determine which emotion was required for each scene, and turn to the page indicated and Bob’s your uncle.

The notion—art without the untidiness of uncertainty—survives, as this book suggests, in many forms, and one of them is oral interpretation. This is a high school event in which the competitor mounts the podium to embellish snippets of speech with age-old clichés of delivery.

It survives also in the “intellectual” school of script interpretation. “I want to know everything there is to know about this character and the times in which he lived,” the actor says. “And if the author wrote, ‘… did smite the Sledded Polack on the Ice,’ I want to know the crux of the dispute between Poland and Denmark which gave rise to that line, and I want to know the depth of the ice.’ ”

Sounds like a good idea. But it ain’t going to help. It will not help you in the boxing ring to know the history of boxing, and it will not help you onstage to know the history of Denmark. It’s just lines on a page, people. All the knowledge in the world of the Elizabethan era will not help you play Mary Stuart.

You have to learn the lines, look at the script
simply
to find a simple action for each scene, and then go out there and do your best to accomplish that action, and while you do, simply open your mouth and let the words come out however they will—as if they were gibberish, if you will.

For to you, to the actor, it is not the words which carry the meaning—it is the actions. Moment to moment and night to night the play will change, as you and your adversaries onstage change, as your conflicting actions butt up against each other.
That
play,
that
interchange, is drama. But the words are set and unchanging. Any worth in them was put there by the author. His or her job is done, and the best service you can do them is to
accept
the words
as is
, and speak them simply and
clearly in an attempt to get what you want from the other actor. If you learn the words by rote, as if they were a phone book, and let them come out of your mouth without your interpretation, the audience will be well served.

Consider our friends the politicians. The politician who trots out the “reverent” parts of the speech “reverently,” the “aggressive” parts “staunchly,” the “emotional” parts “feelingly”—that person is a fraud, and nothing of what he or she would have you believe is true. How do we know we cannot trust them? We know because they are lying to you. Their very delivery is a lie. They have lied about what they feel in order to manipulate you.

We do not embellish those things we care deeply about.

Just as with the politician, the actor who puts on Funny Voices is a fraud. She may, granted, have a “good idea” about the script; but the audience isn’t looking for a person with a “good idea” about the script. They are looking for a person who can
act
—who can bring to the script something they couldn’t have learned or imagined from reading it in a library. The audience is looking for spontaneity, for
individuality
, for strength. They aren’t going to get it from your tired old interpretive powers.

Here is what I have learned in a lifetime of play-writing:
It doesn’t
matter
how you say the lines
. What matters is what you mean. What comes from the heart goes to the heart. The rest is Funny Voices.

I
f it is necessary for us to devote the energy to believe that we are a Great Actor, or a character actor, or an ugly actor, or a charming actor, that energy will not be put into the task of observation and action on the things we have learned … let us accept ourselves and set about our task. If it is necessary for us to believe we live in turn-of-the-century Russia or that that woman who last week played our sister Anya is this week Arkadina our mother, that energy will not be devoted to getting our play done. All of acting, all parts, all seemingly emotion-laden scenes are capable of and must be reduced to simple physical actions calling neither for belief nor for “emotional preparation.”

Most plays are better read than performed. Why? Because the feelings the play awakens as we read it are called forth by the truth of the uninflected interactions
of the characters. Why are these interactions so less moving when staged by actors? Because they are no longer true. The words are the same, but the truth of the moment is cloyed by the preconceptions of the actors, “by feelings” derived in solitude and persisted in, in spite of the reality of the other actor.

An “intellectual” company of actors becomes a cabal of hypocrisy. “I will agree not to notice what you are truly doing, because to do so would interfere with my ability to trot out my well-prepared emotion at the appropriate instant. In return, you must agree not to notice what
I am
doing.” So the investment in “emotion” makes the play not a moment-to-moment flow of the real life of the actor, but, instead, an arid desert of silly falsehoods enlivened periodically by a signpost of “fake” emotions.

But we need not hobble after false emotions. We are not empty. We are alive, and emotion and feeling flow through us constantly. They are not susceptible to our conscious mind, but they are there.

There is nothing we feel nothing about—ice cream, Yugoslavia, coffee, religion—and we do not have to add these feelings to a play. The author has already done that through the truth of the writing, and if he has not, it is too late.

Be a man; be a woman. Look at the world around you: onstage and off. Do not forsake your reason. Do not paternalize yourself. Your true creative powers lie in
your imagination, which is eternally fertile, but cannot be forced, and your
will
, i.e., your true character, which can be developed through exercise.

To bring to the stage a mature man or woman capable of
decision based on will
is to make of acting not only an art but a
noble
art.

In so doing, you present to the eyes of a demoralized public the spectacle of a human being acting as she thinks right irrespective of the consequences. What is required is not the intellect to “help the play,” but the wisdom to refrain.

O
ften, as students, we are struck with a sense of guilt because we cannot enter into that state of
belief
we think is required of us. We speak of “getting” the character. “Getting” the role. Of that magic time when we were onstage or in class and we somehow “forgot” that we were in a play or in a scene. And we feel that it is required of us to dwell always in this state, this magical state of psychosis: to dwell in a state where we “forget” that we are actors in a play and somehow “become” the characters. As if acting were not an art and a skill but only the ability to self-induce a delusional state.