True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (8 page)

The greatest performances are seldom noticed. Why? Because they do not draw attention to themselves, and do not seek to—like any real heroism, they are simple and unassuming, and seem to be a natural and inevitable outgrowth of the actor. They so fuse with the actor that we accept them as other-than-art.

It was said of African-American sports figures and entertainers that they had “natural ability.” This was a code of WASP America—a sop and an insult to greatness, which meant “They are shiftless and lazy and have succeeded through a fluke.” Similarly, the industrial-serfdom model of art wants to both endorse and define “hard work” as if and because such an endorsement
permits the speaker to believe that, given the time, she could have made a similar accomplishment.

Emotion memory and sense memory are paint-by-numbers. They perpetuate the academic fallacy that, yes, yes, inspiration, bravery, and invention are very well, but they are not quantifiable for the purposes of the university, and so, cannot be art. What nonsense. Acting, like any art, can be learned, finally, only in the arena.

One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water—at which point the only “theory” which is going to be useful is that which keeps one’s head up. Just so with acting. The job of the actor is to communicate the play to the audience,
not
to bother it with his or her good intentions and insights and epiphanies about the ways this or that character might use a handkerchief—these are the concerns of second-class minds. And the lessons of the audience disabuse all but the most fatuous of the desire to “help.”

Acting is a physical art. It is close to the study of dance or of singing. It is not like the study of mechanical drawing or literature to which the academics would reduce it.

Let the politicians have their fixed smiles and their crocodile tears, let them be the unabashed promoters of their own capacity to feel. Let us be circumspect and
say the words as simply as possible, in an attempt to accomplish a goal like that delineated by the author—and then both our successes and our failures can have dignity.

W
hen you tell a joke, your choice of what to include and what to exclude relates solely to the
punchline of the joke
. Those things which tend toward the punchline are included; those things which are purely ornamental are excluded. One does this naturally, as one knows the punchline is the essential element. A joke holds our attention because we assume, as audience, that all elements presented to us are essential.

In a well-written play, and in a correctly performed play, everything tends also toward a punchline. That punchline, for the actor, is the
objective
, which means
“What do I want?”
If we learn to think solely in terms of the objective, all concerns of
belief, feeling, emotion, characterization, substitution
, become irrelevant. It is not that we “forget” them, but that something else becomes more important than they.

Take the joke: “A man goes into a whorehouse. A
run-down, weatherbeaten building nonetheless possessing a certain charm. Once, when the street was a residential block, the building, no doubt, housed a middle-class family—a family with aspirations, trouble, and desires not unlike our own.…” We see that all this, beautiful though it may be, is irrelevant
to the joke
. Not irrelevant
in general
, not
unbeautiful
, but irrelevant
to the joke
. What we are being presented with may be a magnificent essay, but we know it cannot be a joke, and that the teller is misguided.

She wanted to “help.”

How do we free ourselves from the misguided wish to “help”? To free ourselves from having to decide whether something is
effective, beautiful
, or
germane
, we ask the question “
Is it essential to the
action?” and all else follows. In so doing, we choose not to manipulate the audience,
though we might
, we choose not to manipulate the
script
, though we might; and we choose not to manipulate
ourselves
, though we might; and we find, by so doing, that the audience, the script, and ourselves function better. What we are doing is eschewing
narration
. If we devote ourselves to the
punchline
, all else becomes clear.

The punchline is
the action
.

Think of it as a suitcase. How do you know what to put in the suitcase? The answer is, you pack for where you want to go.

——

Anyone can turn on a TV program fifteen minutes into it and know exactly what is going on, and who did what to whom. But television executives insist on including fifteen minutes of narration in the script. Anyone can look at a couple across the lobby of a hotel and tell more or less what they are talking about and how they feel about each other. You don’t need narration in the writing of a play, you need action. Just so, in the acting, you don’t need portrayal, you need
action
.

Again, what is this
action
? The commitment to achieving a single goal. You don’t have to become more interesting, more sensitive, more talented, more observant—to act better. You
do
have to become more active. Choose a good objective which is fun, and it will be easy. Choose something that you
want to do
. The impulse to
play
, to
imagine
, got you interested in theatre in the first place. You knew, as children, that the game had to be fun. You played “War” or “Marriage” or “Lost in the Woods”—you did not play “Root Canal.” Choose a fun action. You remember how.

Actions rehearsed and performed grow stronger. Because they are fun. You can rehearse that goodbye speech to your girlfriend or boyfriend fifty times and it is still fun. That’s all the mystery there is to the “objective”—it is an action which is fun to do and is something like that which the author intended.

While you are intent on an
objective
, you do not have to compare your progress to that of your peers, you do not have to worry about a
career
, you do not have to
wonder if you are doing your job, you do not have to be
reverent
to the script—you are at work. Not only is it the simple solution to a seemingly complex problem, it is the right solution. Not only is it the right solution, it is the only solution.

A
ny system built on belief functions through the operations of guilt and hypocrisy. Such a system, whether of acting training, meditation, self-improvement, etc., functions as a pseudo-religion, and is predicated on the individual’s knowledge of his or her own worthlessness. The system holds itself out as the alleviator, cleanser, and redeemer of the guilty individual.

Now, none of us is free of self-doubt, and none of us is free of guilt. We all have thoughts, feelings, episodes, and tendencies which we would rather did not exist.

A guilt-based educational system, which is to say, most acting training, survives through the support of adherents
who were guilty before they signed up
, who came to classes and failed (how could they do otherwise, as the training was nonsense), and were then informed that their feelings of shame—which they brought
in
with them—were due to their failure in class, and could be
alleviated if and only if the student worked harder and “believed” more.

Faced with nonsensical, impossible directions (“Feel the music with your arms and legs”; “Put yourself into the state you were in when your puppy died”; “Create a Fourth Wall between yourself and the audience”), the victim can choose one or both of the following choices: to strive guiltily to fulfill the demands, or to claim, falsely, that she has succeeded in doing so.

Both voices keep the student tied to the institution, the first out of guilt, and the second out of a (correct) apprehension: “I have succeeded here, but I fear my merit, like the soft currency of a bankrupt country, is dispensable only in these limited surroundings, and will not transfer to the outside world” (the stage).

Curiously, the state these systems profess to cure—anxiety, guilt, nervousness, self-consciousness, ambivalence—is the human condition (at least in the postindustrial age) and, coincidentally, the stuff of art. Nobody with a happy childhood ever went into show business. The states enumerated are what impelled you to go into the theatre in the first place. Psychoanalysis hasn’t been able to cure them in a hundred years, and an acting school isn’t going to cure them in two easy terms. They are part of life and they are part of our age and, again, they are at the
center
of not only your, but the universal, longing for drama.

You went into the theatre to get an explanation. That is why everyone goes into the theatre. The audience,
just like you, came to have its anomie, anxiety, guilt, uncertainty, and disconnectedness dealt with. Your responsibility to them is this: deal with your own.

Your fear, your self-doubt, your vast confusion (you are facing an ancient mystery—drama—of course you’re confused) do not
mar
you. At the risk of nicety, they
are
you. Sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich or an academician won’t do the trick, if the trick is to bring the play to the audience.

What
will
do the trick? Well, as in any situation where one is lost, it is helpful to acknowledge one’s state. We can say, “I’d be able to orient myself if I just knew where I was”; or “I’ll go on a diet as soon as I’ve lost some weight”; or “I’ll begin to
seriously
attempt to understand the art of the actor, and the requirements that art makes on me, as soon as I know what I’m doing.”

When you accept that you
don’t
know what you are doing, you put yourself in the same state as the protagonist in the play. Just like him, you are faced with a task whose solution is hidden from you. Just like the protagonist, you are confused, frightened, anxious. Just like him, your certainties will prove false, and humble you; you will be led down long paths and have to turn back; your rewards will come from unexpected quarters. This is the course of a play, a career, a performance, a life in the theatre.

Stanislavsky said that the job of the actor was to bring the life of the human soul to the stage. That life is
your
life. It is not neat and packaged. It is not predictable;
it is often terrifying, disgusting, humiliating. It is all the things which make up your life. You don’t have to wish it away. You
can’t
wish it away, you can only repress it. But you needn’t do so.

The beginning of wisdom is the phrase “I don’t understand.” Fine. You are faced with a part, a play, a scene. Begin with the useful phrase “I don’t understand.” “I don’t understand how I am to proceed.” Perhaps you feel better already.

Let’s revert to some very simple first principles: Your job is to communicate the play to the audience, by
doing something like
that which the playwright has shown the character to be doing. So, logically, a first step must be to observe what the character is doing.

At the beginning of
Hamlet
, Horatio comes onto the battlements to find out what all the hoopla is about this supposed ghost. That’s what he’s doing. There is no belief required, no emotion, only action. He, Horatio, wants to find out what the fuss is about.

All right. That’s the
character
. The character is not
you
, it is not
anybody
, it exists only in the lines of dialogue on the page. What, then, are you to do?
You
don’t want to do anything which involves a ghost, that would entail a certain measure of
belief
on your part. (What if you don’t believe in ghosts, or don’t believe in ghosts on the night of performance?)

Well, then, the next step of your task is to discard anything in the operations of the character which would require you to “feel” or to “believe”—to reduce
the operations of the character to the lowest common denominator, so as not to burden yourself, so as to be able to act truthfully.

Now, you
might
or
might not
be able to act truthfully in a scene where you had to find out about a ghost; but nothing could stop you from acting truthfully in a situation where you had to
clean up a mess
.

One could say that that is the irreducible essence of that scene. (Please note that there may be other correct answers, but there is no
perfect
answer. It is the purpose of this simple analysis to get you out onstage playing a scene
something like
that which the playwright delineated. The search for the
perfect
analysis will keep you
off
the stage and in the classroom.) So, you say that, in the scene,
your
job is to
clean up a mess
. (Horatio’s job was to clear up the hoopla about the ghost;
your
job is to clean up a mess.) Please note that we have, at this point, left Shakespeare’s scene behind. We need never again refer to the ghost, or to fear, or to belief. The purpose of our simple analysis is to understand not the
appearance
but the
mechanics
of the scene. We want to lift up the hood, as it were, and look at the wiring.

All right. Now, when we go to a party, we are introduced to many people. Some we have met before, but we remember them vaguely It is helpful, in these cases, to ask a friend, “Who is that woman again?” And the friend might respond, “Oh, she’s the wildlife veterinarian,” and we nod, and, our recollection jogged, we say, “Oh, yes. Thank you.”

Similarly, when we have determined our action (in this case, to clean up a mess), we might require or enjoy a jog to our memory: “
What
does that mean again?” This is where the application of the phrase “as if” becomes most helpful.
What
does it mean to clean up a mess?

Well, it’s as if you went shopping with your little sister and she was caught shoplifting. And you go to the store manager and clean up her mess. It’s as if the credit card company charged you three thousand dollars for items you never bought. You don’t have to
believe
these things have happened. First, it’s impossible, as they didn’t happen. They are fantasy; and, second, even if you did “believe” them, it wouldn’t aid you in playing the scene. They, these “as ifs,” are just
reminders
, should you need them, to help you clarify to yourself the action in the scene.