True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

M
y closest friends, my intimate companions, have always been actors. My beloved wife is an actor. My extended family consists of the actors I have grown up, worked, lived, and aged with. I have been, for many years, part of various theatre companies, any one of which in its healthy state more nearly resembles a perfect community than any other group that I have encountered.

I wanted to be an actor, but it seemed that my affections did not that way tend. I learned to write and direct so that I could stay in the theatre, and be with that company of people.

I studied acting in various schools, and could understand little of what was being said. I, and the other students, saw, I know, that the goal of the instruction was clear—to bring an immediacy to the performance—but none of us, I think, understood, nor did practice reveal,
how the school’s exercises were to bring that goal about.

As a teacher, director, and dramatist, I’ve worked—as did
my
teachers—to communicate my views to the actor. I have been fortunate in that I’ve had a lot of time to do it—almost thirty years—and that my views have been informed by and directed toward performance on the stage in front of a paying audience.

That is what acting is. Doing the play for the audience. The rest is just practice. And I see that the life of the academy, the graduate school, the studio, while charming and comfortable, are as removed from the life (and the job) of the actor as aerobics are from boxing.

This is a book for the actor. It contains, I hope, a little common sense, and a few basic principles. I hope that they will aid you to appreciate, to understand, to practice, this most challenging, and most worthy of endeavors.

A
s actors, we spend most of our time nauseated, confused, guilty. We are lost and ashamed of it; confused because we don’t know what to do and we have too much information, none of which can be acted upon; and guilty because we feel we are not doing our job. We feel we have not learned our job well enough; we feel others know
their
job but we have failed. The good we do seems to be through chance: if only that agent would notice me; if only that producer had come on Tuesday night when I was good rather than on Wednesday night when I was off; if only the script allowed me to do more
this
and less
that
; if only the audience had been better; if only we had not gone up five minutes late—as a consequence of which I lost my concentration.

So we become envious of those who have “luck,” of those who, seemingly, have “technique,” as, having
no “technique” ourselves, we think that their accomplishments must be based on “luck.” So we invest more heavily in a “technique based on luck,” and it becomes, in effect, a
superstition
, an investment in self-consciousness, in introversion. We turn our attention inward because introversion spares us from the horrible necessity of living in a theatre world for which we are totally unprepared. So our “technique” becomes more and more devoted to the development of a kind of catatonia: Sense memory. Substitution. Emotional memory. The “Fourth Wall.” The creation of auxiliary “stories” which are just as difficult to “perform” as the script but lack the merit of being about anything other than ourselves.

The Stanislavsky “Method,” and the technique of the schools derived from it, is nonsense. It is not a technique out of the practice of which one develops a skill—it is a cult. The organic demands made on the actor are much more compelling, and the potential accomplishments of the actor much more important—the life and work, if I may say so, much more heroic—than anything prescribed or foreseen by this or any other “method” of acting.

Acting is not a genteel profession. Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people’s performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. An awesome compliment.

Those players moved the audience not such that
they were admitted to a graduate school, or received a complimentary review, but such that the audience feared for their soul. Now that seems to me something to aim for.

Here are some thoughts on the subject.

S
tanislavsky was essentially an amateur. He was a member of a very wealthy merchant family, and he came to the theatre as a rich man. I do not mean to denigrate either his fervor or his accomplishments—I merely note his antecedents.

The busker, the gypsy, the mountebank, come to the theatre to support themselves. As their support depends directly upon the favor of the audience, they study to obtain that favor. Those who have, in the perhaps overused phrase, “come up from the streets,” have little interest in their own performance, save as it relates to their ability to please an audience. This is, I believe, as it should be.