Tag Archives: acting technique

The Hardest Part of Acting

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As with most complicated activities, acting can be distilled into a few simple concepts.  If we could only fulfill these simple requirements, 90% of the job would be done.  Well, 80%, anyway.

The easiest thing to do is to play the verbs.  It’s very challenging in the beginning, but far and away is the easiest thing to learn.  Once you get the hang of it, it’s very freeing and very easy.

The next easiest thing to do is to allow emotions to flow through you without constraint and without censoring them.  It’s about a willingness to leave the door open to whatever emotions may arise in the course of a play, to give them freedom to exist fully, and to allow them to dissipate naturally.  And to let them be no matter how personally uncomfortable they may be.  It’s an art learned over time.  (More on this in another post.)

But the third concept, hands down, is the toughest to do:  to react ONLY to what you receive from your acting partners.

Reacting means giving up complete control of what comes out of you, and to let it be guided strictly by what you receive from whomever is in the scene with you.

No one wants to do this.  We ALL want to control our own destiny.  We want to actively create our performance.  We have all sorts of ideas about what we should be doing when.

Throw them out.  All of them.  (Well, not all.  But for our purposes right now, yes, toss them all.)

Portrait of the young woman blindfoldYour job is to listen to your scene partner as if you’ve never heard these lines before, as if you know NOTHING about what happens in the play.  Stop looking at the play as if you are an English student  writing a paper on it.  Pretend you know nothing about the other characters’ motives or what happens later in the play.  Let yourself be surprised by whatever they do, and react to what you get.

It’s a difficult task, but not impossible.  As with all new activities, it won’t happen overnight.  Be grateful, initially, if it happens a few times during a scene.  That’s a huge accomplishment, it really is!  As you practice it, you’ll find it happens more and more frequently.  And you’ll gradually learn how to put yourself into a state of mind that makes it easier and gives you the best shot at doing it throughout a scene.  When you’re in “the zone”, listening and reacting mostly takes care of itself.

But initially, you need a third party – a teacher or a director – to help you identify when you are reacting to what you are getting from your scene partner as opposed to when you are controlling the scene.  Actors are often convinced they are listening and reacting when, in fact, they aren’t.  They don’t realize the extent to which they are anticipating the next moment until I point it out.  The first time they look puzzled, but do the scene again.  The second time they give a guilty giggle, as they recognize what I’m talking about.  The third time out, they start to see just how hard this is to do, and I see the “Oh my God, this is really hard!” flicker through their eyes.

It is.  Just not impossible.

See Act Without Expectation here.  See The Open Door Reading here.

Choosing Verbs

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Choosing verbs can be challenging.  We tend to go for nouns, not verbs.  We’ll throw the verb “to be” in there so that it seems like a verb, but it’s actually a passive verb serving the noun.  We move from “I want happiness” to “I want to be happy”, but it’s really just a noun in disguise.  Your acting is better served, instead, by choosing active verbs.

Let’s take a common motivation in plays:  “I want love” or “I want you to love me”.  Passively stated, right?  loveI want this thing called love to come to me.  But remember, acting is about action.  It’s about characters actively pursuing what they want.  So we have to state this desire to be loved in a more active way.  Here are some examples:

Child’s love:  If a parent is withholding their love, we will typically turn cartwheels to get it.  “I want to prove myself worthy of your love.”  “I want to make you finally tell me that you love me.”  “I want to show you that I am lovable.”

Romantic love:  “I want to win your heart.”  “I want to fix our marriage.”  “I want to make you stop having an affair and love me instead.”

Parental love:  “I want to make my son proud of me.”  “I want to protect you.”  “I want to give my child all the things I never had.”

Notice that for some of these, I have used the verb “to make”.  Instead of saying “I want my son to be proud of me”, I say “I want to make my son be proud of me.”  The former puts the focus on the son’s feelings; the latter puts it on what I will do to make my son proud of me.  Perhaps I will stand up for what I believe at great personal cost because to do so will make my son proud of me.  Perhaps I will work hard to achieve something in order to win my son’s admiration.  But it isn’t about my son feeling proud of me; it’s about what I do to create that feeling in him.

If asking yourself what you want leaves you feeling baffled, try thinking in terms of “why am I saying this?”  None of us talk just to talk.  Even those who seem to do so have a reason – silence is scary because it means dealing with your feelings is a common one.  So what you want to figure out is “what is your character hoping to achieve by saying what he does?”

Sometimes you’ll find several beats within a scene that seem to have the same verb.  If so, it’s a good idea to try to find synonyms so that each beat has a different verb, giving it a slightly different tone.  Often, choosing verbs that allow you to escalate is useful.  For instance, you might go from Explain to Persuade to Convince to Sell.  Flirt to Tempt to Seduce.  Ask to Barter to Offer to Buy to Beg.  Inquire to Probe to Push for an Answer to Demand.

The verbs that may jump to mind first will probably be ordinary ones, like explain or understand or ask.  If you can change them to more specific verbs (like Probe, instead of Ask), your acting will become more powerful and interesting.

See Playing the Verbs Part II here.  See Playing the Verbs Part III here.  See Why Playing the Emotions Doesn’t Work here.  See Why Playing the Verbs is (Ultimately) Easier than Acting Emotions here.  See Big Verbs vs. Little Verbs here.  See How to Learn to Play the Verbs here.

Why Playing Verbs is (Ultimately) Easier Than Acting Emotions

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When you choose what you want, which is always expressed as a verb (“I want to . . .”), you’ll find there are Big Verbs and Little Verbs.  The Big Verbs govern what your character wants in the entire play, or in an act, or in a scene.  The Little Verbs govern what your character wants in a single Beat.

Let’s go back to Dora’s monologue in Equus.  I’m going to choose “To justify my actions with regard to Alan to the doctor and to myself” as the Big Verb for the monologue (and the scene from which it comes).  As for the Little Verbs for each of the beats I identified in a previous post, they are in boldface below and precede the dialogue in the beat:

(To establish why you don’t understand my situation)  Look, Doctor:  you don’t have to live with this.  Alan is one patient to you:  one out of many.  He’s my son.  /  (To explain what this is doing to us)  I lie awake every night thinking about it.  Frank lies there beside me.  I can hear him.  Neither of us sleeps all night. /  (To complain about your unfair attack)  You come to us and say, who forbids television?  Who does what behind whose back? – as if we’re criminals.  /  (To defend myself)  Let me tell you something.  We’re not criminals.  We’ve done nothing wrong.  We loved Alan.  We gave him the best love we could.  /  (To concede we aren’t perfect)  All right, we quarrel sometimes – all parents quarrel – we always make it up.  /  (To defend my husband)  My husband is a good man.  He’s an upright man, religion or no religion.  He cares for his home, for the world, and for his boy.  Alan had love and care and treats, and as much fun as any boy in the world.  /  (To demonstrate that I am not a stupid woman)  I know about loveless homes:  I was a teacher.  Our home wasn’t loveless.  I know about privacy too – not invading a child’s privacy.  /  (To concede that my husband may have contributed in some small way)  All right, Frank may be at fault there – he digs into him too much – but nothing in excess.  He’s not a bully. . . /   (To blame Alan)  No, doctor.  Whatever’s happened has happened because of Alan.  Alan is himself.  Every soul is itself.  If you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on earth to this, you wouldn’t find why he did this terrible thing – because that’s him; not just all of our things added up.  /  (To make you understand)  Do you understand what I’m saying?  I want you to understand, because I lie awake and awake thinking it out, and I want you to know that I deny it absolutely what he’s doing now, staring at me, attacking me for what he’s done, for what he is! /  (To blame the real culprit – the Devil – and thereby back off of blaming my son)  You’ve got your words, and I’ve got mine.  You call it a complex, I suppose.  But if you knew God, Doctor, you would know about the Devil.  You’d know the Devil isn’t made by what mummy says and daddy says.  The Devil’s there.  It’s an old-fashioned word, but a true thing . . . /  (To apologize)  I’ll go.  What I did in there was inexcusable.  I only know he was my little Alan, and then the Devil came.

Why is this more helpful than playing emotions?  Certainly there is some anger in this piece, but if you choose to play the anger, you’ll be inclined to be angry throughout the monologue.  Once you look at the individual beats and their verbs, however, you can see why anger doesn’t work well throughout.  Just think of these beats in terms of aggressive/defensive, and you’ll find they seesaw between these two positions.  The aggressive verbs?  Establish, complain, demonstrate, blame.  The defensive verbs?  Explain, concede, make you understand, apologize.

The verb “defend” can be either aggressive or defensive, depending on how you choose to play it.

Once you understand that Dora uses a variety of aggressive and defensive tactics to justify slapping her son, it is easier to see how the emotions she feels throughout the speech are in constant motion, conflicting with and contradicting each other.  This inner torment can be fascinating to watch.  We never know what to expect from Dora.  We like her one moment, pity her the next, hate her in the third, sympathize in the fourth.  The whirlwind of emotions that pass through her keep our attention, keep us thinking about this extraordinary story Shaffer has presented us with, trying to sort out the moral and ethical questions it raises, to figure out who’s the “bad” guy.

seesawThe seesawing happens so quickly and often that even if we could accurately identify an emotion per beat (and “anger” doesn’t work for all of the aggressive verbs), it isn’t a practical approach.  To make a conscious switch from one emotion to another takes too long and is unbelievable to watch.  It’s your conscious brain making the switch, not your subconscious; in real life, it is always the subconscious which is in charge of your emotions, and your subconscious makes all such switches in an instant.

Try to make the switch with your conscious brain, and the audience will see the wheels turning in your head.  That’s all it takes for them to stop believing in you.

If you stop worrying about whether you are using the right emotion (should I be angry? Irritated? Defensive?) and simply try to accomplish your verb, the right emotion will come along all by itself.  (Assuming, that is, that you’ve left the door to your emotions open.)

Let’s take the first beat to see how this works:  “To establish why you don’t understand my situation.”  Or maybe I decide to rephrase that, to replace “establish” with “explain”.  Or to use “To put you in your place.”  Feel free to try on different phrases, like you’re trying on different shoes, until you find a phrase that really resonates for you and feels “right”.

Whichever phrase you end up with, I can imagine any number of emotions that might come up as a result, and they are the adjectives and adverbs we are inclined to act.  Angry.  Resentful.  Frustrated.  Hurt.  Exasperated.  Sarcastic.  Superior.  I can also imagine two or more of these co-existing during the beat, depending on exactly what verb I choose.  But the magical thing about playing the verb is that I don’t have to pay much attention to the emotions or figure out which is the “right” one.  “Explain” and “establish” are going to bring up slightly different emotions without me having to pre-plan anything.  “Putting you in your place” will naturally bring up a very different set.

Playing verbs is infinitely easier to do than playing emotions and adjectives.  I don’t have to choose the “right” sort of anger (and anger, as with all emotions, comes in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.)  All I have to do is try to explain something.  Or defend my position.  Or concede a point.  Or blame someone else.  Which is very simple and straightforward.

See Playing the Verbs Part II here.  See Playing the Verbs Part III here.  See Why Playing the Emotions Doesn’t Work here.  See Choosing Verbs here.  See Big Verbs vs. Little Verbs here.  See How to Learn to Play the Verbs here.

Playing the Verbs, Part III — Raising the Stakes

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One of the keys to good acting is figuring out what your character wants, slavishly sticking to trying to get it, and not worrying too much about how you feel.  If you really know what you want, why you want it, and everything hangs on your getting it, then most everything else is going to fall into place without you having to work too hard.

Let’s go back to our party; notice that each option begins with the word “because”.

“I want to make sure this party comes off perfectly, because I will feel embarrassed if it isn’t successful” or “because if I can’t control my world, I won’t feel safe and will freak out” or “because if it is successful, I will get the job I want more than anything in the world, the one that will both set  me up for the rest of my life and make me happy to go to work every day.”

What do I want?  To give a perfect party.  Why do I want it?  “Because . . .”

As for “everything hangs on your getting it”, this is about what we call “stakes”.  Every character has something at stake, which means that whether or not they succeed at something MATTERS.  I mean REALLY, REALLY MATTERS.

Whether I am fourth or fifth in line doesn’t matter much if I’m making a bank deposit, I’ve got time to kill, and there is plenty of money already in the bank to pay my bills without bouncing a check.  If my family is starving and there are only four loaves of bread left at the bakery, it does matter.

Whether I am hired for a job doesn’t matter much if I’m already employed and simply looking to move up the ladder, but it matters a ton if I’ve been out of work for eight months, my unemployment has run out, and I have a child who needs a life-saving operation.

Whether a man asks me out for a date doesn’t matter much if I just think he’s cute; but if I have fallen head-over-heels in love with him and want to bear his children, it matters a great deal.

poker chipIn each of these cases, I can RAISE THE STAKES for my character by choosing the second alternative or something like it.  The higher the stakes for your character, the better.  When everything seems to hang on whether or not you what you want more than anything in the world, it’s fun theater to watch!

A good way to do this is to think in terms of Life and Death circumstances, at least figuratively.  The higher you can build your house of cards, the more things you can hang on whether or not you succeed, the more it becomes a tightrope act.  And the audience is on the edge of its seat.

Let’s take the first “I am bossy, because”, which is to avoid embarrassment.  This is good, but the stakes aren’t high enough to be as interesting and dramatic as possible.  We can amp up “embarrassed” by changing the word to “mortified”.  But even this isn’t enough.  To really make this work, you have to understand WHY your character is mortified.  Does her self-esteem depend on appearing to be perfect?  Has she never failed at anything?  Does she feel inferior to all her invitees, and “knows” they will judge her as being inadequate if the party isn’t perfect?

Whatever you choose, make the consequences of failing to get what you want as dire as possible.  If this party isn’t successful, will she be ostracized by the group?  Is the party for her husband’s coworkers, and her husband will be furious and withhold his love if they don’t walk away impressed?  Or better yet, is their marriage on the rocks and depends on this party being a success?  Will her husband file for divorce if someone leaves the party unhappy?

Or does his getting a promotion depend on her impressing the boss with her social skills, and they need his promotion to buy their apartment, which has just gone co-op?  Or to pay for private school for their children?  Or to bail her mother out of jail?

Sometimes the playwright will clearly define what your character wants and why he wants it so badly, but more often than not, it is written “between the lines” and is part of the subtext.  If the playwright doesn’t explicitly tell you either the desire or the reason for it, then you are free to choose whatever you like.  Just be sure that nothing in your choice conflicts with any of the information the playwright does give you.  Your choices must always make perfect sense in the context of the play.  But make clear choices that give you something to go after and a compelling reason to do just that!

See Part I here.  See Part II here.  See Why Playing the Emotions Doesn’t Work here.  See Why Playing the Verbs is (Ultimately) Easier than Acting Emotions here.  See Choosing Verbs here.  See Big Verbs vs. Little Verbs here.  See How to Learn to Play the Verbs here.  See An Example of Why Verbs Make a Difference here.

How Action Enhances the Play

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Most physical action used in plays is not indicated in the script.

Yes, sometimes there are stage directions that appear in parentheses.  Some scripts have more of this than others.  These days, playwrights steer away from including any stage directions unless they are absolutely necessary to understanding what is going on in a scene.  For instance, if a character says “Here”, and then pulls a packet of unmarked bills from his jacket pocket, and the other character says “Thanks”, you’d have no reason to know that it’s a bribe and not a throat lozenge unless the playwright tells you.  But directions such as “sits” or “stands” are rare in today’s scripts.  The playwright understands that it often doesn’t matter exactly when the sitting or standing happens, and that if it does, a good actor will be able to figure it out without assistance.

But even in older scripts where stage directions are sprinkled in here and there (and sometimes these are not the playwright’s opinions but merely the stage manager’s recording of what was done in the original production, which you should not consider to be sacrosanct), there is much that isn’t included.  It’s your job as an actor to add physical movement that underscores, enhances, or adds to the fun of the play.

If you’ve ever read a Shakespeare play, you’ll know that aside from entrances and exits, there isn’t much recorded in the script in terms of movement.  Watch a good production, however, and you’ll find lots of action, especially in the comedies.  I just saw the London production of Twelfe Night with Mark Rylance and a host of exquisite actors at the Belasco Theatre in New York, and it was full of marvelous physical bits that made us all laugh.  Here’s a few photos to give you an idea of what is possible when you let your imagination loose and express yourself through more than words (you can also check out Youtube for the American Conservatory Theatre’s commedia del’arte production of The Taming of the Shrew — links in the right column — for some very physical Shakespeare!):

TN4

TN3

Twelfe Night

TN6

TN1

Playing the Verbs, Part II – Going After What You Want

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Untrained actors act the adjectives and adverbs; trained actors act the verbs.

“Acting the verbs” means figuring out what your character wants and trying to get it.  This is really pretty simple, although it requires a large shift in how you look at a scene.

Instead of thinking of your character as being “needy”, think in terms of “I want you to love me.”  Instead of thinking of your character as being “bossy”, think in terms of “I want to make sure this party comes off perfectly, because I will feel embarrassed if it isn’t successful” or “because I need to control my world in order to feel safe” or “because if it is successful, I will get the job I want more than anything in the world.”

myriam-hands-on-hipsI hope you can see that the three options I’ve given for why your character might be bossy are very different, and will probably produce different results.  The sort of “bossy” you are will change, because what is driving it is different.  But if you just play “bossy”, you’re apt to go for the same kind of “bossy” no matter who your character is or why he is doing what he does.

And let’s be honest:  in your real life, do you ever decide to “be” bossy?  No, you decide you want to give the best party ever.  You decide that the people around you are incompetent or slow or uncreative, and they need you to direct them.  You have a strong attachment to your vision, and you want to see it achieved.  You may end up bossing people around and irritating them in the process, but it’s not like that’s what you’re striving to do.  You’re just trying to give a really good party.

EVERYTHING we do in our real lives is in service of getting something we want:  a quart of milk, an answer to a question, an experience, a job, love, pleasure, prestige, power, money.  No matter how trivial the goal is (I want to read a book I am enjoying; I want to snack on something to take off the edge before dinner; I want to straighten that picture on the wall because it’s driving me nuts), EVERYTHING we do is to get something we want.

It’s the same for your character.  EVERYTHING your character says or does is in service of getting something she wants.  It isn’t about feeling her emotions.  The emotions are simply a by-product of who you are, what you want, how you try to get it, and whether or not you are successful in getting it.

See Part I here.  See Part III here.  See Why Playing the Emotions Doesn’t Work here.  See Why Playing the Verbs is (Ultimately) Easier than Acting Emotions here.  See Choosing Verbs here.  See Big Verbs vs. Little Verbs here.  See How to Learn to Play the Verbs here.  See An Example of Why Verbs Make a Difference here.

Why Acting the Emotions Doesn’t Work

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All actors begin by acting the emotions of their characters.  Emotions draw us to the theater, so we think that is where we have to start.  I’ve talked about some of the reasons why this isn’t effective:  it is superficial, tends to lead to one-note performances, and often keeps us from finding the more interesting choices.

But the biggest reason why it doesn’t work is what my actress friend Sharon mentioned at dinner the other night.  Emotions are always IN motion.  They change in split seconds, flicker through you and mutate into another emotion so quickly and often so dramatically that they can’t be captured intentionally particularly well.  It is also impossible to consciously act two emotions at once, while we regularly feel multiple emotions concurrently.  Our conscious brain is the tortoise, while our subconscious is the hare.  Trying to act the emotions tends to iron out the wrinkles in a performance, and the wrinkles, quite honestly, are much more interesting than the Botox version you otherwise get.

At last week’s class, Nora asked if it is possible to act an emotion without actually feeling it.  There are actors who regularly do this, and unfortunately, there are professional actors among them.  But as Davina noted, the audience knows the difference between an actor who is actually feeling the emotion on some level and one who is pretending to do so.  Audiences are infallible lie detectors; they know when you’re faking it.

“Well, if I’m not supposed to play the emotions, what do I do?  My character is emotional, I can’t just ignore that!  If I do, how can I possibly feel the emotions so the audience sees them?”

Simple.  Understand enough about who your character is and where he is coming from, and then just try to get what you want and keep the conduit to your inner emotional life open.  If you do that, the emotions will not only take care of themselves, they will also show up in far more interesting ways than if you strive to be angry, resentful, disappointed, gleeful, etc.

Yes, the major emotions you have identified in your first read-through will probably end up being a part of the scene, but if you don’t focus on them but INSTEAD focus on getting what you want, all the subtleties of emotion that we regularly experience will come through as well.

This is acting distilled to its simplest components.  It’s good, sound theory, but it IS theoretical, not practical.  So next time, I’ll talk about how to translate it into something practical!

Playwrights are literary (and how this affects acting beats and performance)

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A good playwright doesn’t just know how to develop a plot, maximize conflict, and create interesting characters.  All these things help plays to be successful, but playwrights aren’t merely practical creatures.  They (the good ones, anyway) also know how to use literary devices to their best advantage on stage.

The kinds of literary devices I’m about to talk about help to focus the audience’s attention on what is important, as well as to make what is happening as clear as possible.

Here is the monologue from Agnes of God that Davina is working on, along with the Beat marks she is presently using.  They are slightly different than the ones she started with, because it became clear that the literary choices of the playwright help to determine the Beat divisions.agnes1

Dr.  Livingstone:  How dare you march into my office and tell me how to run my affairs – how dare you think that I’m in a position to be badgered or bullied or whatever you’re trying to do.  Who the hell do you think you are?  /  You walk in here expecting applause for the way you’ve treated this child.  /  She has a right to know!  That there is a world out there filled with people who don’t believe in God and who are not any worse off than you!  People who go through their entire lives without bending their knees once – to anybody!  And people who still fall in love, and make babies, and occasionally are very happy.  She has a right to know that.  /  But you, and your order, and your Church have kept her ignorant, because ignorance is next to virginity, right?  Poverty, chastity, and ignorance, that’s what you live by.

What are the literary devices John Peilmeier uses in this monologue? 

REPETITION.  Repetition means at least two of something.  It’s typically used to emphasize something, and Peilmeier uses it (forgive me) repeatedly in this monologue.  Two examples:  “how dare you” and “She has a right to know.”

GOOD THINGS COME IN THREES.  We talked about lists of threes in comedies, that three is the necessary number for a joke to be funny when it involves a list of some sort.  It doesn’t just apply to jokes, however.  When a writer wants to emphasize a point, he often builds to it by using a list of three.  Such lists can be used in a number of ways, but typically they escalate upwards emotionally, as in big, bigger, biggest.  (Choose to use them differently if you like, but be sure that you recognize that there are three related items which need to be delivered with some sort of variety in order to be effective.)

This monologue has a number of lists:

  • How dare you/how dare you/who the hell – forget that the third element doesn’t begin with “how dare you”, it is nevertheless the climax to this list of three.
  • Badgered/bullied/whatever you’re trying to do
  • People who/people who/people who
  • You/your order/your Church (and notice how each element is tied to the Mother Superior)
  • Ignorant/ignorance/ignorance
  • Poverty/chastity/ignorance (notice that “ignorance” is part of two separate lists)

FRAMING.  Framing is when the repetition begins and ends a thought.  “She has a right to know” is used to frame a list.  Just in case you forget where she started, why she made the list, Peilmeier reminds you by hammering it home with the closing frame.

A less obvious frame is in the last two sentences.  It is an implied frame, because it begins with “you, your order, and your Church” and ends with “that’s what you live by”, which is another way of saying the list that begins this section.  Just in case you forget that Dr. Livingstone is directly accusing the Mother Superior, the phrase “that’s what you live by” brings you back to where she started.

Peilmeier uses these devices to make sure you get his major points.  Words in a play can fly by, and you don’t know which words are the most important ones unless the actor and/or playwright help to underline them for you.  Peilmeier presents the actress with some great tools in this monologue; your job is to use them to their best advantage.  Don’t swallow any of the repeated words, and make sure your audience knows you are giving them a list.  The need to give them some variety in delivery will also help you explore the emotional underpinnings to your character at this moment.

With regard to choosing the beats when you find literary devices like this, make sure you include them in one beat.  Lists, frames, and repeated words typically belong in the same beat.

On Censoring (and why you shouldn’t!)

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The moment I read a script, I’ve made dozens of decisions about a character.  Who she is.  How she speaks.  How she moves.  How this or that line probably should be said.  What sort of movement is required.  What I want.  Etc.  You do, too.  We can’t help it.

Human beings are always judging and evaluating new information placed before us.  We like to categorize things.  When you meet someone, you immediately start “identifying” who it is.  What are some of the favorite questions we like to ask new people?  Where are you from?  Do you have brothers and sisters?  Where do you work?  What do you do for a living?  Are you married?  Where did you go to school?woman_clipboard

And we assess the other person’s appearance immediately, too.  Are they attractive?  Do they dress neatly or sloppily?  Do they care about their appearance?  Do they have good taste in clothes (according to our lights, that is).  Are they color blind?  Do they need a haircut?  Is that blond real or bottled?  Are they athletic or bookish?  Funny or annoying?

We aren’t always right about our assessments of people.  Ever know someone who makes snap judgments about people, pronouncing someone to be a “jerk”, only to tell you months later, after he’s gotten to know the guy, what a “good guy” he’s turned out to be?  Or who praises someone to the hilt after a single meeting, only to discover later that it was all a show and that he’s done someone wrong?  If you don’t, then look in the mirror, because the odds are that you’ve misjudged someone along the way.  But knowing that doesn’t stop us from making quick judgments about those we meet.

Real people have the opportunity to change your mind about them.  But characters in a play aren’t as forceful.  They won’t resist your labels, at least not loudly enough to get your attention.

What seems obvious on the first read-through often IS part of the scene, and part of the character.  But it is only one part.  Human beings are much more complicated than the broad strokes we sometimes settle for as actors, without even realizing that is what we are doing.

In fact, human beings are not just complicated, but they are also often contradictory, and their behavior and dialogue reflect that.  When you are inclined to say, in response to a director’s suggestion, “But my character wouldn’t do that,” you are often censoring it on the basis that the director’s suggestion is blue, but you’re creating a character based on oranges and reds.  What if, instead, you chose to go for a rainbow?  Or instead of a quartet, for a symphony?  When you do this, you not only surprise the audience, but you make the play richer and more layered.  And you create characters who, by virtue of their very contrariness, seem like very real human beings.

Acting is Exploring, Not Deciding

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Forgive the length of this post, I couldn’t find a way to split it in two!

Your subconscious is the most amazingly sophisticated computer.  I almost wrote “known to man”, except that we cannot, with our conscious brains, begin to appreciate all that our subconscious can do.

I say “can” do, because our conscious brain is apt to interfere with the process.  We think far too much and do ourselves a disservice by doing so.  If, instead, we would listen for the words our subconscious whispers to us, we’d all be better off.  Learning to do something well is in large part a product of learning to shut up and listen.

Remember the old adage about computers, “Garbage in, garbage out”?  When we use our conscious brains too much, we tend to put garbage into the computer.  I’ll explain why it’s garbage another time, but garbage confuses the subconscious, which doesn’t know what to do with it.  The garbage doesn’t fit with what’s true, but the fact that you’ve entered this data makes your subconscious try to work with it, to fit the square peg into the round hole.  Because here’s the funny thing about your subconscious:

It doesn’t have a value system.

Binary codeIt’s like Binary Code computer language.  It knows 0s and 1s, but it doesn’t have an opinion as to which is better.  It just knows they are different.  It understands frequency, however.  Here’s my golf analogy:  If you hit a ball in the water the last time you played, you’ll worry that you’ll do it again during your next round.  So you’ll think things like, “Just don’t hit it in the water.”  “Just get it over the water, I don’t care where it ends up.”  “Oh my God, I hit it in the water last time, I don’t want to do that again.”

Your subconscious doesn’t understand the word “don’t”.  Instead, it homes in on the word “water”.  “Oh,” says your subconscious, “he keeps talking about the water.  That must be where he wants his ball.”  And Bingo! That’s where your ball goes.

On the other hand, if you simply present ideas to your subconscious without stressing one over another, your subconscious is free to choose what works best, and it is smart enough to do precisely that.

It is easy to rush to make choices as an actor.  After all, you have a finite rehearsal period in which to put a play together to show the public.  No one wants to make a fool of themselves, so making choices early makes us feel that we’ll be able to practice those choices often enough to make them look good.  This theory is fine as long as the choices are good ones, but they often aren’t.  It’s impossible to understand your character in the first few weeks of rehearsal.  And even if the choices are good, making them early often precludes choosing a better one later.

Rehearsals are instead best used as explorations into what is possible.  In experimenting, we often come across things that don’t work, but those “mistakes” often lead us to things that do.  The creative process starts, I’m afraid, with a lot of garbage, but the garbage is the warm-up.  Your work at the end of the night is always better than the work at the beginning, isn’t it?

Once your creative juices get warmed up, they start to produce quality stuff you can keep.  Do enough exploring and, after a few weeks, the pattern starts to emerge, a pattern that is impossible to see with any clarity before then.

This is an uncomfortable approach at first.  It’s easy to get scared by an opening night that seems to loom larger with each passing day.  Making choices makes us feel secure, but if you can have the courage to trust the process and explore every conceivable option throughout the first half of your rehearsal process without making choices, you will find that a great performance will be the natural result, and that it will come together fairly effortlessly in the last few weeks of rehearsal.

I’ve seen this happen time and again.  I make my actors a nervous wreck when I direct, because I refuse to let them settle into complacency early on.  I am continually pushing and asking questions and trying new things through Week 5 (assuming an eight-week rehearsal period).  They are sure, I think, that this thing will NEVER come together!  Can’t we please have more run-throughs?  (Run-throughs are an actor’s greatest security blanket.)  But the work starts bearing fruit after Week 5, and the payoff in performance is self-evident.

By delaying choosing, you turn the decision-making process over to your subconscious, which is better qualified for the job.  You will also find that you don’t have many choices to make after all, that it has made them for you.  All you need to do is run with them!