What Do Arbitrary Choices Look Like?

Posted on April 23, 2014 by J.

In class two weeks ago, the actors were busily making arbitrary choices about their characters.

It’s fascinating to watch. Despite talking about how unproductive this approach is, people instinctively use it. It’s almost an uncontrollable impulse. (I’m not criticizing my students for doing this. We all do it. Learning how to act is, in part, learning when we’re being arbitrary so that we can stop. When I point out to my students what they’re doing, they quickly recognize what I’m talking about and why it matters. Which is why they are such wonderful students!)

Arbitrary choices are the ones we decide on before trying them to see if they work. “This is what I should do here.” They don’t spring organically out of what actors call “the work”, but are intellectual choices we impose on our performances. It’s the “decider” in us looking for certainty. “There! Thank goodness, another problem put to bed!”

Deciding upon them in advance can prove fatal. We become so attached to them that we will give them up only if they prove to be disastrous. The moment we make the decision, we have closed ourselves off to ANY OTHER possibility, no matter how good it is. Our subconscious even stops working on the problem. It’s done! Solved!

One actress, following the first read-through of a brand new scene, responded to my question about her gut reaction to the character by saying, “I didn’t really notice, I was busy trying to figure out where I should be laughing.”

Laughter is not something you should plan for unless the dialogue makes it clear that you have to laugh. Then you have no choice. Otherwise, laugh if, as the character, you genuinely find something to be funny. Don’t if you don’t.

I asked her about the times when she did laugh during the scene. Were they the “right” times?

Her: “Well, they were pretty much real laughs.”

Me: “No wonder they worked so well!”

Lesson: Real emotions are very effective on stage. Laughing was entirely appropriate to her character, so those real laughs worked. Artificially imposed laughs rarely are believable.

Another actress, who performed a lengthy monologue, opted to sit at one point in the middle of the speech and then sprang up almost immediately, standing or walking for the remainder of it. We talked about it afterwards.

Me: You sat down at one point . . .

Her: Yes, and it was a mistake.

Me: I’m not so sure it was. It actually seemed to suit the moment very well. It was the springing back up that
seemed out of place.

I suggested that there was good dramatic support for sitting for a portion of the monologue, but that there were a variety of options in terms of timing the sit and stand. At which point, she said, “I know! I should sit on THIS line.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

It is perfectly okay to say, “Let me try doing this here.” That’s a very different thing than saying, “I should do this.” Once you’ve tried it, you can determine its effectiveness. You can then try other alternatives and compare the results. In her particular situation, there were a variety of choices worth exploring. The line she selected was the most obvious choice – predictable, even – but that doesn’t automatically make it the best.

When you make intellectual decisions outside of the framework of actually running the scene, you are making arbitrary choices that have nothing to do with the emotional life of your character. It is an external you are strapping onto your character, whether she likes it or not.

If you find that choice through trying various options during a run-through of the scene, great. But if you choose it based on your intellectual assessment of the play, it will never work well, no matter how “right” the choice is. Like line readings, such choices have a foundation of quicksand that will give way at some point.

To read Isn’t the Obvious Choice Sometimes the Right Choice?, go here.

New Workshops for Actors and Directors

Posted on April 21, 2014 by J.

I’ve reconfigured the Workshops page (formerly “Seminars”) to include a number of shorter workshops.

The Spacious Acting™ Workshop remains the broad overview of the most important aspects of acting, an intense way of being immersed in what acting really is. It’s intention is to give you the experience of what you’re driving toward so that you can identify it in the future and work toward it in a more intentional and productive fashion. Without that experience, you think you’re doing great work when you really aren’t, simply because you have nothing to compare it to. Once you have that experience, you can move to a whole different plane.

However, it’s not for everyone. For one thing, it requires three days (or two long ones). For another, there are topics that can’t be properly covered in it. So there are some shorter workshops that can improve your work. Here they are, in brief:

Beats and Verbs: They sound simple, in concept. They’re tough, in practice. This workshop gives you a good grounding in them that will help you take ownership of the concepts and apply them in your work.

Connecting the Dots: Script analysis is apparently one of the trickiest things for untrained actors, and I’ve found they don’t even realize what they’re missing. If you aren’t naturally gifted in this art, you need someone to show you the way. Most texts on the subject are too mechanical and don’t help you to understand how to put into practice what you discover about your character. I do.

For Directors Only: All actors are different, but they fall into easily identifable groups. Understanding what group an actor is in tells you what he needs from you to produce his best work. His learning style, how he processes information, and what makes him most creative is key to getting the best performance you can from him. The odds are that you’ll have someone from each group in every play you stage. You need to deal with each of them differently. In addition, we’ll cover the most useful approaches you can take with actors of varying capabilities, no matter what group they fall into — including the neophyte actor!

Plugging in on Stage: This is all about receiving from your scene partner and reacting only to what you get. I don’t see nearly enough of this happening in community theater, even among experienced actors. This is a completely experiential workshop. We do it until you get it.

Creative Blocking: Good blocking that keeps the audience interested, maximizes the fun, and improves the storytelling can be so hard to find. Yet it’s the simplest way to make dramatic improvements in both the quality of the acting and the audience’s enjoyment of the production as a whole. I show you how it’s done. This one’s for both actors and directors.

Pre-Production Essentials for Directors: Because most community theater directors get promoted from the acting ranks, they don’t always realize that there’s a ton of work that should be done before auditions. This workshop helps you to understand how to improve your shows by preparing well.

Not all of the workshops’ detailed descriptions are posted yet, but they will be soon. Keep checking!

John Cleese on Creativity

Posted on April 20, 2014 by J.

Both of the following videos are well worth watching. After you’ve seen them, read my comments below — just a few things I’d like to highlight about what he says.

And then there is the longer 1971 talk:

Cleese notes that being creative requires a certain mood: a willingness to play like a child, exploring ideas not for any immediate practical purpose, but just for enjoyment. Kids do things for their own sake, without expectations of results. When you’re playing, nothing is wrong.

Cleese talks about open and closed modes, which is directly related to the concept of trial and error that I have mentioned. In the open mode, you are deciding what to try. You go to closed mode to try it, and back to open mode to evaluate its success. Creativity is a matter of toggling between the two positions, although acting requires that you keep one avenue “open” even while you are trying something in closed mode, and I’ll talk about this in the future.

Space and time, his first two requirements, are essentially about giving yourself permission to play, to be creative without the need to solve problems. Cleese suggests it takes a half hour to get yourself into open mode for starters, a time frame I concur with. This half hour is why I suggest that two hour rehearsals are really too short. Cleese’s audience is made up of businesspeople, and 90 minutes is probably as long as that group will find profitable, but acting is slightly different. I believe that 2½ hours is the minimum time to maximize the benefit for an actor. Three is great, if you can manage it, and a ten minute pause in the middle of a 3 to 4 hour rehearsal will not break the spell. Nor will a lunch break in the middle of a longer stretch.

However, while the entire rehearsal should be about “play” on some level, small segments of it can and should be set aside as “let’s just experiment with this one thing” time, giving the actors the freedom to explore while knowing that the production is still basically on track. This is a particularly useful approach in community theater, where actors are often results-oriented.

Cleese’s third requirement (also “time”) is what I have referred to as the “subconscious effect” (he calls it the unconscious, but we’re talking about the same thing.) Creative ideas sometimes need to marinate for a while before they can really germinate.

Cleese uses the word confidence for the fourth requirement, but I use the word courage. I want a stronger word than confidence to convey the importance of this. If you are particularly wedded to the idea that there is a Right, then you need courage, not confidence, to break out of that pattern.

To play is to experiment. To play well, you need to have the courage to fail. Courage to make mistakes. A willingness to be open to anything that may happen. But mostly, as Cleese points out, courage to sit with the discomfort — the absolute anxiety — of uncertainty until you absolutely have to make a decision.

If you can remember that when you’re playing, nothing is wrong, and that you have the ability to evaluate the success or failure of what you’ve tried after the fact, then it is easier to be courageous. While it feels better to make decisions, if you trust the process and wait until you really have to make decisions to make them (and the more you do this, the later you’ll be able to wait), you’ll find it is worth the wait. Which will then make it easier to wait the next time. Once you have experienced the benefit of waiting, you can start to move from courage to confidence.

It’s interesting that Cleese suggests that humor is that fastest way to get into the open mode. Perhaps this is why I laugh so readily during rehearsals, and try so hard to get my cast to laugh, too. Laughter is relaxing. At the very least, don’t take yourself or what you’re doing (even if it’s Medea) too seriously. It’s not nuclear war.

And lastly, Cleese says this about the Subconscious Effect: “This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.”

It may not come in this rehearsal, or the next. It may show up in the shower on Friday. But it will come. Trust it, and it will come.

To read What is Creativity?, go here. To read What If I’m Not Creative?, go here. To read How on Earth Can I Be Creative as an Actor?, go here.

Actor’s Etiquette: Memorize Your Lines

Posted on April 18, 2014 by J.

I once directed a play with a cast of experienced actors. At the first rehearsal, I gave them my usual spiel about memorizing lines (you can’t do any real acting until you are off book; the earlier you memorize them, the better your performance will be; I suggest you aim for three weeks before opening; don’t try and go off book until you really are off book, because it’s a waste of everyone’s time and I won’t permit it).

Some directors set “deadlines” for the acts to be memorized, but really – there’s nothing we can do if you miss the deadline, is there? It’s not like we can send you to bed without supper (not that I think negative reinforcement is a particularly influential approach.)

The actors nodded at me as soon as I began speaking. As experienced actors, they knew exactly what I was talking about, and three of the actors in this show had a ton of lines each, so they knew what they were facing.

Three weeks before we opened, none of them had come close to memorizing their lines. I hadn’t really focused on this fact. Yes, I knew they were still carrying scripts around, and yes, they seemed to rely on them more than I thought they should be at that point, but these guys had been around the block more than a few times. They knew what was required. They were pros, they’d get it done.

Also, different people handle memorizing differently. I’ve worked with actors who made me unsure they were ever going to finish memorizing the script, but came in Tech Week solid in their lines and doing some remarkable work. I hadn’t really worked with two of these actors before. What did I know about their process?

Three weeks out, it finally occurred to me that I had to bring the obvious to their attention: “Uh. You guys might want to think about memorizing your lines. We open soon.”

I could tell by the expressions on their faces that they hadn’t fully registered the gravity of their situation until I brought it up. They began to work in earnest on memorizing from that point on, but two of them never really got solid and we had one performance that took a big hit as a result.

As a director, the one thing I DON’T worry about is whether an actor has memorized their lines. It’s not my butt up on stage, and the one thing the audience won’t blame me for is an actor who forgets his lines. I have always figured the potential of public embarrassment is sufficient motivation for an actor to hit the books and get his lines down.

I was wrong on this particular point.

I can’t memorize your lines for you. I also don’t wish to be a nag; it’s an unpleasant role to have to play. In the future, I’ll remind my casts each week of how far we are from opening and note where I think they are in terms of memorization, but I’m not going to do more than that. You’re responsible for yourself.

Memorizing your lines is a basic element of being an actor. Do it early so you are sure to get it done.

How on Earth Can I Be Creative As An Actor?

Posted on April 16, 2014 by J.

Dictionary.com calls creativity the ability to transcend the traditional and to create something new. In other words, don’t settle for the obvious, the stereotypes, the ordinary. Don’t go for hackneyed line readings or hang on for dear life to the first decent idea that comes down the pike.

But something new? Really new? Well heck, if that doesn’t put pressure on you, I don’t know what will! So let me rephrase that in a way that will put a lot less pressure on you.

Creativity is about making something unique.

Fortunately, since you ARE unique, you are completely capable of creating something unique, as long as you stay true to yourself. That means avoiding all those obvious choices, because you know what? They aren’t new, and they aren’t you. They are copies of what you’ve seen before, in movies and on television, or on Broadway the last time you visited NYC. They are an imitation of things that impressed you on some level. But even at their best, they are an imitation of someone else. They aren’t uniquely “you”.

Let me repeat what John Cleese said in his 1971 presentation on Creativity: It is NOT a talent. It is simply a way of operating. A way of going about things.

Exactly how you go about being creative depends on your own personality type. Certain types of creativity are easier for each of us, and certain types harder. If you know what it comfortable for you, you can use it to your advantage, probably without thinking too much about it. And if you know what isn’t comfortable for you, you can intentionally go after it, because you’ll be inclined to avoid it otherwise. You expand your own creative potential when you work this way.

The most important thing is to recognize that deep inside you is a completely unique interpretation of any role you might play. It’s deep inside you. It’s not the stuff floating on the surface. What you’ll find there is whatever you’ve most recently absorbed from others, or the stereotypes. You’ll find the flotsam and jetsam.

We’re looking for sunken treasure ships.

It’s okay to start with the obvious, with the stereotypes. Use them as warm-up exercises. Use them to get them out of your system, to understand their limitations. Just don’t stop there. Keep looking for the sunken treasure.

Sometimes you can intentionally dive for it. This is called trial and error. You keep trying different stuff until you yell, “Eureka!” Sometimes all you do is open the hatch to the hull of the ship and get out of the way, and trust that the jewels will float to the surface in their own good time.

Avoiding the stereotypes and seeking out the less obvious alternatives is an act of courage, and some people find it easier to do than others. Trying things you think will fail or at the very least, aren’t sure will succeed is hard. Isn’t it a waste of valuable rehearsal time?

No. As Ben Franklin said, “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.”

Very often, the stuff that falls on its face helps you to find the thing that soars. Something you would never have found if you hadn’t tried that stupid idea.

To read What Is Creativity?, go here. To read What If I’m Not Creative?, go here. To read John Cleese on Creativity, go here.

Using Subtext to Underscore a Scene

Posted on April 13, 2014 by J.

Sometimes the text and the subtext are in perfect alignment, and what you say should be taken at face value. Sometimes “How are you today?” has no hidden meaning behind it. It’s just something we say in greeting one another.

But they often aren’t aligned. Sometimes we say one thing and mean another. Sometimes we feel one thing but pretend we don’t. Your job, as an actor, is to figure out when there is something hidden, as well as when there isn’t.

Who among us, in our real lives, says everything we think? How often are we truly honest about what we feel? And even if we are, how much of what we say is about what we feel?

Very little. We talk for other reasons. To gain information, to persuade, to explain, to think through, to debate, to wonder, to entertain, etc.

A single scene in a play may have multiple beats representing Small Verbs (tactics) you use to pursue the Medium Verb that covers the entire scene. Occasionally, you’ll get more than one Medium Verb in a lengthy scene. (Your Big Verb for the entire play will remain consistent throughout, however.)

I said that your subtext is both emotions and needs (verbs). The needs aren’t the Small Verbs, which are simply how you go about getting what it is you want. Needs are the bigger verbs, both the Big Verb that governs the entire play, and the Medium Verbs that govern scenes. Added to those needs are any of the emotions that you may be feeling. That’s your subtext.

Any time what you say and do is not perfectly matched with what you feel or what you want, you’re dealing with subtext. If you are in touch with those hidden elements, the audience will sense them. Your given circumstances provide the subtext at the start of the scene, but new information or events can provoke new but unspoken emotions in you that you didn’t have when the scene began, changing or adding to your subtext.

The subtext will typically cover more just the single lines I used as examples in the last post – it will cover one or more beats.

For instance, if I want you to do me a favor, I may not come right out and ask for it. I need the favor, but I’m afraid it’s something you won’t want to do, and I feel badly about asking for it. So perhaps I ask you a few questions first, because I want to figure out if it’s really going to be inconvenient for you to do the favor for me. Perhaps it means driving out of your way, and I want to be sure you have a car in good working condition, and the time to do it in between picking up the dry cleaning and getting your hair cut.

These aren’t idle questions; they are directly related to the matter of asking you to take care of four 8-year-old girls who are having a tea party as their playdate. How I ask the questions is going to be different than it would be if I was just curious about what you are doing on Friday. If you start telling me you’re getting your hair and nails done because of a special event you’re going to that evening, I may start feeling guilty about the fact that I’m going to ask you to do me this favor on what is probably a full day for you. And when you change the subject, I’m going to have to figure out a way to get back to the topic of just what your schedule looks like, so I can determine whether or not I’m going to ask you to do me the favor or find someone else to do it.

I may offer information about my own scheduling problems – the doctor appointment that suddenly became available on Friday, so I don’t have to wait until next week to find out what this strange lump in my body is. I may share with you my worry that I have the same cancer that killed my mother. Now I’m giving you a reason to want to help me when I finally get around to asking you the favor.

In other words, on my side of the conversation, it’s ALL about asking you a favor. THAT’S the subtext of the whole thing. I don’t ask the favor until the end of the second page, but those two pages are all about asking you a favor.

But again – don’t make the mistake of trying to play the emotional subtext. Playing emotions for their own sake doesn’t work, whether you’re dealing with text or subtext. It’s too heavy-handed and not grounded in real desire.

This is where the verbs come into play. They allow you to play the subtext, which includes your emotional state (an altogether different thing from the emotions that may flicker through you during the scene), with subtlety. I’m not playing guilt, need, fear, envy. I don’t have to figure out which line is the line to show my guilt on, which line to show my fear on. I just understand my circumstances: I am scared that I have a cancerous tumor, and need to visit the doctor on Friday to calm my fears. My daughter has been planning the tea party for three weeks, and the mothers of the other girls are counting on having the afternoon free and have already made other plans that take them out of town. You’ve got your own life and your husband is being honored by the Kiwanis Club tonight, and I feel guilty about asking for valuable time to do something that is bound to be stressful. But I really need this favor, and I’ve asked three other people, all of whom have turned me down. I really need my friend’s help.

If I understand my circumstances fully, then all I have to do is concentrate on playing my verb – getting you to do me this favor – and everything else, including my emotional life, is largely going to take care of itself in all the right ways.

To read What is Subtext?, go here.

Actor’s Etiquette: Read the Script

Posted on April 11, 2014 by J.

It is not sufficient to read the play once and then to work on scenes as if they are separate entities. Everything in the play informs every other moment in the play.

This happens particularly in scene class, but I’ve seen it happen in regular rehearsals, too. In class, I assign a scene of two to three pages. The actor gets the script and reads it. Now he knows the gist of what happens in the play and has a feel for who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. He has a visceral response to what sort of person his own character is. Fine. That’s enough, right? Now he’ll just work on the scene.

Sorry, but it isn’t nearly enough.

Working on a single scene requires a lot of the same investigation into the character and his background that working on the entire play demands. You can’t understand your character in isolation. You’ve got to know what happened in the scene before the one you’re playing before you can begin to understand how he feels in this scene. Background information that is revealed in scenes before and after yours may help to explain something that happens in your scene. A comment made in Act II sheds light on something he said in Act I.

As for rehearsals for a full production, it’s not enough to encounter the play when you are working on it with the rest of the cast. It’s not enough to read it for the purpose of memorizing your lines. Plays are littered with clues that help you to understand your character, and at some point I’ll talk a bit about how to find them and put them together. The point is, you have to look for the clues, and you can’t do that particularly well when you are running a scene or memorizing your lines. Yes, you’ll discover some things when you do, but it won’t be enough.

When I act, I am actively mining for information about my character throughout the rehearsal process (and throughout performances, for that matter). By “actively mining”, I mean that I am paying close attention to everything that is said, and everything that I read, to see if I can understand it on a deeper level. There isn’t a magic number for how often you should read a play, but I probably read the ones in which I have a large part at least 80-100 times. You don’t have to read it that many times, but I hope it suggests that more than a half dozen times is required to really get the most out of it!

What Is Subtext?

Posted on April 9, 2014 by J.

[We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming on Creativity to bring you two posts on Subtext.]

Subtext is what your character isn’t saying. Not in words, anyway.

The playwright provides you with dialogue. The dialogue is the text. It’s what we are willing to have other people hear. Sometimes we tell the truth when we talk. Sometimes we deliberately lie (or fudge the edges). Sometimes we tell what we think is the truth even though it isn’t. We aren’t ready to face the truth yet, and so we’re lying to ourselves as well as to everyone else.

You don’t have to “play” the text. The words do that quite nicely without much help from you. Playing the text is sort of like a fourth grader pointing out where the moon is when he sings about it, and holding his hand over his heart when he sings above love. It’s unnecessary “sign language”.

What an actor brings to the play is what’s going on INSIDE the character, the stuff he doesn’t say out loud. The playwright provides clues to that, which are often subtle. It’s up to you to identify and highlight them for the audience, and to do so not just when those verbal clues arise in the script, but throughout the scene.

In other words, if you get an inkling halfway through a scene that your character is in love with the other person in the scene, you don’t just start giving evidence of that on the line that makes you understand that fact. You didn’t just start to fall in love when the revealing words come out of your mouth. You’ve been in love with the other character from the beginning of the scene, in all likelihood. It is part of the subtext of the scene that will color everything that you say and do.

So how do we find the subtext?

Subtext is both emotions and need: the stuff you carry into the scene and what you’re trying to get out of it. Your needs are expressed in the verbs you choose. Your emotions, along with your general nature (your personality and history) help to determine how you go about filling your needs; that is, how you pursue your verbs.

Ask yourself why you say each of your lines. If you don’t know the answer, read a bit more carefully. They aren’t just words on the page; they are pieces of information that, put together, create a life. Read them to make sense of the insensible.

But don’t settle for the easy answers to the questions, answers that just rephrase the line you’re working with.

For instance, if an actor has a line that is a question – “What did you mean by that?” – and I ask why he says it, he might tell me, “Because I want to know what she means.” Well, of course – but WHY does he want to know what she means? Will he be insulted if she means A, or hurt if she means B? Or is he simply confused by what she’s said – does it seem to him that she is talking about something entirely different than what he thought they were talking about? And does that worry him?

Look for what we can call the “secondary why”, which has to do with the subtext of the line, and now you are moving closer to understanding what is going on with your character. Notice that in the examples above, what I am finding is emotional. I’ve given you an example that is out of context intentionally, so you can see the link to the emotions: insulted, hurt, worried.

Remember, it’s okay to spot the emotion in a scene, as long as you don’t stop there. Don’t try to play the emotion, but instead just let it inform the scene by influencing how you go about pursuing your verb. Your emotional state is part of what is called the given circumstances of the scene. The given circumstances are all the things that have led you to this moment in time (“given”, because the playwright has chosen them). Understand them and play your verbs, and any new emotions that arise in the scene will take care of themselves.

Now let’s put a question in context and get both the emotions and the verbs. Let’s say you ask your “husband” in the play, “How are you today?” Yes, you want to know how he is. But you have a deeper reason for asking it. He had a migraine headache last night – you’re hoping it is gone, because you hate to see him in pain. Or you’re hoping it is gone, because you’re hosting a dinner party tonight, and if he has a headache, it will be a difficult night.

In the first case, you are feeling love and concern for his well-being. Your verb might be “to take care of him.” In the second case, you might be worried and just a little overwhelmed. Your verb might be “to have a successful party.”

Or perhaps you had a fight last night, and you’re testing the waters, to find out if he’s still mad at you. Or perhaps you want to ask him a favor, to let your parents stay with you for two weeks when they visit next month. He’s not fond of your father, so you want to make sure he’s in a good mood when you ask him.

In the first case, you might be uncertain and hopeful, and your verb is “to reconcile with him.” In the second case, you might be feeling anxious and needy, and your verb is “to convince him to let your parents visit.” (Maybe I have that wrong – maybe you’re uncertain and needy, and anxious and hopeful!)

All of these possibilities are the subtext, the meaning that lies underneath the very simple words, “How are you today?” Read the script over and over again until you find the meaning that is hiding between the lines.

To read Using Subtext to Underscore a Scene, go here. To read An Example of Why Verbs Make a Difference, go here.

What If I’m Not Creative?

Posted on April 6, 2014 by J.

You’re human. You’re creative, by definition.

I hope the previous post goes some distance to convincing you that creativity isn’t just inspiration. The famous Thomas Edison quote on the matter is “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” It’s not about sitting around waiting for something good to show up. It’s intentionally working toward your goal and creating opportunities for good stuff to happen.

Creative geniuses don’t just produce works of genius at their first attempt. Yes, apparently Edward Albee wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in one sitting, but I guarantee you the play had been in his head for quite a while before that.

But even so, that’s the exception to the rule. For most of us, quality work is trial and error. We’ve all seem film images of the writer tearing a piece of paper out of the typewriter and crumpling it up, tossing it on a pile of one hundred similarly treated sheets and holding his head in frustration at his inability to produce one decent paragraph.

We’ve seen images of the composer at the piano, tinkering with a melody and not finding a tune worth keeping.

We’ve seen the tormented artist, unable to capture the light with his paintbrush in the way his eye sees it.

Why the heck do we think, as actors, that we can arrive at our destination any more easily?

I said this before, but it’s worth repeating: You just met this character. How can you possibly know what the RIGHT choices are (or even the BEST ones) until you’ve lived with the character for at least a few weeks and have learned something about him? Would you expect to learn everything you need to know about someone on a first date?

Of course not.

As actors, though, we rush to judgment. We are so scared that we won’t be ready in time that we lock choices into place as quickly as possible. In doing so, we close the door to our own creativity, to spontaneity, to surprise. We suck the life out of the character and the play when we stick with these early and invariably obvious choices.

Yes, the author churns out more words than he keeps, but finally, there IS a moment when he types “The End”, and the paper comes out of the typewriter with a flourish. Mozart, suddenly inspired, starts scribbling notes like a madman. And the artist springs out of bed and takes up his palette, sure of what his painting was lacking.

It is the element of surprise that keeps our attention as theatergoers. When we don’t know what’s going to happen next, we are on the edge of our seats. That’s not just a function of plot twists. When characters don’t follow the stereotype, we want to know more about them. If they do follow the stereotype – the well-worn path – there is no need to stay awake. We can let our attention wander without missing much. “Wake me up when something interesting happens.”

How do we find the something interesting?

Well, it’s this thing called creativity. And as John Cleese says, creativity is NOT a talent. It is a way of operating . . .

To read What is Creativity?, go here. How on Earth Can I Be Creative As an Actor?, go here. To read John Cleese on Creativity, go here.

Actor’s Etiquette: The Actor’s Job

Posted on April 4, 2014 by J.

It’s all on your shoulders.

The quality of your performance is determined by three things:

How much talent you possess (This is a fixed element. Training can bring out hidden talent; it can’t create it.)
How much time you put into the work, especially outside of formal rehearsals
How effectively you know how to use your personal and formal rehearsal time

There is no substitute for time. There are no real short-cuts in acting. Yes, good technique speeds things along and allows you to accomplish more as a result, which leads to better performances. But good acting still takes plenty of time, it’s just that now you know how to use that time to maximum effect.

Being a good actor is, as with most things, a matter of taking responsibility for your own stuff and not expecting someone to hold your hand through the process. If you’re reading this blog, you’re either an adult or you’re going to become one. That means determining what kind of actor you want to be and making sure that you do whatever you need to do to achieve that.

I’ve been doing this a long time. When an actor shows up at rehearsal or to class, I can tell whether he’s done any work on the play since I last saw him. I can tell whether it was work done earlier in the week or hastily done this afternoon. I can tell what kind of work he’s done – whether he’s just been saying his lines or if he’s dug into the character, and if the latter, what kind of digging he’s done.

Whether I’m directing or teaching, there is a limit to what even I can do with you if you aren’t bringing something to the table. THAT’S what you’re responsible for, as an actor. Like me in that play I talked about in the last Etiquette post (when I was playing adjectives, by the way – that much I can recognize in hindsight!), you are only going to be as good as you can be at this particular moment, and that is PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT. It’s where you are right now. It’s the best you can do.

But it’s ONLY the best you can do if you are really putting in the time and effort and doing everything you know how to do at this moment. That’s something the director simply can’t do for you. We might be able to nudge you in the right direction now and then. But we can’t do the work for you.

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Tag Archives: Actor