The great actor and teacher Herbert Berghof said, “Words are the messengers of our wishes.” The playwright reveals the desires and intentions of the character using both description of action and the lines the character is to speak. When a stage direction prescribes an action, perhaps saying “Louis mimes barfing in Joe’s lap,” as in the scene from Angels in America, we would never think of changing that to suit our own idea of an alternative action. We might be free to perform the “barf” the way we want, realistically, cartoonishly, — in that freedom lies the art of our interpretation — but “barf” we must. We should no more think of eliminating that action than we would an entrance or an exit. So it is with the words that the playwright assigns to us. They are the “messengers” of the character’s wishes, actions that define the character every bit as much as entering, exiting, slapping, barfing, falling, dying. Your work as an actor is to find an interior life that will let you own the actions and the words of the character as set down by the playwright, not to alter those actions or words to suit your own ideas as to what the character should be doing or saying.
     Sometimes, it might seem impossible to speak the line as it is written by the playwright. You look at it on the page and don’t believe that it could ever come out of your mouth in a natural way, and so you back off of it, swallow it when you say it, pull the energy out of the scene and the playwright’s design. But by backing off of it, you preordain a negative outcome. Rather, you should invest in it fully, give it everything that you have. Attach the arrow of your intention to the words, and in so doing, you may discover that it does indeed hit its target.
This is an excerpt from the article Acting Verbatim which appeared in my blog in May, 2011. To subscribe to my newsletter, containing these and other articles on acting technique, click here.

As the actor, I usually try pretty hard not to think about what the play is about, because I can’t act that. I can only act, “What do I want right now?” Who’s familiar with the Angels in America? It’s a play that dealt a lot with issues of homosexuality in the ’80s in the United States of America, sociopolitically, economically, a huge, amazing piece of work. It won the Pulitzer Prize.
     I can’t act that. If I’m playing Louis in Angels in America, I can’t act, “Hi, I’m here to tell you about what was going on sociopolitically around the issues of AIDS in the United States of America in the ’80s.” I can’t do that. I can only act what Louis wants and how he moves through his day. The playwright has to make that reflect the issues that he’s talking about.
     That said, I will now prove myself a hypocrite. There have been times where I’ve said to a director, “I don’t wanna do it that way.” “Why not?” “Because, if we’re doing it that way, then the play is gonna be about something else. It’s gonna be telling a different story. And I’m not interested in telling that story.”

This is an excerpt from a talk I gave on acting as a career as part of the Working Professional Series at the Theater Department of Lehman College. It is also available as a transcript and podcast on the Lehman College Website.

I’m not interested in portraying Shylock as an irredeemable villain. I’m interested in portraying villains and showing their humanity. Even if you’re playing Hitler, I think your job is to show his humanity. Because the minute you play a villain and make him the other, make him completely the other, then we don’t have to take any responsibility for the human condition, and we don’t learn anything. It just becomes, you know, “Ooh, Afghan terrorist equals demon,” right?
     What do we learn if we say that? We don’t learn anything. And there’s no possibility in theater or film for learning, for growth, and for reconciliation if that’s how we play our villains. But if we play our villains going, “Oh, my god, young Afghan boy grows up and sees all this terrible stuff happen because of the Soviet Union, and then because of the United States’ complicity in this kinda stuff, and all that terrible stuff turns this person into a terrorist,” I’m not gonna say terrorism is okay, but I understand how that happens. Then we can learn something. And we can communicate it to somebody else. And we can feel compassion. And we can learn. And we can grow.

This is an excerpt from a talk I gave on acting as a career as part of the Working Professional Series at the Theater Department of Lehman College. It is also available as a transcript and podcast on the Lehman College Website.