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Playwright John Kolvenbach, a friend, has developed what he calls “A Practical Guide to Producing a Kolvenbach Play.” In reading it over as I guide students through his work, I have come to believe that it provides insights that are useful to actors addressing any text, not just the wonderful plays that John has written. I offer it here and encourage you to read it, and also to pick up some of Mr. Kolvenbach’s lovely work, if you haven’t had the luck of running into it yet.
From my observation of various rehearsals over the years, what works and what doesn’t. The plays present a dual challenge: they are technically difficult and they require all the heart you have to give. They are demanding. May this make them less so.
The beats and pauses are plot. They aren’t theme. They serve the same purpose as the lines in the play. They convey information. If they are adhered to, the meaning of the scene should become quickly clear.
A pause is twice as long as a beat, roughly.
The plays are scored, and the music of the play is essential to the experience. The audience will only receive the play if the music is in place. The plays should sing. To do this, keep the ball in the air. I’ve heard this called “repartee” though I don’t think it’s that, exactly. I’ve worked with directors who have had ping pong tables in rehearsal, likening the dialogue to the game. Technically, (especially in the more comic plays) it’s that there is no pause after your line and before mine, unless one is written. No space for thought. Throw it back and forth.
Then, when there is a beat/pause, take it. You will have earned it. Don’t coast up to the stop sign and then creep away. Slam on the brakes and peel out.
But the music cannot be mechanically performed. If you bat the dialogue back and forth, it will be dead and the audience will not receive it. It must befull and fully lived in. You’re living through the scene, with a foundation of the score beneath you.
The score is there to reinforce intention. So go get what you want.
It can’t go too fast. This happens a lot. Don’t speak too fast. It’s difficult, but you need to excise filmic, behavioral pauses without allowing it to become a runaway train. The actors need to be on their front foot, but they must be in control of it, they have to Own it. My characters don’t speak quickly, they react immediately.
The best way to get the music of the play in place, in the bodies of the actors, is to run lines with someone on the script, calling out the beats/pauses when they occur. This must be done again when the actors are on their feet in the scene. Run lines with beats/pauses vocalized (say “beat.”) The actors can do this too, speaking the beats/pauses as if they were lines.
If you just review these things at the table, the actors will get cranky. They will begin to feel put upon. So it needs to be drilled. I encourage the director to be more like Balanchine, less like Freud.
The stakes in every scene and in the play need to be as high as is possible. Please don’t stage them as funny. The comedy will play if the music is in place. The people are real and want real things and each actor needs to bring themselves to the play Personally. The plays can hold a lot, please fill them up.
Then if you have the music in place, and the souls of the actors exposed and at risk, then you can let it rip. The plays require passion.
All of this should lead to freedom. After all the work is done, improvise within a very supportive form. The plays should end up being exciting to perform. Wild. And the audience should feel a great sense of suspense.
They don’t mean a thing if they ain’t got that swing. Good luck.
JK.
John Kolvenbach’s plays include Goldfish, Fabuloso, Love Song, Gizmo Love, and On An Average Day.
From my observation of various rehearsals over the years, what works and what doesn’t. The plays present a dual challenge: they are technically difficult and they require all the heart you have to give. They are demanding. May this make them less so.
The beats and pauses are plot. They aren’t theme. They serve the same purpose as the lines in the play. They convey information. If they are adhered to, the meaning of the scene should become quickly clear.
A pause is twice as long as a beat, roughly.
The plays are scored, and the music of the play is essential to the experience. The audience will only receive the play if the music is in place. The plays should sing. To do this, keep the ball in the air. I’ve heard this called “repartee” though I don’t think it’s that, exactly. I’ve worked with directors who have had ping pong tables in rehearsal, likening the dialogue to the game. Technically, (especially in the more comic plays) it’s that there is no pause after your line and before mine, unless one is written. No space for thought. Throw it back and forth.
Then, when there is a beat/pause, take it. You will have earned it. Don’t coast up to the stop sign and then creep away. Slam on the brakes and peel out.
But the music cannot be mechanically performed. If you bat the dialogue back and forth, it will be dead and the audience will not receive it. It must befull and fully lived in. You’re living through the scene, with a foundation of the score beneath you.
The score is there to reinforce intention. So go get what you want.
It can’t go too fast. This happens a lot. Don’t speak too fast. It’s difficult, but you need to excise filmic, behavioral pauses without allowing it to become a runaway train. The actors need to be on their front foot, but they must be in control of it, they have to Own it. My characters don’t speak quickly, they react immediately.
The best way to get the music of the play in place, in the bodies of the actors, is to run lines with someone on the script, calling out the beats/pauses when they occur. This must be done again when the actors are on their feet in the scene. Run lines with beats/pauses vocalized (say “beat.”) The actors can do this too, speaking the beats/pauses as if they were lines.
If you just review these things at the table, the actors will get cranky. They will begin to feel put upon. So it needs to be drilled. I encourage the director to be more like Balanchine, less like Freud.
The stakes in every scene and in the play need to be as high as is possible. Please don’t stage them as funny. The comedy will play if the music is in place. The people are real and want real things and each actor needs to bring themselves to the play Personally. The plays can hold a lot, please fill them up.
Then if you have the music in place, and the souls of the actors exposed and at risk, then you can let it rip. The plays require passion.
All of this should lead to freedom. After all the work is done, improvise within a very supportive form. The plays should end up being exciting to perform. Wild. And the audience should feel a great sense of suspense.
They don’t mean a thing if they ain’t got that swing. Good luck.
JK.
John Kolvenbach’s plays include Goldfish, Fabuloso, Love Song, Gizmo Love, and On An Average Day.
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I believe that the work that we do as actors and writers sends energy out into the universe, and we can never know where that energy is going to go, or what it is going to do when it gets there. Meditating on this simple fact can be very freeing in your work. It will help you to get your focus off of yourself. It will make your work about something outside yourself, and your petty concerns. That will make you a better actor. It is ironic, but true, that the less you think about yourself, the more of yourself you can bring to your work. Of course, so many of the jobs that we do to survive seem to have no redeeming value other than the money that they bring us. This is true even of many high paying acting jobs: the Tide commercial, the 3 episode arc on Gossip Girl — probably not going to save a marriage with either of those. But again, links in a chain, and work that enables you to go out and pursue all the other jobs that do have the potential to be a gift in someone’s life. Think of the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who does liposuction, breast augmentation, botox and collagen injections, and then volunteers at a low income medical care clinic and fixes a child’s cleft palate. One job supports the other, and a life is changed.
This is an excerpt from the article An Actor’s Credo: Why What We Do Matters, which appeared in my blog in January, 2012. To subscribe to my newsletter, containing these and other articles on acting technique, click here.
This is an excerpt from the article An Actor’s Credo: Why What We Do Matters, which appeared in my blog in January, 2012. To subscribe to my newsletter, containing these and other articles on acting technique, click here.
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. . . and Uta Hagen's Six Steps
I’m often fond of saying the toolbox that we carry to work is our past and our experiences. That’s what’s in my toolbox. I open it up, and I look in there, and I need to know as much as I can about my personality, how I appear to the world, what my emotional state is.
You’ve gotta know these six things about every scene and exercise you do. Uta [Hagen] calls them the six steps (See A Challenge for the Actor, by Uta Hagen, Macmillan 1991, p. 134): Who am I? What is my present state of being, how do I perceive myself, what am I wearing; What are the circumstances? What time is it, the year, the season, the day? Where am I, what city, what neighborhood, what room, what’s the landscape like? What surrounds me, the immediate landscape, the weather? What are the immediate circumstances? What has just happened in the room that I left? What is happening in the room that I am in? And what do I expect to happen in the room that I am going to; What are my relationships? How do I stand in relationship to the circumstances, the place, the objects, the other people; What do I want; What is in the way of what I want; And what do I do to get what I want?
So, you need to know all of those things. And what’s amazing is I sit there in class and watch students come in and do these exercises [from A Challenge for the Actor]. And I swear to you, each and every one of you would sit there, you wouldn’t be able to tell what the difference was, but you would know instantly who knows where they’re coming from and where they’re going, and who doesn’t know where they’re coming from and where they’re going.
It’s metaphysical. I don’t know how to explain it, but you can feel the difference when somebody’s done their homework and when they haven’t. It’s just crystal clear.
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.
You’ve gotta know these six things about every scene and exercise you do. Uta [Hagen] calls them the six steps (See A Challenge for the Actor, by Uta Hagen, Macmillan 1991, p. 134): Who am I? What is my present state of being, how do I perceive myself, what am I wearing; What are the circumstances? What time is it, the year, the season, the day? Where am I, what city, what neighborhood, what room, what’s the landscape like? What surrounds me, the immediate landscape, the weather? What are the immediate circumstances? What has just happened in the room that I left? What is happening in the room that I am in? And what do I expect to happen in the room that I am going to; What are my relationships? How do I stand in relationship to the circumstances, the place, the objects, the other people; What do I want; What is in the way of what I want; And what do I do to get what I want?
So, you need to know all of those things. And what’s amazing is I sit there in class and watch students come in and do these exercises [from A Challenge for the Actor]. And I swear to you, each and every one of you would sit there, you wouldn’t be able to tell what the difference was, but you would know instantly who knows where they’re coming from and where they’re going, and who doesn’t know where they’re coming from and where they’re going.
It’s metaphysical. I don’t know how to explain it, but you can feel the difference when somebody’s done their homework and when they haven’t. It’s just crystal clear.
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.
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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.
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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.
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A work in progress.
It was in January, 2011 that I received a call from Joanne DeNaut, the casting director at South Coast Rep, asking me if I would appear in a sit-down reading of the new play,The Prince of Atlantis, as part of SCR’s NewSCRipts series. The next incarnation of the piece was in April, 2011 — another reading, as part of the Pacific Playwrights Festival. Now, another year later, we are the festival’s main stage production.
Participating in the development of a new play is one of the most rewarding things that an actor can do, and the journey with Prince to this point has been very exciting. Author Steven Drukman and director Warner Shook led our company through an intense but rewarding rehearsal process. Through a generous grant from the Edgerton Foundation, we were given an extra week of rehearsal, and we spent it around a table, reading and re-reading the play, discussing, parsing, experimenting. It was amazing to have six days to explore the text with cast, playwright, director, and dramaturg; to have the luxury of time as we dove into event, circumstance, neighborhood, history, language and dialect. We had a thrilling opening night on April 6th, and audiences have been loving the show. Now, as we settle in for our run, the ride just gets better and better.
If you’re around in southern California between now and April 29th, I hope you have a chance to catch this sweet and tender comedy. And if you do, let me know you’re coming. You can watch scenes from the show, check out photos and design work, or watch the SCR video blog interview with me.
Participating in the development of a new play is one of the most rewarding things that an actor can do, and the journey with Prince to this point has been very exciting. Author Steven Drukman and director Warner Shook led our company through an intense but rewarding rehearsal process. Through a generous grant from the Edgerton Foundation, we were given an extra week of rehearsal, and we spent it around a table, reading and re-reading the play, discussing, parsing, experimenting. It was amazing to have six days to explore the text with cast, playwright, director, and dramaturg; to have the luxury of time as we dove into event, circumstance, neighborhood, history, language and dialect. We had a thrilling opening night on April 6th, and audiences have been loving the show. Now, as we settle in for our run, the ride just gets better and better.
If you’re around in southern California between now and April 29th, I hope you have a chance to catch this sweet and tender comedy. And if you do, let me know you’re coming. You can watch scenes from the show, check out photos and design work, or watch the SCR video blog interview with me.
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An actor's musings on the how and why of acting.
The following are excerpts from a talk I gave 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.
There are a lot of people out there, we think, “Ooh, he’s an actor. If he’s not Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, isn’t on the cover of People or Us Magazine, he can’t be earning a living.” And that’s not true. There are a lot of actors out there, guys like me, earning a regular middle-class living, sending their kids to school, paying the doctor bills, getting health insurance through the union, who you will never hear of, but they make a living as an actor.
So, it’s a viable career to pursue, as long as you remember that if you wanted to be a plumber or an electrician, you can be a plumber or an electrician and earn a good living without anybody ever hearing of you. You can earn a good living as an actor without anybody ever hearing of you.
Uta Hagen and a lot of teachers who came around in the ’40s started to have another idea about what actors do. And the idea that they had was that every character that you might play, every character that you might play at any point in your career already lives inside you in some way.
Rather than try to imagine how would some theoretical person behave in the circumstances that this character is going through, what you do is you look at the circumstances that the character is in and you say, “That is like the time in my life when this happened or that happened. How did I behave? This character is scared. This character is scared that his mother and father are gonna get divorced and he’s gonna be left alone.”
Now, okay, you may say, “My mother and father didn’t get divorced and I wasn’t left alone.” But when were there some circumstances that were parallel to that in some way, that brought up those same fears of abandonment for me? Maybe when I was five and my dog ran away, or my best friend at school suddenly was best friends with my enemy. When did that come up for me?
And you think about that. And you use memory techniques to think about that. And then the behavior comes back. And because you’re relating it to real experiences for yourself, the behavior becomes authentic, the emotion becomes authentic. I teach public speaking to attorneys. And they all say to me, “We don’t wanna learn the techniques that you use as an actor, because you guys are faking it. Actors are fakers. And I’m an attorney. I’m in court. I need to be authentic.”
And what I tell the attorneys is that good actors are not faking it. If you and I are playing a scene, a love scene, the situation is false, the emotion is real. You may find me physically unattractive, you may not like my personality, but you find a way of thinking about somebody who makes your heart sing. When you’re on stage with me, you think about that person. You superimpose them over me, and then the emotion becomes real.
Or you may be doing a play with your best friend, but you have to come to blows and hate each other. You superimpose, you think about, you remember the times in your life when you have had those thoughts, and feelings, and emotions, and you bring those up. And then the anger that would be going back and forth between you and me as we play that scene, the situation is fake, but the anger will be real.
Another idea that I think is interesting, that we talk about all the time, is believing that it’s really going on right now. It’s called emotional transference. You say, “This is what’s going on this scene. This was the event in my past that emotionally is identical to that scene.”
I think back to that. If I can remember what I was wearing, what it felt like, if I can remember the smells of the day, the weather; things like that will hook you into the emotion and bring you back to that time, and let that emotion start running through you again.
People come to me sometimes and they say, “You know, all the people in that movie are great actors. How did it turn out to be such a piece of crap?” How many times have you gone to see a movie and go, “How did this happen? 10 million dollars. Warner Brothers or 20th Century Fox behind it. Anthony Hopkins and Gene Hackman. How did it happen?”
The answer varies from situation to situation. I was in a play once off-off-Broadway for next to no money that I was basically kinda doing as a favor for a friend. And this guy had written a play about a true event that happened between his dad and his uncle, and whole bunch of friends of theirs.
So, there were these real guys from the past. And they were gonna come see the play, all these guys. And they had been mixed up in some scheme, and a couple of them had gone to jail for a little while and not spoken to each other. Now, they were all friends again. And it was a very traumatic event for this playwright when he was a kid. His dad went to jail for a couple of years.
Now, everybody is grown up, everybody is friends, it’s all in the past, forget it. But this guy has written a play about it to sort of get these feelings out. And we’d be in rehearsal, and he’d be coming up to me, saying, “No, that’s not what he was like.” And I’d say, “I don’t give a good goddamn what he was like. It’s on the page, or it’s not there.”
And he was also directing it, which caused all kinds of problems. My personal feeling is, if you’re writing the play, if you want total control, go write a book, write a novel. This is a collaborative art form. You write a play, you get to build the skeleton. And that’s your job, and put it on the page. The director’s job is then to come up with an overarching view of what this evening should be like, thematically, stylistically. The director gets to decide all of that.
I, 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.”
So, there are a couple of things going on when you’re an actor. One is your day-to-day work in rehearsal, and the only thing you can do on stage is go after what your character wants, your character’s objectives. But then, at a certain point, you step back and you go, “Wait a minute, I don’t wanna do The Merchant of Venice and do it stylistically as if anti-Semitism is okay.”
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.
And that’s the kind of art that I’m interested in taking part in. So, sometimes, even though I will, on the one hand, say, “Ooh, not my job to decide what the play is about,” there are other times when I’ll say to a director, “Go to hell. I don’t wanna tell that story. I don’t think it’s socially responsible to tell that story.”
I’m often fond of saying the toolbox that we carry to work is our past and our experiences. That’s what’s in my toolbox. I open it up, and I look in there, and I need to know as much as I can about my personality, how I appear to the world, what my emotional state is.
You’ve gotta know these six things about every scene and exercise you do. Uta [Hagen] calls them the six steps (See A Challenge for the Actor, by Uta Hagen, Macmillan 1991, p. 134): Who am I? What is my present state of being, how do I perceive myself, what am I wearing; What are the circumstances? What time is it, the year, the season, the day? Where am I, what city, what neighborhood, what room, what’s the landscape like? What surrounds me, the immediate landscape, the weather? What are the immediate circumstances? What has just happened in the room that I left? What is happening in the room that I am in? And what do I expect to happen in the room that I am going to; What are my relationships? How do I stand in relationship to the circumstances, the place, the objects, the other people; What do I want; What is in the way of what I want; And what do I do to get what I want?
So, you need to know all of those things. And what’s amazing is I sit there in class and watch students come in and do these exercises [from A Challenge for the Actor]. And I swear to you, each and every one of you would sit there, you wouldn’t be able to tell what the difference was, but you would know instantly who knows where they’re coming from and where they’re going, and who doesn’t know where they’re coming from and where they’re going.
It’s metaphysical. I don’t know how to explain it, but you can feel the difference when somebody’s done their homework and when they haven’t. It’s just crystal clear.
There are a lot of people out there, we think, “Ooh, he’s an actor. If he’s not Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, isn’t on the cover of People or Us Magazine, he can’t be earning a living.” And that’s not true. There are a lot of actors out there, guys like me, earning a regular middle-class living, sending their kids to school, paying the doctor bills, getting health insurance through the union, who you will never hear of, but they make a living as an actor.
So, it’s a viable career to pursue, as long as you remember that if you wanted to be a plumber or an electrician, you can be a plumber or an electrician and earn a good living without anybody ever hearing of you. You can earn a good living as an actor without anybody ever hearing of you.
Uta Hagen and a lot of teachers who came around in the ’40s started to have another idea about what actors do. And the idea that they had was that every character that you might play, every character that you might play at any point in your career already lives inside you in some way.
Rather than try to imagine how would some theoretical person behave in the circumstances that this character is going through, what you do is you look at the circumstances that the character is in and you say, “That is like the time in my life when this happened or that happened. How did I behave? This character is scared. This character is scared that his mother and father are gonna get divorced and he’s gonna be left alone.”
Now, okay, you may say, “My mother and father didn’t get divorced and I wasn’t left alone.” But when were there some circumstances that were parallel to that in some way, that brought up those same fears of abandonment for me? Maybe when I was five and my dog ran away, or my best friend at school suddenly was best friends with my enemy. When did that come up for me?
And you think about that. And you use memory techniques to think about that. And then the behavior comes back. And because you’re relating it to real experiences for yourself, the behavior becomes authentic, the emotion becomes authentic. I teach public speaking to attorneys. And they all say to me, “We don’t wanna learn the techniques that you use as an actor, because you guys are faking it. Actors are fakers. And I’m an attorney. I’m in court. I need to be authentic.”
And what I tell the attorneys is that good actors are not faking it. If you and I are playing a scene, a love scene, the situation is false, the emotion is real. You may find me physically unattractive, you may not like my personality, but you find a way of thinking about somebody who makes your heart sing. When you’re on stage with me, you think about that person. You superimpose them over me, and then the emotion becomes real.
Or you may be doing a play with your best friend, but you have to come to blows and hate each other. You superimpose, you think about, you remember the times in your life when you have had those thoughts, and feelings, and emotions, and you bring those up. And then the anger that would be going back and forth between you and me as we play that scene, the situation is fake, but the anger will be real.
Another idea that I think is interesting, that we talk about all the time, is believing that it’s really going on right now. It’s called emotional transference. You say, “This is what’s going on this scene. This was the event in my past that emotionally is identical to that scene.”
I think back to that. If I can remember what I was wearing, what it felt like, if I can remember the smells of the day, the weather; things like that will hook you into the emotion and bring you back to that time, and let that emotion start running through you again.
People come to me sometimes and they say, “You know, all the people in that movie are great actors. How did it turn out to be such a piece of crap?” How many times have you gone to see a movie and go, “How did this happen? 10 million dollars. Warner Brothers or 20th Century Fox behind it. Anthony Hopkins and Gene Hackman. How did it happen?”
The answer varies from situation to situation. I was in a play once off-off-Broadway for next to no money that I was basically kinda doing as a favor for a friend. And this guy had written a play about a true event that happened between his dad and his uncle, and whole bunch of friends of theirs.
So, there were these real guys from the past. And they were gonna come see the play, all these guys. And they had been mixed up in some scheme, and a couple of them had gone to jail for a little while and not spoken to each other. Now, they were all friends again. And it was a very traumatic event for this playwright when he was a kid. His dad went to jail for a couple of years.
Now, everybody is grown up, everybody is friends, it’s all in the past, forget it. But this guy has written a play about it to sort of get these feelings out. And we’d be in rehearsal, and he’d be coming up to me, saying, “No, that’s not what he was like.” And I’d say, “I don’t give a good goddamn what he was like. It’s on the page, or it’s not there.”
And he was also directing it, which caused all kinds of problems. My personal feeling is, if you’re writing the play, if you want total control, go write a book, write a novel. This is a collaborative art form. You write a play, you get to build the skeleton. And that’s your job, and put it on the page. The director’s job is then to come up with an overarching view of what this evening should be like, thematically, stylistically. The director gets to decide all of that.
I, 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.”
So, there are a couple of things going on when you’re an actor. One is your day-to-day work in rehearsal, and the only thing you can do on stage is go after what your character wants, your character’s objectives. But then, at a certain point, you step back and you go, “Wait a minute, I don’t wanna do The Merchant of Venice and do it stylistically as if anti-Semitism is okay.”
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.
And that’s the kind of art that I’m interested in taking part in. So, sometimes, even though I will, on the one hand, say, “Ooh, not my job to decide what the play is about,” there are other times when I’ll say to a director, “Go to hell. I don’t wanna tell that story. I don’t think it’s socially responsible to tell that story.”
I’m often fond of saying the toolbox that we carry to work is our past and our experiences. That’s what’s in my toolbox. I open it up, and I look in there, and I need to know as much as I can about my personality, how I appear to the world, what my emotional state is.
You’ve gotta know these six things about every scene and exercise you do. Uta [Hagen] calls them the six steps (See A Challenge for the Actor, by Uta Hagen, Macmillan 1991, p. 134): Who am I? What is my present state of being, how do I perceive myself, what am I wearing; What are the circumstances? What time is it, the year, the season, the day? Where am I, what city, what neighborhood, what room, what’s the landscape like? What surrounds me, the immediate landscape, the weather? What are the immediate circumstances? What has just happened in the room that I left? What is happening in the room that I am in? And what do I expect to happen in the room that I am going to; What are my relationships? How do I stand in relationship to the circumstances, the place, the objects, the other people; What do I want; What is in the way of what I want; And what do I do to get what I want?
So, you need to know all of those things. And what’s amazing is I sit there in class and watch students come in and do these exercises [from A Challenge for the Actor]. And I swear to you, each and every one of you would sit there, you wouldn’t be able to tell what the difference was, but you would know instantly who knows where they’re coming from and where they’re going, and who doesn’t know where they’re coming from and where they’re going.
It’s metaphysical. I don’t know how to explain it, but you can feel the difference when somebody’s done their homework and when they haven’t. It’s just crystal clear.
- Published on
Why what we do matters.
Ah, the holidays. The end of one year, the beginning of another. A time of joy and inspiration for many of us, of family pressure and craziness for others. A time of looking back and evaluating, of looking forward and committing to new goals and ideals. A time when our emotional pot can get stirred. This year, many of us are facing financial uncertainty unprecedented in our lifetimes, both for ourselves and the nation as a whole. This can lead to a lot of questioning and soul searching, particularly for those of us who have chosen to follow a career in the arts, a career known for financial instability even during the best of times. Sometimes the voices in our heads can get very loud. We might look at our wallets and ask, “What am I doing with my life?” We might look at our work and ask, “Does any of this really matter?” So now that the holidays are over, and we are getting back to day-to-day business, I’d like to share some of the thoughts that percolated through my eggnog-and-shopping-crowd addled brain throughout the season.
For me, at times of stress, general questions about goals and ideals in life become more focused into questions about the value and purpose of what we as actors do with our careers. After all, we’re really just storytellers, purveyors of entertainment and diversion. There are serious problems in the world. What are we, artists, doing about these problems? We’re not curing cancer, or housing the homeless, or feeding the hungry.
Or are we?
December, 2001 in New York City. The first holiday season since the towers came down. 9/11 had thrown everything into sharp contrast for me, and like so many others, I was having a crisis of faith. I wasn’t sure what I could grab onto to keep me steady when the world was rocking so violently. Prior to the attacks, my role as father and provider gave me an identity. After the attacks, when my then wife and my child were feeling afraid and insecure in a world that had always seemed safe to them, that role felt more like a burdensome weight than an anchor that kept me moored in a turbulent sea. I was being looked to for strength, context and answers that I didn’t have. At the time, I had not developed a strong spiritual practice or connection to anything, and so I didn’t feel I had those things to give. And though finances were pretty good — I was working steadily as an actor, lots of theater, a recurring role on a television drama, tons of voiceover work — a career in the arts is always tenuous. It was an unsettling time.
One day I was making my rounds in the city, pondering these questions. Cheerful holiday advertisements were a painful and hollow contrast to the questioning and mournful mood of the city’s residents, who were not yet ready to celebrate, so soon after the tragedy. Riding the subway, hurrying to my next appointment, the rattle of the cars was a welcome relief after the cacophony of carols blaring from every open store, shallowly proclaiming the joy of the season. I got off at my stop and was walking down the platform toward the exit when a young woman caught my sleeve and said, “Excuse me, but I have to tell you that you saved my marriage.”
I stopped short, confused. I must have looked dumbfounded. I had never seen her before. I may have said “What?”
“I’m sorry,” she continued, “I saw you on the subway, and I just had to let you know.” We stood there on the platform as trains came and went, and she told me her story. She and her husband were both actors. They had been married for a couple of years, both of them struggling to make a living at their craft, studying, holding down menial support jobs so they could go after their dreams. After a while, things had started to go better for her. She was getting a good amount of paying work, and no longer had to do anything else to bring money in — was, indeed, too busy to do other things. But the same was not true for her husband. Instead, for him, things were getting worse. Nothing was happening in his career, and he had to devote himself more seriously to something else in order to make the necessary amount of money. Construction, I think it was, or perhaps carpentry. Although he was happy for her, it was difficult for him, watching her success grow, and he became demoralized. He was working so hard, for longer hours and for so much less money than her, at something with so much less “prestige,” whatever that is, and his ego was taking a hammering. There was tension between them. She suggested counseling, for him and for them as a couple. He was resistant. The tension grew into friction and, as she put it, their marriage was circling the drain. Still he would not agree to counseling, and she started to wait, with resignation, for the end.
Then one day a friend offered them two tickets to “Dinner With Friends,” a play I was doing in New York at the time. It is a wonderful play about, among other things, the difficulties a marriage can face as romance melts into comfort and then congeals into mere routine. They took the tickets, and at intermission, in the lobby, this young woman’s husband broke down in tears, told her he had been a fool, that he had been forgetting what they had, that he would do whatever he could to save their marriage. They got into counseling, and now, two years later, she told me, they were going to make it.
Now I am under no illusions about this story. I know that I didn’t save this woman’s marriage, any more than the paramedic who uses a defibrillator saves someone’s life. Hundreds of people save the life of a heart attack victim — all the people who play a part in the system: The donor who buys the defibrillators for the hospital, the councilman who votes for the funding for the paramedics, the man who invented defibrillators in the first place. But the point is that without each link in that chain, the heart attack victim dies. Likewise with the events that saved this woman’s marriage. I was merely doing my job to the best of my abilities. I was playing my part in a process — I was a link in a chain.
I believe that the work that we do as actors and writers sends energy out into the universe, and we can never know where that energy is going to go, or what it is going to do when it gets there. Meditating on this simple fact can be very freeing in your work. It will help you to get your focus off of yourself. It will make your work about something outside yourself, and your petty concerns. That will make you a better actor. It is ironic, but true, that the less you think about yourself, the more of yourself you can bring to your work. Of course, so many of the jobs that we do to survive seem to have no redeeming value other than the money that they bring us. This is true even of many high paying acting jobs: the Tide commercial, the 3 episode arc on Gossip Girl — probably not going to save a marriage with either of those. But again, links in a chain, and work that enables you to go out and pursue all the other jobs that do have the potential to be a gift in someone’s life. Think of the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who does liposuction, breast augmentation, botox and collagen injections, and then volunteers at a low income medical care clinic and fixes a child’s cleft palate. One job supports the other, and a life is changed.
A friend of mine once told the following story, particularly apt to this discussion. When she was a student in college, her family situation was difficult, and her social life at school was not going well. She was afflicted with a serious illness from which she would never recover, leaving her with some permanent physical challenges. As the holidays approached, her sense of loneliness and isolation increased to the point where she resolved to end her life. She gathered the necessary supplies, and was setting them up on the table in her small apartment, with only the noise of the television to keep her company. At around one o’clock in the morning, as she was preparing to take her pills, the opening credits of Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life began to roll. She had never seen the movie, but she watched it then, start to finish, and when it was over, she flushed the pills down the toilet.
The Talmud tells us “And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” I think about this often. Now of course we never know how our work plays out in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know, for instance, if the people whose marriage I “saved” will go on to have a kid who discovers the cure for cancer. But I also don’t know that they won’t. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I did my part. It’s not up to us what happens after we have followed our dreams and done our best. What is up to us is the decision to use the gifts that we are given, and trusting that a power greater than us has a design that we can’t see.
For me, at times of stress, general questions about goals and ideals in life become more focused into questions about the value and purpose of what we as actors do with our careers. After all, we’re really just storytellers, purveyors of entertainment and diversion. There are serious problems in the world. What are we, artists, doing about these problems? We’re not curing cancer, or housing the homeless, or feeding the hungry.
Or are we?
December, 2001 in New York City. The first holiday season since the towers came down. 9/11 had thrown everything into sharp contrast for me, and like so many others, I was having a crisis of faith. I wasn’t sure what I could grab onto to keep me steady when the world was rocking so violently. Prior to the attacks, my role as father and provider gave me an identity. After the attacks, when my then wife and my child were feeling afraid and insecure in a world that had always seemed safe to them, that role felt more like a burdensome weight than an anchor that kept me moored in a turbulent sea. I was being looked to for strength, context and answers that I didn’t have. At the time, I had not developed a strong spiritual practice or connection to anything, and so I didn’t feel I had those things to give. And though finances were pretty good — I was working steadily as an actor, lots of theater, a recurring role on a television drama, tons of voiceover work — a career in the arts is always tenuous. It was an unsettling time.
One day I was making my rounds in the city, pondering these questions. Cheerful holiday advertisements were a painful and hollow contrast to the questioning and mournful mood of the city’s residents, who were not yet ready to celebrate, so soon after the tragedy. Riding the subway, hurrying to my next appointment, the rattle of the cars was a welcome relief after the cacophony of carols blaring from every open store, shallowly proclaiming the joy of the season. I got off at my stop and was walking down the platform toward the exit when a young woman caught my sleeve and said, “Excuse me, but I have to tell you that you saved my marriage.”
I stopped short, confused. I must have looked dumbfounded. I had never seen her before. I may have said “What?”
“I’m sorry,” she continued, “I saw you on the subway, and I just had to let you know.” We stood there on the platform as trains came and went, and she told me her story. She and her husband were both actors. They had been married for a couple of years, both of them struggling to make a living at their craft, studying, holding down menial support jobs so they could go after their dreams. After a while, things had started to go better for her. She was getting a good amount of paying work, and no longer had to do anything else to bring money in — was, indeed, too busy to do other things. But the same was not true for her husband. Instead, for him, things were getting worse. Nothing was happening in his career, and he had to devote himself more seriously to something else in order to make the necessary amount of money. Construction, I think it was, or perhaps carpentry. Although he was happy for her, it was difficult for him, watching her success grow, and he became demoralized. He was working so hard, for longer hours and for so much less money than her, at something with so much less “prestige,” whatever that is, and his ego was taking a hammering. There was tension between them. She suggested counseling, for him and for them as a couple. He was resistant. The tension grew into friction and, as she put it, their marriage was circling the drain. Still he would not agree to counseling, and she started to wait, with resignation, for the end.
Then one day a friend offered them two tickets to “Dinner With Friends,” a play I was doing in New York at the time. It is a wonderful play about, among other things, the difficulties a marriage can face as romance melts into comfort and then congeals into mere routine. They took the tickets, and at intermission, in the lobby, this young woman’s husband broke down in tears, told her he had been a fool, that he had been forgetting what they had, that he would do whatever he could to save their marriage. They got into counseling, and now, two years later, she told me, they were going to make it.
Now I am under no illusions about this story. I know that I didn’t save this woman’s marriage, any more than the paramedic who uses a defibrillator saves someone’s life. Hundreds of people save the life of a heart attack victim — all the people who play a part in the system: The donor who buys the defibrillators for the hospital, the councilman who votes for the funding for the paramedics, the man who invented defibrillators in the first place. But the point is that without each link in that chain, the heart attack victim dies. Likewise with the events that saved this woman’s marriage. I was merely doing my job to the best of my abilities. I was playing my part in a process — I was a link in a chain.
I believe that the work that we do as actors and writers sends energy out into the universe, and we can never know where that energy is going to go, or what it is going to do when it gets there. Meditating on this simple fact can be very freeing in your work. It will help you to get your focus off of yourself. It will make your work about something outside yourself, and your petty concerns. That will make you a better actor. It is ironic, but true, that the less you think about yourself, the more of yourself you can bring to your work. Of course, so many of the jobs that we do to survive seem to have no redeeming value other than the money that they bring us. This is true even of many high paying acting jobs: the Tide commercial, the 3 episode arc on Gossip Girl — probably not going to save a marriage with either of those. But again, links in a chain, and work that enables you to go out and pursue all the other jobs that do have the potential to be a gift in someone’s life. Think of the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who does liposuction, breast augmentation, botox and collagen injections, and then volunteers at a low income medical care clinic and fixes a child’s cleft palate. One job supports the other, and a life is changed.
A friend of mine once told the following story, particularly apt to this discussion. When she was a student in college, her family situation was difficult, and her social life at school was not going well. She was afflicted with a serious illness from which she would never recover, leaving her with some permanent physical challenges. As the holidays approached, her sense of loneliness and isolation increased to the point where she resolved to end her life. She gathered the necessary supplies, and was setting them up on the table in her small apartment, with only the noise of the television to keep her company. At around one o’clock in the morning, as she was preparing to take her pills, the opening credits of Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life began to roll. She had never seen the movie, but she watched it then, start to finish, and when it was over, she flushed the pills down the toilet.
The Talmud tells us “And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” I think about this often. Now of course we never know how our work plays out in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know, for instance, if the people whose marriage I “saved” will go on to have a kid who discovers the cure for cancer. But I also don’t know that they won’t. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I did my part. It’s not up to us what happens after we have followed our dreams and done our best. What is up to us is the decision to use the gifts that we are given, and trusting that a power greater than us has a design that we can’t see.
When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like beasts, only for the day. Today we live, but tomorrow today will be a story. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer
© 2012 Matthew Arkin