Riding Streetcar(s) can be Tricky . . .

Two young women in my class are doing the 1st Blanche/Stella scene in "Streetcar." No big deal, right? Wrong. On the surface, Stella seems to be placid and quiet while Blanche natters on, nervous and uncomfortable. But both women have to locate the tense underscore that Williams provides in order for the scene to succeed. On first reading this essential fact eluded these two talented actors.

Remember that in any scene, the actors have to be aware of their objective and their obstacles. Blanche's are clearer than Stella's. But it's absolutely essential that Stella find her keys so that the tension and conflict between the sisters works.

And you have to look past the dialogue to find them. That's the problem. Many young or inexperienced actors flounder when they try to find answers exclusively in the dialogue while ignoring the subtext.

Williams gives us hints IN the dialogue, which demand that we look closely at subtext. Stella is defensive about: her living conditions, her marriage to Stanley (she hasn't even told him that Blanche is coming to visit - fearful of how he's going to respond), and her pregnancy - which she doesn't know how to share with Blanche. Further, she has to deal with Blanche's nervous state and the obvious fact that there's something wrong. If the actor digs through this rich subtext, all she needs to know reveals itself.

The problem for the actor lies in knowing where to look. Once you remind yourself that the solution to an acting issue often lies BENEATH the surface of the text, a light appears at the end of the tunnel. These 2 young women are now confidently on their way!

Where does it come from?

In working with young clients over the past week, I noticed a strange phenomenon. Their attempt to produce deep emotion came from the chest - and in one case - from the shoulders. Really. It's definitely a symptom of the actor being in "the head", but presenting the problem in terms of physical location had a powerful effect.

I pointed out to my younguns that when we are in the throes of deeply felt emotion, be it anger, fear, love - what have you, the felt component is centered low down, in the gut. If you reflect on this, dear actor, you'll realize that we're affected by what we feel in our core, not our shoulders or chest.

I asked one student to put his hand on his lower belly and to produce felt emotion from where his hand was located. The result was immediate and astonishing. Stuff began to volcano up and out in a way that literally knocked him back - tripped over the dog and landed on the couch. He's not cured. Not yet. But it's a start. I'm reminded of Stanislavski's work with producing theatrical truth from the outside in. You can get to the moment by physical means. The inside connects to the outside, which has to happen anyway, of course, but there are lots of ways to get there. Whatever works!

In any event, friends, if you feel trapped by thought, try bringing the emotional beat down to your core and see if it rumbles up in a way that defies your head and pays homage to your living soul!

After - Beating . . .Shakespeare

Not a subject for battered persons, I should hasten to say! No, no, dear friends. I was with one of my talented clients the other day - a new actor - and we were working over Portia (The Merchant of Venice) - figuratively speaking. The beating thing again. Forgive me. And even though this lovely young woman was doing lovely things, there was something awry. Amiss. Eureka! The after beat.

For those of you who might have missed this in an earlier post, the after beat (my own term, I think - being a brilliant coiner of terms)is what you play after the last word leaves your mouth and which either helps you to demand a response from the other character, yourself or which connects you to the next word that's about to come out of your mouth. Making sure you play the after beat, guarantees you won't drop out of the scene. Guarantees it!

When doing Shakespeare, Iambic Pentameter in particular, the problem for the actor is amplified because there are no pauses for transition available. Real pauses would break the rhythm of the line. So the after beat is played as a "breath beat", usually at punctuation marks. Thus the integrity of the line is maintained.

My young friend knows all this, but was still beaten off (I'm really sorry - can't resist. Pun-ish me!)by after beat issues. I learned something important. What she hadn't done in her study of the monologue was to actually write the after beat down, in colloquial terms, and learn it as she learned the text.

I then insisted that after doing this, she rehearse the monologue at half speed, making sure the lines and the after beats were joined together into a consistent whole and only then, bring it up to speed. I love it when I learn something new. And I love my students for giving me the opportunity!

Take that, Sucker!

Every time I see an actor, especially before an opening, going furiously over lines, making sure he/she won't forget them at a critical moment, I think: "Sucker!" Perhaps something kinder, but the caution's the same.

The play's been rehearsed for 4 weeks, the lines at the last rehearsal were perfect - so why is the actor worried about forgetting? Probably because the lines were memorized, not learned properly. Psychologically, if you're worried about lines and go over them just prior to opening, you are creating a perfect scenario. You WILL forget. And you've set it up!

On the other hand (there are five fingers, yuk)if the lines have been learned, not memorized, then the implication is they've been assimilated through association with an inner emotional beat and become part of muscle memory. Actors who go about learning lines this way spend much less time studying the script and find themselves absorbing dialogue AS THEY REHEARSE.

About 15 years ago, I found myself having to take on Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, 4 days before opening. It was a 15 show run and the good Friar had to go on with "The Bible" in hand. What I found was that as I adapted to the environment and interacted with other actors, the text began to stick and I actually had very little "book" work to do. After the 5th performance, the Bible became a prop and I didn't have to refer to it again.

Try it. Not Friar Laurence, heaven forbid! But try dealing with your lines this way. It's far more organic and really helps keep you out of your head.

On Camera actors have a somewhat harder row to hoe. Get the sides 24 hours before the audition and show up ready to go. Memorization may be the only salvation in that case - or as in having to learn three scenes for tomorrow's shoot after putting in a 12 hour day on set. I suspect, however, that the best film actors will tell you lines are learned, not memorized. Take that, sucker!

More, More Shakespeare. . .Always be prepared for surprises!

With Shakespeare, you can't count on anything! It's true, for the most part, noble or high born characters speak in verse and low born folk in prose - BUT NOT ALWAYS. It's far safer to look at all of this in another way. Serious, passionate, elegant matters can be expressed in verse and lighter, witty matters can be expressed in prose.

Sometimes Wiley Will uses verse and prose in the same scene - with upper class and lower class characters uttering both. A great example of same is in Romeo and Julietwhere Romeo, in his encounter with The Nurse, (II,4)teases her, and not nicely, either, in prose, and she replies in kind. But when they turn to the serious business of Romeo's meeting with Juliet, Romeo speaks in verse and Nursie follows right along. So they're both speaking verse, low born and high born. When the matter's resolved, though, and the bantering resumes, they both revert to prose. Pretty tricky stuff, dear actor, and you have to deal with it seamlessly and without effort. Seeing and understanding the pattern is the key to success here.

I haven't touched on Rhymed Couplets yet, so here's a light, and I hope, deft touch. The young lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream are fools - or, more properly, foolish. Shakespeare emphasizes their shallowness by having them speak (not entirely, mind you) in rhymed couplets. They come off as silly things and again, actor friends, If you understand the purpose behind the writer's choice of style, it's a big help in discovering what to do with and how to play the text.

The other use Shakespeare devised for the rhymed couplet was to use them to end things. Scenes, acts and the like. As in Hamlet (II,2)

". . .- the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

That ends Act II, Scene two of Hamlet - and, similarly, ends today's sermon.

More Shakespeare . . .

How to speak him. Well part of what you need to know, anyway.

Shakespeare wrote in three modalities.

Iambic Pentameter

Rhymed Couplets

Prose

Which mode he chose depended on many things, chief among them, the status of the character, the nature of the drama (or comedy) and the issue at hand.

In this post, I'm going to concern myself, primarily, with how the great man used Iambic Pentameter. To begin, Iambic Pentameter is usually spoken by noble or high-born characters. Prose, as a general rule, is reserved for lower born characters. A regular Iambic line has five "feet", or stressed syllables. There are irregular lines, but that's a subject for another day.

In a regular line - such as "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" (Hamlet, II,2)the stresses fall on O, Rogue, Peasant, Slave and I. The actor should find the pulse of the 5 beats in the line and be guided by them as he speaks it.

Amazingly, more often than not, the actor finds that the emotional content of the line is amplified by how he speaks/stresses the words. This isn't some airy-fairy fiction. It's fact. If you try it, you'll believe. It's not mysterious, but it's absolutely beyond the realm of imagining that Shakespeare was able, time and time again, to produce dramatic fiction, constrained by the rules of Iambic Pentameter, and create dialogue that surpasses anything ever written. That's genius, alright.

Anyway. In order to keep the meter, the actor can't take pauses, moments for reflection etc. as he might in a modern text. Shakespearean text depends on momentum in order to achieve its effect. The actor, therefore, must make his transitions either on the line itself or while other characters are speaking. But, in any event, he must make all the appropriate emotional shifts. The most important thing in this regard is to use the punctuation marks as keys for when emotion shifts - and you have to do it in rhythm. It's often appropriate to take a "breath" beat when you hit a period.

A fine example of a very good actor doing a breathtaking job with text can be found in Kenneth Branagh's delivery of the St. Crispin's day speech from Henry V. With a minor exception here and there, that, dear friends is how you do it! More about build and release in Shakespeare - "Surfing the Text" in a later post.

Long Ago and Far Away . . .

We're living in the early part of the 21st Century. Well . . .most of us are. There are parts of the world where they're still looking forward to 1600, but that's another story. Anyway - for those 21st Century actors reading this, please take a moment to contemplate a life in the 19th Century - say in the time of Dickens. Or in the late 16th Century in the time of Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Those writers, indeed writers of every stripe in any century, wrote for their own audience. They weren't writing for posterity. At least I don't think they were. Imagine the look on Euripedes' mug if he knew that some 2,600 years after he wrote it, a University in Athens (Georgia)was going to produce Electra. Is it important, then, even if the director dresses his cast up like a womens basketball team for the company to know something about the playwrite and the time in which he lived?

The answer is yes. Even if the production strays far from the author's original intent. In order to sit on top of a ladder and drip paint onto a canvas, did Jackson Pollock have to know something about formal aspects of painting? Same answer. So in order to move away from the original play, it would behoove us to know where the original play came from.

But even if we're doing King Lear in spacesuits, odds are we'll be speaking Shakespeare's words, more or less as he wrote them. In order to do that convincingly, we have to understand every word, it's original context and how to pronounce it. The farther all that is from our own experience, the more work we have to do. It is, in fact, a translation issue. The actor has to translate archaic language into something that is easy and familiar

Recently, I coached an actress who had to shoot several scenes speaking Mandarin. She's oriental, but Canadian, and didn't speak Mandarin at all. She learned the Mandarin pronunciation and inflection and her father gave us the English translation. As we worked, she learned the beats, emotionally and physically, in English and then, by associating them with the Mandarin words, was finally able to play the scenes in Mandarin.

That's precisely what I'm suggesting you do with language that isn't your own. With Shakespeare, for example, put the text into your own words. Learn the beats by association, make sure everything is clear and well defined - then play the Shakespearean text. There are plenty of other things you have to do in order to play Shakespeare properly, but we'll save that for another day.

The Soloist. . .

Based on Steve Lopez' book about his relationship with former cello prodigy, Nathaniel Ayers, mentally ill and living in the Dickensian shadow world of Los Angeles' 90,000 homeless, The Soloist,while often moving - and filled with the glorious sounds of great music, comes up short.

What is of particular interest to actors, though, is how Jamie Foxx navigates his way through the tortured mind of a schizophrenic genius. To put it simply, an actor can't play a crazy person. It's impossible - in the same way as playing "God" or "The Devil" is impossible. Nor can you be "in limbo", as many writers suggest - unless you know the color of the rug and where the toilet is. But I digress.

The clear answer here is that when playing a mentally unbalanced person, as Leonardo DiCaprio did in Gilbert Grape,many years ago and Jamie Foxx does now in The Soloist, is to play each beat, accompanied by the appropriate emotional and physical support, string them together - and let the text create the impression of mental illness. In other words, dear actor, you simply organize the beats as you would with any other character and trust to the text and environment to do the rest of the work for you. The temptation is to generalize, to try and play a concept of crazy. It's a mistake.

Remember Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate or George Burns in Oh, God? These chaps went beat by beat doing horrible things and wonderful things in their respective movies and the circumstances prescribed by the writers and directors of these pictures made Pacino The Devil - and Burns a cigar smoking God with coke bottle eyeglasses. Just play the beats, trust the script to do the rest of the work for you.

Oh Dear . . .

I went to the theatre the other night and was disappointed. This isn't an unusual occurrence. From the perspective of the actors/acting it was a very mixed bag. The director misread the play. You've gathered by now I'm not going to tell you what show, where and who - because this isn't a review and those particulars are unimportant. What's important are the technique issues the production raised and what might have been done about them.

It is definitely an ensemble piece in which most of the actors contribute almost equally to the effect of the whole. But there is a central character who carries the core of the play. Discussing this with a couple of students last night and with the lady who accompanied me to the theatre, they were all equally at a loss as to who that character might be.

There are a couple of problems here. First of all, the director is, when all's said and done, the company leader. It's the director's job to build a vision for the play, and to guide the actors' performances so they all, as a unit, fulfill the writers intent. That didn't happen. And this is where the actors responsibility to himself comes in. In reading the play, one of the first things that needs to be done is to determine what your character arc is. In other words, how do you change from the beginning of the play to the end, what are the steps along the way and when do the changes occur. This just didn't happen. The actor might have been miscast, but that still doesn't excuse missing the critical business of finding the essence of the characters inner state. Both things, both bad, unfortunately happened: No character arc and no viable inner state of being.

And it wasn't just the main character. All of the performers played from the chest. Loud, technically laudable, but rarely did emotion drop down to the gut. Consequently, the performance had zero emotional effect. Maybe the company decided it wasn't meant to be emotionally engaging. Bertolt Brecht believed emotion took away from the audiences rational examination of the plays message and was astonished when he discovered he'd been oh so wrong for years. Audiences would dissolve in tears at the pain and passion of Helene Weigel's "Mother Courage", and our Bert didn't get it. Well, finally, he did - but that's another story.

I've come to believe that if you don't care about the emotional content of the play, if you aren't moved by the plight of the characters, the message, like the best Chinese meal you've ever eaten, will dissipate shortly after you leave the theatre, leaving you hungry once again. The message of a play is delivered through the struggles of the people personified in it. Actors take note. It's all about the feeling, not how loudly and/or competently you speak the words.

Fuhgedaboudit . . .

Why is it so hard to just let the performance go? To trust that if you come into the scene, prepared for the first moment - all you need do is let the play/film, the other actors, the environment draw the performance out of you, spool it out as smooth as a cast by a well tutored fly fisherman. Imagine what would happen to that poor bugger if he insisted on examining the line every 6 inches or so. Hook removal must hurt like hell!

So why do you, dear actor, insist on examining every line before you speak it? The chief reason is that you don't accept the environment of the script as real and you don't accept yourself as real playing within it. Self-consciousness or, rather, global consciousness of self is the villain here.

In the real world, where everything for response to the environment, other people, our own joy and/or angst is provided, free of charge, so to speak, our behavior is natural and spontaneous. In the world of the script, as I've told you many times before, none of those stimuli are real at first. Your job is to place them in the text, using the environment, all dialogue and your own (actually, your character's) state of being as a source for all your responses within a dramatic scene. You learn all of this in order to assimilate it and then forget it!! Forget it!!

Forget it. That's not easy. You've been trained since birth to use conscious thought in order to produce a good result. It's the way 99% of people in the world operate. And you can't. You simply cannot do it and succeed as an actor. Forget the fear factor. Don't worry about giving up control of your performance. You're not giving up anything. In fact, you're enabling the dramatic circumstances to become your reality - which is essential in order to enable the audience, for a while, to accept what you're up to as the real thing.

Think, for a moment, about the best performances you've ever seen. What every one of them has in common is that you can't tell where the actor ends and the character begins. It's a seamless blend and you accept it as real.

I can't, simply by writing about it, jolt you into giving up conscious control of your performance. Believe me, I'd do plenty of butt kicking, if I was there, in the moment with you. You'd give up thought as a performance tool in self defense. I promise you, it would be ugly!! You wouldn't need Joe Pesce coming after you with a baseball bat. You'd have me, yapping, "Fughedaboudit!!"

Short but Very Sweet . . .

In class today, I was observing a scene in which one of the actors was sitting off by herself - seemingly uninterested in what her fellow actor was saying. No reaction - zip, zilch. I stopped the scene and asked her what she was doing. "Well," she replied, "I'm ignoring her." Aha!. Thought it - didn't say it. Might have said "Eureka", if it'd occurred to me. But . . .

This was a case of the actor playing her objective - which was "To Ignore", without playing the obstacle which was "She Keeps on Talking!" The rule is simple. You can't ignore that to which you don't at first pay attention. And if the other party keeps going on, you find moments where you continue the pattern of "attention/ignore."

Remember. It's all about what you have to overcome in order to achieve your goal. Conflict is the essence of drama.

Remarkable . . .Part Deux

Although J.S. Bach's statement inexactly but still accurately quoted - ". . . you hit the right keys at the right time, and the instrument plays itself" - doesn't need further explanation, I will, like a dog with a very good bone, chew on it some more.

Stating the obvious, dear actor, you are the instrument. The keys to your performance have been studied and learned throughout rehearsal and diligent homework. You've assigned the right emotions to the proper lines. You have learned precisely when they must happen during performance and when to squeeze the trigger. Notes and keys all present and correct.

The beauty part of what 'ole JSB said - and, perhaps, not so obvious, is the "playing itself" part. Here's what it means and why it's so danged important for you to store it away, burn it into your brainbox and follow its rule absolutely, completely and forever.

After all the work you've done to prepare for performance, TRUST YOURSELF. Play your moment before for every scene - that critical, necessary moment that prepares you for the first instant we see you - and then LET THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE SCENE draw out the performance stored inside you without constraint. You are the instrument. The instrument plays itself. It is really so simple. Trust is the hard part.

Remarkable . . .

"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."

-- Johann Sebastian Bach


How's that for a Friday afternoon in April, 2009. Think about it!

Taking Stock . . .A Personal Inventory

By the time you're 15 - maybe younger - you've felt the full gamut of human emotion. You probably haven't done anything about most of them at that tender age - but you've experienced the impulse. In your early 20s, there's a lot of "been there, done that" introspection going on, emotionally speaking. And in fact, before you hit the age beyond which no one trusts you - metaphorically speaking, you've done it all.

"Craziness!", you cry. "Never!" I beg to differ and I'm allowed to. My blog. My way. For example. Here's a wake-up call for all you lethal non-killers out there. Tree Huggers and Earth Worm devotees - those of you who swear that cooking broccoli sends you into paroxysms of grief. Lobsters - yeah I get that one. Inhuman, actually. But I digress.

Alright. You're camping. Pay attention. At 3 A.M. there's an infernal buzzing around your head. You swat at it. It stops for a second, only to return with fiendish vigor. You swat again - this time to no avail. The high-pitched drone seems endless. Sleep eludes you. Suddenly, maniacally, you leap out of the sleeping bag, find a shirt, a flashlight, a toothbrush - whatever comes to hand - and you go after that sunovabitching "droner" like one possessed. And you get it! Squish it up against the wall of the tent (which may or may not remain upright) or against the body part of a companion who also may or may not remain upright. But, oooh! The satisfaction. Tell me about it killer!

So there you have it. You've felt the need to "end" something and you've done it. So that emotional hook is there and it's accessible. I'm not nuts and I'm not trying to equate doing a mosquito with blowing away a person. So this isn't quantitative. But it is qualitative.

Using this model, mixed with a little imagination, you can locate any emotion within yourself and apply it to a given moment in the text. You get into trouble when you read the text in despair because -"I've never done that!" Sure you have and if you look inside yourself, you'll find the emotion that propels the action you need. I've just proved it to you. This probably needs further explanation -which, I promise - will be forthcoming.

Listen Up . . . Part II

I've had sessions with several students this week, all of whom have the same problem. They now, at least, understand the importance of listening to the other actor so that response can be based on what's being said, implied or questioned. But all these new actors, listen globally and not specifically.

Let's say, for example, a passage of dialogue contains a half a dozen sentences. If you examine those lines, you might find 5 commas, a colon and 6 periods - give or take. The actor listening to that dialogue should understand his/her overall emotional response to the lines, of course. But the punctuation marks are a clue to shifts in the dialogue and should be examined as a stimulus for a shift in response.

Inexperienced actors, worrying about getting their own lines in on time, will respond with a lick and a promise at every other period - but they ignore the battalion of shifts available to them, as indicated by the shifts in their partner's dialogue.

What's interesting about this is that if actors listen and respond to every phrase, every nuance coming at them in the dialogue, they'll never have to worry about their own lines. They'll naturally slide into the pattern of the scene as nice as you please.

It's a fail-safe way to make sure you're in the moment and not in your head. After all, if you're focused outside yourself, on the words and behavior of someone else - you can't be thinking about yourself, can ya? That's what listening's about!

Body and Soul . . .

An old song, to be sure. They don't make 'em like that anymore. Actors, take note. What the audience relates to: You. All of you, body and soul. Too many actors, especially young ones, don't realize we need the whole enchilada. Inner Life, Voice and Physical Being. All three elements are brought to bear on every spoken moment. Acting conservatories, the good ones, anyway, insist that their students be trained to move and speak as well as to feel. Too often, these academies fail to connect the dots for their students - but that's a subject for another day.

So. If the text is a structure, then it stands to reason that in order to meet that structure, we apply all of our resources to it. Stanislavski, the great Russian theorist and teacher, proclaimed: "Chance is the enemy of art." He was right. The problem for the actor, then, is this. How can movement, gesture, voice and inner life all be brought to bear on the moment and not stifle it? Can we build the performance in such detail and then leave the hammer and drill at home when we perform? The answer is yes!

Creating specific, focused detail is fine - as long as we learn it, absorb it and then forget it. What we learned will stay with us, guaranteed.

I was talking to a student about this today and showed her Abbot and Costello's hilarious "Who's on First" routine. It's as wonderful today as it was 60 years ago. Every second of it - every nuance, every gesture had to be worked to a fare-thee-well - and yet when you watch it, it appears as spontaneous as if they were performing it for the first time. The economy of movement is fantastic, vocal emphasis is perfect and the inner process flawless. If you haven't seen this classic turn recently, It might be worthwhile to revisit it. Right now!

More Words . . .

Actors, au fond,(showin' off again!)are communicators. In an age where young folk are losing the ability to write a coherent sentence, the actor remains, willing or unwilling, an agent for the glory of words. Language. Until telepathy becomes further advanced - we have to depend on expressing ourselves the old-fashioned way. Is it only me who shudders when I hear/read something along these lines: "Well . . .like he went, that's sick." Then she like . . .goes . . ."You wish! ROTFLMFAO." That's shorthand. Talk to a teenager. Anyway, the language of The Bard deserves better, and the actor had better deliver

What some actors don't know - and which many have forgotten - is that words are the verbal expression of the inner beat. If a character feels strongly about something and the writer has captured the emotion accurately, then the words should accurately communicate the feeling. This really needs to be demonstrated, not explained - but I'll do my impoverished best

Let's say we've defined the inner beat as "prideful anger/vengeful fury." The lines are:

"Well my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th' legitmate. I grow, I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards."

(King Lear, Edmund - Act I,ii

Without going into the rules for speaking Shakespeare, it's abundantly clear that words like "letter", "speed", "invention", "thrive" and so on, are filled with lots of juice. The actor playing Edmund has to squeeze every drop out of them, propelled, of course, by emotional truth. If the words are flat, emotion remains hidden, meaning falters, the drama is diluted and the play fails. Not a happy outcome.

All dramatic text is expressed through words that carry emotion. The actor has to locate their meaning, express emotion through them - thus keeping audiences engaged in the play or film. It's been said, truthfully, I think - audiences don't go to the theatre to merely hear the words. They can buy the script and read the words themselves. They go to the theatre to experience feelings that support the words. It's human process, created by the actor, that makes for vibrant drama.

Words, Worlds and what we do about them . . .

I’m continually amazed by what young actors don’t know. Maybe it’s the world we live in. Something about the air we breathe that suffocates intellectual curiosity. Whatever it is, and this isn’t a research paper into the fatal flaws inherent in modern life, young actors display a fearsome lack of knowledge about the world of the script they’re about to populate.

I’ve stated in an earlier post, several earlier posts, actually, that one of the actors jobs is to make the dramatic text his/her own reality during the visit, no matter what the duration, into the world of the play or screenplay.

When I first encountered Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters”, I was struck by the curious reaction of the guests at Irina’s Name Day party, corresponding to what we would call her 21st birthday celebration, when Dr. Chebutykin presented her with a silver samovar. All the guests were thunderstruck, embarrassed. There were rivers of tears. Anton Chekhov, great writer that he was, one of the greatest in the history of theatre literature, saw no reason to explain this phenomenon. Why would he? The audience he wrote for would know instantly what the problem was.

I, not being Chekhov’s contemporary, despite having been called a museum piece on more than one occasion, didn’t know very much about life in pre-revolutionary Russia at the turn of the 20th Century.

So, without the benefit of google and the resources of the world-wide web (see – I am a museum piece!) I researched the bejesus out of it all and found my answers. Not just to the samovar issue, but to life for that class of people in that part of the world at that time in their history.

So if you’re waiting for me to slake your thirst and provide the answer. . . Or if you don’t know what a samovar is in the first place, well friend, may I refer you to Google, Wikipedia and all the other fabulous tools available to you today on the Internet. It’s called due diligence. And finding the answers, my actor friend, is your responsibility.

I could have produced “The Three Sisters” in a state of shining ignorance, but that would have created a hole in the fabric of the reality we were trying to create. A half-real world is no world at all, in my opinion. And in this forum, that’s the opinion that counts. You make a single mistake in the consistency of the world you’re creating, and that mistake can easily lead to another and so on – until the whole thing comes a cropper.

Here’s a question for you. If you came across the word “samovar” in a script you were reading the next day at a first rehearsal, and you didn’t know what the word meant, would you go to a dictionary to find out its’ meaning before the rehearsal? Be honest now. In my experience, most young actors would let it slip, try to throw it up in the air at rehearsal and see where it lands. I’m sorry to have to tell you that at best, that attitude is slipshod and at worst irresponsible. If you don't know what you're saying, there's a 90% chance the beat you play will be incorrect.

In this day and age there is also no excuse for saying or mispronouncing any word appearing in a dramatic text – unless that word is truly arcane and impossible to get your tongue around. Even then –know what it means and do your best to say it.

Every mistake we make in creating the world implied by the text – including the words spoken in that world, makes a hole in its unity and breaks the audience out of the illusion of reality we’re trying to project. Much more on that coming up.

The Myth . . .

Ever since I began teaching acting to boys and girls looking at the “sport” with stars in their eyes, I’ve been assailed by an unassailable truth. The myth. Here’s the myth. Film acting must be real. That in itself is absolutely true. So what’s the myth?, you ask. Ah ha. I’ll get to it I promise, but it requires noodling around a bit.

Reality is relative. As I’ve said many times before – there’s your every day eat breakfast, go to work, be bored, go on a date, be bored reality and there’s Leo DiCaprio’s reality in “The Departed” or “Blood Diamond.” Different kettles of flounder, wouldn’t ya say? So why do beginning actors (and failed older actors) substitute reality number one for reality number two?

The myth. At last. The myth tells the unwise that in order to be viable for film, you have to dumb down for the camera. Back off, be smaller than you are on stage. Vibrant emotional attack on text is movie actings Ebola. The virus’ll kill you dead. Well, how silly is that? I wanted to say “stupid”, but that’s inflammatory. So – wanting to be Hollywoods next best, biggest thing, the hopeful Wattses and LaBoeufses reduce text to a dish as boring as scrambled eggs without the yolks. Young actors doing an elderly care facility version of, say, “Fargo” just isn’t on! “Oh. Let’s throw Buscemi into the wood chipper, but lets not get too excited about it. “ Balderdash.

Okay. Let’s get real, so to speak. The camera is a magnifying glass. It puts certain constraints on the size of what you can do in the frame. There’s a microphone 8 inches or less from your pie hole – which puts additional constraints on your vocal output. But that’s no license to kill via eye drooping boredom. It is your absolute responsibility to forget your own less than scintillating reality and bring yourself up to the emotional demands of the dramatic text. It’s simply not negotiable.

The camera, that ‘ole magnifier, wants to see every twist and turn in your inner process – as many shifts as the text allows. Without resorting to the 7 year itch, the more shifts, the more interesting the performance. The camera wants to see the fire boiling in your belly and shooting out of your EYES. The eyes, if you didn’t realize it before – you better get it now, are the primary tool for generating and focusing the heat and importance of the emotional beat.

En fin. I ain’t just a pretty face. Erudition, friends, erudition. You compress the physical attributes of your performance to fit the frame. You compress the emotional vibrancy of the performance to fit the frame. But you dare not go in with an empty tank, thinking that a bare recital of the words will carry you through. For those of you still in doubt, revisit DiCaprio in “The Departed.”

24/7. . .The Camera Never Sleeps!

For on-camera actors, the whole business of needing, craving, demanding response from others takes on an added dimension. You have to assume the camera’s always on. On you! The editor/director, of course, decides when to come to you for reaction, but you better have something for them to come to.

I’ve been told, and I’ve no reason to doubt it, that many casting directors are more interested in how you respond to the (dumb) reader than how you deliver lines. That may be an exaggeration, but how you respond to the reader is unquestionably very important.

When an actor asks me to coach her (guys too, of course!) for an audition, one of the first things we do is go through the other actors lines in order to determine how and when to respond to the stimuli contained in the text. Usually, you have no more than 48 hours to prepare for an audition, so quick work and quick decisions are absolutely necessary.

You know the reader’s probably gonna be a dud, but you have to respond as though you were working with Depp or Streep. One of the pitfalls of on-camera. I said in an earlier post, and I’m not drumming up business here – if you can afford the relatively modest fee – and it’s an important audition, go to a coach. That outside, objective eye can make all the difference.

Bottom line. You may be able to get away with the occasional lapse on stage – although I don’t encourage it – but film is utterly unforgiving. The camera is like a magnifying glass and it will pick up on interior emptiness – which you absolutely cannot afford.

So the message is: Work on the environment, the other characters dialogue and everything else, as hard as you work on your own lines. That allows you to know how, when and why to respond. That nasty ole’ camera is on you 24/7

Answer . . .please. . .

A man walked into a bar . . . No. Sorry. You’re in a bar with a pal, burbling away – or shouting away – depending on the ambience and, as usually happens, nothing of importance is transmitted in either direction. So it’s not a matter of life and death if your pal ignores your question and responds with an equally unimportant question of her own. It’s a bar for chrissake and you’ve done this thousands of times and this is the 6th time you’ve seen each other today, so chill! Fair enough.

But, as I’ve mentioned many times before, dramatic text ain’t real life. Each situation, every scene is fraught. That’s right, fraught. There’s something at issue, something that needs to be accomplished, a conflict, people working at cross-purposes. Fraught. The text is structured that way. Otherwise, folks, we wouldn’t be interested in watching it play out.

So for every question asked in a scene, be it from from a play or movie, the answer to the question is important to forwarding the action. Moving it along. Unfortunately, many actors don’t ask questions to which they really want the answer. Or they fail to check to see if a point they’ve just made has hit home. Instead, they make declarative statements which don’t demand a response from other characters in a scene. This is unnatural and, therefore, not real. It’s also unfortunate.

If you don’t invite response from others, or are not interested in how they react to important things you’ve offered up, you cut off communication. Cut off communication, the audience loses the thread. Lose the audience, game over. Another example of what we do naturally in a real life situation that’s fraught (becoming my favorite word) that we often fail to do in a fantasy scenario that’s equally fraught. And they all are. Simple enough. “You get it? Answer me . . .please.”

Listen Up . . .

New actors (and some old ones, too!) listen up, for the sake of your personal saviour! This isn’t sophistry or cleverness (well . . .I like being clever) – but, rather, an essential part of your responsibility as an actor.

In the last week, 4 –count ‘em – 4 clients have proven, once again, that the art of what I call “full body listening” continues to elude them. Full body listening. Right. What is it? It’s simply being attuned to everything in the dramatic circumstances that provide you with a stimulus for response.

Essentially, we can break the pack down into the following categores: First, what’s happening in the prescribed environment. Like cold or heat or a gunshot wound, or boiling an egg, or suffering from a hangover, or looking for your cat. And so forth. Second, your own emotional state – how you feel, your train of thought (careful now!), the tactics you’re employing to get what you want. And so forth.

Most importantly – and I’m continually amazed at how many actors ignore this one – What the other people in the scene actually say to you. Their dialogue. How many of you realize that it’s as important to study other characters dialogue as it is your own? Bunches of stimuli come from what the other actors do, say, perpetrate in your presence.

New actors, I’m afraid tend to get their words out and wait for the next opportunity to speak WITHOUT PAYING ATTENTION TO THE STIMULUS THAT COMES FROM THEIR FELLOW ACTORS – WHICH OFTEN GOVERNS THE NATURE AND QUALITY OF THE RESPONSE!!! This is not rocket science. But actors fail miserably at this essential task time after time.

In the real world all the natural stimuli affect us, bad and good, without our having to do anything about them. But in the world of play, we MUST create our response to the available stimuli if we hope to successfully make the dramatic situation real to our audience. Not optional, ladies and gents, not optional. Much more about this in future posts.

The Coach . . .

Vince Lombardi. The quintessential coach. . .he made the Green Bay Packers into something special. But that's football. Acting's not so different in that respect (in many respects, actually - but that's a story for another day). The Acting coach is a particularly valuable asset to the film actor. In two ways, maybe more.

First, there's the audition. Here's how it goes. The actor gets the sides, if he's lucky, 48 hours before the audition - often less. With time so short - and especially if the audition is for something major - the actor really needs another helpful eye. The coach looks at the scene, does an analysis - and helps the actor find a variety of emotional shifts in the text - to insure that the audition is going to be interesting.

Remember. Time is always of the essence and the actor never has enough of it The coach assists in making sure the actor's caught all the stimuli available in a scene that has to be learned in just a few hours. So the coach helps sort it out, flesh it out - gives the actor a leg up in trying to secure a call-back. Get the call-back first. Then get the part.

That's what I tell 'em. I also tell 'em - that if they don't catch the interest of the auditioner in the first 20 seconds or so, they've blown it. So the opening salvo has to be captivating. And we work on that, believe me.

If the auditions submitted by ePitch (electronically via email)I'll go with the actor to the studio where the audition's being shot, work with the actor, even go as far as to be the reader(the person reading the other character in the scene - often the worst dweebs in the universe in actual Audition World) to make sure he/she's dotting all the "i"s and crossing the "t"s. Done this twice in the last week - and it definitely provides the actor with an extra level of comfort.

If the actor does get the call-back, then we get back to work and see what else we can find, incorporating feedback received from the audition itself. Useful stuff like "faster." Kidding.

And there're other kinds of coaching. We work with kids seeking post-secondary training in actor training programs, helping them tune up the monologues required for possible admittance to the hallowed halls. Got 3 of those at the moment.

And then there's on set coaching. Some Hollywood stars won't go on set without their coach, again, looking for that objective eye that helps them flesh out their performance. And as I've mentioned elsewhere, many film directors admit they don't know much about what actors do and hire an acting coach to work on set with all the actors in the picture hoping to maximize their performances.

So - actors. Be smart. Use a coach. The key is finding someone who's on the same wavelength, who has insight and communicates, gets with you like butter on bread. Spread the joy. A coach. Don't leave home without one!

Structure and the Movies . . .

Okay. So you're in a movie and you have an actual part. With lines. And more than 6 scenes. God, you are good!

As I've mentioned before, the shooting out of sequence issue can present problems for the actor. It's essential that the character arc, scene to scene, be absolutely clear in the actors' mind. If your 4th scene is shot before you've done 3, but after you've done 5 . . .well you begin to see the problem.

So, you've done 5 and you have to be sure that what you do in 4 will match up with what's already been shot.
On a modern set, you'll have the opportunity to watch what's already been laid down on a TV monitor, so matching is somewhat easier than it was in the days when we all scurried into an overheated room to watch the dailies. Anybody older than 40 knows what I mean.

Now we've shot 3 and just finished 5 - which leaves 1,2 and 6. So . .I think you might have a notion as to how you deal with the problem. Head'em out, match 'em up.

A more pressing problem with film acting, perhaps, is the built-in rehearsal issue. For stage, the actor usually has sufficient time to map the work over a span of several weeks with daily feedback from the director. If you're lucky enough to work with a director who walks, talks and communicates well with actors, this input helps with the careful building of structure. But in film:
A: The director expects you to do all the work.
B: The director doesn't know how to talk to actors-other than to say: faster, softer, cuter.
C: The director is only interested in "the shot" and "special effects." "That's why we've got an acting coach on set, fer chrissake!"
D: Rehearsal consisted of 2 table reads and a bit of staging while the grips were setting up for the next shot.
E: Everything else under the damned sun!

So in effect, ladies and gents, you're on your own. Which is why the care with which you build the structure of your performance, the skill with which you generate your moment before and the natural, emotionally vibrant delivery of the text are what make you movie friendly. In theatre, the actor has more sense of immediate communication actor to actor and the benefit of an ongoing process. In film, the actor must be able to work without a lot of outside input and learn to work fast.

Which is where COACHING rears its handsome head!

Structure. Build it. . .and they will give you work!

The dramatic text is a structure that has a beginning, a middle and an end (we can only hope). If the writers’ fingers are an extension of his emotional connection to the material, who knows – the text may even be worthwhile. The responsibility of the production team – be it for film or stage – is to recognize the texts’ structure and build the product so that it both illuminates and enhances the writers intent.

The actors part in this is to figure out what part of the writers design is carried by her/his performance. So. Create your own structure, scene by scene. Look at how the character grows, diminishes, changes from point A to the end. Have a clear idea of what you need to accomplish in every scene and of the things that stand in the way of your getting there.

The surest way to drive yourself crazy is to try and do it all at once. Like eating the whole pie in a single gulp. Yum. Rhubarb. Indigestion. Take it a bit at a time. Digest it slowly and let the flavors mingle as you go. You’ll be amazed to find that lines, emotional beats, physicality all come together and are absorbed until everything feels organic. Free range acting.

Creating the structure for your performance involves thinking about what’s required emotionally, physically and vocally. It’s like creating a road map which you follow the first few times you drive from, say, Minsk to Pinsk. After several trips – the car practically drives itself and you bravely stow the road map in the Lada’s glove box. As long as the latch works. Same with the structure for a performance. Stow it. Forget it. Let the circumstances of the event pull the cork so that your work flows like good wine, without you having to think about it. Movies?, you ask. Somewhat different. More on that later.

Why I hate the "M" word . . .

When was the last time you heard someone tell you they were going to memorize how to drive a car? Or how about: "I better memorize how to kiss, or Margie's gonna drop me!" And then there's: "Boy! Tiger Woods sure memorized how to hit a golf ball."

Getting the point? Memorizing is for things that're done by rote: Dates on a history test, your mother's cell phone, the grocery list, maybe. For things like music, physical skills - and anything that actually has to be assimilated and turned into muscle memory - the proper word for acquiring any of those skills is LEARNING.

We learn to drive a car, ride a bike, hit a golf ball - and the actor LEARNS lines. Many actors have told me that their biggest chore is memorizing lines. Here's what I tell them: If you associate the line with emotion and study the line and emotion together, the line actually learns itself! You cut your study time down by more than half.

But the real point is this. The performance must be organic, real. Remember my definition: "Acting is moving through the fantasy world of the text in a completely natural state." Memorization is a function of the head, conscious thought - performance is all about feeling your way through the world of the play or screenplay, reacting to stimulus from other characters, the environment and your own inner life. That's why I say: LEARNING is an organic process, memorization, for our purposes, is not. More on this later.

Movies and the Moment Before

Ever since the days of the old Warner Brothers Stock Company, movies have been shot out of sequence. Everybody knows why, so there's no need to go into it - except to say that, in some ways, the good old days really were better.

These days, the actor has to cope with the reality of a shooting schedule based on pragmatism - which, loosely translated - means bucks. Big bucks and how to spend less of them. Thus, in aid of the bottom line, scenes are grouped together and shot according to logistics not aesthetics.

After reading the screenplay and locating his/her character arc from the beginning to the end of the script, the actor prepares the work according to the shooting schedule, always keeping in mind how the scene being shot fits into the characters journey through the text.

For example. Day 2. First up is the scene in which you're chased down nightmare alley by the 3 clawed monster Gerbil. Reality is, you've just come onto the set from your trailer having indulged in your morning (or is it mourning?) latte and blueberry scone. My . . .aren't you the star!? Seriously. After costume and makeup're done with you and a PA's got you all nice and schvitzed up with joyful squirts from a spray bottle, the AD calls, "Actor's, first positions!"

Now you're really in the soup - unless you know exactly where this scene fits into your overall journey, what the physical/emotional state of being is - and, equally as important, exactly what's happened to the character in the instant prior to our first glimpse of you, running frantically in front of a green screen, which allows us to put all the rest of the garbage - sorry, "stuff" into the frame during post. In other words you develop the Moment Before - but probably without the benefit of having actually done the preceding scene, which would not have been the case in a theatre production.

So it's incumbent on you to keep every bit of it straight. A missed Moment Before, resulting in a confused actor, is one of the few things they can't fix in post.

How I found out about "The Moment Before" . . .

Half a lifetime ago, I was directing Sean O'Casey's monumental play, The Plough and the Stars (The battle flag of the nascent - and in 1916 - ill fated Irish Republic) , when it occurred to me there was a war going on.

The history books call it the Easter Uprising, but to the folks living in Dublin in 1916, it sure as hell must have seemed like a war - as a British gunboat shelled the General Post Office from The River Liffey and troops got ready to storm the GPO in order to wrest it from the hands of the outmanned and outgunned Republican forces who had taken the GPO as an opening gambit in their struggle to gain independence from England.

In case you didn't know - that struggle's been going on for centuries and "The Troubles" are drenched in blood and earmarked by savagery on both sides. There's a thrilling movie, Michael Collins, which documents the struggle for Irish independence in the years following The Easter Uprising, starring Liam Neeson as Michael Collins, "The Laughing Boy", as he was known. And it paints a vibrant portrait of a troubled time. But I didn't intend to write a history lesson here. It's supposed to be all about acting. Sorry.

Anyway. The war. Well it rages throughout The Plough and the Stars and in the 2nd act, which takes place in front of a tenement building close to the action, soldiers, looters, onlookers and bystanders run to and from the scene of the battle. We hear the bombardment and the sound of gunfire, but never see the action itself, although we do see the results of it.

Actors getting ready to enter from the wings, I realized, had to bring the war onstage with them or the audience would never believe the war was raging all around the embattled folks trying to get through that bloody Easter weekend. And thus was born in my mind, The Moment Before. Refined, to be sure over many years, but birthed during rehearsals for The Plough and the Stars.

The idea is simple enough. The actor, before every entrance, must produce within him/herself the physical and emotional circumstances relative to what she/he's just experienced and bring that reality to the living moment on stage. It gives the actors performance continuity and provides the audience with the belief that the world of the play exists beyond the window through which they're viewing a selected portion of that world.

The Moment Before. More than important. Essential. Next time, why The Moment Before is even more critical for film actors.

Confusion, confusion . . .!

I read my last post over again. Then read it again – and realized it’s tough to be absolutely clear writing about something you’ve only talked about, some would say ad nauseum, for many years. The Emotional Memory conundrum is a good example.

I did caution the actor, didn’t I, to STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THE TEXT AS POSSIBLE when looking for the emotional connection to a particular moment? I did do that, right? Yes, I think so. But it needs to be explained further. Clarified. So here’s the rest of the skinny, as they say. Although I’m not sure, exactly, who actually says that. No matter.

Let’s say, for example, you’re playing a serial killer in “Silence of the Iguanas" (I made that up, but you knew that). Well, try as you might, you will not find a serial killer experience lurking in your pure and blameless life. At least I hope not. But you can identify the motivating emotion behind the killer’s actions. And that’s the emotional definition you locate and go with. You locate that core emotion within yourself, but don’t try to create your own personal serial killer. And that, finally, is where the text comes in.

As you learn your lines and go through rehearsal, you continue to make the association between the text and the emotional impulse you discovered while working away from the text. They will join, trust me here, and become a single unit. In other words you feel the appropriate emotion and let the text do the serial killer part. So you can become a monster on stage from 8 to 11 every night, or every time the director calls “Action!” and walk away from the set unsullied, without having to be a serial killer while scarfing down a double cheeseburger at Wendys or ogling a cutie on the bus.

It works. It really does. And those of you who’ve been reading carefully will note that I said just a few moments ago: "As you learn your lines" . . . The dreaded “M” word, uggh it’s hard to write it – MEMORIZE . . .shudder, will never reach these scrambled pages. It should be stricken from the actors’ vocabulary. Or beaten out by a monkey with a baseball bat. More on that next time.

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!

Constantin Stanislavski was a trouble maker. Late in the 19th century, the great Russian theorist and founder of The Moscow Art Theatre stood the actors' craft on its head and shook it hard enough to permanently change the way artists and audiences look at the theatrical experience.

Productions had often featured overwrought, melodramatic displays of false emotion, but Stanislavski insisted on "psychologial reality" and his work heralded a new era in natural acting and believable environment. He organized his thinking and his work into a regimen that became known as The Stanislavski System. An Actor Prepares, arguably Stanislavski's most influential book, still remains of biblical importance to actors everywhere.

Trouble Maker. That's what I said. The trouble started when American teachers and directors took Stanislavski's ideas and turned them into what has become known as "The Method." Based on Stanislavski's System, Lee Strassberg, at the Actors Studio, took the idea of truthful performance and relentlessly wrung its neck.

Early proponents of The Method produced sullen, introverted, tortured performances that were awful to watch. Today, Inside The Actors Studio has devolved into a sort of TV Clown show, presided over by James Lipton who invites celebrity actors to face a group of students and, at the end of Lipton's chatty interview, offer them a "class" . It's largely nonsense. And painful to watch

One of the seminal tools The Method offers is Emotional Memory. The idea is for the actor to take the emotional moment required by the text and find a comparable event from his own life so that he can apply his own emotional experience to the text, thus producing a "real" moment. Hordes of young actors are confused by this tedious process which, by the way, often doesn't work.

Let me give you an example. A young actor is playing a hit man. The text indicates he must blow away his next victim with near orgasmic pleasure. Let's say, for arguments sake, this young actor is the son of a Presbyterian Minister and his jolly, winsome Edinborough wife. The only things the young man has ever blown away are the feathers that somehow escape his down pillow. Near orgasmic pleasure is clearly something the young man shares only with himself - but by age 15 or so, we all, surely, know the feeling.

So trying to find the hit man hidden inside is surely a useless endeavor for this young man and finding orgasmic pleasure as he pulls the trigger is absolutely a non-starter. What to do? Well. Here's what I'd offer the troubled young actor. First of all. STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THE TEXT AS POSSIBLE!! Identify the emotion the hit man feels, find that emotion within yourself - remembering to STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THE TEXT AS POSSIBLE!! - then, at the next rehearsal, say the lines, perform the action, associating them with the emotions you found within yourself, having remembered to STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THE TEXT AS POSSIBLE!!

You provide the emotion, the text does all the rest. I believe that by the time we're teenagers - Dakota Fanning managed it earlier - we've experience a very large range of emotion and have it stored away somewhere. Don't tell me you've never gotten satisfaction from killing something. Remember the mosquito that buzzed around your head at 3 in the morning, one soft summer evening - driving you nuts - until in an absolute killing frenzy, you leapt up and ended the damned thing - with extreme prejudice. Remember that, killer? And so it goes.

How do you think Luther Adler, one of the great actors of the Yiddish Theatre, played Adolph Hitler - or Laurence Olivier managed to play the sadistic White Angel in Marathon Man? I mention Laurence Olivier because I believe all great British actors work this way. They locate emotion inside themselves and subsequently apply emotion to the text. If they define the emotion, they're able to produce it. Brits as Stanislavskiites. Whoda thunk it? And did I mention: STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THE TEXT AS POSSIBLE!! I mentioned that, right?

What is the Net we want to be without . . .?

When was the last time someone told you to: "Look before you leap."? How many parents have told their kids: "Use your head!"? How many teachers have exhorted their students to: "Think it through!"?

As a kid, I walked around with these stock phrases, and more, pasted to the inside of my skull - and, perhaps, in the world of Mechanics and Brain Surgeons, Lawyers and Stock Brokers (actually I don't know about those last guys any more)- it works.

In the world of actors, not so much. Thinking. Uh, uh. Not during performance. We've been told since childhood that we can try to control the outcome of any endeavor by conscious thought, using the old noggin, as it were. Conscious thought is the net - and the actor has to catch the trapeze without it.

Acting, during performance-and even during rehearsal-is a matter of immediate, emotive response to what happens in the moment. What we acting teachers like to say to the actor(aren't we smart!?): "You don't want to be in your head - you want to be in the moment."

The truth of the matter is that audiences don't go to a movie or a play to see what the actors are thinking about the text. Audiences go for the feeling.

The actor has to think at home. It's home work, building a structure for the performance, learning that structure, ASSIMILATING IT and then LEAVING IT TO WITHER OUTSIDE THE STAGE DOOR!

Let me offer an example. When I learned to drive. That's me and my Plymouth at the top of this post. Stick, baby, stick - the first several lessons, with my poor pop turning green (not with envy) in the passenger seat, I put my brain box in gear as I learned how to change gears without smacking into fire hydrants, old folks (there was no points system back then) and other animate and inanimate objects.

Dad lived through it, I lived through it - and pretty soon, I didn't have to think at all about the mechanics of operating a car. I'd learned. It was part of my muscle memory and I no longer had to pay attention to it.

It's the same for the actor. You learn the role and everything associated with the role (much more about this in coming entries) and let the performance flow freely without conscious thought. No other way to fly, boys and girls. No other way.

Continuing . . .barely scratching the surface . . .

Okay. So the actor's job is to move through the artificial world of the text in a completely natural state. Above is my glorious Wunderhund, Calypso, in a completely natural state. In other words, relaxed, no consciousness of self and at ease in her environment.

The problem for the actor is that the world of the script is not, has never been and will never be real. Therefore, the lack of self-consciousness the actor feels going through real, every day life is compromised when dealing with dramatic text. How, you might ask? Good question.

The fact is - in the script there are no stimuli. The writer, hopefully, has created a lush, imagined environment - rife with hints about what the world might be like if it were real. But in our reality, all we have, when reading the script for the first time, are words on paper. Even glorious words are still just that - words.

So, in order for the actor to be in a natural state, he/she must find all the stimuli needed to enable natural response. Or,in other words - to make the fantasy world of the script real enough to believe in as real. For the curious or uninitiated, the process of stimulus identification is one aspect of the process called, rehearsal.

It's been called plenty of other things since that bad boy, Thespis, stepped out of a Greek Chorus some 2500 years ago, give or take a century or two. But until another word is invented, rehearsal will do. When I taught in the Actor Training Program at The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill - there was a curious phrase that everyone from the lighting guy to the leading actors kept repeating:

"Play Practice tonight - Y'all come if you can!" Guess I've learned over the years - that's not quite right.

To begin . . .

I've been at this a long time. . .A very long time.

I awoke this past January 9th, my birthday, looked at my certified certificate of antiquity, and realized that all the urgency and desire - the conviction that I could write the quintessential acting text - the best book ever - was simply a lot of nonsense.

I'd been talking about it for 30 years and still didn't have a helpful word on paper. Some great acting book. We're defined by what we do, not by what we say we want to do!

But now, The Blogosphere. Maybe this nonthreatening forum could allow me to express thoughts about the actors' process as they occurred to me, thus relieving me of the tedious process of concrete organization, the search for a publisher and all that folderol. I am not a happy rigmarole kind of guy. So. Well. . . .We'll see if this blog is finally, actually the real thing, won't we? Do I have something to say, and if I do, will I, at long last, say it?

I started teaching acting in New York City after my heralded off-Broaway production of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and was delighted to discover empirically that Stanislavski knew what he was talking about. My work confirmed his. Pretty arrogant stuff for a wannabe. But it's always been that way with me.

And while my life story and personal road to discovery may be fascinating, that's not what this is about. I don't think. Who knows?

I'm going to end this post soon - immediately, as a matter of fact, but not before I offer my definition of "ACTING".

It's the job of the actor to move through the artificial world of dramatic text in a completely natural state.