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.