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!