Reflections On Year One - Acting Thesis

Yes, this is another class assignment. Deal with it.

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When I began my undergraduate education at the University of North Texas in 1996 the first text I was given to read was Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting; the second was Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. I came into college without having embraced acting as an art form; much less one that had such a wide variety of techniques to accomplish what was to my perception the same end result. Acting was, to me, a series of technical exercises that was only as varied as the genres listed in the video store. Action. Drama. Comedy.

So the notions of Boleslavsky and Shurtleff were more than merely foreign concepts – they were essentially in a different language. How could I possibly expect to apply their concepts to fit within my preconceived notion of what acting was? My first digestion of these texts did as much for my acting as eating them would have done. They struck the surface, but didn’t penetrate. I heard the words, but didn’t know how to allow them to inform my art. By the time I graduated in 2001 I had barely advanced beyond my first day.

The intervening years and my first three quarters of graduate school gave me the perspective I needed to let the ideas permeate. An idea heard once can be remembered and regurgitated, but my comparatively short time at Depaul has allowed me to explore, interpret and embrace everything I first heard fourteen years ago, to make sense of it and apply it to my craft.

I committed to acting as a career path three days before I began college. I was as fresh to the idea as Boleslavsky’s character of The Creature to whom acting was a matter of surface technique – how to make it look like she was doing what the text said she was supposed to do. Her first lesson in actual human suffering was my own:

I must tell you that this very moment you did more for the theatre, or rather for yourself in the theatre, than you did in playing all your parts. You suffered just now; you felt deeply. Those are two things without which you cannot do in any art and especially in the art of the theatre. Only by paying this price can you attain the happiness of creation, the happiness of the birth of a new artistic value.

It was only through my two quarters of studying Meisner this year that I began to comprehend the value of that statement. Acting isn’t about presentation or duplication of the human condition. It is about a genuine creation of a human being believing in and behaving within a set of given circumstances. From Boleslavsky, “To imitate is wrong. To create is right.”

My original trepidation was based on my fear that suffering was the only characteristic necessary to embrace acting as an art. Of course suffering is necessary, but so is joy, fear, pride, or any of the wide range of emotional experiences. “If you are a sensitive and normal human being, all life is open and familiar to you.”

One of the more influential training experiences was with the professors of the Moscow Art Theatre in 2005. One man, Yuri Yeremin, posed the question, “What makes an actor unique among artists? What is it that an actor does that no other artist does?” The first part of the answer was “The ability to believe in a set of given circumstances.”

Meisner would have us understand the difference between belief and acceptance. One may not ever believe he is his character, or that he is living within the world described for within the script. Indeed, complete belief would have us inquiring about the crowd of strangers staring at us from beyond the lights. The actor should rather acknowledge, understand, and accept that the given circumstances are indeed true, and behave truthfully within them.

“The Creature: But I am speaking to my mother in the part.
I: Is she really your mother?
The Creature: No.
I: Then what difference does it make?”

Boleslavsky’s first chapter on Concentration is about the acceptance, as Meisner would have it, that you are living within those given circumstances. It is necessary to use one’s own five senses to inform the quality of that world. See the place you’re in. Feel its temperatures, its textures. Hear the sounds that belong in that place. If you’re doing something, really DO it, don’t simply show the audience what it would look like if you were. Are you sewing? Then sew, don’t merely pass a needle back and forth to yourself. Chopping garlic? Keep hacking away until it’s done. Allow that a standard of perfection must be met. One cannot expect an audience to accept your given circumstances if you, as the actor, cannot accept them yourself.

Meisner deepens the concept of concentration by bringing in a partner to create an additional set of effects. The influences on the five senses are compounded and informed by the emotional response to another human being in the room. This is someone who has just as much influence on your emotional state as the room itself and the activity you’re doing has on your physical senses. Take in what you’re given, let it affect to you, and respond to it truthfully.

“The Creature: So one must choose his actions in accordance with the character of the part that opposes him.
I: Always. Not only the character of the part, but also the individuality of the actor who plays the part.”

It was this additional element that was the most difficult for me to embrace. I had always considered myself as someone who is willing and able to accept a variety of variables in my life as well as my performances. One of the first things I learned about myself while studying Meisner is that I only felt this way due to the sheer amount of analysis and mental preparation in which I regularly engaged. Every possibility and contingency was considered, and every reaction I could possibly have was mapped out.

This idea has served me reasonably well in life, but I needed to let go of that need to control in order to progress as an actor. There is no scene, not even a monologue, that doesn’t have an intended target. I want something from someone, and I cannot know what to do next if I’m not paying attention to how my actions are being received and interpreted. Every action must therefore be a reaction to the other person in the scene.

The text of a script is rich with information about a pair of characters in a scene, but it is the job of the actor to add dimension and importance to the lines and what they might mean. I began my scenework at DePaul by reacting only to the lines I heard, but not to the person who was saying them to me. In this manner I was able to perform an entire scene by myself. My scene partner became irrelevant. By pre-coding my thoughts, statements and responses, I was neglecting myself the opportunity to be surprised and make discoveries throughout my scenework. I would react to the lines, but not to my partner’s wants or emotional states. As Trudie told me from my first scene showing with Emma Kate, “It was good acting, but it wasn’t the truth.” From Shurtleff,

One can employ any extravagance of feeling or expression, as long as there is relationship in it. What we term overacting is done by people who are acting by themselves, narcissistically setting up a storm in which no one else exists. Of course, this is unreal. Add relationship, the awareness and need of another, to these very same extravagant choices, and they will be real, lifelike.

Later in Meisner came the work of emotional preparation. I had never tried this before, preferring to enter each scene as I begin anything in life – with cool detachment from a centered, mind-cleared state. That worked as I began to spar in my martial arts practice or concentrated on a homework assignment. But theatre is not life. It is far more interesting than life. The boldest choices borne of the strongest possible set of actions in order to achieve the most passionate of dreams are what good theatre is all about. Emotional preparation in its most extreme is what makes a scene interesting.

My struggle to adequately prepare emotionally is a consequence of my active fantasy life. Since I was a child I have been a fan of the most wild science-fiction and fantasy enabling me to imagine myself in the most fantastic scenarios (as the hero, of course). As someone who was regularly bullied I discovered long ago I could carry out quite extravagant revenge fantasies in my mind. In my attempts to always be prepared for the worst case, I have regularly imagined – and planned for – what I would do and how I would react in the event of the death of a loved one. Because I knew it was always a fantasy I trained myself not to dwell too long or hard on these extreme circumstances. Because I did this so often I began to grow immune to the effects of letting these emotions reside within me.

It was here that instead of using Meisner to understand Boleslavsky, I discovered that the opposite was in fact true:

How do you learn a tune you want to remember? How do you learn the outline of muscles you want to draw? How do you learn the mixture of colors you want to use in painting? Through constant repetition and perfection. … your actual work is done in solitude—entirely inside of yourself. You know how, now, through concentration. Think over the process of approach toward the actual moment of that real double feeling. You will know when you get it. You will feel the warmth of it and the satisfaction.

Here Boleslavsky gives a fine rehearsal technique, but my biggest success in emotional preparation came from unearthing the memories from a quite painful set of circumstances throughout my life. My physicality has always been something of which I am proud (insofar as one can be proud of an accident of birth), but there have been times I’ve come dangerously close to accidentally bringing physical harm to another. Far more often I’ve been chastised and made to feel ashamed by how close others have perceived I came to hurting a person through my ineptitude, true or not.

One of the reasons for success in drawing upon this set of emotions is how many times I’ve felt and hidden from them. By exploring the long-standing aspects of myself of which I am deeply ashamed, and therefore hide, I was able to hit a previously unmet level of discovery.

The other reason I believe this worked so well for me is that is relied on a circumstance that was created by something I had done, not something that had happened to me. This is always the more interesting choice.

“I: All right. What is the action?
The Creature: To be insulted.
I: Wrong. To preserve your dignity.”

The text of Michael Shurtleff’s Audition is replete with cyclical information. That is to say that there is no one aspect of his Twelve Guideposts that does not contain some scrap of each of the others, and multiple passes of the material are required to understand fully the complexities of his guidance.

He nonetheless begins with the most important foundation of scenework – that of relationship. Who is your partner, and what does this person mean to you? It is only when this groundwork is laid that the rest of the importance of the work can follow. Shurtleff’s notion that “every scene is a love scene” is paramount in making the sort of active, important choices that make a scene the most it can be.

My first scenework of the year, Pinter’s Betrayal with Emma Kate, wouldn’t have been nearly so dimensional had I not done the necessary exploration of relationship. The characters of Jerry and Emma have a deeply rich and complex association. They are long time (though not lately) lovers who played house in the afternoon in spite of their spouses, yet they never meant so much to one another that making the dream into a reality was important enough to carry out. The text of the scene is filled with reminiscence, and it would be a sharply neglectful reading if the actors failed to embody the relationship in its entirety.

An actor cannot act without creating a relationship with that other person who’s onstage with him. Some actors do it instinctively; they are the lucky ones. But when the instincts don’t work the way they should, the first thing an actor must do then is ask questions about the relationship and insist upon full emotional answers that can lead him to commit himself fully.

Equally important is the concept of Fighting For. I’ve heard this in every acting class and read it in every acting text, but it’s usually described as a want, a goal, or an objective. But wanting something and having a goal is passive, not active, and as previously described, it is the active choices that make the best scenework.

I believe my most important work of the year was with John in The Lonesome West. He and I wanted a scene in which we could play around, say snide things and vulgar things, and basically behave as a couple of shocking and immature boys. We found a scene with that particular set of traps, and fell right into them. I don’t doubt the scene has been played with the dynamics that drew he and I to it, but we learned this was neither the more interesting choice, nor the best use of our tuition.

We began our viewpoint of the scene as two men (brothers) who despised one another, tried to one-up the other man. We wanted nothing from one another; instead we wanted to do something to each other. We eventually (through direction) began to incorporate and embrace the “love scene” idea, and this significantly changed our attitude from fighting against into fighting for.

I respect and appreciate Shurtleff’s ideas of opposites. He explains that for everything a character wants and feels, he should also want and feel the exact opposite. I love you, but I also hate you. I respect you, but you also disgust me. It is this internal conflict within a character that can make it so much more interesting than it would otherwise be, and it is true to life as well. While this is an excellent quality to use to inform scenework, it holds a danger for me. My safety zone is within my own head, and if I regress into myself it can be difficult to come back out. Instead I should know that my internal conflict should be based on a problem with my scene partner, and needs to be brought forth in order to be dealt with and solved.

Opposites are inherent in Shurtleff’s guidepost of Humor. Humor is such a subjective quality, varied drastically from one person’s opinion to the next. But he explains that humor is necessary to scenework, especially the most dramatic of scenes. Predictability and uniformity is scenically uninteresting. No matter how dramatic and dire a situation may be, a lack of variation will kill it. Variation not merely in tempo and tactics, but in attitude as well. Humor adds perspective to a scene – it’s so much more funny when juxtaposed against tragedy (or just plain seriousness) and vice versa. If you heat a glass it will only get so hot, but subject it to the extremes of hot and cold and the glass will shatter.

My goal as an artist is to shatter my audience. As Shurtleff said to one of his students, “The way you shifted from one role to another as she revealed her new tactics to get at you was very effective. We never knew for sure what you might do next. I think that makes acting most interesting.”

Earlier I discussed the cool detachment with which I’d begin a scene – this is against Shurtleff’s advice as well. In the guidepost to which he refers as The Moment Before, he explains that something always happened before the moment that starts a scene. Coming into things with from a mindless, emotionless state is far less theatrically interesting than having a strong driving force for my first action.

Buried within The Moment Before is a concept introduced to us in class known as what is Beneath the action of the scene. Sometimes The Moment Before is literally just that, but there are scenes that are influenced by the long-term history of the characters involved.

The biggest Moment Before I had all year was in The Lonesome West; we had just come from the funeral of our priest who had committed suicide. He had left us a note that put us in charge of his immortal soul. Father Welsh had explained that he was betting his soul could be washed clean of the sin of suicide if it brought some greater good. The good, he’d explained, would be that it stopped us from fighting one another as we’d done all our lives. This Moment Before and this Beneath had the most power over transforming the quality of our work into something more than the cheap interpretation we had originally picked.

Finally, everything I learned all year came home in working my final scene with Pamela from Orange Flower Water. Once again we played two people in love, with spouses and children to acknowledge, but the inherent question was much larger from us both. Instead of should we cheat on our marriages, the question was should be abandon our marriages and start a new life with one another. I wanted this, but our philosophical disagreement stood between us. I had to change her mind about the nature of her faith and keep her on my side at the same time.

I’m proud to say I was able to employ everything I learned this year into this scene. I felt my biggest struggles with staying in Solo Performance Mode were gone. I didn’t say anything to her I didn’t feel came out of a reaction to her behavior. I was engaged and invested in affecting her, listened sharply and was affected by her attitude. I didn’t pre-code or pre-plan a response, and allowed each rehearsal to refresh with a new understanding of who she was, what she wanted, and how I felt about that, and how that feeling informed my next extension into her to get what I wanted. What I knew we both wanted.

I believe the most important lesson for me to learn is that I’m not done learning. Education, like art, is never truly finished. There’s always a greater understanding to be had, a deeper richness and complexity that can be gained from further exploration. Luckily for me there are two more years of graduate school, dozens of texts on acting, and a lifetime full of opportunities for me to expand upon what I’ve learned.