Answer to Mamet's: "True and False"

A Reader’s supplement to David Mamet’s ‘True and False’
(The Bold italics are my response)

To the Actor:

P3: I studied acting in various schools, and could understand little of what was being said. … I knew that the goal was to bring …..an immediacy to the performance….but none of us understood, nor did practice reveal…how the school’s exercises were to bring that about. It seems that you are saying you were uncomfortable in this practice, inferring that you were ‘lost’ inside the confusion of the exercises. This means it wasn’t you that lacked clarity, focus and structure, but the exercises themselves that lacked clarity, focus and structure.

P4: …..the life of the academy, the graduate school, the studio…. are as removed from the life of the actor as aerobics are from boxing. Could the analogy be made here that the academy etc. is much like going to the bar for a drink after football practice – a social ancillary that softens the physical bumps and psychological lumps but, by being distractive, is of no real purpose to the development of an actor.

Some Thoughts:

P5: As actors, we spend most of our time nauseated, confused, guilty. We are lost and ashamed of it; confused because we don’t what to do and we have too much information, none of which can be acted upon (because information is not knowledge); and guilty because we feel we are not doing our job well enough… The good we do seems to be through chance: if only that agent would notice me, etc, etc.
The answer to this comes in two parts.
1. It is because the whole scene is based on chance, both short and long term, that things will fall into place if I get a good break. It’s much like buying a lottery ticket and hoping I’ll win the lottery- somebody will, but its improbable that it’ll be me. In effect I’m a victim hoping that someone or something will come along and rescue me. To take control over my situation (as much as one can), the question becomes: what am I doing to minimize the effects of chance. Essentially all actors are in competition with their peers, and there is a lot of competition out there, and increasing all the time. If I’m doing the same things as my peers the chances are the same things will happen to me. Therefore, how am I preparing myself culturally, aesthetically and politically for all the challenges I will face? And it requires a lot more than just positive thinking- it requires implementation.
2. The existential confusion of most actors occurs because they are almost totally unprepared for the rigours of performance. While a lot of attention is paid to ‘creative’ approaches, almost no effort is expended on how these should be supported against the pressures a performance places on an actor, the instinctive “in the moment’ responses, that are expected can only be fostered by the acquisition of undeniable skills and the confidence that goes with it. In any other discipline, it is acquired through training. Using music and sport as examples: in both of these it would be inconceivable to enter the affray without deep and continuous training. The most important elements of training are: repetition, routines, formats and tools. And since most acting approaches teach actors to be terrified of all four as being stultifying and uncreative, they are automatically prevented from being prepared. Of course it doesn’t dawn on the acting teachers that athletes and musicians are creative precisely because of their ‘uncreative’ routines. But that would be against their tenet of the sanctity of Actor Confusion, wouldn’t it?

P6: The Stanislavsky ‘method’, and the technique of the schools derived from it, is nonsense. It is more an approach than a method. It looks at the creative aspects of acting without addressing how to methodically and practically gain the necessary skills.

Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people’s performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. Actors used to be shamanistic – they used to summon up and confront the audience with its own shadows. Modern technology has flattened out real life experiences, and with it, expectations. Real shamans used to froth at the mouth, working themselves up, to not pretend to be the character, but in fact become the thing itself. The modern actor, much weaker in spirit, has devolved into performing the illusion of doing so. A surreptitious tear, a cracking voice are the civilized theatre’s versions of such transformations.( This is a paraphrasing of a section from Martin Buzzacott’s: ’ The Death of the Actor’

Ancestor Worship:

P9: The actor is onstage to communicate the play to the audience. Can we expand this statement to read: the actor is onstage to engage with the play in visceral, prismatic terms to ‘real’-ise the play, that is, to take the words off the page and give them sculptural density so that they can be felt or experienced by the audience in a way much more powerful than just heard or read.

P10: Eisenstein wrote that the true power of film came from the synthesis in the mind of the viewer of shot A and shot B. Shot A: a judge clearing his throat. Shot B: a woman raising her head from a desk – the audience creates the idea: ‘hearing the verdict’. Talking more in terms of the unconscious or instinctive, could one say that the audience creates their own ‘experience’ of hearing the verdict.

Similarly, it is the juxtaposition in the mind of the audience between the spoken word of the author and the simple directed-but-uninflected action of the actor which creates the ineluctable idea of character in the mind of the audience. The character also needs to be sited within an aesthetic landscape provided by the designer/director. This places the character in visual and thematic relief, the coding of which adds nuance and depth to complete a picture initiated by the text.

P11: The actor on the stage, looking to create a ‘state’ in himself, can think only one of two things:
1. I have not reached the required state yet….. or
2. I have reached the required state, how proficient I am! At which point the mind, ever jealous of its prerogatives, will reduce the actor to (1). Neither of which are (in the moment), and that is because his ego is dominating his experiences, his feelings. All performers have and need Ego, for it is the Ego that strives for self discovery (the search that drives all artists). But, paradoxically, it is the Ego that also stands in the way of self-discovery, and an actor needs to corral his Ego, in order to progress….. Easy to say……much harder to do…….

P13: On the stage it is the progress of the outward-directed actor, who behaves with no regard to his personal state, but with all regard to the responses to his antagonists, which thrills the viewers. Except to say that as well, the actor must be aware and react to the effect the others are having on him, as the viewers are primarily identifying with his feelings.

P14: Similarly, on stage, the Great Actor, capable of bringing herself to tears, may extort our admiration for her ‘accomplishment’, but she will never leave us stronger. One of Tadashi Suzuki’s well known observations are the comments he made following a viewing of a Broadway production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. He observed that at the close of the play the three sisters were able to cry on cue. He then noticed that the audience were impressed by the skill but noted that, rather than saying to themselves ‘how impressive it is that they can cry on cue’ the audience themselves should have been crying in reaction to what was happening on stage….. They were impressed but not moved.

P15:…..but I suggest that they, the accomplished actors, young, vital, talented and hearty, succeed at the Actor’s Studio and elsewhere, in spite of their training. Quite so! A good point can be made that they are ‘instinctive’ genii, which begs the question, can their abilities and exploits be approximated by some form of training - are there structured exercises that can take the ‘non-genius actor’ to a similar zone.

A generation that would like to stay in school:

P19: The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and direct. If one goes further and posits that the audience is a witness and in extension a vicarious participant, one can expand this to say that a performance in the presence of an audience will teach you these things.

The skill of acting is like the skill of sport, which is a physical event. And we can, by extension, look to sports for the examples of training that enable equivalent instinctive response.

P20: The Method School would teach the actor to prepare a moment……it is impossible to prepare an instinctive moment. It is possible (and necessary) to prepare for an instinctive moment.

P21: If the actor had simply opened his mouth on cue and spoken (even though he felt uncertain) the audience would have been treated to the truth of the moment…….he would be truly instinctual which means he would be truly himself in the moment. This is extremely difficult and begs the question what exercises can be structured to give him the confidence to be instinctual.

P22: …..It is beside the point to have the actor ‘undergo’ the supposed trials of the character upon the stage. The actor has his own trials to undergo and they are right in front of him they don’t have to be super-added - they exist. His challenge is not to recapitulate, to pretend. To pretend is to impose one’s ego( I want) on a given situation. An actor has to undergo experiences but cannot do this convincingly if he is pretending. Another way of saying it is that, if his will prescribes or dictates the experiences, they are immediately contaminated and he cannot intuitively undergo them.

Scholarship:

P23: Polite Western society has long confounded scholarship with art. In truth scholarship is critiquing the people who do art.

That is the mis-judgement of the method: the notion that one can determine the effect one wants to have on the audience, and then study and supply said effect…. Preoccupation with effect is preoccupation with the self. For, if an actor works in that way, it is prescriptive, imposing one’s will, by force of ego, on the action and the audience. This may impress the spectator with its machinations, but will not ‘move’ them. The audience will only be ‘moved’ by witnessing actors being affected by experiences. This, the actor can only achieve instinctively, by reacting intuitively and honestly to a real emotional and psychological experience.

Find your Mark:

P28: … and then, rather than pretending, we can discover whether or not we are courageous. Acting, at its most exciting occurs when it is a self discovery, both for the audience and the actor. The audience is having its own self discovery by witnessing the self discovery of the actor. Brando was non-pareil at this. You felt, watching him, that you were witnessing him do whatever he was doing….. For the very first time! The camera allowed you to be there, to witness its inception!!!!

P30: The magic phrases (arc of the character) and procedures (subtextual analysis) are incantations to lessen the terror of going out there naked. But that’s how the actor goes out there, like it or not. These incantations are attempts to ward off nerves by pretending they do not exist. This of course backfires because it is a double deception. It's easy to say things like: "dont be nervous". This is deceitful authority, because it pretends to solve the problem, but merely turns it back on the actor. The real solution would lie in:" What do you give the actor to fill that void?"

P31: Actors like to attribute their feelings as it gives them the illusion of control over them. They are trying to wish away the unexpected…..Very good! I assume you are proposing that the actor has to think these deceptive thoughts to compensate for an awful void that exists because the actor cannot feel ‘in the moment’.

So wisdom consists in this: do not attribute feelings, act on them before attributing them, before negotiating with them…. This is another way of encouraging the actor to act instinctively before the ego distorts the experience.

P32: ….giving oneself up to the play…I would instead say here ’giving oneself up to the performance’ because the play exists as an extant document, but the performance of the play exists only on stage. The audience can go and buy the play (as a book) any time- they can only ‘buy’ the performance in the fleeting moment while they are witnessing it.

I’m on the corner:

P34: To say of it:” I’ll try” is to excuse oneself in advance. Its like saying “I’m on a diet”, which really means: “I am REFUSING to change my eating habits!”

Business is business:

P41: I’ve heard of young actors, feeling constrained, speak of ‘stepping out’. They want to invent, to mold, to elaborate, to influence, etc…. to be in effect, anything but themselves. Right On! These actors want to dominate the role, to impose their egos on the role, rather than have their ‘self’ experience the role.

It takes great strength of character- which is formed over time and in frightening times…..Time and adversity. It was Proust who said: “There is no knowledge without pain”

P42: To serve in the real theatre, one needs to be able to please the audience and the audience only. I rather suggest that you please the entire performance, which includes the actors, director, writer and audience. They are all stakeholders at their different levels, with different expectations, but linked inside a common event.

Auditions:

P44: Producers are not interested in discovering the new. They want the old- and if they cannot have it they want its facsimile. Too true! If you want to be successful commercially, you take something very old and make it appear new by adding some slight superficial changes.

P47: As a member of an audience, I will tell you, it is an insult to come backstage and say to a performer ”You were great tonight”, only to be told: ”No, I was terrible ! You should have seen me last week!” The audience comes for their own experience, which is not the same, but is predicated on the actor’s – to disagree with the compliments is to repudiate the experience.

P48: I have watched long runs over the years…. Generally the “I’m garbage” and the “I’m brilliant” were the same. The actor, by definition, is inside the performance, and so cannot judge it objectively (he cannot know precisely what the audience is getting). The audience is a witness and vicarious participant, so as well, cannot judge objectively – they only know what they feel about it. The only person capable of any objectivity, and hence is the authority of last resort, is the director.
The purpose of the performance is to communicate the play to the audience. The purpose of the performance is to give the ‘voice’ of the play a ‘body’. Until it is performed live, a play is really a book - a series of words and literary images, figments of the author’s imagination. As a book it is a form of private communication. Once performed, it becomes a public event, a communal experience, where the audience bonds through sharing a ritual.
Such an idea of a ritual implies physical actions that have meanings that can be felt as transformational (two that come to mind are Uplifting and Thought-provoking). For something to be perceived as uplifting, the movements and gestures of the actors must add sense and weight. This sense and weight add a mythic quality to the words, making them appear larger than life, affecting the audience much more powerfully than if they had come out of a daily or domestic body language.

P50: I knew a man who went to Hollywood and languished jobless for a period of years. He came back and lamented “I would have been alright if they had only explained the rules”. But who are ‘they’ and what are the rules? There is no ‘they’ and there are no rules. In fact you have to make your own rules by making your own culture. Your own culture means that you must invent and invoke your own standards. This would determine that your culture is intrinsic- it belongs to you. Most theatre culture is extrinsic- it is governed by rules imposed from the outside. In my country (Australia) this takes generally either of two forms:
Your politic aligns itself with government arts policy, or,
You have established a certain clientele, who are happy to keep coming in the door if you keep delivering the same aesthetic.
Both of these are extrinsic forces acting upon you and make you susceptible: If political fashions change, you’re left high and dry. If you change the product, the punters may melt away.

Paint by numbers:

P52: The only reason to rehearse is to learn to perform the play…..It is not to ‘investigate the life of the character’. There is no character. There are just lines on a page. Any character on stage is mythic or mythical- they are not real. They are a combination of
The writer’s imagination,
the actor’s portrayal,
the director’s attitude, and
the audience’s apprehension.
Even if the character is based on somebody real (eg Julius Caesar), the actor cannot pretend to be Julius- he cannot play Julius. He can only ’play’ aspects of himself that identify or align with Julius.

P53: The use to which a gambler puts his or her money is: ’time at the tables’. And the use to which an acting student puts his or her time, money and faith is ‘time at the school’. It is an end in itself. Fascinating insight! Perhaps that is why actors, once they have left school, feel no need to train or to hone their craft. They have done their time.

P54: The paint by numbers mechanical actor judges himself and the performance constantly, and by a pre-ordained checklist, as if acting were rally driving and the actor rated by how accurately he hit each checkpoint.This can also be termed the ‘Bag of Tricks’ acting technique, where the actor spends the performance dropping off bits of ‘business’ which keeps the audience laughing or crying, because it “Usually works!”.

P55: Actors must be trained to speak well, easily, and distinctly, to move well and decisively, to stand relaxedly, to observe and act upon the simple, mechanical actions called for by the text. This may be true for a standard play, such as the old sepia standards, where the production recycles Macbeth in different period costume and décor (What! Mussolini’s Italy this time! ) Get Olivier’s film of same and direct traffic accordingly. Because these are competent re-enactments, they only require blocking.
But, what about a transformational piece of theatre such as Tadeusz Kantor’s: ‘Le Classe Morte’. Works such as LCM stand above standard fare just as John Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever, stands above pop. Works such as SFF or LCM, make you forget you are watching theatre or listening to pop music- they have shamanically taken you to another place. They redefine the possibilities of the form, they open up new possibilities, revealing new aspects of the audience to itself, that they didn’t know were even there. Such theatre is not born of the 4 week ‘blocking’ process.

Work:

P55: “Good-day” on or offstage, can be an invitation, a dismissal, an apology, a rebuke. Its meaning will come from the intention of the speaker to the spoken to. Similarly, onstage, a line’s ‘meaning’ to the audience, is conveyed by the actor’s intention. This ‘intention’ has more than one component. One can assume that the most important would be the emotional or psychological attitude employed by the actor in the way he would deliver the dialogue. However, research has shown that verbal communication between people can be broken down into:
Words: 10%,
The Sounds of the Words: 30%,
Body Language accompanying the words: a whopping 60%!
This is a truly staggering ratio and one that belies the importance that we generally place on the spoken text. It would imply that the recipient of verbal communication unconsciously augments and corroborates the words by ‘reading’ the way that the body is ‘speaking’.
The statistic also explains the situation where the audience, having ‘read’ the anacrusis (the preparation before an action, eg the uplifting of the hand before the strike) has ‘heard’ the speech even before it has been delivered. They’re already on the beach waiting for you to get there. This fixation concerning the words, their meaning and importance, has ignored the simple fact that if the actor’s body language or action is not congruent with his voice, then the audience will not believe the actor despite his best intentions.

P56: The work on the text, finally, shields the actor both from anxiety about his performance and from the necessity of paying attention to his colleagues while on stage. Could one also expand that to:
Paying attention to the audience,
Paying attention to the set and props, and finally ( and even more holistically)
paying attention to the performance as an experience.
P59: The Fourth Wall: There is not a wall between the actor and the audience. Such would defeat the very purpose of theatre, which is communication and communion. The idea of the fourth wall is a construction of someone afraid of the audience. The actor before the curtain….may have feelings of self-doubt, fear or panic. The erection of the 4th wall is the negative ‘in denial’ response to those feelings of self doubt and panic. For the very act of performing to a public is a challenge to one’s sense of self. The audience is there to gain knowledge from the play, the performance and the actor. Because the actor is their main point of contact, they place a great demand on his psyche- you could say that they are sucking his energy away. This is stage fright pure and simple. As an actor, every time that I face the audience’s energy, I am confronted with the shock: “I don’t know who I am anymore”. With training and experience that feeling goes away, but I do feel it initially, especially on the first night. Once I realized it for what it was, the issue simply became: How to acquire enough sense of myself ( what I would call self-definition) to withstand the existential shock and protect the ‘psyche’ from diminuition.

Oral Interpretation:

P62: You have to learn the lines, look at the script simply to find a simple action for each scene, and go out there and do your best to accomplish that action, and while you do, simply open your mouth and let the words come out however they will - as if they were gibberish - if you will. That is a noteworthy proposal, but surely a big demand to ask somebody brought up on a standard acting approach? It is as if you thrust a guitar into a neophyte’s hands and then say: “Just improvise, even though you can’t play any music, don’t know any scales, arpeggios, etc” Everybody would understand the absurdity of such a situation within a musical context. Why is it that such a demand is so accepted in the acting world? Surely the question is…..How do we structure a training system that encompasses exercises and routines that foster such abilities. These exist in music and sport. Why not transpose them?

For to you, the actor, it is not the words which carry the meaning - it is the actions. Once again, 10% words/30% sounds/60% body language.

P63: The best service an actor can do is to accept the words as is, and speak them as simply and clearly in an attempt to get what you want from the other actor. Again, this is a very easy thing to ask, but much harder to deliver. As one of the great physical theatre teachers Etienne Decroux once demonstrated; He indicated a movement pattern and commented with: Easy to see! Easy to say! Easy to do badly! However in the following line you perhaps unwittingly provide the answer:
If you learn the lines by rote, as if they were a phone book……This is exactly how athletes and musicians train. Football players do routines that are formatted with highly defined time and spatial strictures. Inside these strictures they perform their drills by rote, repetition upon repetition, and they do this so that in the ‘moment’ of the game, they can react instinctively to any situation that may arise. If they had to resort to any sort of reasoned process regarding a situation within the game proper ( how do I get myself in the right position to kick the ball?), they would immediately have lost the moment( and the ball!).
For some strange reason (probably aversion to hard work) actors think:
“It’ll be alright on the night!” Even though nothing they do remotely prepares them for the night. Actually most actors amplify the problem by avoiding training because it is uncreative, avowing: “It’ll kill the moment, etc”.

We do not embellish the things we care deeply about. Oh so true! Jacques Copeau, the grandfather of what has become gesture based theatre, once commented: “To be sincere, you have to move slowly”. On first reading it comes across as too simplistic but on reflection it is most acute and it is a re-phrasing of your sentence.
Most actors need to embellish, to fill the void so to speak because they care more about themselves than anything else. I am reminded of watching a documentary about a well known film actor traipsing across the Siberian wastes by motorbike. At one stage they were being carried on a truck when the driver saw a bear cross the track ahead. They stopped the truck, gave chase, killed and skinned the bear before resuming. This offended said moviestar superbigtime, even though:
The bearskin was probably worth a year’s income to the driver,
It happens all the time, and
His reaction won’t change anything.
What it did show was that his reaction; what it meant to him, was more important than the thing he was reacting against. Of course an artist’s powerful feelings are important drivers for his expression, and indeed it may be that the need to express powerful beliefs is what defines an artist most of all. But the canvas for this outburst should in this case be the stage or film, not self important posturing in the midst of some muddy Siberian track.

… but the audience isn’t looking for a person with a ‘good idea’ about the script. They are looking for a person who can act- who can bring to the script something they couldn’t have learned or imagined from reading it in a library. They are looking to be ‘moved’. This is to take them on a journey- on their own journey of self- discovery.

Helping the Play:

P64: All of acting, all parts, all seemingly emotion-laden scenes are capable of and must be reduced to simple physical actions calling neither for belief nor emotional preparation. The 10.30.60 principle.

Most plays are better read than performed. Why? Because, in truth, most actors on stage are only reading the play! So when they are sitting down reading they are more honest than when they are pretending to do more.
Most productions are just speaking books because most directors are only interested in the dialectic between the script and themselves. (How often have you seen a director look at the script when they perceive a problem - they should be looking at the stage! The problem is on the deck!)
Why are these interactions so less moving when staged by actors? Because the actors have no ‘body’ knowledge, power or poetry! They can add nothing to the words. At a reading it is no distraction because their bodies are silent and not exposed. But in most cases, as they begin to walk around their bodies become a distraction that obscures and fragments the audience’s appreciation of the language- their bodies become an obstruction to the audience’s experiencing the play.

P66: What is required is not the intellect to ‘help the play’ but the wisdom to refrain. Indeed! The intellectual, the ‘I’ is an impediment!

Acceptance:

P67: As if acting were not an art or a skill, but only the ability to self-induce a delusional state. Without a thorough and systematic training acting is definitely NOT an art or a skill.

But is this true of music? Does the musician devote his energies to forgetting that what is in front of him is a piano, and does the dancer strive to forget that she is dancing and endeavour to believe that what she is doing is walking? NO! Because the musician/ dancer always needs to know the notes/steps they are playing/dancing. That is in its deepest essence, them knowing themselves in the playing. Otherwise they would be as ‘lost’ as most actors are.
It would follow that if the actor had a similar ’physical score’ he would then have the confidence to feel himself inside (occupy) his speech and actions. And since the playwright cannot or does not provide the Physical score ( except for Beckett, whose plays are stripped back to be purely physical scores) then it is left to the director. He /she is the equivalent of the conductor/choreographer, the provider of the aesthetic landscape that frames and presents the text.
It would follow from this that the actor should have a physical training score comparable with the music scale and the ballet barre.

P68: The dancer does not endeavour to create in himself or in the audience the feelings the choreography might invoke: he just performs the steps the most truthful way he knows how. Not quite true. The dancer as well as doing the steps, must occupy the dance, must be on a journey inside the dance. The crucial thing is that these two aspects must go beyond co-existence, they must feed off each other, nurture one another by combining together. One must not dominate to the detriment of the other.

P69: To act means to perform an action, to do something. If acting is actions, should not the actor’s ‘script’ be his actions, and the actions be a score as structured as in music. And is it possible to create a language vocabulary of gesture that corresponds to steps/notes? By this I do not mean an alphabet of gesture such as developed by Le Coq or Meyerhold. Their mimetic gestural vocabulary manifests as an extreme form of stylised theatre, by creating sequences of movement that corral disparate actor’s bodies into coherent patterns. This is because, unlike dancers, who are selected by a very clear process of muscular and skeletal determinism, actors are an amalgam of various forces and skills. Once again, much like the members of a football team.
Dancer training is concerned with distilling skills to create a unity of style. Actor training, like football training, should focus instead to create a sense of team work and commonality of purpose through physical exercises. This, would, of course, incorporate skills development, but by evolving a vocabulary that is user friendly. By user friendly I mean a training vocabulary that is available to anybody regardless of age, sex, history, experience, or facility.
This type of training requires exercises that are simple and repetitive, building up a ‘library’ of experiences or physical memories. The actor can then draw on these vocal and movement memories instinctively, much the same as a football player uses his training exercises as a memory bank, from which he instinctively draws on the skills necessary for the game.

P70 Let us learn acceptance. This is one of the greatest tools an actor can have……Because the capacity to accept derives from the will and the will is the source of character. Too true! Too many so-called acting methods prevent the actor from accepting himself by encouraging him to pretend to be something other than what he is. Unless you can face yourself and accept who you are, there will be no moving forward.

Rehearsal Process:

P72: What should happen in the rehearsal process? Two things:
1.The play should be ‘blocked’.
2. The actors should become acquainted with the actions they are going to perform.
Both one and two mean that the play should be structured so that the actors know where they are, and what they are doing at any given time and where they are doing it in the space. Whose responsibility is that? The director’s! Since the actor cannot (can a violin write its own structure in a quartet?).
The director must supply the aesthetic landscape for the actor, much the same as a conductor does for an orchestra.

What is an action? An action is an attempt to achieve a goal. Let me say it even more simply: an action is an attempt to achieve a goal. Obviously, then, the chosen goal must be accomplishable. Here is a simple test: anything less capable of being accomplished than “open the window” is not and cant be an action. However, if an action such as O.T.W is to accompany poetic words (and after all, theatre is about poetry), should not the action be poetic in order to amplify and frame the words? If it is not a poetic action, will it not demean or weaken the impact of the words?

P73: You’ve heard directors and teachers by the gross tell you :”Come to grips with your self”, “Regain your self esteem”, “Use the space”, and myriad other pretty phrases which they, and you, were surprised to find difficult to accomplish. They are not difficult. They are impossible! And they are impossible because they are only admonitions, They contain no practical suggestions. And why no practical suggestions? Because, in the main the teacher/director doesn’t know any more than the actor, and has to resort to unhelpful prevarications such as above. For that is the only way this type of director/teacher can maintain his authority- by shifting the goal posts rather than providing real information.

This is what makes a person with an objective alive: they have to take the attention off them selves and put it on someone they want something from. This is why somebody on stage really doing something is more compelling than somebody pretending to do something- Their ego has been refused attention and losing interest, it metaphorically wanders off, leaving the body simply to get on with the job.

The Play and the Scene:

P76: The boxer has to fight one round at a time; the fight will unfold as it is going to. Not quite true. Ali beat Foreman in the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ by using a deliberate strategy of tiring him out over several rounds. In acting as well there is a long term action (the journey) and a short term action (the moment). A true performance is a compound of both, coexisting and interacting, and neither dominant to the detriment of the other.

Emotions:

P78: The addition of an ‘emotion’ to a situation which does not organically create it is a lie. I think you said either in this book or elsewhere that one cannot project emotion-emotion is something that happens to you. A rather brilliant observation! If the actor cannot project emotion at the audience, but only feel it, then it follows that the audience has to witness, feel or participate in the actor’s emotion, and by doing so, feel their own emotion. It is not, nor cannot be the same emotion, but the audience needs to be in the presence of the actor’s transformational emotion to feel their own. The actor is the shaman that reveals the audience’s psyche to itself, without the audience being aware of it.

P80: Emotional memory and sense memory are paint - by- numbers. Emotional memory is fake because only the emotions you feel in the moment are real. The exhuming of them may create something attractive, but it is still fake.

Acting is a physical art. It is close to the study of singing and dancing. Yes, but only if it has a comparable structure. Most theatre has no temporal or spatial structure and that is why the actors, production , director and audience are psychically lost.

Action:

P82: In a well written and performed play, everything tends towards the punch line. That punch line, for the actor, is the objective. If we learn to think solely in terms of the objective, all concerns of belief, feeling, emotion, characterization, substitution, become irrelevant. But surely a great and lasting work has several levels of perception, layers of meaning that allow the various spectators to extract their own personal ‘stories’. It was Proust who said that “everybody reads themselves into what they are reading. In a classic Commedia piece good and bad characters can be countenanced more subtly as clowns of innocence and experience. And we all know that the historical attraction for many men is the opportunity of seeing pretty girls with not many clothes on.

Guilt:

P86: None of us is free of self-doubt and none of us is free of guilt. A guilt based educational system, which is to say most acting training, survives through the support of adherents who were guilty before they signed up, who came to classes and failed (how could they do otherwise, as the training was nonsense), and were informed that their feelings of shame- which they had brought in with them- were due to their failure in class, and could be alleviated if and only if the student worked harder and ‘believed’ more. Under this way of learning there is no way out as the actor’s guilt is folded back inside himself, rather than allowed to give expression. However, guilt can also be an important driver for gaining knowledge. Guilt is a natural emotion, a subconscious cry for self-betterment. It is self imposed psychic pain. Marcel the Proust also said: “There is no knowledge without pain”. It is easy to understand that there can be no physical knowledge without physical pain- all athletes would know this implicitly. But acting involves psychic and physical growth, and if you transposed the shifts, can there be psychic growth through physical discomfort? Can one develop a training that combines the two, while still ensuring that there is minimal collateral damage?

P87: Faced with nonsensical, impossible directions(“Feel the music with your arms and legs”). Not as nonsensical as you might think! Elite athhletes, musicians and dancers would find no idiocy in that sort of directive. And your description ‘nonsensical’ is also inversely ironic as such directions are designed to increase the actor’s sensitivity beyond the linear and obvious. And the idea is to go beyond quotidian patterns in preparation for non-quotidian theatre. The issue would be the context of the direction: is it just another bland admonishment with no practical backup? In most cases the answer would be yes. I’ve heard that Brando and Dean, et al would commiserate about their time with Strasberg and what a pain in the arse it was to ‘be a teapot’. I’m not surprised because it is ridiculous to pretend to ‘be a teapot’ and experiences such as this convinced Brando that acting was stupid childish games. But if such suggestions were couched in contexts that were both poetic and structured, then the actor wouldn’t feel that he was pretending. He would actually be feeling, following an unconscious train of thought, that would have a similar creative, inspirational effect as listening to his dreams.

Nobody with a happy childhood ever went into show business. Not necessarily true, but it is true to say that actors seek redemption through performance- their soul’s tonic through self discovery in front of an audience.

The audience, just like you, came to have it; anomie, anxiety, guilt, uncertainty and disconnectedness dealt with. Your responsibility is this: deal with your own. Very true! The audience, by walking into the theatre, admits to a contract whereby they will, by witnessing you as a shaman deal with your own issues, come to a greater acceptance of their own issues-its called psychic healing and has always been the true purpose of theatre for millennia.

Your fear, your self doubt, your vast confusion( you are facing an ancient mystery-drama-of course you’re confused) do not mar you. At the risk of nicety, they are you. Most actor preparation posits that you should not ‘be nervous’! This to ask them to deny their human frailty, rather than to accept it.

P92: In rejecting a situation based on guilt (I can do more, do better, etc.), in beginning with a frank avowal(I am confused, uncertain, etc.), and proceeding honestly from one step to the next, you put yourself in the same position as the written character and can begin to bring to the stage the truth of the moment. I think what you have stated as an ambit claim is a very good starting point, but as it stands, it is only an admonition until the actor is provided with a highly defined aesthetic landscape (AKA a coherent training process) where he can progress through all these issues.

Concentration:

P95: The more a person’s concentration is outward, the more naturally interesting that person becomes. By outward I assume you mean that he is attuning himself to receive outside information to a greater extent than he is expressing information. So, what that means is that he is in a heightened state of feeling, and one can push the sense further so that in extension he should also be feeling the effect it is having on him.

The person with attention directed outward becomes various and provocative. The person endeavouring to be various and provocative is stolid and unmoving. Annoying because of self-importance or because you can see and hear their psyche creaking and groaning in distress?
We’ve all seen the ‘vivacious’ person at a party. What could be a bigger bore? Its not your responsibility to do things in an interesting manner. The issue here is: ‘interesting manner’. Could you not say: to be interesting you have to be doing interesting things. Not pretending to do up you shoelaces-actually do them up, and the greater the degree of difficulty- the more interesting. And the more and different interesting things you are doing, the more compelling you become. Tadashi Suzuki once said: “True intensity on stage is borne of doing many things at once!”

P96: The teenager who wants the car; the child who wants to stay up the extra half hour……These individuals have no problem concentrating. Elect something to do which is physical and fun to do, and concentration ceases to be an issue. I would supplant the word fun with ‘challenging but rewarding’ as fun is the enemy of art.

Here is a bit of heresy. Our theatre is clogged with plays about Important Issues; Playwrights and Directors harangue with right thinking views on many topics of the day. But these are, finally, harangues, they aren’t drama and they aren’t fun to do. The audience and the actor nod in acquiescence, and go to their seats or onstage happy to be a right thinking individual, but it is a corruption of the theatrical exchange. Great art ( to which we should all be aspiring regardless of success) transcends time and circumstance by contending with the deep moral and spiritual issue of mortality.

Talent:

P100: A common sign in a boxing gym: BOXERS ARE ORDINARY MEN WITH EXTRAORDINARY DETERMINATION. I would rather be able to consider myself in that way than to consider myself one of the ‘talented’; and –if I may-I think you would, too. If talent, as you so rightly say, is so deceptive, then what can you have in your work process to stop its highs and lows corrupting you. You could argue, that like the other vicissitudes facing you as an actor, you need tools to stop the misleading highs and lows of success- intentions are a good start, but one needs a format in which to see out those intentions.

Habit:

P102: Put things in their proper place. Rehearsal is the time for work. Home is the time for reflection. The stage is the time for action. Compartmentalise and cultivate that habit and you’ll find your performances incline to take on the tinge of action…. Be generous to others. Everyone tries to do their best….Yearning to correct or amend the something in someone else will make you petty. Cultivate the habit of only having aversion for those things you can avoid (those things in your self) and only desiring those things you can give yourself. Improve your self. Wonderful sentiments but they only flag an attitude or approach. To take that approach further, it has to be subsumed into a procedural doctrine. The most successful aesthetic movements inaugurated processes that corral and amplified those sentiments. What is incumbent on us as living in the oughties, is to find our own versions of these processes, using as templates those ideologues that have gone before, and reconfiguring them to suit contemporary sensibilities and idioms.

P103: Singing, voice, dance, juggling, tap, magic, tumbling. Practice in them will perfectly define for you the difference between possession and non-possession of a skill. As well, see them as not separate and immiscible, but excavate them for their consanguinity-their underlying technical connections. Then assimilate them and transpose their attributes. For, if they are techniques, they are transposable- if not you are racking up un-connectible styles.

The Designated Hitter:

P106: Truly great performances cause us to question, to pause, to ponder, to re-examine. They do not conduce to the immediate ejaculation: “Bravo!” Because the modern ‘Bravo’, especially when associated with a lot of hollering and whooping, is really a celebration of the self- importance of the audience: “I’m Soo cool, cos I can dig you that much!”Whoo..whoo!

….And so the Great Actor is seldom a very good actor. We praise his or her performances as we would praise our own possessions if we could do so with impunity. That is the gift of the Great Actor, and the reason he is so well rewarded- he allows us to act vainly and call it appreciation. It is an example of our cultural insecurity. The praise means: “He’s mine I’ve got one, too!”! The Great Actor, like the modern popster (and some try to be both!), has been eaten by celebrity, and the only way they can get their ‘selves’ back is to act badly. Britney’s Bad Behaviour, and the’ Leave Britney Alone’ utube cult shows that, true to the end, she’s a canny business woman, using her psychic problems as a marketing tool.

Performance and Character:

P110: They came to see a play, not your reasoned ‘emotional’ schematic of what your idea of a character might feel like in circumstances outlined by the play. Surely they came to see a performance of a play- they can see (read) the play anytime, these days on the net, and don’t even have to go to a bookshop.

If you decide to be an actor, stick to your decision. The folks you meet in supposed positions of authority- critics, teachers, casting directors- will in the main be your intellectual and moral inferiors. They will lack your imagination, which is why they became bureaucrats rather than artists; and they will lack your fortitude, having elected institutional support over a life of self reliance. Essentially, they lack your intent-your deep moral imperative.

P111: An actor should never look inward. He or she must keep the eyes open to see what the other actor is doing moment to moment, and to call it by its name and act accordingly. Its not possible to look outward all the time, just as it is not possible to old one’s breath forever. To look outward all the time is as fixed a position as looking inward. Perhaps it is better to look at outward/ inward in terms of balance. The energies coming into the body must be balanced by the energies going out, whether you are thinking in terms of projection or reception.

P112: A word about teachers. Most of them are charlatans. Too true! Most of them don’t know any more than their students and that’s because they never studied or worked with any one who knew more than they did- a perpetual vicious circle of incompetence.

Few of the exercises I have seen, teach anything other than gullibility. Most teachers, because they don’t know more, have no moral authority and so have to resort to prevarication and obfuscation, maintaining their emotional /psychological command over their charge by increasing the gullibility factor.

The Villain and the Hero:

P114 The audience will accept anything they are not given a reason to disbelieve. A young woman across the room at a party is pointed out to us as being worth $500 million. We now begin to look at her differently, even though she has done nothing. A characteristic was ascribed to her, and we accepted it. Another way of putting it is to say that she has been framed a certain way, set against a landscape, so we will then ‘read’ her in a certain way.

You don’t have to portray the hero or the villain. That’s been done for you by the script. Or: the director’s interpretation of the script.

Acting ‘As if”:

P116: Its like playing lacrosse. In order to play lacrosse you have to know the rules. The purpose of the rules is to make the game more enjoyable- you don’t have to prepare or put your self in a lacrosse state of mind. Not altogether true. The rules are to make it more functional. If there are no rules, it becomes impossible to judge situations of disorder and dispute, i.e. to make it as fair as possible. This ultimately makes it more satisfying.

In none of these do we have to ‘remember’ how we are supposed to feel. We simply remind ourselves what we are about to do, and we are suffused with the desire to do it: we jump immediately and happily into the midst of the game………. We can make our speech to the tyrant time after time, and indeed we do, sometimes improving it, sometimes simply repeating it for the joy it affords us. This perfectly describes the ideal instinctive state, which is very special and the aim of every actor. It occurs at least once in any rehearsal situation, and it would seem that repeating it, or more properly, regaining it is the primary focus of the following rehearsals and performances. A la recherche l’instinct perdu! The most practical way seems to be to repeat it so often that it becomes instinctive again. Ablation back to the zero point due to repetition seems the best praxis.

What do we say of the actor who would wish it all away….. and substitute some shoddy counterfeit of emotion. We say that such a one is great, that he is a Great Actor, and that we have never seen such technique. What does this talk of technique mean? It means that we were so starved of anything enjoyable that we were reduced to enjoying our own ability to appreciate. We were impressed, but not moved.

What would the word technique mean if it were applied to a chef or a lover? It would mean that their actions were cold and empty, that finally, we’re disappointed by them. This is precisely what it means when applied to a stage performance. To use the word technique in its most perjorative sense, like this, is to affirm that the aim of art is to sublimate technique so that the audience’s rational perceptions of time and space have been refracted- they have been transported to a dreamscape, where the usual conscious judgements are suspended. If they become aware of technique or worse still, start to say:“ I didn’t understand it”, then they have dropped out of that magic zone and are back in ‘I wonder if I turned the oven off?’ everyday life- surely what theatre is NOT about.

Most actors are terrified of their jobs. Not some, but most. They don’t know what to do and it makes them crazed. They feel like frauds. That is because they are generally lost psyches in a bland, ill-defined landscape. They don’t know where they stand in terms of space and time and therefore have to fill the void with ‘ busy’ness’, so that they don’t feel empty. This means that they are not learning, discovering new psychic spaces. Instead, they have to trawl through their bag of tricks, their old habits, and put them on display as something new and exciting. They don’t ‘know’ themselves in that false and empty environment, and that’s why they feel deep down they are frauds.
Now of course they can never ‘know’ themselves fully- that’s an impossibility. But they can, when placed in a highly defined aesthetic, be on a journey of self-discovery, and that is a very exciting thing to witness.

They once Walked among Us:

P121: Now, the great (acting teachers) are safely dead and cannot be quizzed, but we might safely assume that they brought something of passion and courage to their work. And real knowledge, because they were there when it was invented. If you go back to the originals, they were made by the experience as much as it made them.

P122: As we move further down the chain, both the students and the teachers are attracted not to the new, but to the approved. The analogy can here be made with photo-copying, where each subsequent copy progressively loses definition. So to in acting: as each generation of actors and teachers becomes further removed from the discovery/invention, the result becomes blander and more diffuse.

Thank you David, and Happy Trails !