And then the rain -- True West

Auditions 1: judging by the results, theater education sucks.

If you get a B.A. or a B.F.A. in acting, you should be able to act. That's a high standard, I know, but it only seems fair that if you pay a ton of coin for a degree, they should teach you something back.


But, okay: acting . . . it's an art after all. It requires all kinds of tricky things that no one can teach, not really. (That's why the best acting schools are so selective. The teachers must, I think, know that the prospective students either have the knack or don't, and they'd better have it coming into the program or all the exercises and work and productions aren't going to work).


So, let's lower the standard. It seems like asking too much to create a theater artist out of four years of liberal arts school. Maybe that's just a stupid proposition to believe in. But if you do earn that theater degree, you should be able to control your voice and diction and know how to move your body expressively. These are craft elements. They require no special aptitude. You just have to receive instruction and put in the time. They're basic, too. If you can't be heard, no one will be able to appreciate your performance or the playwright's work. If you move awkwardly, it's distracting.


Basic, right?


I spent a few hours learning that this is too high a standard. Dozens of actors showed up with very nicely produced glossy head shots -- almost completely irrelevant to me, other than as a device to help remember who auditioned. And with resumes. Listing BAs and BFAs. Even a few MFAs. And most of them sucked. They were brave. They were bold, and they deserve credit for that and for the work they put into learning their pieces. But the acting was mediocre.


That's to be expected, I guess. But what shocked me is how few of them had any craft. They mumbled. They stood there like dead fishes propped up in a frozen food case. Or they'd make little penguin gestures with their arms. And whatever they'd listed as training didn't seem to matter. Four year programs, two year programs, random classes from a series of teachers -- none of it mattered. If they were good, they were good no matter where they went or studied. If they stank, they stank no matter where they'd picked up their stench. 


Okay, maybe I'm generalizing. We didn't see students from some of the better known schools; I guess they could be better, or at least offer some good diction. You know, the basic price of entry. Not necessarily emotional truth or charisma, or shattering insight into the human heart. Just get the words out.


For the record, I saw some fine actors.


But it makes me think that arts education, or at least theater education in this country is a fraud, and thus, a criminal enterprise. You can't teach art. You can, however, create a place where the craft elements can be learned. Apparently, a lot of schools are absolutely failing. 


They should refund their students' tuition.

Why I Do Theater - Patsy Rodenburg

Vanya research

I'm taking another acting class, which is already much better than the last one. I'm currently working on a scene from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. In the scene, Astrov, the part I play, tries to persuade Vanya to return a jar of morphine that he stole, presumably with the intention of killing himself. I decided to do a little scrounging around on YouTube.

The results show just how differently the same scene can be interpreted. It never really is the same play.


Uncle Vanya -- Russian movie version, 1986
The scene starts around 2:28
This is a classic, straightforward interpretation.

Andrei Konchalovsky, Tarkovsky's former collaborator who's directed some good movies in Hollywood as well as Russia, recently mounted a production that seriously stretches the conventions of Chekhov, bringing farcical and tragicomic elements forward.

Here's an interview with him, which gives even non-Russian speakers a colorful overview of his take on the play.

Close by were a couple of pretty raw clips of Konchalovsky directing this production. He's direct and pointed with his actors, perhaps even merciless. He's also very precise about the movements and gestures of the players. Clearly, every detail matters. What impressed me -- the way he has his Astrov wipe his boots as he enters the "house" -- just the sort of realism in the midst of the fantasy of the set that makes it vivid to an audience. It brings home the given circumstances -- the muddy yard of a provincial farm -- home in an unfussy, direct and yet beautiful way.

Another time he instructs the actor playing the Professor to not just pick up the apple, but to smell it -- to inhale its scent. The guy asks why. The director responds, so the audience can smell it.

Konchalovsky in rehearsal part 1

   

 part 2

  

 Maly Theatre of St. Petersburg -- opening scene with Astrov and Marina. This comes close to how I'd initially imagined a staging of the play. The actors are very good. But I wonder if the classic approach isn't maybe too expected? It makes me wonder: how many straightforward, faithful interpretations of a play does the world need? One per generation?

Still, this Astrov is impeccable.

  

 Later scene from same production, still Act 1

  

 Vanya on 42nd Street -- Astrov and Elena
I think this movie's overrated and not at all the definitive version. I object to Mamet's adaptation, which is thoroughly streamlined, and so, completely misses the point of Chekhov. The acting's American, nice and lean and simple, but the whole thing occupies some realm that doesn't quite honor the original text and doesn't really make it to the level of an intelligent re-visioning of the work. It's not horrible, just not as good as you'd think it would be, given the team behind it.

  BBC TV version, 1970 with Anthony Hopkins as Astrov
The scene starts at 1:40:57.
More classicism with great skill -- but, again, are these people Russian? Plus, it suffers from the bell jar quality that plays staged for TV always have -- like butterflies you trap in a jar. Plus, Hopkins is really too young to convey that resigned yet desperately middle-aged character of the good doctor, Astrov.

 

I take an acting class, last scene

My scene partner and I prepped some more. I put together props and a costume, deciding to ditch my glasses and slick my hair back which makes me look thuggish, fitting the role better. A kind of nervous anticipation settled in during the day of class, surprising me. After all, the stakes were pretty low, and even a total failure wouldn't have much consequence. Still, there they were: opening night jitters.

The class itself fell into the familiar pattern: run the scene, take some notes, make some improvements. All of the actors performed better -- their best so far. Still, that simple issue of variety dogged most of the work. Before the teacher got to work on them, the scenes tended to hit one note.

Part of the reason for this flatness was that the scenes were dead. That is, instead of living in the scene, creating moment by moment, the actors were trying to recreate the scene -- the one in their imagination, or the one that had worked so well in rehearsal.

Variety's the spice

In talking this over, one fellow student put it well: I hear the scene in my head, then I try to play that. That is, you have this ideal version, and you aim for that. This is a mistake. The instructor was diplomatic in addressing the issue. The direct version would be: You have to live in the circumstances of the scene, with whoever's on stage with you. You can't can a performance, you have to react and listen to what you're partner's doing. Just like real life. Even ignoring someone is a reaction.

The common prescription was to increase the stakes. Make what the character wants matter more, or make failing to get it hurt more. Obstacles create energy. 

She also had actors play the opposite -- take what you had thought was the action, and reverse it. From loud, go soft. From fast, try slow.

Our instructor pointed out that you have to be in a different place at the end of the scene than where you began. That is, if you start out happy, for example, you should end up sad -- that a scene involves a change.

If you want your partner to play something, jealousy for example, it's up to you to make her jealous. You have the responsibility of acting in a way that will provoke that in your partner.

Above all, you need to be flexible and crafty and original in pursuing your objective. Try out different tactics for getting what your character wants.  Don't always go with your first choice -- maybe another, better choice is waiting, ready for you to dig it out of your imagination.

I had an example of this during my own scene. To recap, my character is trying to blow off a woman he slept with and in creating trouble for his step sister. She has some information that turns the scene around and gives her the upper hand at the end of the scene. So, in the win/lose binary scenario, he loses.

But, my objective is to win. So, even though the scene has my character failing, I have to struggle in every way I know how to put him on top. Because, that's the guy as written. He's not taking things lying down. My physical action is to stand and leave the cafe. That's not helpful, either -- it seems as if he's leaving with his tail between his legs.

A week earlier, I tossed a couple of dollar bills on the table -- or rather, at the woman. I could tell from the reaction of the other students that it worked. The women, in particular, found it insulting.

We ran our scene, and it went well. the vibe from our audience of students was solid, the work flowed, and my partner and I were in the groove. But, that didn't mean it couldn't use some work. I'll spare you some of the tweaks, except for the final part.

I pulled my move of tossing a few bills on the table and at the woman. I even had them ready in my pocket to go, as part of my prep, something I'd just read about in Stella Adler's book. Boom, out come the bills, bam! on the table. Take that!

Only, the instructor didn't think it was strong enough when we got to that section. "Don't let her win!" she said. "She's winning!" So I'm stuck on stage, groping for inspriration and then I just pull out the rest of my bills and make it rain on the table, flipping them out faster than a Vegas poker dealer wings out cards.

It worked. The pressure plus a memory of some rap video gave me the clue, and -- (not to make a big deal out of my little moment of invention, because it's not, it's what any good actor would do for hours a day)

What I learned

Actors are deeply exposed. Now, you do hear this a lot. But until it's you, under the lights, little old you with your skin full of fear and emotions and yearnings with your face and your voice under scrutiny as you try to create something in real time -- well, you just don't know what exposed is. 

Actors need good feedback. When you're acting, it's hard to tell if what you're doing is working. That's why directors are useful. Or audiences. But in film, there isn't an audience to give you a reading. And if you're in front of an audience, you want to be sure that what you've chosen to do will have an effect.

This was something that confounded me through the whole course. I'd think or feel as if what I was doing was creating the desired effect. For example, I thought I was projecting dominance. But then, the teacher would say I wasn't. Frustrating. Then, I'd find another pose, bigger, more spread out -- and, yeah, that was more dominant. This is a basic example, of course, and maybe you should be so totally in the moment you're not aware of anything else. I don't know. But, it really helps to have someone give you a response, or a check, even if it's only on the "Is my fly zipped?" level.

Thoughtful repetition helps deepen the work. Yeah, I know. That's why they rehearse. Only, in a standard Hollywood film model, they don't rehearse much at all. Lumet used to have a two to four-week rehearsal period before shooting, and that boggles everyone's mind. I guess actors can be skilled enough to drill down and nail it right away, or they simply play a type and give that same type performance. But I don't know how you can really understand a piece without running through it several times, thinking about it, feeling your way around the actions and the text, experiencing how it goes with the other people in the scene. 

The play I worked on was good, but not necessarily a Profound Work. Yet, each time we rehearsed it, we'd notice something different.

Overall

I didn’t find any obvious candidates for casting in upcoming projects. In past classes, I have cast fellow students, with mostly good results. So, I didn’t meet that goal. But, the class had fewer students than other classes I’d taken, so perhaps it’s the law of averages at work. Fewer students mean less chance of a real talent showing up. Unusually, the bulk of the students didn't aspire to an acting career. They were hobbyists.

But, I did brush off some rust. I learned. And the simple act of working on a scene was valuable, not only for acting, but for writing as well. 


Other posts about this class:

Acting Class 1

Acting Class 2
Acting Class 3
Acting Class - Thinking
Acting Class - Rehearsal
Acting Class 4

I take an acting class, scene 4

For the next class, we played our scenes. Again, the teacher let the actors run through the piece without interrupting them, then asked a few questions, and next broke the work down, detail by detail. A lot of this was specific to the scene, and would be boring to read, unless you’re planning on working on a scene from Angels in America sometime soon.

     But, our instructor did suggest approaches that could work under a lot of circumstances. For example:

Play Status

This is based on the idea that in any relationship, status rules. One person is higher status, one lower. This relationship can shift. You fall from king to peasant or rise, depending on the dynamics of the scene. I’d come across a version of this idea in Keith Johnstone’s classic, Impro. 

     For weeks afterward, I watched myself carefully and observed groups of people at work or play, and sure enough, if you reduce relationships down to their bones, you can see this play out as your companions lunch or you enter a boss’s office. I’d thought the concept was crude. Then I looked around and confirmed that, yes, these status games do play out in real life.

     Once you establish who’s high or low status for a section of a scene, then certain behaviors can come into play. The powerful one, say, takes up more space, moves more slowly, displays stillness. The partner can shrink, scrunch up, slump. 

Use or lose the props

Our instructor pointed out that props must have a function, or not be on stage. They have to work to support an action or theme, and not be there just to cover up inactivity. If you inadvertently knock over a bowl, use it – that is, acknowledge that it happened as you would in real life, instead of being stuck on playing through the scene as you’d rehearsed it. 

Ditch the stage directions

Stage directions are usually written down after the first performance. So they reflect the movements and actions of the original cast or the choices director of the first production made. They may not make sense for your scene. Because they’re not carved in stone by the Author, you can try them out and use them. Or not. Unless Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams wrote them. Then you go to theatre hell.

     This was especially helpful in our scene. Some of the actions described in the stage directions didn't feel right, or I couldn't make them work. Maybe it's my problem. But having the freedom to try out other gestures in place of the ones written down made a huge difference in increasing the force and naturalness of the scene.

Two common faults

The scenes we watched mostly failed for any number of reasons. But the other scenes, as well as our scene, suffered from two common faults.

     First, they were all on one level. The actors had decided on a certain level to pitch it, a certain tone, and the would stay at that for the length of the scene. It's a bit like that fourth-grade flute player who hasn't mastered crescendoes or diminuendi or rubato.
     Each of the scenes were classically written. That is, they had a brief set up, rising action and a climax, with some dips and rises along the way. Like sex, actually. So, a lot of the work of the instructor centered on bringing out certain moments, adding some physical actions and varying the objectives to achieve some variety.
      The second issue is more broad, but still created problems. Everyone was still too nice. Too polite. That is, undramatic. Even granted with the permission to be mean, we actors still had a hard time pushing it. This would partly be because everyone has been socialized successfully to be nice -- we're all nice middle class people who are taking an acting class, after all.
     (Stars, must be so ravingly needy and ambitious that they don't have problems with being too nice. They have all experienced so much rejection along the way, that I'd guess whatever niceness they had got knocked out of them, too.)
      It shows up a second, larger challenge -- how to get around your own habits of acting and presentation in the so called real world. Again, after you pretend to be something for a certain number of years -- nice, for example -- it gets hard to ditch that, to dig in and find or imagine or create the quality that the author has in mind for your character.

I take an acting class - rehearsal

My scene partner and I rehearsed outside of class. Rachel’s 24 or so and earning her doctorate in geophysics. She hails from the Upper West Side in New York where she’d done theatre in high school. She also has a boyfriend, something she made clear about 30 seconds into our first meeting. And she kept bringing him up when we weren’t working on the scene. So I talked about my wife. A lot. So there.

To be fair, it’s awkward to have to engage with a near stranger in an intimate way. Our scene wasn’t a love scene, but no matter what the scene’s about, your partner is the target of your attention. The concentration which you put on that person is, or should be, high voltage. Higher wattage than daily life calls for. So, you do feel a certain inhibition. But it’s exactly this constraint that you have to blast through. 

Drama, after all, is not daily life.

When we weren’t talking about wives and boyfriends, the rehearsals went well. The scene itself is juicy. My character, a master manipulator and tough businessman, intends to blow off a seemingly neurotically incapacitated woman. She still wants to date  him, though. The problem is, he slept with her on their first date. She took it seriously. He didn’t. So, it seems as if things are going his way, and then she turns the tables on him. His only recourse is retreat.

Rachel worked hard, and had a fine competitive edge to her. Without saying it, we could both tell we wanted to be the best in the class.  Because our scene takes place in a cafe, I suggested we do it in a real cafe. This, I thought, would give us some useful images and sensations that we could draw upon. Just the mention of the idea freaked her out, so I let it drop. (I’ll make my actors do something like this though on my next show -- it should generate some real life images to draw on.)

Our rehearsals were really repetitions. I heard a director once say that rehearsal in English is imprecise. In German, the word is “probieren” -- that is, to test, to try, to experiment. In French, it’s répéter -- to repeat. The director noted that to rehearse should involve both activities, exploration and repetition.

We strictly worked the répéter side of the street. Mainly, I wanted to get over the barriers of integrating the newly memorized text with the action of the scene. 

As I said, Rachel worked hard. She’s also a bit shy, so it was much easier to run the scene than to make conversation. So, no wasted time. Again, I would feel lost, then connected to the line of the scene.  But even during simple run throughs, you could feel the rise and fall of the scene, driven by its language.

We ended. We felt ready for class, and ready for the inevitable questions that Teacher would put to us.

What I learned:

Rehearsal should be more than repetition. It should involve testing, trying stuff out, and mixing things up.

Jeffery Tambor's acting class

Austin Kleon took a seminar on acting from Jeffrey Tambor at SXSW last year, and these are his notes.

I take an acting class, scene 3

To prep, I read my assigned play, Becky Shaw, by Gina Gionfreddo.The play is well crafted and a pleasure to study. I thought about my character, a tough and manipulative son of a bitch whom I liked. I spent time breaking the seats down into beats, feeling my way into his "actions" -- what he's trying get, and what's preventing him.

We started with some relaxation and warm ups. The relaxation was the standard, "relax your eyes, let go of your shoulders. . ." instruction. The teacher also lead us through physical and vocal exercises. Then we broke up to rehearse on our own. My partner and I had about 30 minutes or so. I figured it'd be best to read through it to get a feel for how the scene played with her, to get a feel for the flow of it, and then we could dive into it. We worked well, but superficially. The coordination between reading the text, listening to her, and feeling out different reactions was like a complicated game, as if I had to toss apples at a target while standing on one foot and whistling Dixie. Time flew by. Our teacher herded us back in the main studio.

My partner and I went first. No need to sit around and fidget as nervous tension builds up. Again, the point here was to simply sit across from each other, and read the text while listening to the other person as carefully and realistically as possible, within the context of the scene.

It went okay, that is, I didn't feel stupid or incompetent. My attention veered wildly from saying the text to my partner to what she was saying to reacting to what she was saying more or less genuinely to evaluating the sound of my line readings, to gauging the reactions of the audience. So, no, not a good performance. I was too much in my head to do anything worthwhile. Our teacher used the same tactics as before: asking us questions about what we wanted, how we could get it, where we were. These did help clarify things.

She suggested the "you know what I mean?/Yes, I know what you mean" exercise where you end your speech with the question and start your speech with the I know what you mean answer. It jammed the rhythm of the scene, but I could see where she was coming from with it.

It's a little strange. You have to contend with the essentially classroom atmosphere and your own eagerness (or lack thereof) to please. This is all entirely separate from living the text as written. It's not the fault of the teacher; it's the inevitable dynamic of a class.

The rest of the class followed the same pattern. People would read, she'd work the scene by posing questions, then seeing how the adjustments would play out. If the actors got stuck, she'd make a suggestion about an action or a motivation to them, through questions about the basics of the scene.

Casting

It makes me wonder about the whole idea that you can read a text and play it within a few minutes. If you're a pro, I guess you'd be able to, by dint of practice and training, cough up a scene, a performance, and let the watchers know what you can bring to the game.

And I understand the utility of it. Say, for example, you are casting a young thug. You want to find out in a minimum amount of time if David can be a convincing thug. Maybe David is a thug. Even better. You can pass him along. But the process is suspect. The ability to pick up and read a bit convincingly is different from living the part.

I remember reading about how Kazan cast his films. He'd see the person on stage. He'd make a point of seeing their actual, finished work. Then he'd hang out with them. Dinner, drinks, long walks, intimate conversations. Then he would cast them. This is the man who discovered Marlon Brando, James Dean and Warren Beatty. Others, no doubt, would've eventually seen and recognized their talents. But he found them first. Not through readings, which seem to me some rarified, fancy bullshit.  I think if you had a modicum of ability, you could polish it with practice. Fifteen minutes a day, I read, should  be devoted to this. That skill, I would submit, is far away from being able to convincingly inhabit another person and present that role compellingly before the camera or an audience.

Same with André Wajda. He'd haunt theaters. Then he'd note the great performances. Then he would cast, based on his direct observation of a finished performance.

Just to complicate the issue, I think monologues aren't very helpful either. You want an actor who can listen and work with other actors. A monologue is a fancy kind of masturbation. Yes, you can see someone cough up an emotion on the spur of the moment. But who does that in our real lives, or even in our dreams? Characters exist in relationships. Even at night, even without reason or pattern in our dreams, a persona does not step out to the foreground and deliver a speech. Yet, this is the basic tool. It's ridiculous. I understand the budget constraints. The time constraints.

And casting, as John Huston said, is 90 percent of the job. Get the right person in the role, and you're done.

I have cast parts successfully and less successfully. What worked best was trusting my instinct, and seeing actors work in a class over weeks. What didn't work was the traditional casting process -- inviting eager (and, let it be said, desperate) people in to a space and witnessing them tap-dancing  their way into a part.

Okay, so it's a bit superficial. I signed up for it. I'm getting parts of my neurons re-awakened, and I'm dealing with the situations real actors must confront. I'm not complaining. But I am thinking there are better ways to operate that what is the standard here at the moment in the U.S.

But these aren't the problems I need to solve. I'm going to work on the part, keeping what she suggested in mind. There's a lot of value in the specific. And simply learning to keep out of my head will be worth the price of admission.

Studies in Posture: Battle of the Russian Machos Edition

For a short, bald guy, Putin holds up pretty well against the biker. Note that he keeps his chin down and looks up with his eyes, maintaining the strength of his presence. Just as the biker chief looks down with his eyes, rather than leaning down or inclining his head towards the politician. That way, he, too, maintains his strong position.

Putin has quite consciously built an impeccably crafted persona of a macho, a man's man. This is harder than it looks. For example, take John Kerry. He tried, and failed miserably. Putin, the spy, has an actor's sense of self-presentation that few politicians ever master.

It would be interesting to see him as a young KGB officer, working with the need to display just the exact amount of submission to his bureaucratic bosses while subtly asserting his ambition.
 

I take an acting class, scene 1

The local regional theater has an education wing. I cast the last play I directed from the students in the class, and that worked well. Essentially, they auditioned for me for the length of the class. They worked hard and well, and I learned a lot about directing a play. Later, I made a good friendship out of the experience. All in all, time and money well spent.

After weighing whether this class would be a diversion from more important work --like, y'know, making a short film -- or a good strategic way to learn and build skills, I decided in favor of the class. I can still work on short films, anyway.

So I found myself in a studio with high ceilings, a wood floor, chairs and a few stray pieces of stage furniture. A fake fireplace stood against one wall. My fellow students milled around, a little awkwardly. An older man with fantastic thick salt and pepper hair introduced himself to me. The Teacher came in. She's middle aged, looking, I have to say, older than her headshot and a little tired, hazel eyes shadowed. An impression of softness in her body, but sharpness in her eyes and face.

We drew our chairs into a circle and made. A Berliner who's earning a masters in geophysics, but who loves acting and is currently performing in a Williams play. A black girl who just graduated from high school. The older fellow's a retried psychiatrist who's a class junkie, he said. Another grad student in geophysics, and two guys in their twenties, one who's very much an Actor. The Actor is effeminate, but not extremely so.  S is taking the class for fun. 

I wondered what the hell I got myself into. I recalled that I need to challenge myself, to stretch, to get back in touch with acting by actually acting. To make myself uncomfortable. I want to loosen up and relearn what it is actors deal with -- from the inside, as an actor. Part of me ridiculed the whole scene and found it pathetic. Amateurs. Knitters. Hobbyists. This, I thought, was the price I must pay for not working harder, earlier. I recognized this chatter as mere static. I reminded myself I have a lot to learn, and that merely performing scenes would educate my nerves and sinews in a way I could deeply profit from. That it was up to me what I learned, and that I would learn.

Mamet . . . Mamet? . . . Mamet

Next we performed warm ups -- basic stretches and few vocal exercises.  The Teacher asked us if we'd heard of David Mamet, and I put in my two cents, ever the eager beaver, then shut myself up. She breaks us up into groups, and hands out scripts from different Mamet plays. She paired me with the psych.

She assinged us a scene from Glengarry, Glen Ross by David Mamet. In our scene Shelly, a real estate hustler past his prime, tries to cadge some good leads from Williamson the office manager. These leads, Shelly thinks, will help him get back in his game and save his ass from getting fired. I haven't read the play, but I saw the movie about eight years ago. I try to remember who the hell played Williamson in the movie? Ed Harris? Alec Baldwin? After a few run throughs, I remember. Kevin Spacey.

Once we've worked on the scene a bit, my partner and I have a basic question -- what do all those ellipses mean? What are you supposed to do with them? At the end of the speech, you know you're supposed to interrupt, but in the middle . . . what? I feel stupid for not knowing, but I've vowed to put the need to look smart aside. I still feel stupid. The Teacher explained that the ellipsis, the three dots, signals a shift. What kind of shift is up to us to figure out, but it doesn't mean a pause. Oh. That makes sense.

A million things happening all at once

The group reassembled in the main studio. Everyone was more comfortable with each other, conversations spilling over from the read-throughs. The teacher asked who wanted to go first, and my new partner and I nod at each other and hit the stage.

The old guy nailed it, or hit it as well as you can in a reading. His age, his slight hoarse voice, the way he leaned into me, hunched over and the text, of course, the text itself sold it.

I haven't read many good descriptions of what it feels like to act. Stanislavski, in his memoirs and his instructional books comes pretty close. When it's bad, or only half-baked, it feels like hundreds of things happening  at once. You have the unfamiliar sensation of being on stage, the bright lights, the sense of watchers, and a particularly intent person, the teacher. Added to this is the desire to do well,  the hope not to look stupid, and the wish to be better than the other guy. So I start clutching at things that will make it better. I listen, hard. That's supposed to help, right?

I listen. But then I'm aware of myself listening, which isn't right -- because then you're not hearing what the other person is saying, and nobody can be aware of listening, people don't do that in real life. My legs feel large and ungainly. I worry about missing my cue, so keep sneaking glances at my book.  This interferes with reacting to my partner, and I feel that, too, that lack. I imagine a Chinese restaurant, and notice that my imagination's a little thin and that I lost track of what my partner was saying. 

He got laughs. I figured out bits of supercilious business, little gestures, where to put my glances, and that helps. I kept going back to focus on him. A certain malice creeps in the corners of myself, and that groove feels right, the room falls away for a few seconds. I'm stuck with this whiny . . . loser. Then I'm out of it -- again, dammit! -- thinking I must be repeating stuff, and that would be boring.

I sucked. We finished. The Teacher complimented us, but especially the Psych, my partner. I felt a twinge of jealousy.

Then she asked me some simple questions: "Why are you eating lunch with him?" What does your character want?" "How does your character want the other person to feel?"  Lightbulbs went off. Oh. Oh. Yeah, I want to fuck with him, to bleed him, to toy with the fucker, to bring him down, to show him. I'm dining on him, not just on Kung Pao chicken.

Now, these are obvious questions -- questions I knew myself. Questions nearly anyone knows. But when I was acting, groping around for a solution, I didn't put it together. When the Teacher asked them, they focused everything.

Then I felt a sudden greed for the experience. I wanted to hop back up and do the scene again, right away.  My only comfort was that  I have generally sucked early on, and that I improved. But it was time for the other team to have their turns.

The other scenes followed, with bits from Oleanna and Speed the Plow. They read well, mostly. S was particularly fluid. The Teacher reminded the other students to let the words carry the meaning, and not to act the words. To play the objective, not the emotion. To pay attention to their partner. These adjustments always worked to improve the level of the scenes.

When we finished, it still seemed early. The three hours had passed unbelievably fast.

What I Learned (and relearned)

No revelations here -- you'll read about these in any good book. But experiencing them in action drives the lesson home. It's as different as reading about kissing is from kissing itself.

- Actors need simple, clear specific questions to ground their circumstances.

- Let the writer do his job. Speak the lines; don't put them on steroids or Act Them. Just say them.

- It helps to remind actors of who they are, why they're in the scene and what they're trying to do.

- Actors need strong, emotionally rooted objectives for the scene.  

 You cannot over emphasize this. It's the golden key, the magic carpet, the fundamental building block.

- Phrasing direction as questions is an effective way to help the actor to a solution.

Dirk Bogarde charts his character in Victim

From the BFI Flikr:

On the inside cover of his personal shooting script, Dirk Bogarde picked out his scenes and tied them together. Here, we can exclusively see character Melville Farr's occurrences in Basil Dearden's Victim (1961) from start to finish.



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Charisma

“Hemingway gave us a haunting clue to it,” she replied. “In his obsession with the Spanish bullfights, he spoke of the lust of the crowd and its desire to feel something special, a raw authenticity, even in so brutal a setting. What he mentions is the hush that would come over the crowd at the entrance of the toreadors. The people could sense the difference between those who did it for the fame, the paycheck, and those who had the old spirit: the nobility, bravery, heart, ‘duende.’ I believe this also happens in the theater. The crowd can sense the one with the authentic message, the connection to the truth.”

via

Posture is power

The Scientific American has published more research showing how you stand can affect your mood, your brain chemistry and the perceptions of others.

This reinforces my own experience doing work with postures, gestures and poses during acting classes. You discover quickly that if you assume a crouching, fearful pose, you can quickly work into an interior state that reflects fear and submission. Conversely, assuming open and royal postures -- head up, chin and chest out makes you feel powerful. Because you can exaggerate these in class more than in real life, the effect is more noticeable.

It's more reinforcement of how internal and external techniques can help an actor embody a character, an emotion, a human being. Just as Mr. Stanislavski and Mr. Michael Chekhov said.

Given the wide range of behaviors and cognition that power pulls into its sphere of influence, a fundamental question is how do people acquire power: what are its sources and bases? Many people answer “money, fame, or an important role in one’s social group.” Indeed, each of these may give you asymmetric control over valued resources, which is the very definition of power. But, are there other sources of power, other ways to both feel powerful and signal power to others?

In fact, there are many paths to increase one’s sense of power. The most obvious method is to have actual control over valued resources. But, power is also housed in our memories – simply recalling a time in which one had power has the exact same psychological and behavioral effects as giving people actual resource control. As memories of past power dance in our heads, we feel more powerful and act as if we are in charge in the present. However, although reliving powerful experiences can make one feel powerful, it doesn’t signal power to others.

As it turns out, there is a simple method to both transform people psychologically and signal power to others: altering your body posture. Across species, body posture is often the primary representation of power. From fish to reptiles to lower mammals to human’s closest evolutionary cousins, non-human primates, power is expressed and inferred through expansive postures, large body size, or even the mere perception of large body size through expansive postures.

 (This also reminds me of  Keith Johnstone's book Impro -- one of the most casually profound books I've ever read -- in which he devotes a section to dominance on stage.)

Read the full article.