(This is a continuation of my last post. You may want to read that first.)
It can be argued that Realism was born for 20th century media, for TV and film. Lord knows, an actor’s face thrown onto a large movie screen is ENORMOUS, and the smallest expressions and gestures become enormously informative. A little “too much acting” in a movie can immediately be WAY TOO MUCH ACTING. Right? That’s what directors and teachers will tell you, especially those steeped in “The Method”.
Well, they’re simply wrong. In fact, they’re somewhat deluded. I recommend to you the work of any of dozens of beloved film actors, whose work was “larger than life”. Start with Laurence Olivier, perhaps the greatest actor of our time. Look at the wonderful work of Jack Nicholson, or even Marlon Brando, famed Method Actors. Yes, you can see elements of the method at work in Brando and Nicholson. (Olivier didn’t care for the Method.) But look at how LARGE their performances are! They’re not all that “subtle”, it’s all usually right out there, bigger than life, hard to miss. I would beg you to watch 20 movies you love, and list your favorite performances. Though they will be filled with genuine human emotions, those will almost always be expressed in a manner larger than life.
THAT’S BECAUSE ACTING IS BY ITS VERY NATURE LARGER THAN LIFE! It was at the start, when we played Gods.
Imagine for a moment an audience. Who are they? People, that’s all. People with jobs, people with families, people with problems. People. They each come to the theatre, or their TVs, or Movie Theaters, with THEIR OWN LIVES DRAGGING IN BEHIND THEM. This guy didn’t eat dinner, he may be fired tomorrow because his boss hates him, he had to pick up the baby-sitter, he has a backache and gas! Yet, he picks up the wife, pays over $100 a ticket, and shows up to the theatre on time to see your play!
The same sort of story applies to nearly EVERY PERSON who watches ANY ENTERTAINMENT. They all have lives, and they all have immediate problems. When in history was the audience’s life ever easy or simple? Never! Even kings get gas! Why do audiences come to the theatre, the movie house, the TV, and in the hundreds of millions? How has theatre survived a history of wars and disasters and personal angst for over 2,500 years? It survives because the audience is willing to believe that whatever is happening on that stage is BIGGER, MORE IMMEDIATE, MORE URGENT, MORE IMPORANT THAN ANYTHING THAT IS HAPPENING IN THE AUDIENCE’S LIFE. What happens in that play, that movie, is LARGER than their lives. So, for a little while, they can watch others, and laugh and cry at someone else’s problems.
Acting doesn’t work well when played “small” or “real”. For one thing, far more often than not, it’s just boring as hell that way. The “realistic” approach works against the strengths of theatre and cinema, the very reasons the audience comes to us in the first place. Remember, theatre started out as a tribute to Gods, Gods perceived to have created the universe, not little men with gas. Though you will find little men with gas in many comedy, what happens to them in the play or movie sure seems enormous to them. That’s why we can find them funny.
Stanislavsky liked to create real, working sinks in sets requiring a kitchen. WHY? The audience knows what a sink is, they’ve lived with sinks forever. They don’t CARE that you can make a sink work on stage or in a movie! Why should they? They don’t pay huge amounts of money to stare at your set and proclaim, “Wow! Running water! There’s something you don’t see every day. Well, I do…”
What audiences care about is HUMAN EXPERIENCE, and IDEAS BIGGER THAN THE LIVES THEY’RE CURRENTLY LIVING. They are looking for a deeper understanding of life, one that will help them survive better. They’re also looking for relief from stress and strain, a few hours of pleasure, problems which aren’t theirs and which don’t actually harm or threaten them. This is what an actor provides, with the aid of other theatrical and filmic artists.
A stage is a small, empty space that begs for symbols to walk through it, not flesh-and-blood human beings. All live performance operates on a level of METAPHOR… symbols that represent larger ideas or truths. Yes, the audience must accept that the actor is believably portraying Hamlet, or whatever role. To be moved, the audience must accept the actions and people they’re watching as plausible. They must be identifiably HUMAN, so that the human audience can understand and relate to their plight. The more recognizably human the performance, the better. However, this does not require the actor to “play small” or real”. There’s a huge difference between “small and real”, and “identifiably human”. We just aren’t that small, not in our own heads. What happens to each of us sure seems big and important, to us.
And the actor…surprise…is not required to suffer as his character suffers, or to experience emotional trauma, or experience ANYTHING that the character experiences, as the Method espouses so often.
“You must suffer for your art”.
Horse pucky.
Art should be a celebration of life, and that includes acting. I’m not in any way suggesting that a CHARACTER might not experience pain, of course it can and will! But YOU, the actor, most certainly do NOT need to experience ANYTHING a character would experience in order to portray a character with complete believability! I know this flies in the teeth of most of what you’ve been told about how to act, but it’s true, nonetheless. What you do have to do is CONVINCE AN AUDIENCE THAT THE CHARACTER FEELS WHAT HE FEELS, THINKS WHAT HE THINKS, AND EXPERIENCES WHAT HE EXPERIENCES.
What YOU feel at any given time is entirely your own business. You may feel everything and nothing, and it should have no bearing whatsoever on the quality of your performance.
Think for a moment. What if you were cast as a character that had to die? How would you “experience” death and then communicate it to an audience? Were you going to have the experience, come back from the dead, and then play Hamlet? Good luck with that, and welcome to an incredibly short career!
What if you had to play a great King, having never been a King? One who must go mad, such as King Lear, perhaps the greatest role in the English language? Sure, you could find some emotional parallels in your own life, but face it, you’ve probably not gone mad at any time in this life, nor been a king.
You can’t BE Lear! You’ve been YOU for a long time, and that’s tough enough. But you can UNDERSTAND Lear and his experiences, through your own creativity and intelligence. And you can, in the NOW, manufacture any emotion or thought or experience that you wish. You are fully capable of creating ANYTHING that any character must express, without ever having experienced what the character experiences! It’s true. We call this “imagination”, something the Method and other schools of acting seems to more or less deny in favor of a dubious quantity of experience. Imagination has NO limits. Experience? Very limited. If you’re relying on experience to underpin your acting, there aren’t a lot of roles you’re going to be able to play.
And once you thoroughly understand a piece, you can intelligently select those emotions, thoughts, and physicalizations (physical qualities and motions) that will BEST COMMUNICATE THE CHARACTER. And then create them, as needed. And re-create them every night for ten years, if so needed.
You are far smarter, more able, and more creative than The Method, or many other schools of acting, give you credit for.
This is the core thinking behind the Ethical Art Technique. You can create, rather than “re-experience”. You can understand, rather than just “feel your way through” a piece. You can celebrate as an artist, rather than suffer.
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Tonight (Wednesday) I teach my workshop for professional actors in Los Angeles. Tomorrow, I'll start a practical discussion with you on how to build a career. If you have questions, I can always be reached at cctauthor@aol.com.
Steven
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