Monday, August 30, 2010

LIFE AND DEATH

The audience enters the theatre (movie or stage). They’ve each had their own day. Some of them had a rough day. Some of them skipped dinner to get to your show. Some of them left their children with the local baby-sitter, who they know learned their craft from Attila the Hun. The unhappy guy in the back, his car broke down today. The frowning lady in the second row only came to the theatre because her mother bought her a ticket, but she hates hates hates theatre.

Still, they’ve all shown up, the deaf and blind, the halt and the lame, the disgruntled and the preoccupied. And they’ve each brought with them their daily, monthly, and life long baggage. It sits in front of them, and around them, and over them and under them. They can barely see the world through their baggage.

Somehow, your performance, your movie or play or TV show, has to be so urgent, so immediate, so important, and become so much so for your audience, that they find themselves able to set aside such concerns and woes and thoughts, and utterly commit to the on-going performance before them.

This is a very tall order. This problem stands at the very crux of the problem of entertainment and art.

You have several forces operating on your behalf. First, they’re THERE. They arrived. That means that, to some large extent, they’re WILLING. You recall how willingness was the first thing you needed to develop to play a role? Well, willingness is the first thing an audience must develop to watch you play the role. If they’re there, the overwhelming likelihood is that they’re at least willing. They want to enjoy the evening. They want you to succeed! At least, they want you to succeed before the piece actually begins.

There will be many artists who have decided that their audience is some sort of enemy, opposed to them and their success in some manner. It simply isn’t so. They took their time, paid, and showed up. They’re hoping you can do something for them, something wonderful. This hope keeps the arts viable and alive. Your success at providing them what they hoped would happen will make you and the works you appear in successful.

So, here’s a key to such success: What is happening to your character must be more important, urgent and immediate than ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING WHICH MAY BE HAPPENING TO ANY GIVEN AUDIENCE MEMBER at the moment of performance.

This is pretty important. If what is happening in the piece to your character is not very important, even to your character, then why should the audience care about him? If he can’t raise up a serious amount of concern or involvement for his own fate, why should others care if lightning strikes him? After all, the people in the audience have problems of their own.

This is true of both comedy and drama. In fact, it’s especially true of comedy. A character must feel that what is happening to them is critical, and as close to life and death as possible. Moliere’s great comic characters seem to be ever on the brink of utter ruin and destruction, and no one’s plays are funnier. The bigger the problem, the funnier the character becomes.

Big problems can also, obviously be deeply tragic. Romeo And Juliet are in love and can’t be together. This problem resolves in their mutual annihilation. Macbeth wants nothing small, he wants to be King, and he has no right to be. Hamlet wishes to take revenge for his father’s murder, but to do so, he must take revenge on his own step father and mother. Revenge, in this case, means murder, by the way. Caesar loves Rome, and wishes to rule it wisely and well. His opponents love Rome, and do not want to see one man rule, a tragedy of disagreeing principles which results in the murder of a ruler and following anarchy.

Shakespeare and Moliere understood that, for the audience to be engaged, the problems facing the characters must appear to be truly significant…even if only to the character. But ideally, these problems should seem large to the audience, as well.

There are seeming exceptions to this rule, the greatest being the plays of Anton Chekhov. These are brilliant and funny plays whose characters have what appear to be the smallest of problems. They’re indolent, lazy, uninterested. It seems as if the author is working in direct opposition to what has proven to work in the past. But this is only a first impression. His characters are all deeply troubled, if by nothing else then their own inability to get up and get moving! Their own indolence haunts and torments them. They are infected with a terrible disease, apathy, a lack of concern for their own fate, and this concerns them. Do you see the contradiction? This is, of course, wonderful ground for both comedy and drama.

The greatest playwrights, all of them, from Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Moliere through Brecht, Shaw and Stoppard, and understood that a character is going through must be so urgent, that the audience will set aside their own trials and travails and commit. You as an actor must understand this, and make certain you play as close to life and death as is reasonable, comedy or drama, regardless of the size of your role. Every character wants something. They almost always confront barriers to their desires. The battle is on, and this is what life (and acting) are about.

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EXERCISE: Using a selected scene from a play, with a partner, go through the scene at least five times, playing ever closer to life and death, as though if your character does not get what he or she wants, they will die. Work this through a number of times, please. Don’t stop until the urgency is powerful and compelling, funny and sad. Work until you know you can play close to life and death, even when it’s not appropriate.

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