Showing posts with label text analysis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label text analysis. Show all posts
Thursday, November 26, 2009
William H. Macy is a written page guy. That's good, but...
And in one very important sense, I am with him. I quoted that same remark of his in a previous posting in which I take pretty much the same position. For me, acting is about touching the same impulse in yourself that prompted the writer to invent the character in the first place. The text is the alpha and the omega. When Mamet and Macy make remarks like this, their targets are approaches such as Method acting, which relies heavily on the actor's personal experience, and, to a lesser extent, Meisner, which gives primacy to the immediate connection to the partner, and the circumstances and text are built up around that.Macy, like his friend, mentor and longtime collaborator David Mamet, does not believe in delving into his characters any further than the writer has already delved. He doesn't believe that creating a back-story - a cherished aspect of the Method school - does anything for the performance.
"I'm a written-page guy," he says. "The writer gives you everything you need."
Before proceeding, I'll point out that Mamet and Macy are not quite the textual purists they sometimes make themselves out to be. Part of their approach, as described in the Practical Handbook for the Actor, involves finding what they call an "As If", a kind of equivalence between the challenge facing the character in the scene and the actor's own life experience. They are still STRONGLY oriented towards the text, much moreso than the Strasberg "method" is, but they do advocate this kind of extra-textual reflection as part of the actor's process. I advocate something similar in the approach I teach, so I do not fault them for this. I have made my reservations about Mamet's Practical Aesthetics known elsewhere. I have something else I want to focus on here.
While I consider myself a "written page guy", as well, I think that there is a way in which Mamet and Macy make things sound deceptively simple. I had been thinking about discussing this for a while, and then, in one of those marvelous moments of serendipity that all creatives know and cherish, I came across a brilliant exposition of the difficulty with what they are saying, in quite an unlikely context. That context was a book by technology guru Clay Shirky called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations , which, by the way, is a great read if you are interested in what's coming next in the way we live now. But here is the Shirky passage I found deeply relevant to this discussion:
There's a story in my family about my parent's first date. My father, wanting to impress my mother, decided to take her to a drive-in, however, he had to borrow his father's car. Once they were at the movie, my mother, wanting to impress my father, ordered the most sophisticated drink available, which was a root-beer float. Now my mother hates root beer, always has, and after imbibing it, she proceeded to throw up on the floor of my grandfather's car. My father had to drive her home, missing the movie he'd driven fifteen miles and paid a dollar to see. Then he had to clean the car and return it with an explanantion and an apology. (There was, fortunately for me, a second date.)
Now, what part of the story is about the internal combustion engine. None of it, in any obvious way, but all of it, in another way. No engine, no car. No cars, no using cars for dates. (The effect of automobiles on romance would be hard to overstate.) No dates in cars, no drive-in movies. And so on. Our life is so permeated with the automotive that understand immediately how my father must have felt when my grandfather let him borrow the car, and how carefully he must have cleaned it before returning it, without thinking about internal combustion at all.
Now imagine, if you will, that someone had written a script of the scene in which Shirky return the car keys to his father, explains what happens, and apologizes. Depending on what his dad was like, this scene could have gone a lot of different ways. But the important point is that the stuff that Shirky mentions about how central the automobile is to the way we date now would have gone unmentioned in such a scene. It would be understood. It does not belong to the text, strictly speaking, but to the context, in this case the historical context.
I am now going to make a categorical statement: all fiction derives its power, to some extent at least, from the rub, the friction, between the text and the context in which the actions it depicts transpires. If you take a screenwriting class, and you write a scene in which a character explicitly states everything about his or her situation, you will be told that this is too "on the nose." It is part of what is mysterious and awesome about storytelling that it engages our understanding of the world in presenting itself, without making its reliance on that understanding explicit. The story is told, and in the process aspects of the context of the story are invoked, in the way the primacy of the automobile is invoked in the above anecdote, without our even being aware of their evocation. Henry James, in the preface to his novel The Wings of the Dove, spoke of wanting his characters to
assert their fulness and roundness, their power to revolve, so that they have sides and backs, parts in the shade as true as parts in the sun
The terms in the sun are the aspects of the situation or circumstances that the writer makes explicit, in the dialogue in the case of a play, and the terms in the shade are the aspects of the situation that we grasp without knowing that we grasp them. They are alluded to or evoked on the written page, but they are not stated outright; then they would no longer be in the shade. Everything would be in the sun, and nothing would be in the shade. There would be no mystery, no enigma, nothing miraculous about the unfolding of the story. Everything would be open to view. Shirky says above that we "instantly understand" what is true about the car and its significance and value, and in one sense we do, although Shirky himself felt the need to spell it out in his discussion, so while we may grasp that importance in experiencing the story, we may also have a difficult time articulating that importance if prompted.
Uta Hagen famously remarked that "every good actor has a secret." The only meaningful way to understand that remark, in my view, given that Hagen herself was a believer in the importance of the text, is that the actor has somehow unlocked those aspects of a situation or a scene that the writer has not made explicit, but are critical to recognizing what is actually at stake in the scene. Actors continually want to believe that everything important in the scene is laid out for them in the script, and it is in the script, but it is not laid out for them. They have to unearth it. Let me be clear: I do not mean that they have to psychoanalyze the character in order to discover what is driving them, unless the writer herself has included psychoanalysis in the play itself. Wittgenstein wrote that "The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. We fail to be to struck by that which, once seen, is most striking and powerful." It is these aspects of the situation that are so familiar that they are hiding in plain sight that we need to discover, and then we will have earned the "secret" that Uta Hagen calls for.
It turns out that no less an eminence than Aristotle understood the importance of the relationship between text and context. (I like to read the blog of Nobel-Prize winning Princeton economist Paul Krugman, and he mostly writes for general consumption, but he'll sometimes write a post that gets deep into the economic weeds, and when he does that, he labels the post "wonkish". My post is about to become a little wonkish, but only a little, so bear with me ) In a groundbreaking new study of Aristotle's aesthetics, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, scholar Richard Halliwell writes that, in addition looking at the form and structure of a play,
...one can also speak of the agents and actions represented by the play, and for this one relies...on the same range of concepts that are used outside the work of art [emphasis added]—concepts, for example, of purpose and choice, success and failure, prosperity and suffering, good and evil, guilt and innocence. Nor, on this model, do we speak descriptively of the work in these terms; we experience it through an understanding that depends on them, and we respond to it with evaluative judgments, hence with emotions, that presuppose and are informed by that understanding.
The concepts he speaks of are elements of the context. In Shirky's case, it was the concept of having "wheels" when romancing a woman in the mid-twentieth century. That these concepts play a role is so much a part of the process of reading or encountering a text that we are not even aware of it. We need it to be brought to light.
So it is in this sense that I take issue with what Macy says he is a "written page guy." He is right that the writer gives you everything you need, but some of it, he gives you so subtly and deftly that you don't know you are getting it. It's learning to become aware of what is essential but not explicit that is is the key to really penetrating any scene.
And how do you that? By learning to pose and answer some pretty tough questions about the character and scene, which can only be learned through lots and lots of practice. The good news is, the fact that it takes lots and lots of practice means that if you do learn to do it, you cannot help but distinguish yourself.
Thanksgiving 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
the actor and the duck-rabbit
Actually, you can see it as either a duck or a rabbit. Now try to see it as both a duck AND a rabbit at the same time. It's not possible.
The way we learn to take in stories as children is as readers or spectators. We watch attentively as the action unfolds, we make predictions about what will happen, and we make judgments about the cleverness, wisdom, and goodness of the characters involved. Our relationship to the work is of one who stands outside it and observes, and then makes judgments.
When we approach scripts, this habitual way of looking at texts usually stays with us, and so even as we approach a role that we are going to play, we are often standing on the outside, looking in. We bring out judgments about the character we are representing along with us, usually unconsciously. These judgments often have the effect of distancing us from the role we are to play, and thus holding us back from fully abandoning ourselves to the cares and pursuits of the figure in question.
Approaching a text to be performed is fundamentally about learning to look at that text in an altogether different way than we do when we are occupying the spectator's position that we learned to occupy as children, when we were told stories. In order to promote the greatest possible identification with the role, we must begin to see the world not as an Olympian observer, immune to the reversals of fortune that the character experiences, but through the eyes of the character herself. There is more to this than meets the eye.
In my class, this process begins with the actor's willingness to say "I" when referring to the role she is playing. If she is playing Blanche Dubois in Streetcar, she will say "I was fired from my job as an English teacher for having an affair with a student" rather than "She was fired from her job as an English teacher for having an affair with a student." Try saying these two sentences aloud. You will discover that they affect you in very different ways. I can say the second one and be secure in the knowledge that no one will confuse me with Blanche; she is the one that suffered this humiliation, not I. But it is precisely this confusion that we want to bring about: we want the audience to (mis)take you for Blanche. But that means taking on the losses and indignities Blanche has suffered, or, I should say, you have suffered as Blanche.
Students are often called upon, in my class, to recount their portions of their histories as the character, including the facts presented by the writer in the text and embellishments that the actor has seen fit to add. Students who assume that because they have read the play and "know what happens", they will be able to think on their feet and spontaneously transpose their knowledge of the story into the kind of first-person narration I have described above without thinking this transposition through in advance often learn the difficulty of making this change in the way they look at the text the hard way: they find they are unable to supply facts which should clearly be at their fingertips, if they had really taken the trouble to look at the experience presented by the writer from the eyes of the character, rather than from the comfortable position of the spectator.
There is more to making this switch than I have described here: there is the central criteria of finding a way to make sense of the past of the character (or "Who-Am-I" as we call it) that generates the most possible "heat" or urgency. There is a lot to that process, which is usually dispensed with by what are supposed to be magic words: "raise the stakes", which actors everywhere tend to understand as an injunction to "act harder", rather than as a call to carefully reexamine the way they have viewed their circumstances and consider whether there are changes they could make to this view that would make their point of entry into the scene "hotter" or more compelling.
It's much easier to see the duck as a rabbit or vice-versa than it is to make the change from approaching a text as a spectator to approaching it as an impassioned, engaged participant. To make this change, the ways of looking at many things, from people to situations to relationships to language to movement, need to be recalibrated. Our way of looking at a script actually entails ways of looking at many other things. Making this change is more like completely rearranging your living room than it is like turning your car to the right. But once you have achieved this new way of looking, you can make strides in approaching texts and roles with infinitely greater speed and insight.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
"choices"
If you could make a word cloud of the words that appear most often in acting classes everywhere, "choices" would be the word that probably comes up more often than any other. Believe it or not, I think that that is actually symptomatic of a deep-seated confusion about what acting is and how an actor's connection to a role develops.
Earl Gister, who was the Dean of the Acting Program at the Yale School of Drama for more than fifteen years, and who was my acting teacher at Yale, spoke of the actor "fulfilling" the role. What he meant by that is that in a screenplay or play, a character fulfills a function in the unfolding of the narrative. On the most superficial level, this means that they will perform certain actions that contribute to the unfolding of the plot: a character might steal money, seek someone's hand in marriage, or sell a house. But beyond the plot, characters, in their interactions with each other, exert pressures on each other that attempt to alter or restore their relationships, to affect the emotional climate in which they travel. It is in these encounters and confrontations that the episodes of the plot become inevitabilities, they become necessary. To the extent that the actor has discovered what pressures the writer needs her to exert in order to make the contribution to the various scenes in which she appears, she has succeeeded, she has "fulfilled" the role.
All of this is to say that first and foremost, work on a role is not about making "choices" but about tapping into the heart of the role as defined by the author, in fact finding the same impulse in the actor herself that prompted the writer to create the character in question in the first place. This impulse will reside "deep inside", it will be a primitive longing for connection and belonging. Rather than making choices, the actor opens himself to the writer's creation in the hopes of being being "chosen" by the role itself. In place of "choices", I would wish that "discoveries" were the word that appeared most often in the word cloud made from acting classes everywhere. This expresses correctly the actor's relationship to his or her role.
The obsession with "choices" flatters the actor, feeds his narcissism, suggests that he can exert his volition, his will, in the shaping of the role, and by doing so "originally", "provocatively", "unpredictably", he will distinguish himself from all the other busy choice-makers out there. When an actor has attuned himself to a text, intuition is active and impulses arise. He does not "choose" anything. Opportunities bubble up out of his frontal lobe (the part of the brain where creativity resides, IIRC), and he ACTS on them. He discovers them. The "choices" canard invites actors to think that what they do TO a role is what will determine whether they succeed, rather than their MANIFESTING or EMBODYING the role. There's the rub, to coin a phrase.
Actors do put their individual stamp on a role, no two ways about it. But it is not by making "choices", which implies a cerebral act of calculation, as if all the possible ways a moment could be played were laid out on a table like a brunch buffet, and it's simply a matter of deciding whether you like the Eggs Benedict better than the smoked salmon. The audience doesn't care about the actor's preference for smoked salmon or Eggs Benedict. It's immaterial to the people watching. What they care about is: has the actor brought her own humanity to bear on the fictional character she is embodying? If she has done that, no one will be thinking about her "choices." They'll be too busy watching the story unfold, and wondering what will happen next.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
the single biggest mistake that actors make in approaching a scene
Let me explain.
Anyone who hangs around acting classes for any length of time will learn that drama is conflict. That's what makes it engaging: people are fighting, values are clashing, wrongs are being confronted, words are being had. However, the recognition that a scene that an actor is working on entails conflict is a very, very preliminary recognition, and a dangerous one to try to take to the bank. If you do try to take it to the bank, you come up with an account of the scene that sounds like this: "everything would be great if the other person would STOP DOING that really annoying thing that they are doing. that annoying thing that they are doing is causing all the problems, and if they would just STOP THAT, just GIVE IT A REST, we would all be just fine." What's the problem with looking at a scene in this way? Well, in this version, the other person is producing some kind of negative condition or circumstance, and your job is to STOP THEM. If your relationship with the other person is defined by shutting down their negative noise, then you are engaged in shutting them down, not in obtaining something positive from them, some kind of value. So you are not seeing them as someone who has something to offer you. If you do not see them as someone who has something to offer you, you cannot need something from them. And if you cannot need something from them, you cannot be vulnerable to them. And vulnerability is what it's all about. It's the whole game. As audience members, we are arrested and compelled by raw vulnerability. It's relatively rare that we see this, in the theater, on films, or on television. When we do, it is truly inspiring and memorable. We do not soon forget it.
Let's give an example. Suppose we are playing Blanche in Streetcar. In the first part of the play, we will see Stanley as uncouth, coarse, abrupt, and inconsiderate. If we describe what we are pursuing as "to stop Stanley from behaving like a barbarian or a jerk", then we are engaged in shutting down what we take to be Stanley's defining behavior. No one watching this is likely to find it compelling or urgent on its face. However, if we define what we are doing as "get Stanley to prove his respect for me as a true woman, a woman among women", then we see him as having something yummy to offer us (respect!), something we can thrive on, something we value. The important point it how we SEE Stanley and how we describe the way in which we are trying to influence him. If we do so in a way that opens our eyes to the potential value to be had from him, from the yummy stuff he can send our way, then we have a scene going. A scene that people will be glad they paid money for, will remember, will be inspired by, will talk about to their friends, will generate buzz about. Nothing the matter with that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
