Showing posts with label Mark Brokaw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Brokaw. Show all posts
Saturday, April 17, 2010
going for brokaw
I went to Southcoast Rep in Costa Mesa to see Howard Korder's new play In the Garden, and I bumped into the master director Mark Brokaw, a graduate of the Drama School at Yale and Obie Award winner, and one the the creators/synthesizers of the approach to acting that I teach at Mother of Invention. Mark was there because he was working on a new play called The Language Archive, which has since opened, and the production got a great review in the LA Times. I have seen quite a bit of Mark's work, and it has been consistently superb. Particularly memorable was a production of Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth in New York, which starred Mark Ruffalo. It was one of the most memorable nights I have spent in the theater, and I didn't even really like the play itself.
Really looking forward to seeing Mark's work again!
Friday, December 18, 2009
ivana chubbuck and objective
So far so good. The innovation created by David Hammond at Yale, and developed by Mark Brokaw and Evan Yionoulis, was to distinguish between two kinds of objectives: plot objectives and underlying objectives. The "plot" in plot objectives refers to the plot of a story or play or screenplay: a character's plot objectives are the changes in the world that she wishes to bring about. A plot objective expresses the way in which a character wants to change some piece of their world. Plot objectives might include getting you to buy my house, to accept my marriage proposal, to stop playing the drums at night in your room so I can have some peace and quiet, or to join me in robbing a jewelry store. All of these involve my attempting to change my circumstances for the better, or, put differently, to solve a problem. Pursuing a plot objective activates those parts of an actor that are involved in solving problems: the mind, and to some extent the heart, as often solving problems involves influencing others emotionally.
What these teachers at Yale recognized, though, is that the mind and the heart is not all there is. There is also the gut. In the gut lives the appetites, and also, our capacity for locomotion, for fight or flight (in the hips). It's entirely possible for an actor to be engaged as a problem solver, in the head and heart, and to be asleep in the gut, at the visceral level (viscera is Latin for the guts, quite literally, the bowels, so to eviscerate someone is, colloquially, to rip them a new one).
So these teachers recognized that a conception of objective as a problem that you need to solve, a change in the circumstances surrounding you, is incomplete, by itself. Solving these problems is important -- that's part of the fascination of stories, is seeing people contend with adversity. But we as spectators are not going to be viscerally engaged by this problem-solving alone.
Unless.
We conceive of another type of objective. Let's call it the "underlying objective." The underlying objective is is the NEED that lives in the belly, the proverbial fire in the belly, that drives us to enter into the fray, influence people, and solve problems. It is the motor that drives us forward, the motor of appetite, hunger, need. My teachers recognized that the underlying objective was the thing that impels us to take up plot objectives, and then to put them down in favor of other plot objectives. The underlying objective is the need which stays constant, even as circumstances shift and plot objectives change accordingly. One of the consequences of this is that the underlying objective is not phrased in a way which involves another person, because other people are part of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and so an objective that involves another person will be some form of a plot objective. If my underlying objective is to get "respect as a true healer", then the plot objective "getting you, my client, to confide in me, your therapist" will give me a piece of the underlying objective, but the underlying objective is something that exists in me APART FROM who or what is around me. The changes I will seek to bring about in the world (my plot objectives) are ways of getting my underlying objective met, of ANSWERING that need. We always look for the need to be met from others, but naming the need itself is saying something about us, not about what we want other people to do.
This distinction between plot objective and underlying objective is very powerful, and it is not simple. I realize I have provided only a very preliminary sketch of it here. And I don't intend to to try to say too much more about it here, because I believe that a classroom setting is where it can be best presented and understood. Without the context of a scene and actors to work with, there is a limit to how much can be made intelligible about it. But I think I have said enough to be able to make clear what Ivana Chubbuck gets right (not that much), and what she doesn't (quite a bit).
She does say "Always Make the SCENE OBJECTIVE about Relationship, Don't Play the Plot", and with that, I am in 100% agreement. And she says that a scene objective (which is another form of the underlying objective, any distinction between them is not important here) should not be "rational" or "cerebral", that it should be "basic", "needy", and "primal". I'm down with that. She also says the scene objective doesn't change-- that's good. And that every scene has one, good too, and that it is an actor's most important tool. But that's about where my agreement with Ivana Chubbuck ends. I fundamentally disagree with her on her criteria for what makes an underlying objective. I don't want to do a big recap of her criteria for picking an objective, because I think it is mostly foolish. So I will focus on one important point: she says the scene objective (or underlying objective) should be worded in a way that requires a response. From her examples of what that would look like, I am going to go through a list of "good" scene objectives (underlying objectives) that she provides, and say specifically what I think is wrong with each of them.
- "To get you to love me"
The problem with this is that it describes what we want the other person to DO (love us). We want, with an underlying objective, to say what it will mean to us or give us if the other person loves us. It will give me my...(something). By knowing that we need our (something), we can constantly be monitoring in the scene to see whether the other person is giving us our "something", we can HARVEST our "something." To get the other person to love you? So what if they don't? THAT is the question an underlying objective needs to answer.
- "To get you to give me a job"
Plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot. This is nothing but an attempt to impact our circumstances, our situation in the world. It says nothing about what is AT STAKE in the situation, what it will cost us if we don't get the job, what we will GET if we do get the job. Chubbuck might argue that this is addressed in what she calls the "overall objective", but she muddles things badly by saying that the actor should not play the plot in the scene objective, and then suggesting...wait for it...PLOT OBJECTIVES...as scene objectives. She speaks of the need to get beyond the plot to the relationship, but her scene objectives ARE the plot.
- "To make you validate me"
In my class, we call "validate" "the V word." I write off "validation" as what I call "Oprah talk", which is a particular form of what Chubbuck calls the "rational" and the "cerebral". Validation is not a part of our everyday ways of describing our needs. Can you imagine any advertiser (advertisers understand all about language and the visceral) asking you to see a movie described as "one man's quest for validation"? I didn't think so. Also, we don't look on validation as a very legitimate thing to pursue: someone who needs a lot of validation is considered needy, insecure. Not buying it.
- "To make you my ally"
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, an objective that gets beyond the plot, whether you call it overall, underlying or scene, needs to not be phrased as a way of changing our circumstances, as changing our circumstances IS the definition of the plot. An objective that goes beyond the plot is something you can HARVEST in pursuing your plot objectives. What will you get if you make the other person your ally? Not only what will you be able to accomplish if you make the other person your ally, but what will it mean about you that you succeeded in making someone your ally? That is getting beyond the plot.
I think I've made my point. Chubbuck talks a good game about the need to move beyond the plot, that is, beyond problem-solving, but her recommendations about how to do that are confused and misleading. Getting the gut activated involves something beyond naming what you want to see other people do, and yet Ivana Chubbuck seems to think it involves precisely that.
Friday, March 20, 2009
the trouble with Mamet's practical aesthetics
Let me first of all establish my credentials and my lineage as an acting teacher. I did an MFA in directing at the Yale School of Drama ('97). During my time at Yale, I was fortunate enough to study with Earle Gister, a remarkable teacher who chaired the acting program at Yale for 17 years, and ran the acting conservatory at Carnegie Mellon for years before that. The other teachers who were important in my development were Evan Yionoulis and Mark Brokaw, directors who went through the directing program ten years before I did. Evan became the chair of the acting program at Yale for five years after Earle left. Evan and Mark have had high flying New York directing careers; Mark has done outstanding work with actors like Mark Ruffalo and Mary Louise Parker, and Evan won an Obie for her production of Three Days of Rain, which Patricia Clarkson starred in. She also directed Robert Sean Leonard in The Violet Hour on Broadway. Evan and Mark had been students of Earle, but there was another important acting teacher at Yale when they were there in the eighties. His name was David Hammond. When Hammond left Yale, he ran Playmaker's Repertory Theater in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for many years, and he ran the MFA program there as well.
Between the four of them, they came up with a new way of looking at acting characterized by astonishing depth and clarity. I will say more about what is involved in that, but first I'll talk about Mamet's practical aesthetics. I actually assign a short chapter from the The Practical Handbook for the Actor in my course. That chapter is called "the emotional trap." The chapter has an important message, as there is no more pernicious belief about acting than the widespread belief that what actors do is "show emotion." This is argued in the Practical Handbook with perhaps an excess of machismo, but its points are well taken: an actor who is focused on his own emotional state is focused on himself, and is thus, by definition, self-conscious. Many acting classes pay lip service to the notion that emotion is an improper focus of the actor's attention, but most return to it in the practice of scene work. Practical aesthetics argues compellingly for turning our backs once and for all on the importance of emotion for the actor at his work.
There is, of course, a sense in which, as audience members, we do look to actors for manifesting emotional states, somehow, but the Practical Handbook's point is that it is counterproductive for the actor to think of this when she goes about her work.
But what's an actor to do? The Practical Handbook prescribes a strong emphasis on concrete physical tasks, activities and goals, for one thing. And the evangelizers of practical aesthetics are right to stress the power and importance of these things. I also assign a brief piece from the collection The Legacy of Stanislavsky in my class, in which the Russian maestro himself makes an analogy to airplane taking flight. He says that the physical score of the scene, things like tasks, activities, etc. are like the runway for an airplane. He says that the spiritual life of the scene is what occurs when the plane takes flight, but this is not possible without the runway. If an actor has not understood his physical surroundings in the scene in the way she needs to, the "spiritual" life of the scene, to use Stanislavsky's old-fashioned terminol for the temporary lack of a better one, will not happen. Imagination and instinct can almost never be tempted out of their holes without the actor paying sufficient attention to the physical situation. The Practical Handbook's emphasis on the effort and care the actor must pay to his or her physical situation is right on the money.
The Practical Handbook is also right to emphasize breaking scenes down into manageable, bite-sized portions. A scene is a journey, and a large part of its interest are all the bumps in the road, hairpin turns, dead ends, rope bridges, sandtraps, and unexpected places of shelter that are encountered on the course of the journey. Motivated by a fear of not measuring up to all these shifting contours, actors often try to pretend for themselves that the terrain of a scene can be navigated by facing in the right direction and just forging ahead, come hell or high water. They want to suppress or deny the fact that the scene asks many different things of them in the short space of four minutes or so. And Mamet's practical aesthetics pushes back against that strongly. It argues for a rigorous segmentation of the scene, and for the identification of appropriate tasks for each segment that can help ground the actor in the present moment with clarity and specificity.
So far so good. Mamet's movement, for that is what it is, makes a compelling, late-twentieth century case for the primacy of doing and for the power of an actor whose attention rests consistently and specifically on his or her partner.
So what is missing? It's not that easy to name, but I will do my best. The emphasis in practical aesthetics is on the notion that a big part of what people are is problem-solvers. In scenes, people(characters) have challenges of various kinds, problems, if you will. When the actor focuses on the solving of those problems, he she is to some extent liberated from self-consciousness, from the awareness of being watched, scrutinized, and evaluated. Further, his mind, his expressive faculties, and his will are organized by the problem at hand, which, in virtually all scenes, involves influencing other people in one way or another.
What is missing, though, is some strong way of addressing the precise WAY in which it is urgent to solve these problems. Problem-solving will imbue an actor's work with clarity, lucidity and credibility, but it will stop short, by itself, of compelling us to CARE. The problem to be solved in a scene might be getting someone to marry you, or sleep with you, or buy your house, or lend you money, or lend you her car, but the real question is: so what? So what if she turns you down, or refuses to buy your house, or help you break out of jail? What will that mean to you? Not just what will it mean to you to have to stay in jail, but what will it mean to you that she refused to help you, refused YOU?
The magic word that is often used to gesture at this is "stakes." "Raise the stakes!" is the eternal battle cry. Unfortunately, this is often understood practically by actors, in the absence of any meaningful advice about how to do this, to mean "act harder", which is almost never fruitful. Some teachers may understand something about the profound relationship between a thoughtful grasp of circumstances and stakes, but usually the most is said is that the stakes need to be high.
But as important as grasping circumstances is to effectively working with the notion of stakes, it doesn't take you all the way there, according to my teachers at Yale. It was their genius to re-engineer the notion of objective, so that there are two types of objectives in any scene: ones that focus on problems that need to be solved (plot objectives) and ones that name the burning need that will be answered by the solving of those problems (underlying objective). There is a lot to say about the power of this approach, but for this discussion, suffice to say that it invites the actor to confront the nature of her care for, her involvement with, her investment in, her implication with, the solving of the said problems. In what way is her whole being tied to the particular outcomes she is striving for in a scene? We are dealing here with attachment, with the significance of people places and things to us, with care, with our profound need to stand well with others. Attending to a need, pursuing its gratification, is different from focusing on emotional states, because attending to this need, which in my approach is described as living in the belly, the gut, the Pilates core, always immediately directs the actor's attention outward, because the need needs to be met! It is never an invitation to self-involvement. Emotional states will follow as a result of the pursuit of the need, but they can be safely ignored by the actor, as the Practical Handbook advises.
Does practical aesthetics have a way of addressing stakes, urgency, need, whatever you want to call it? Yes. Students are typically told to think of some situation in their own lives that is compelling and comparable to the scene in order to arouse investment in the situation of the scene. This is, essentially, what Uta Hagen named substitution forty years ago, and renamed transference fifteen years ago. It is NOT comparable to emotional memory or method acting, but that is a matter for another day. By finding a compelling or powerful transference, we are told by practical aesthetics, we will care about the scene in the way we need to.
To this I say: maybe. I teach transference as well, and while it can be powerful, certainly, I don't believe it is a substitute for the actor actually struggling to articulate what the need is for which he is fighting. My experience has borne out this belief. It's not enough to know that the person you are interacting with in the scene means something to you like what your brother means to you in real life, you need to be able to name, concisely, what is the thing that a brother gives you that you can't do without. In the approach I teach, there are rules about what counts as a satisfactory answer to the question of need, and these rules guarantee that the answer will be something that has to be sought, hunted down, discovered, it is never ready to hand. In engaging in this struggle, the actor comes into close encounter with the circumstances of the scene, and thus with the writing, in a way that leads her to discover the real significance of those circumstances, and paves the way for those circumstances to activate her viscerally. For an actor, there is nothing better than that.
(This post is from the blog of the Mother of Invention Acting School in Los Angeles and San Francisco (www.utteracting.com): an acting class in Los Angeles and San Francisco for serious, motivated students.)
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