True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor Read Free

in script analysis—all of which, by the way, can be acquired piecemeal through observation and practice, through personal tutoring, or through a mixture of the above—such acting training will not help you. Formal education for the player is not only useless, but harmful. It stresses the academic model and denies the primacy of the interchange with the audience.
    The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.
    Like the belief of the terminally ill in medicine, the belief of the legitimately frightened in the educational process is a comforting lie.
    Young people ask if they should go to graduate school in the theatre, as they ask if it is a good idea to go to law school to improve their minds. (A question testing the limits of irony.) Alice, when in Wonderland, asked the caterpillar which road she should take, and the caterpillar responded by asking her where she wanted to end up. That’s a question you might ask yourself.
    If you want to be in the theatre, go into the theatre. If you want to have made a valiant effort to go into the theatre before you go into real estate or law school or marry wealth, then perhaps you should stay in school.
    The skill of acting is finally a physical skill; it is not a mental exercise, and has nothing whatever to do with the ability to pass a test.
    The skill of acting is not the paint-by-numbers ability to amalgamate emotional oases—to string them like pearls into a performance (the Method). Nor is it the mastery of syntax (the academic public speaking model). The skill of acting is like the skill of sport, which is a physical event. And like that endeavor, its difficulty consists to a large extent in being much simpler than it seems. Like sports, the study of acting consists inthe main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.
    Now what do I mean by that? The Method school would teach the actor to prepare a moment, a memory, an emotion for each interchange in the play and to stick to that preparation. This is an error on the order of the basketball coach instructing his team to stick to the plays which they practiced irrespective of what their opponents are doing.
    We actors, being human, do not like the unexpected. If we encounter the unexpected onstage in front of people, we are apt to reveal ourselves. And formal academic education and sense memory and emotional memory and creative “interpretation” and all of these skills which are much more appropriate, finally, to the lectern than to the stage, are ways of concealing the truth of that revelation—of that moment.
    The truth of the moment is another name for what is actually happening between the two people onstage. That interchange is always unplanned, is always taking place, is always fascinating, and it is to the end of concealing that interchange that most acting training is directed.
    In my earlier days actors would begin a line by adding their own words, saying “I mean.” Some thought that had personalized the line and made it “more real.” Today we see actors doing the same thing in a different way. It is what I call Hollywood Huff acting.The actor is given a cue, and he shuffles his feet and blows out air in a huff, much like a whale, sometimes enunciating a sort of “phew,” and then continues to the assigned line. What does this mean? It means the actor was moved by an unforeseen sensation, emotion, or perception, and, in an effort to regain what he understood to be a necessary anchor of self-consciousness, he played for time. All of this happened, of course, in the merest fraction of a second, but it did happen.
    And it happens all the time, that huff, that “I mean.” That’s where the scene went. If the actor had simply opened his mouth on cue and spoken
even