[In Part 2 of my report on Why Acting Matters, I present my own discussion of what I consider author David Thomson’s most significant idea, the phenomenon of acting in everyday life. I think Thomson gives this topic short shrift in his monograph, so I’ve expanded on his introduction of it and, drawing on a few other writers on the topic and my own experience, examine the real reason I find acting matters in human society. See if you agree—and don’t hesitate to comment with your own thoughts on the notion that all of us act in our ordinary lives nearly all the time.
[I recommend that newcomers to this
blog go back to Part 1 to read about the book and its author. The first installment of this post also
includes my own appraisal of Why Acting Matters as
well as some background.]
David Thomson does touch in Why Acting Matters on an aspect of the
significance of acting in real life that I can see having spread worldwide with
human DNA. The author suggests that
“it’s fundamental that acting out began as a longing to communicate and a need
to impress . . .” (p. 36). “We have to
imagine,” he explains, “that one day, or one millennium, in the gradually
emerging thing to be called society, men and women began to act. Instead of just being themselves, they
presented those selves with some sort of purpose” (p. 35). Ultimately, by the time humanity begins to
become civilized and socialized, and they “gathered together in their urge to
communicate, people will perform, pretend, exaggerate, lie . . .” (pp.
34-35). This, I hope we’ll see, is why acting
really matters—above and outside any profession that employs it as an art form
to entertain or inform viewers. Because
human beings are impelled to play parts all the time in their everyday
lives. So forget Olivier and Brando and
Leigh and Day-Lewis, David Garrick and Richard Burbage, Mei Lanfang and Bando
Tamasaburo. Think about Uncle Bill;
Cousin Mazie; Joe from down the block; and your boss, Mr. Jones. And you, yourself. None of these may be actors . . . but they
all act.
Thomson makes this point, which I
think is his most important, as an afterthought, relegating it largely to a
half dozen pages near the end of his last chapter plus a few references earlier
in the book. But other writers have
examined this phenomenon more centrally.
One that Thomson mentions in a note is sociologist and writer Erving
Goffman (1922-82), whose study The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1959) is intended “to
serve as a sort of handbook detailing one sociological perspective from which
social life can be studied.” Goffman
sets out to “consider the way in which the individual in ordinary work
situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he
guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the kinds of things he
may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them,” but, the
scientist makes clear, the “perspective employed in this report is that of the
theatrical performance; the principles derived are dramaturgical ones.”
In
Goffman’s report, he explains, “the individual . . . was viewed as a performer, a harried fabricator of
impressions involved in the all-too-human task of staging a performance; he was
viewed as a character, a figure
. . . whose spirit, strength, and other sterling qualities the
performance was designed to evoke.” The
other writing team, in contrast, looks at the same phenomenon from the opposite
perspective: instead of studying society through the prism of theater, John
Lahr (b. 1941), the long-time theater reviewer and son of actor Bert Lahr (the
Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz,
1938, and Estragon in Waiting for Godot,
1956), and Jonathan Price (b. 1941), a poet and
theater professor, examine theater by looking at the ways we perform in
ordinary life. In Life-Show: How to See Theater
in Life and Life in Theater (Viking Press, 1973), wrote the
authors:
When we explore the boundary between the
stage world and the real world, the questions . . . of performance and
authenticity dominate the inquiry. To
understand the life of the stage is to confront the drama of culture. In both, we find Man making scenes, acting
out his problems, manipulating sets, props, costumes, gestures, and language to
reveal and conceal himself. The study of
each illuminates the other.
Finally,
I consulted performance artist Linda Montano who published a book
on her work called Art in Everyday Life (Astro
Artz, 1981). Montano (b. 1942) wrote: “Everyone has energy
and wants to express it, direct it somewhere”; her impulse was to do
performance art “because it allows me to give value to things and I also like
getting so involved in something that I can transcend my ordinary concerns,”
echoing one of David Thomson’s reasons he says acting matters.
I
date the history of acting in “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines,” posted on ROT on 21 July 2011, the same way Thomson
does (see Why Acting Matters, p. 35). As I
imagined it, the impulse to perform came from the need to teach or explain
events of import to the community:
That impulse
predates written language so it was channeled into two other outlets: art and
performance. The first theatrical
performances must have occurred the first time a Neanderthal hunting party
danced around the campfire to replay for the rest of the clan the day’s
success. This surely led ultimately to
modern theater, and, eventually, film, television, and even YouTube, but acting
out stories, both actual and made-up, is one of our oldest tools for building a
society.
Many cultures today, such as Native Americans, use
this method to pass on the group’s history and religion or teach new
generations the ways and customs of the society. It was how we perpetuated and passed on our
traditions. It’s part of nearly all
human culture. “Culture is a story told around a
fire,” declared stage director Leonardo Shapiro.
The campfire is gone and in many societies, performance largely moved
into theaters or designated performance spaces—but not all of it, and not all
the time. As Lahr and Price demonstrate
in Life-Show, “The issues dealt with
by stagecraft and stage management are sometimes trivial but they are quite
general; they seem to occur everywhere in social life . . . .” Thomson lays out a couple of typical scenarios:
You
are having an important job interview.
You are meeting a person of one sex or another, without knowing yet how
significant the relationship may prove to be.
You are in the offices of a movie studio pitching a story to them: it
might rescue the studio and do you no harm.
Or, in an idle part of a summer afternoon, in a remote part of the
forest, you are simply trying to observe yourself as a way—of understanding
this curious role you have been assigned.
Will nothing suffice? (pp. 147-48)
And so, we play-act. It’s no accident that Thomson quotes director
Robert Eyre in the front matter of Why
Acting Matters: “What is true, I
think, is that if you scratch an actor you will find a child. . . . [A]ctors must retain a child’s appetite for
mimicry, for demanding attention, and above all for playing.” As Thomson notes often in Why Acting Matters, another way of way
of saying ‘acting’ is ‘playing’—and so is ‘pretending,’ both activities
associated with childhood. (Thomson also likes to remind us that yet another
synonym for ‘acting’ is ‘lying,’ and he’s not the only one. The author reveals that the only acting class
Brando ever taught was called Lying for a Living [p. 156-57].) Furthermore, Lahr and Price point out:
Actors are signs: they give off messages with
their bodies, their voices, and their words.
They manipulate the audience for the required emotion; they disguise
themselves in roles. They assume
identities before our eyes.
So do we.
Because,
it seems, we never grow up completely.
We retain the drive to pretend.
We just use it for more sophisticated purposes. “Thus,” writes Goffman, “when an individual
appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to
mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it
is in his interests to convey.” So, the
sociologist posits, we employ the technique of role-playing in various
ways. “Sometimes the individual will act
in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing himself in a given way solely in
order to give the kind of impression that is likely to evoke from them a
specific response he is concerned to obtain.”
This would be mostly how Richard III behaves, say when wooing Lady Anne
or refusing the crown. It’s also Hamlet
in his scenes with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after he begins to suspect them
of disloyalty. “Sometimes the individual
will be calculating in his activity but be relatively unaware that this is the
case.” This is also Hamlet, but when
he’s with Horatio and perhaps his father’s ghost. “Sometimes he will intentionally and
consciously express himself in a particular way, but chiefly because the
tradition of his group or social status require this kind of expression and not
because of any particular response (other than vague acceptance or approval)
that is likely to be evoked from those impressed by the expression. Sometimes the traditions of an individual’s
role will lead him to give a well-designed impression.” This is most of us in many social or business
circumstances; it was me when I was in the army, especially when I was in
uniform, or when I was teaching middle or high school and in front of my
classes. (To be sure, Lahr and Price
observe: “The corporate ladder, the military chain of command, the classroom
represent both ground plans for action and prompt-books for required
responses. Within these environments,
the life-performer tries to construct his image for the public.”) It could also be seen in Hamlet’s demeanor in
the court scenes where particular behavior is prescribed or Richard’s when he
confronts the Lancasters, his family’s enemy, when a certain insolence is
expected. This develops because, as Life-Show observes, the “life-performer”
“is continually being placed in cultural scenes in which special performances
are demanded and in which his position is clearly blocked.”
“[T]he adept
life-performer has a sense of timing, symbolic gestures, and setting with which
he impresses people,” Lahr and Price report, “and conveys an idea of himself
and what he stands for. His scenes are
often staged and done for effect.” Both
on stage and in life, these writers point out, “we find Man making scenes,
acting out his problems, manipulating sets, props, costumes, gestures, and
language to reveal and conceal himself.”
And Goffman underscores that both on stage and in everyday life, “the successful staging . . . of false
figures involves use of real
techniques—the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real
social situations.” Thomson, from his
perspective, puts it this way:
You
probably never meant to be an actor yourself, in the professional sense, yet
you are steeped in the awareness that a smile, a silence, a pause, or a sigh
are all things that will be read as signs of character and intent. That is how you look at other people; that is
how you assume they study you. (p. 149)
So, just
like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and (God forbid) Richard III, we become different
selves for different people in different circumstances. That’s acting in everyday life. (For some reason, we don’t like to use
theater words for real-life performance.
Maybe it’s just a matter of keeping the distinctions clear, but there’s
an edge of discomfort in the euphemizing of acting terms outside the
theater. Note that the writers I’ve cited
here, one an academic using theater to examine everyday interaction and the
others a pair of theater people using real life to illuminate theater, use
alternative terms: Goffman,
for example, calls the performer in his study “the observed,” while Lahr and
Price’s term for the actor is “life-performer.” When I guided
an elementary-school class in a social studies exercise in which third-graders
played settlers in a 17th-century Massachusetts colony, the classroom teacher
insisted on calling the exercise a “role-play” rather than a “performance” and
the preparation sessions were
“caucuses,” not “rehearsals.” I later
did a playwriting project with this same class and then theater terms were
okay.)
Let me
give you some examples of “role-playing”—the presentation of my self in
specific everyday situations—out of my own “life-show”; I imagine that you’ll
recognize parallel instances from your experiences.
When I was in Berlin in the army, contact with an
East German or Soviet agent had to be reported. It was my unit’s job,
aside from determining if there was any security problem, to scare the GI or
U.S. civilian more than they already were in what were called SAEDA briefings—Subversion
and Espionage Directed Against the Army.
I remember one very vividly because it involved a teenager, a high
school boy whose dad was a GI in Berlin Brigade. The boy had driven to
West Germany with a teacher to take his SAT’s in Frankfurt, as I recall. On the way back to Berlin on the Autobahn
through East Germany, when they stopped at one of the checkpoints, the kid
decided to practice the Russian he’d been studying. While the
teacher was getting the papers attended to, the boy started a conversation with
a Soviet guard and gave him a pack of American cigarettes, a prized
acquisition. Well, someone in another
car at the checkpoint saw this exchange and reported it at the MP station where
he crossed from East Germany into West Berlin. The MP’s reported this to
us, and we ID’d the student and called him in for a SAEDA talk. I was the
agent assigned to talk to the kid and no matter how much I assured him that
nothing was going to happen, he was sure his father was going to get shipped
home at the very least. It was quickly obvious, of course, that nothing
serious had happened—though contact with a Soviet guard was against regs.
I did my best Dutch Uncle routine, a role for which I consciously had to apply
my acting skills as I wasn’t much older than the kid was, and sent him home,
still terrified.
In
addition to on-the-job acting, I did some amateur theater in Berlin, the
principal outlet for which was the facility of the Special Services
Office. There was an incident where I
wore my Military Intelligence . . . errr,
cloak, I guess—and put on
another improv. The Special Services director came to me because a member
of her staff had been telling people he was an intel agent. He’d even
taken to wearing a snap-brimmed fedora and a trench coat! Now, a lot of
people outside MI had an inflated idea what spooks could and might do because
of movie and TV figures like James Bond, Derek Flynt, Napoleon Solo, and the Mission: Impossible team. I never disillusioned anyone of their
fantasies; I just let them believe what they wanted—and this PFC was one of
those in awe of my spook status.
(Counterintel was low-profile, but not clandestine.) So I had an informal talk with the guy. I believe he thought I might actually make
him disappear or something. (I’ve always
been pretty good at playing hard-asses.)
Now, I never made it official, but I gave him one of my “stern
talking-to’s”—a performance like the SAEDA briefings but more intimidating. I put the Special
Services guy on notice—like a traffic cop who says, “I’ll let you go with a
warning this time, but don’t let me catch you speeding again!” He was . .
. ummmm, shall we say, chastened? He thought I was King Shit after that.
I just let him.
Neither of these roles was the usual
me—not that they aren’t part of my makeup; they are, but not the face that I
customarily show to the world. They’re
special masks I created for specific occasions, to impart the impression with
which I want to leave my “audience.”
Another occasion where I played an unacknowledged role in real life,
although this actually took place in a theater, came a few years after I left
the military.
Early
in my attempt to make a career in the theater, I assayed my first professional
directing gig. An Off-Off-Broadway cast
of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a couple of weeks into
rehearsals, had fired its own director!
They’d become frustrated with his work because he hadn’t blocked the
show, hadn’t given them any character notes, and, despite fervent requests,
hadn’t made any cuts in the script. The
artistic director of the theater (where I’d been working as an actor for a
while) asked if I would consider taking over the production. I watched a rehearsal and agreed to accept
the job. In addition to not wanting to
upset the cast any more and, perhaps more importantly—certainly for me—not
wanting them to see that I didn’t know what I was doing, I consciously chose
actions to appear more secure and authoritative than I really was. It was
a deliberate strategy, because I didn’t want the cast to feel they had just
jumped from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak. I decided, first,
not to tell them that I’d never directed pros before, then to make very definitive
decisions about text cuts (that was the straw that caused the rebellion) and
tell them exactly what was in, what was out, and what we could discuss. I
made some detailed directing notes, mostly blocking, and worked out some
physical business to insert, and I made some very specific character
notes. It was all pretty arbitrary and
basic stuff, but I deliberately selected these actions so that I’d seem to be
in charge and on top of the situation (even though I wasn’t—I was just
SWAGging). It was all a choreographed act I figured would carry us into
the rehearsals far enough until the work itself became a focus. One thing
that worked in my favor, of course, that I couldn’t have known about was that
the cast was so desperate for some guidance and real direction that they
glommed onto my efforts like Velcro! The bluff worked, but mostly
because the cast was really ready for it. (After the play opened, and we
had our opening night party, several of the cast, drunk by then, very
forcefully said they’d work with me anytime again and that I was a real
“actors’ director.” That’s when I told them that this had been my first
professional gig. They were shocked—and I was delighted!)
I pulled this performance off (and
the one on stage, too), but that was probably mostly down to the cast. Even though they were actors, they didn’t
twig to my own acting because they were so focused on their own task and so
receptive to my decisiveness, I was able to keep my performance going until the
play opened and I copped to the role-play.
It helped, of course, that this group of actors didn’t know me (I
inherited the cast assembled by the original director) so as long as I didn’t
slip, they had nothing with which to compare my behavior. I tried the same gambit four years later on a
more limited scale, but this time I was working with a cast, some of whom knew
me, who were more confident and less desperate.
On the basis of my “directorial authority,” I tried to bluff one actor,
whom I’d just directed in another show (and with whom I’d acted twice as well),
into something I wanted him to do and he just didn’t buy it. Life-Show
posits that “
the working consensus,” Lahr and Price’s term for the implicit methodology of
the role-play, “established in one interaction setting will be quite different
in content from the working consensus established in a different type of
setting.” If that’s so, then the reverse
must also be true: the set-up that worked in one situation won’t necessarily
work in another, however similar they may seem.
(It’s also true that a “performance may seem sincere, but that does not
mean it is truthful,” most likely because the acting is poor, and the observers
for whom the desired impression is intended can tumble to the deception.)
The upshot
of acting in everyday life is, I think, what Lahr and Price affirm:
C. G. Jung argues that role-playing is the
necessary fluid through which the individual flows into society. Roles are shaped and developed through social
demands. On stage and in life, the
discovery and acting out of roles is an attempt to impose an order on the
world.
In
Why Acting Matters, Thomson puts it
more ominously:
We
have had to do this [i.e., perform in everyday circumstances] because in the
increasing crowd self-awareness may be our defense against fears of
anonymity. But that pressure towards
loss of identity increases all the time, and so the process of acting becomes
more necessary as an assurance that we exist. (pp. 149-50)
In fact, Thomson declares
dramatically: “Why acting matters? Could
it be that we fall apart without it” (p. 150)?
That may be overstating the case considerably, but social discourse
would certainly be a great deal more difficult and fraught if we didn’t act in
our everyday dealings with one another.
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