Notes from a Sometime Actor

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk’s second contribution to Rick On Theater in 10 days, “Notes from a Sometime Actor,” is pretty much self-explanatory: it’s comprised of notes on acting by someone who occasionally performs in plays.  Fairly simple, right?  Well, maybe.  If you’re someone who, first, knows whereof you speak, who, second, is conscious of how you’re doing what you’re doing, and who, third, can articulate that effort to someone else. 

[By the way, that old bromide, ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t do, teach” is bullshit.  At least in the acting dodge.  There, the best teachers are actors—sometimes directors—who also have the additional talents to make what is largely an intuitive, internal process understandable to another person.  Good acting teachers may be working pros or retired, but they all can do.  They just like sharing what they’ve learned with other, younger artists.  In case you miss my meaning: that’s Kirk Woodward.

[The extraordinary thing about Kirk is that he’s very aware of what he does when he makes art—he has the ability to analyze what he does—or what he’s done—so he can reduce it to practical terms and communicate it.  That’s what he’s done here: located the essence of his artistic-practical experience acting in a play and drawn lessons from it.  Then he wrote it out for you and me to learn from.  Believe me: you can’t beat that with a stick!  So, listen up!  You might just pick up some insight.]

Over the years I’ve directed plays, taught acting, and led numerous sessions of “creative dramatics” or theater games – I hope with some success. But teaching something isn’t the same thing as doing it, as I learn every time I act in a play instead of telling somebody else how I think they might want to do it.

I realized again the difference between leading and doing when a friend of mine asked me this past September to take a role in a short one act play, 10:10 PM, written by another friend, Lyle Landon, and presented as one in an evening of nine short plays produced by a Montclair, New Jersey, company called Apricot Sky, whose leader, Eric Alter, is himself an accomplished and published playwright.

10:10 PM, briefly, is an eight-minute-long play in which a husband (that would be me), enthusiastic after watching the Mets get the lead in a baseball game on TV, tries to convince his wife, who is reading in a comfortable chair, to drop her book and join him in the bedroom. It’s a cheery, light-hearted domestic comedy, maybe even a farce.

I was reluctant to accept the role of the husband, which seemed to me not the sort of part I was right for, both because of the subject matter of the play (whatever that says about me) and because there’s a lot of physical action in the play and I’m not as young as I used to be.

Looked at objectively, however, neither of those reservations has much substance. Even if the role were unpleasant, which it’s not, actors play all sorts of roles, many of them downright unsavory. That’s what actors do.

Also, the director, Colleen Brambilla, is brilliant at looking at and staging plays from a primarily physical perspective. Her starting point in directing is the external aspect of a play. With her background as a dancer and choreographer, she knows how to unite content and appearance.

Colleen is a friend from years back, and so is Christine Orzepowski, one of the outstanding performers in our area (northeast New Jersey), who had been cast as the wife. In particular, the three of us and others with whom we are still close took part in many plays in the 1970’s for the Attic Ensemble in Jersey City, a fine semi-professional theater that continued production until quite recently.

I’ve acted on stage very seldom in recent years. I do perform regularly with the New Jersey Mental Health Players, about which I’ve written elsewhere in this blog [“Bertolt Brecht and the Mental Health Players,” 21 October 2014], but those performances are semi-improvised and seldom demand much more physical activity than sitting in a chair or occasionally standing up.

When I read 10:10, I immediately realized that this play would be different, because it calls for a large amount of physical action. True, it’s a short play, only about eight minutes long in performance, but then a 100-yard dash doesn’t take much time either, and it’s strenuous.

I will try to describe some of my experiences with 10:10 under the headings of things that I learned during its rehearsals and performances.

NO PLAY IS EASY. A normal expectation is that if we’ve done a thing for a while and have had some success with it, we should be able to do it as well or better next time. However, 10:10 helped me realize that each play is not only a challenge, but a new and different challenge, even a short one act play like 10:10.

In this case the biggest difference from other performances for me was the play’s physicality. Any play, however, offers new challenges, even if, for example, one is stepping into an already-running production, or doing a play one has already done. More than likely at least some of the cast and the production team will be different, and even if they’re exactly the same as before, they will nevertheless be different – older, with new experiences under their belts, more skilled in some things and possibly less practiced in others.

10:10 looked like a simple acting task: a husband wants sex, his wife makes him work for it, and that’s pretty much it. Except it’s not. Which husband, which wife, what kinds of relationship do they have, for that matter what kind of sex life do they have? Those questions are only starting points. Taking a role for granted is a trap.

RUST IS REAL. I quickly realized how “out of shape” I was as an actor. This is largely a matter of focus. An actor learns to focus with remarkable concentration on what’s going on in the character’s life, to the exclusion of nearly everything else. The degree in which the actor accomplishes this feat is to a large extent the degree in which the actor’s performance is successful.

If you doubt this, watch any play at an amateur level and see whose performance captures your attention. It will be the one or ones whose focus is the strongest. Even if an actor’s choices are bizarre in terms of the play, strong focus will still make the actor’s performance memorable.

I was out of practice in this type of concentration, and it took me a while to get it back. How? Basically, one has to throw oneself into the role without reservation. (How well I did that, of course, would be for others to say.)

MAKING SPACE IN THE BRAIN. One of the particular challenges in this play for me was that, because so much depended on physical action, I found it hard to learn the lines, not that there were that many of them, but they only began to stabilize in my mind when they were solidly attached to behavior.

Some of my problem with learning lines might also be attributed to my age, although I don’t think that’s the case to any particular degree right now, but more to my not being used to memorizing lines. The actress Julie Harris (1925-2013), in her autobiography, urged actors to memorize big chunks of anything, every day, to keep that facility in practice. I was always fascinated by that idea, but I never did it.

FOLLOW THE SCORE. Our director Colleen Brambilla, is extremely oriented toward the physical, and from the beginning of rehearsals she demanded precise, “clean” movement, without excessive fuss or stirring around. This is not my natural way of moving and I found it strenuous and difficult.

Uta Hagen (1919-2004), in her indispensable book Respect for Acting (1973), writes:

Physical actions are the necessary balance for verbal actions. When the actor is truly alive on stage there is an endless variety of interaction between verbal and physical behavior. Ideally, the audience should be unable to differentiate whether he walks when he is talking or talks when he is walking!

Actors talk about a “physical score” for a scene or a play, meaning a sequence of meaningful physical actions that give the words of the play a home and a context. I learned about this years ago when I did a terrible job on a scene in acting class.

After the scene my teacher, Elizabeth Dillon, said, “Next time, here is all I want you to do,” and she gave me a series of physical actions – sit here, pick up a paper on this line, and so on. The scene worked like a charm. I told Colleen this story, and she said, “I would have liked her.”

I found that the best way to prepare for a runthrough or performance of 10:10 was to review in my mind, not the lines, but the physical actions. The lines basically took care of themselves, because they were welded, so to speak, to the physical actions.

ALL ENVELOPING. Both Christine and I found this little eight-minute play to take up most of our day, at least on performance days. It was always in the backs of our minds – there’s a show tonight! Neither of us ever felt we could take it for granted. Each performance day, I felt that I was going to be taking a test that night.

I don’t know if I’d feel this same stress about another play or not, but I doubt that I would. Like snowflakes, each play is different . . .  or perhaps the explanation is simply that I was just out of practice.

PACING COMES FROM INSIDE, NOT OUTSIDE. Although 10:10 is a comedy, or perhaps a farce, Colleen never talked to us about the pacing of the scene, concentrating instead on performing the physical actions fully and “cleanly.” We found that we didn’t have to worry about whether the scene was “fast” or “slow” as long as we did our tasks thoroughly.

Related to pacing, both actors and directors are fond of saying, “This scene/moment/play needs more energy.” The trouble with saying that is that “putting more energy in it” is not something we commonly do in life. We may hope for more strength at a particular moment, but we seldom walk around saying, “I need to put more energy in my life,” and if we do, the results are likely to be somewhat weird.

Energy on stage comes from the actors’ involvement in the play and in its characters. If the actor, as the character, goes after what the character wants with focus and commitment, energy and timing will more or less take care of themselves.

YOU NEVER KNOW. Colleen and I had dinner a few days after 10:10 was over. “It was clear to me,” she said, “that the husband knows that if he can just get his wife to laugh, she’ll say ‘yes’ to what he wants.” “Did that come across in the play?” I asked. “Yes, I think it did,” she said.

I thought to myself, why in the world did I never conceptualize that point myself? How did I miss that?

Live and learn.

[You can take my word for it that everything Kirk said above is true and useful.  And that it came from practical experience. 

[I’d like to add one additional bit of practical advice to Kirk’s list.  He didn’t include it, I’m sure, because he’d never do it himself, and I suspect no one he works with would, either.  But I’ve experienced it and almost nothing irks me more.  DON’T DIRECT ANOTHER ACTOR.  That means not only don’t approach another actor with “What you should do here is . . .” or “If I were doing your role, I’d . . .”; it also means don’t ask another actor to “Do me a favor” or tell her or him “It would help me out if you . . . .”  Stay in your lane.

[And don’t think of getting around this by going behind the actor’s back to the director and asking him or her to get the actor to do what you want.  There’s little in the business that’s more unethical or more damaging to a working relationship.]