Acting Notes

by Kirk Woodward

 

[Kirk, who’s contributed scores of articles to Rick On Theater over the years on a myriad of subjects, is, among his other work, an acting teacher and an occasional actor.  Among his guest posts on ROT are several on the subject of acting: “Herbert Berghof, Acting Teacher” (1 June 2011), “Reflections On Directing: Actors” (17 April 2013), “Creative Dramatics” (30 September 2013), “Reflections on Theater Etiquette” (11 February 2014), “Notes from a Sometime Actor” (27 December 2019), “Acting Class (On-Line Edition)” (4 August 2020), and “The Method – a Review” (12 March 2022).

 

[There have also been about a half dozen pieces on actors, both contemporary and historical, which necessarily touch on the art and craft of their profession as well.  (By the way, I’ve authored more than a few posts concerning the thespian art as well, but I won’t list them here.)

 

[Kirk returns to the subject of acting now, prompted by a recent experience on the boards after something of a hiatus.  I will only say that I agree with almost everything Kirk says below, and I’ve had plenty of experiences myself to support all his conclusions.]

 

Acting is a subject of never-ending interest to me, because it’s where so many things converge – past and present, real and imaginary, fantastic and literal . . . on and on. An acting performance is a collection of so many things, brought together in a single person, usually working with others who themselves are the same bundling of aspects of life.

 

Recently I had the opportunity to act in a small production, a collection of scenes with theater as their theme, and I found myself thinking again about this mysterious craft, or art, or combination of both, whatever it is.

 

The experience of being in an in-person performance again, after two years of Zooming, may have stimulated some of my thinking. Also, as I have reported in this blog, I’ve read several interesting books about theater recently. I’ve listed a number of these at the end of this article.

 

So here are a few recent thoughts on the challenging and interesting world of acting. They are personal – my own thoughts – which means that any of them can be misleading or just plain wrong. Nevertheless:

 

1.     Acting classes run the risk of looking silly.

 

Several of the scenes that we performed satirize acting classes, to the extent that I remarked to a fellow actor that I wondered how an acting teacher would dare to do anything similar, after seeing these scenes. If you’d like an example, check the 2009 play Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker (b. 1981). 

 

[Circle Mirror Transformation premièred at Playwrights Horizons, New York City from 13 October 2009 to 31 January 2010.  The text is published in Circle Mirror Transformation (Acting Edition), Dramatist’s Play Service, 2010; The Vermont Plays: Four Plays, Theatre Communications Group, 2012; and Circle Mirror Transformation, Faber and Faber, 2013.]

 

No doubt about it, acting class exercises can look silly – exercises such as a group lying on the floor with eyes closed trying to count to 10 one by one without two saying the same number at once, or walking in random patterns noticing things about each other.

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These examples, and others, can look funny because they don’t seem to have much to do with stage work except in the most general way. In fact, they are forms of exercise, and any type of exercise can seem odd.

 

In a gym, for example, one does a number of activities that an outsider might think of as pointless, like walking in place for long periods of time (outside of the Army, how often do you do that?), or lifting heavy objects (weights) and putting them down again, over and over (again, possibly as punishment, but otherwise, when?).

 

We know, of course, that these exercises build muscle skills that are useful outside the training room. In the same way, acting exercises in “technique” classes can strengthen the performer’s ability onstage to focus, to relate to others, to live “in the moment,” and so on. Those are “portable” skills, also useful in life and unquestionably useful in acting.

 

I do feel that an acting teacher should periodically make explicit the connection between exercises and performance – that is, that a teacher should point out now and then why the class is doing the exercises it’s doing.

 

I took one adult “technique” class at a well-known acting school where the teacher clearly worked without a plan, calling out exercises at random with no point in mind as far as I could tell except a general feeling that we’d be better performers as a result. The result, honestly, was a generally disinterested class.

 

I have used the kind of “technique” exercises described above in creative dramatics classes – and occasionally, I regret to say, used them arbitrarily. However, I haven’t employed that kind of exercise much when specifically teaching acting.

 

Instead I try to stay closer to actual texts, sometimes from plays, sometimes specifically created for training purposes. Similarly, when directing a play the only exercises I use are related to the texts.

 

An exception, in all situations, is the relaxation exercise. Relaxation is so essential for a good performance that such exercises can be useful anytime.

 

2. There are no simple productions. Any production adds layers of complication as it gets closer to performance.

 

This statement is dogmatic, but I stand behind it, and I present my recent acting experience as proof. We began with the notion that we would do a “bare bones” show, no costumes, no props (that is, “properties,” objects used on stage), no sets. Well . . . Wear anything” becomes “wear this.” “No props” becomes “props.” “No set” turns into borrowed “flats” (set walls) and curtains.

 

We were hardly alone in this experience. For example, William Redfield’s Letters from an Actor, referenced below, tells the story of the 1964 production of Hamlet directed by John Gielgud (1904-2000) and starring Richard Burton (1925-1984). Gielgud and Burton decided, primarily for artistic reasons, to stage the play on a mostly bare stage, with the actors wearing rehearsal clothes.

 

But there are no simple productions. Some sort of stage had to be designed; it needed platforms; it had to have walls, which had to be painted. Similarly, rehearsal clothes turned out to be extremely difficult to coordinate. Props were even worse: would it make visual sense for actors in rehearsal clothes to carry swords, and where would they put them?

 

But, one might say, surely there could be a production that literally had no technical requirements at all? Of course, and yet . . .

 

A few years ago we did a living room production of my three-part play A Modern Evening of Classic Drama (see Classics (spiceplays.com)). The cast literally wore whatever clothes they’d been wearing that day; there was no theatrical lighting or set (although we did rearrange the furniture in the living room).

 

There was only one prop, a silver mug. Somehow, half the time we couldn’t find the mug, or forgot to put it in place. Never simple.

 

Lesson: it can take a great deal of illusion to give the impression of reality.

 

3. No matter how small the show or role, on performance days the actor very likely doesn’t want to do anything or think about anything seriously until it’s time to go to the theater. In that situation acting is the most important thing on one’s mind; everything else is secondary.

 

I’ll admit my experience is minor league, but everything I’ve read suggests that even the best, most experienced actors feel the same way. Acting is a stressful activity, and that stress must be managed somehow.

 

The worst way to manage an actor’s stress, I’d think, is drink or drugs. The best, I’m pretty sure, is to acknowledge that while one is in a show, “reality” for you is the production, so focus on that and get plenty of rest. Acting, at that moment, is the point at which your life is most intense.

 

I’ve heard and read this feeling expressed so often that I’m convinced it’s almost always true. The anticipation may possibly lessen in long runs – because saying and doing the same things night after night may dull the nerves.

 

And of course there’s always the chance that my point is simply a rationalization for sleeping most of the day, avoiding exercise, and eating junk food. But considering the environment of a play – you are offering yourself both for the judgments of a group of strangers, and in effect for a jury of your peers, your fellow actors, as well – I stand by my statement.

 

4. People talk about “characterization” in acting. I suggest that for the actor, there is no such thing. There is only behavior.

 

There’s no “character” anywhere except you and what you’re doing in a role - no Platonic ideal of a character out there somewhere, no reality to a role other than what you’re doing in it.

 

If your character limps, mumbles, or wears a moustache, it’s because you’re doing it under the circumstances of the play. For better or worse, you’re it.

 

Reviewers in particular don’t believe what I’ve just said. They tend to think of a “character” as a thing emanating from the play, which an actor matches or doesn’t. They think of characterization, then, as a result, but an actor needs to think of it as a process, something the actor does.

 

When an audience member says something like “That was a really interesting characterization” or “I didn’t believe the character” they’re reporting on the result of the work the actor has done. I believe it’s safe to claim, though, that most actors would say that aiming for a “result” with a character is a sure way to achieve a bad performance.

 

The better way is to do what you as the character would do under the circumstances of the play. If we do that faithfully, the result may look like a characterization, but from the inside it will be behavior.

 

5. It may be useful to look at rehearsals and performances as examples of “acting classes,” on the grounds that you’re always working on acting; you never “arrive.”

 

For me, at least, this is one of the best discoveries to make about acting – to look on every performance experience as training.

 

Certainly at some point a show should be more or less “set” – everyone should know how everything works, where everyone stands and moves, and basically what their performances are.

 

There are exceptions, of course, but those tend to be on the avant-garde side. There is also the example of the great performer Ethel Merman (1908-1984), who was reported to have said, when given a late change in a show, “Call me Miss Bird’s Eye. This show is frozen!”

 

But for most of us, mere mortals unlike Miss Merman, the fact remains that each performance will contain minor variations no matter how much we try to keep it consistent, and what’s more each performance should. External factors (the weather, the day, outside relationships) and internal factors (new ideas, changes in other actors’ performances, accidents) can and must lead to adjustments, at least small ones.

 

More importantly, though, each performance ought to be a learning experience, and if we look at acting that way, we won’t be quite so bowled over by the idea of “being ready by opening,” and will look at opening night, and the final performance, and everything in between as a continuing process of growth – just like life.

 

Parenthetically I should note that, in my opinion, an acting class is actually a more difficult environment in which to perform than a play is. In an acting class everyone is examining what you’re doing and looking for things to fix. In a play the audience is there to have a good time (except perhaps for reviewers – and your friends, and they’ll get over it).

 

6. When it succeeds, acting is about live people discovering live things.

 

Of course acting is about a great many things, but I believe this may be the foundation. I came across this idea while reading The Method (see the bibliography below), which presents a great many ideas about acting. Those ideas all have some point to them, even the extremely outdated ones. Which do we endorse?

 

Many factors go into an answer. One is the issue of whether training really changes actors much at all. How different would actors be if they’d never taken a class? Obviously, an unanswerable question, and nowadays most actors have taken classes somewhere.

 

However, some still haven’t, and for centuries the training of actors was an apprenticeship rather than a classroom experience, As far as we are able to tell at this distance in time, some fine performers emerged from that process, with only informal teaching at the most.  

 

When Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) began his attempt to systematize the art of acting, he did not claim to be inventing a new way of working, but to be drawing on the work of actors who had never heard of his “system” at all.

 

So what is the irreducible minimum of good acting? It should be something common to performers whether they take acting classes or not. My nomination for that irreducible minimum is that the actor be a “live person” – present in the moment, fully existing as a conscious human being right there on stage – under the circumstances of the play and the role.

 

I can expand the idea a bit: Acting is live people discovering live things.

 

This kind of aliveness goes by many names. “Mindfulness” is a frequently used term these days. “In the moment” is another. Stanislavski talked about perezhivanie, which The Method describes as “a state of fusion between actor and character, a merging of the two selves.” The same book says:

 

The actor’s job was to meet the character, commune with her, create something that, years later, Stanislavski would call ya yesm, a phrase borrowed from Church Slavonic that meant “I am.” Ya yesm was a state of living within the “very middle of an imagined life,” the end result of a process that flowed from truthful choices to belief in the circumstances of the play.

 

A personal experience: for years when performing I often felt I was in a trance, operating automatically. At the end of a show I would look back and think, “What happened?”

 

I don’t know if I’m recreating the memory of those experiences, or genuinely recalling them. I do know that today I’m working on trying to be as present in a scene as I can, actually dealing with real people who are also in the play.

 

That’s fine, but, of course, there’s also acting to be done. That’s why the word “discovering” is included in the formulation “live people discovering live things.” 

 

“Discovery” is a sort of game that actors play with themselves, in which they look for places where their characters learn new things, and pretend that those new things are a surprise to the actors too.

 

“Discoveries” keep performances fresh. An actor can play the game of “discovery” practically every moment of every performance, and there’ll always be something new to discover, because, as noted above, there will always be at least minor differences between one performance and the next, hence the last part of the phrase, discovering “live things.” As Heraclitus is said to have said, you can’t step in the same river twice.

 

“Live people discovering live things” is an appropriate description of the acting process – at least part of it – because acting is an “imitation of life,” so it definitely should have life in it.

 

Or perhaps I’m just reflecting my own personal needs. Such is acting. It’s an inexhaustible subject – like life itself.

 

*

 

Here are the books I’ve been reading recently on personalities and issues in acting, directing, and theater as a whole. I highly recommend all of these:

 

Letters from an Actor (1966), William Redfield. Limelight Editions.

An expanded diary of a noted American actor cast in the famous production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton. Real life experiences during a production by major professionals of a great and challenging play.

 

Mike Nichols: A Life (2021), Mark Harris. Penguin Books (paperback).

All of Nichols’ life is interesting. In particular I’d single out the insights his career offers about directing, and of course there are many fascinating anecdotes about the entertainment business as well.

 

Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins (2006), Amanda Vaill. Broadway Books.

Robbins was a celebrated, gifted, and often difficult director and choreographer. Vaill, with a background in dance, gives a full and indelible picture of this artist who was central to the theater of the late Twentieth Century.

 

The Fervent Years (1941), Harold Clurman. Da Capo Press (paperback).

One man’s look at the life cycle of the Group Theatre, which he was instrumental in founding. A personal, somewhat impressionistic view, invaluable in particular for anyone thinking about the dynamics of a theater organization.

 

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (2022), Isaac Butler. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Can a book about the development and spread of an approach to acting be a thriller? This one is. As books about theater go, not to be missed (see “The Method – a Review,” 12 March 2022).

 

[I usually make some comments on Kirk’s posts that are expressions of my own experiences that parallel (or occasionally contradict) what Kirk has written.  Most of the time, I send them directly to him, though occasionally I write them up in an afterword to his guest posts.  I was going to do the former this time—my having trained as an actor myself and having worked as one for a while—but I’m going to share my illustrative experiences with ROTers instead. 

 

[Going in the order of Kirk’s presentation above, the first comment is on his assertion that “it can take a great deal of illusion to give the impression of reality.”  This is why I’ve always insisted that stage Realism, the theatrical style pioneered by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) and which became the dominant form of Western theater in the 20th century (and still is the most common), is theatrical.  Maybe that’s self-evident to most readers, but when I was a grad student, most of my schoolmates (and even some faculty) disparaged Realism as a mere imitation of life. 

 

[My stance was that it’s an artistic imitation—‘representation’ is a better word, I think—of life and requires considerable artistry to create and maintain the illusion.  I’ve sat through a good number of realistic and naturalistic performances that fooled me into forgetting I was watching a play, most notably in my memory the Off-Broadway 1979-80 production of Marty Martin’s Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein starring Pat Carroll.  Her performance—GS³ is a one-person show—was so magical that I found myself literally thinking, as I was watching Carroll, “Gee, Stein’s a fascinating person.  I’m so glad I met her,” before I realized what I, a trained and experienced actor, was saying to myself.

 

[As for not wanting to do anything before a performance, in my earliest years as an actor, including graduate school shows, I couldn’t eat before a performance.  I was ravenous afterwards, but before the show, I couldn’t put anything in my stomach.  I lightened up eventually, but it was many years later.

 

[Once on stage, Kirk says, “There’s no ‘character’ anywhere except you,” and that forms the basis for many actors who speak of their roles in the first person: “I do this” and “I enter the room.”  Quite a few acting teachers inculcate this thinking in their students because, they remind us, we’re the ones up there doing everything.  Brechtian actors and teachers will differ, but Stanislavsky-based actors and teachers, especially, perhaps, Method followers, live by that creed.

 

[Kirk admonishes actors “do what you as the character would do under the circumstances of the play.”  I point this out because it’s the foundation of the distinction between role and character as I try to describe it in “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character” (25 September 2013).  This was the acting technique emphasized by Leonardo Shapiro, the experimental theater director on whom I’ve blogged frequently whose practices were a synthesis of the theories of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99).

 

[The guest-blogger points out that before actors started training at conservatories, studios, and acting schools, “for centuries the training of actors was an apprenticeship.”  That’s a pretty straightforward statement, but in support of it, and by way of illustration, I’d like to note that Eleanor Ruggles’s bio of the first world-famous American-born actor, Edwin Booth (1833-93), Prince of Players (1953), describes that process as Edwin follows his father, Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), from theater to theater across this young country, watching and assisting him and taking small parts, until he replaced the older Booth as the headliner.  (The 1955 film adaptation of the biography, which starred Richard Burton as Edwin Booth; Raymond Massey as Junius Brutus, Sr,; and John Derek as John Wilkes, which I happened to have watched again a few weeks ago, depicts some of this apprenticeship in the early scenes.)

 

[“Acting is live people discovering live things” is one of Kirk’s fundamental principles of acting.  I want to point out that this is the center of Brechtian acting theory and was also essential to Leo Shapiro’s acting technique as well.  It’s not a focal aspect of Stanislavskian acting, but it’s not dismissed or rejected,  Teachers like Uta Hagen who are essentially Stanislavsky-based, note its value as an acting technique, especially in rehearsal.  

[One of my acting teachers used to quote Martha Graham: “Don’t come on stage to give; come on stage to take!”  It sounds selfish and egotistical, but what I understand it to mean, for an actor, is that you take in what the other actors are sending you, you discover new stimuli, you let them inform your performance, and you respond to them.

 

[I’ve always maintained that actors are the worst judges of their own performances.  After a show, actors often assess how they felt they did that night, but when they did well, they often disparage their work and when they didn’t, they think they’ve done a good job.  Kirk shows why this is so when he observes that “for years when performing I often felt I was in a trance, operating automatically.”  

[Essentially, actors are so wrapped up in the moment-to-moment work that they are oblivious to what’s happening outside the performance.  They’re aware of the audience, of course, but only as a general presence—seldom as individuals with moment-to-moment presences of their own.

 

[When I sent Kirk my comments on “Acting Notes,” I related an incident that illustrated his admonition that “a teacher should point out now and then why the class is doing the exercises.”  I won’t retell that story here; it contains some rather personal details.  I will, however, try to pass on the gist without the specifics. 

 

[When I had first come to New York City after getting out of the army, I took a full load of classes at HB Studio.  One was an acting technique class from a working actor in film and theater with a long resume (which I didn’t know until I started the class).  He assigned me and my partner a scene from Shaw’s Man and Superman and added different adjustments each time we brought it to class.

 

[I actually enjoyed the exercise—and the teacher seemed to like our work because he invited us to bring it in to one of his other classes to present several times—but I never understood what my partner and I were supposed to be learning. 

 

[I went on to another teacher later and found the same thing happening.  I swore to myself after that that I would never do that to someone else if I ever directed or taught—and I never have.  I might wait till after a class or cast has tried the exercise to tell them why they did it, but I never left them wondering what the point was.  Even if the exercise was just for loosening-up or focusing, I’d at least tell them that.]

 

[In general, nothing I experienced as an actor, director, acting teacher, or theater teacher conflicts with what Kirk has said in his “Acting Notes.”  As in the experiences I’ve recounted, I can attest to the truth and accuracy of all Kirk’s observations.]