by Kirk Woodward
[Kirk Woodward has contributed many posts to Rick On Theater since I
launched it in March 2009—122, including several multi-parters. Most of Kirk’s pieces have been on theater or
other performing arts, notably music, and he’s covered a broad range of topics
within those areas. One of the areas of
theater on which Kirk’s written is, necessarily, acting and actors.
[As a sometime actor himself, and a director and acting teacher, Kirk’s well-positioned to write about acting. (It also doesn’t hurt that he’s also a produced playwright, in which capacity he’s had to work closely with actors as well. And let me not forget that his late wife, Pat, was an accomplished actor, teacher of acting, and director as well.)
[Back in March 2022. I published Kirk’s review of Isaac Butler’s book The Method, his exploration of the popular acting style based on an American interpretation of the techniques of Konstantin Stanislavsky. Kirk recently reread The Method and did some reconsidering and expanding of his responses. “Bombast and Beckett” is my friend’s later thoughts on the book.
[Let me add that I also trained as an actor at HB Studio, the American Academy of Dramatic Art (briefly), and the T. Schreiber Studio (with the late Lee Wallace [1930-2020]), and I have an MFA in acting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (when it was still the School for the Creative and Performing Arts). I had a short career on the stage, doing some teaching and turning to directing in the last few years. I have some experience from which to judge Kirk’s conclusions, and I agree with them entirely.]
One of the best books about theater in general, and about acting in particular, that I have read is The Method by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury, 2022), a “biography” of the approach to acting that may be said to have begun with the work and writing of the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938). I’m reading the book for the third time, and I continue to find new and interesting things in it. (For a review of and commentary on Butler’s book, see “The Method – a Review,” posted on this blog on 12 March 2022.)
At the end of the book is this provocative passage:
Today, the major challenge to an actor is not being heard, or seen, but seizing and holding an audience’s attention. One thing that art can offer us is a chance to be a pure spectator, to discard for a moment the discomfort and anxiety of always performing and to simply experience. But it turns out we often find these islands of solace anxiety-producing. We feel the pull to check in with the outside world, the worry that we might be waiting in the wings while a big moment passes us by onstage. It is this drive in the audience that actors must fight against. The ever-escalating battle for the finite resource of a viewer’s attention encourages both storytelling and acting in which the choices are big, simple, and clearly communicated. . . . Now acting and writing head instead toward clarity, worried that a surfeit of mystery and subtext risks committing the cardinal sin of art: boring the audience.
I wrote a friend that:
Butler points out how closely related styles of acting (and playwriting, I’m sure) are to the society they exist in – maybe “the environment they exist in” is more accurate. David Byrne [the singer and composer, formerly leader of the rock group Talking Heads; b. 1952], in How Music Works, claims that the environment is as much the creator of art as the artists are. Anyway, as Butler says, the acting style of Cary Grant would have been completely out of place in Streetcar, and Brando’s acting would have been baffling in Philadelphia Story.
That may just be another way of saying that acting styles and fashions change. However, something he says at the end of the book has made me rethink some of that narrative. Something is radically different for theater (and movies) now in a way that’s more than just changes of styles. For the first time people don’t have to go to the theater – it’s entirely optional in a way that it wasn’t, say, in 1900, where there were extremely limited alternatives. Not only do they not have to go – they’re afraid to, because something more interesting may be happening somewhere else at exactly that moment, as illustrated by the number of people consulting their phones during plays, and also by the number of ways you can multitask art, for example by streaming while texting. What style of acting does that call for? FOMO, fear of missing out, is driving our media, and what kind of theater can keep up with that?
No sooner had I written those words than I began to regret them, or at least to rethink them. Should I have? Jason Zinoman, in his column “On Comedy,” posted on the New York Times website on December 31, 2024, titled “For Comics, Honing Jokes Has Taken a Back Seat to Marketing. That’s Not Good.,” quotes the comedian Isabel Hagen (b. 1991 or 1992):
Every day instead of writing, I sit and think: I should post a clip of stand-up. What clip will get mean reactions that spark fights in the comments and therefore feeds the algorithm and gets me more views? Should I go into my folder of bikini photos and post one with the caption ‘lol hi’?”
Zinoman notes that “the major change has been the proliferation of video,” and then he adds, “The current ethos is to throw everything at the wall as fast as possible and see what sticks.”
“Hagen speculates,” the Times columnist asserts, “that the accelerated speed of technological change is what’s behind the need to grow careers at the same rate”; however, he wonders: “Do we want to live in a world where quality is so easily compromised to get more attention? Should we really be happy with a cultural system that incentivizes artists to spend more time selling their wares than developing their work?”
The stand-up Hagen “fears that we are moving to a culture where we’re just looking to be distracted.” She concludes, “If distraction is the goal, the loudest and most persistent ‘artist’ will win, and many may forget why they entered a creative field in the first place.”
If what Zinoman and Hagen say is true of live comedy performance, what can we say about theater? Is it likely, is it even possible, that live drama can compete in a short-attention-span world?
Whether or not it was literally correct for me to have said that “For the first time people don’t have to go to the theater,” I am certainly not the first or only person to observe that attention spans are getting shorter while the availability of easier, faster, and more disposable means of entertainment are proliferating.
At the moment, for example, one can stream a series of movies, series, and concerts on the cell phone while doing any number of other tasks, or doing nothing. How can theater compete with that?
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that paradoxically what seems to be the great weakness of theater – the proliferation of faster and more available kinds of technologies – may be its strength. The “Third Law of Motion” of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), which states that “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” applies to society as well, perhaps not in every specific but certainly in general.
Technology today is producing a reaction – for example, people deliberately doing without their cell phones or computers for varying periods of time. For those fed up with things technical, theater in its basics can be powerfully attractive. Theater can be performed anywhere, under any circumstances, even without technological assistance if appropriate. For example, I’ve staged plays in living rooms with no settings or properties of any kind.
[Many of Kirk’s ideas in this section are reminiscent of the foundational theories of Polish director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), considered one of the founders of experimental theater. Early in his career, Grotowski devised what he called “poor theater” (see Towards a Poor Theatre [Simon and Schuster, 1968]), which eliminates all the aspects of theater that he considered “extraneous” (i.e., “spectacle”).
[Poor theater entails little to no costuming, props, or elaborate sets. Grotowski relies on the abilities of the actors and uses nontraditional performance spaces (i.e., not conventional theaters). It’s essentially the opposite of commercial theater. Grotowski believed that theater shouldn’t be compared to television or film and shouldn’t try to emulate or compete with them. ~Rick]
Will theater in years to come resemble theater as we know it now? I don’t know, and certainly on Broadway these days we’re seeing plays that make elaborate use of technology, Will that kind of large-scale production survive? The monetary costs of technology can be enormous, and in addition, as always, there’s the problem of attracting audiences. Will a play that tries desperately to use cinematic techniques be as popular in its way as a movie?
We shall see. Regardless, live theater is always an alternative. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It can be simply staged. It needs something to say, but it doesn’t necessarily need elaborate and expensive ways in which to say it.
However, my major subject in the letter I quoted above wasn’t so much about the survival of live theater as about the impact our intense current technological environment might have on acting. Here too I find myself rethinking my initial panic, for the following reasons.
There are of course countless theories about acting – what it is, what it means, how to do it. It might make sense just to ask actors what they do, and quote them, in order to define the craft, and there are excellent books that do just that, for example Actors on Acting by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (Three Rivers Press, 1995). However, actors’ thoughts on their craft are all over the place, and there may be discrepancies between what performers think they do and their actual behavior.
Similarly, in the last hundred years or so there’s been no shortage of acting teachers and writers on the craft. One might wonder how there’s anything more to be said, although of course it keeps being said anyway. Is it possible to find a synthesis somehow?
Perhaps we can look at acting this way (although of course there are exceptions to every rule). Actors’ work typically sorts itself into three different areas. Actors work on themselves, their bodies, minds, feelings, spirits. They also work (typically) on the script of the play (e.g.: Aaron Frankel’s [1921-2018] How To Do Homework course at HB Studio; see “An Actor’s Homework,” 19, 22, 25, and 28 April 2010) or on other material provided by the creator(s) of the play. And they work with a group of other people – production staff, audience, but in particular with other actors.
Self, script, other actors. It seems sensible that a theory of acting would incorporate all three aspects of the craft, making a sort of “three-legged stool” capable of supporting almost any kind of acting.
This is not always the case. In the Twentieth Century, three of the major teachers of acting in the United States were Lee Strasberg (1901-1982), Stella Adler (1901-1992), and Sanford Meisner (1905-1997).
Although the following is an oversimplification, Strasberg may be said to have prioritized the actor’s own inner self, through a technique known as “affective memory.” Adler was particularly noted for the emphasis she put on script analysis. And Meisner based his teaching on the interaction between actors, devising exercises to bring them into close communication with each other.
Each, then, is best known for emphasizing one of what I have described as the three major elements of acting. Each also, I believe, would have said that of course all the elements of acting – internal, script-oriented, and relational – are important to a performer, and that of course an actor would have to be skilled in all of them. And after all the three famous teachers learned their craft in the same place – the Group Theatre of the 1930’s, out of which came The Method.
In practice, however, I suspect, actors are likely to use what might be called a “toolbox” approach to acting, drawing on a range of techniques depending on what is needed at the time. Butler in The Method makes it clear that many actors who swear by the approach of one of the great teachers (or of other teachers, or of principles outlined in numerous books), nevertheless in practice use a combination of techniques as necessary.
Butler writes that we can
go to many rehearsal halls in America and you’ll see a process divided in equal fourths into work around a table, staging, refining, and tech. The director and actors will talk about beats and structure a scene by its actions, will try to create staging that is informed by the characters and their needs. Visit a scene study class in America and you’ll likely hear the teacher ask the student some variation of “what does your character want? What is in their way? What are you doing to get it?” You’ll see them try to activate the mind, will, and feelings of the actor. You’ll hear them say the words “given circumstances.” You’ll hear actors alternate between the third person and first when discussing their characters. . . . You’ll hear them talking about being present in the moment, or really listening to their scene partner, or the steps they’re taking to stop indicating so damn much.
Every word in that paragraph is a description of standard American acting practice. It’s what I’ve learned and worked with and taught in my own experiences in theater. The elements of the description originated in various places and have been passed down to today by generations of actors, directors, and teachers who included elements from the various “schools” of acting and applied them to the actors’ selves, script study, and teamwork.
Actors who approach their work with a mixture of internal work and physical relaxation, intelligent script analysis, and the ability to talk and listen in the present moment to the other actors in a play, are in a position to expand from that base to almost any style of acting, from detailed realism to stylized period performing, from mumbling to mesmerizing, from bombast to Beckett.
Because, particularly in this country, an actor’s career is so precarious, so strenuous, so uncertain, an actor becomes skilled in adjusting, in rolling with the punches, in taking advantage of what’s available. As long as the foundations of an actor’s craft as I’ve described them are sound, an actor can and will maneuver from a solid base.
That is why I feel my letter, although accurate enough in laying out the problem, was wrong to expect a crisis in acting. This is not to say that there are not – or will not ever be – crises in society, in the economics of entertainment, in delivery methods of performance. There will be. There are, right now. (See “A Crisis In America's Theaters,” 13 September 2023.)
But the actors who have learned the pillars of the profession – sound work on themselves and their minds and emotions and bodies, capable script work, and the ability to “live” in performance with others – should be well prepared to weather the storm.
[When I read “Bombast to Beckett,” I had some reactions to several of the things about which Kirk had written. That happens a lot, not just with Kirk’s pieces, and the reactions aren’t usually in disagreement, but are often commentary on or support for what the writer has said.
[These were my thoughts on the post—my responses to what I was reading. I’ve decided to append them pretty much as I wrote them on Kirk’s draft of the article. I've done this before: my four posts of commentary on Kirk’s Art of Writing Reviews back in November ’09 were entirely composed of my remarks, made in marginal notes, on what I was reading.
[When I taught writing to college students, I told them that writing, especially essay-writing, was a sort of conversation between the writer and the reader(s). That's what an essay is supposed to do: make the reader think, look at something from a fresh angle, ask questions. In an extended version, the “reader” would write another essay in response (the other side of the conversation), then the original writer or another essayist would chime in, and so on. Well, what I’m doing here is a perfect example of that, and this afterword will be my contribution to the conversation.
[What I’m going to do here is comment on some of the things Kirk said in “Bombast” that jogged my mind and made me think about all kinds of ideas. That's a good thing, I think.
[To his first quotation from The Method, Kirk invoked FOMO as a motivating force in present-day acting. This, in a way, is what drives Tom Stoppard’s (b. 1937) 1966 absurdist comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: two (inconsequential) characters who are out of the room when significant actions occur, try to “glean” (a word they use extensively in one scene) what’s happening around them.
[In Act I of this Hamlet-derived play, The Player admonishes the courtiers to “. . . look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.” But in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s situation, when someone like Hamlet, Gertrude, or Claudius finishes a scene with them and leaves the stage, the two courtiers are left behind while the others enter a scene of great moment “somewhere else.” (The reverse also occurs: when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern leave a scene, they enter into oblivion, while a scene of great moment takes place where they left.)
[Stoppard makes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to piece together what went on in their absence—and they always get it wrong. I maintain that one of Stoppard’s favorite themes is How do we know what we think we know? It’s the central theme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Arcadia (1993). In Arcadia, piecing together what the characters missed is something of an intellectual exercise, but in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, misinterpreting what happened when they weren’t present, leads to the courtiers’ deaths.
[I pointed out to Kirk that his discussion of eschewing spectacle and tech on stage sounds very Grotowskian. I suggested Kirk give the Polish director and theorist credit and he responded that “a reference to Grotowski is fine if you think it will be useful”—I did, as you can see—"no harm in expanding readers’ frames of reference, I guess.”
[By the way, I always found it interesting, in the days when I was researching the work of experimental stage director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97; see, among other posts on ROT, “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro,” 16 April-7 May 2023), that he laid claim to being an acolyte of Jerzy Grotowski, who was fundamentally anti-tech, while Leo himself loved tech.
[Shapiro’s productions were low-tech (but not no-tech) due to budget, not artistic philosophy. He once told me, after I saw one of his shows in which he had some very effective low-tech visual effects—he was very good at that—that he wished he’d been able to afford holograms. (Kirk noted: “That is a funny paradox with Leo.”)
[Kirk speaks of the impact of the "technological environment might have on acting,” which made me think that artificial intelligence is already considered a direct threat to acting and actors. AI was at the center of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike against movie and TV producers (14 July-9 November) and the almost-simultaneous Writers Guild of America strike against the same industries (2 May-27 September).
[According to the unions, AI makes possible "artificial" actors and acting, NHI (no humans involved). What impact could be greater? Among the goals of the actors’ strike was the prevention of AI from replacing actors on set by creating virtual copies of actors’ faces, bodies, and voices.
[(The writers’ demanded that scripts, dialog, or plots generated by AI not be considered literary or source material—meaning machines can’t be eligible to receive any writing credit and thus take both creative credit and payment out away from WGA writers.)
[The effect of these developments, if any, on the nature of the work itself (writing or acting) hasn't been openly discussed as far as I know—except the possibility of putting actors and writers out of work entirely if producers and directors can assemble Franken-scripts and Franken-casts instead of hiring live writers and actors.
[One frightening change in the field that occurs to me is that in the (near) future, actors may be hired to create AI templates, like mo-cap files, to be stashed and then used later in myriad movies, tv shows/commercials, and videos, morphed into other “actors” and inserted into scenes over and over again. Sooner or later, once the technology has advanced, there’ll be fully generated virtual productions without actors, a director, designers, techies, or ushers!
[Back in 2021 (in a post called "Computers and Actors, Part 1" [4 October]), I ran a 1987 Time magazine article on the pre-AI precursor of this potential, "Dreaming the Impossible at M.I.T." by Philip Elmer-Dewitt. It was about a computer program that let playwrights create a virtual representation of their plays w/out hiring actors and a studio and putting up a workshop production of their scripts.
[Kirk’s response to these comments was that my points “are extremely important”—but that “developing the thought of electronically created actors would derail” “Bombast to Beckett.” You can see that’s he’d be right.
[As to Kirk’s brief discussion of actors talking about their techniques and practices, I’d add that there’s also the apparent fact that actors, even the most talented performers, aren’t the most articulate about what they do. They often either use acting jargon (of which there are many different “vocabularies” for all the “countless theories,” as Kirk indicates, plus hybrids) or incoherent explanations made up of things teachers, coaches, or directors have said to them and their own unmediated descriptions of their techniques. At least that’s been my observation.
[I guess that suggests a corollary to the saw that "those who can't do, teach": Those who can do, often can’t teach. Acting is such a personal and individual endeavor, it’s not easy for artists to explain or describe what they actually do clearly to someone else.
[Kirk’s response to this remark was: “You’re absolutely correct. I was tempted to mention that, but [I] didn’t feel that was important enough.” As far as “Bombast” is concerned, he’s probably right—but the next time an actor is a guest on a talk show and the host asks about her or his craft, note how coherent the actor is.
[When Kirk refers to books by actors writing about their own techniques, I thought another excellent example, in addition to the anthology collection of Actors on Acting, is, of course, Uta Hagen’s (1919-2004) Respect for Acting (Macmillan Publishing Co., 1973). My dad gave me a copy in 1974, when I got home from the army ready to go to the American Academy of Dramatic Art.
[That copy got so well-thumbed, it was falling apart, and so full of marginal notes, underlining, and highlighting, it was hard to read the original text. I was teaching acting then and ended up buying a new copy so I had a clean one to lend to students. (I should note that my first acting teacher at HB Studio and the Mason Gross School was Carol Rosenfeld, a student of Hagen’s and my main model as a teacher.) Kirk agreed that Respect was “a really fine book, one of the very best of its kind in my experience,” but he didn’t feel expanding his examples beyond the one book would advance his point.
[Kirk points out that the “three-legged stool” that comprises an actor’s preparation for a role necessarily requires that "actors work on themselves." Possibly many readers know that the original Russian title of the Stanislavsky book we know in English as An Actor Prepares (translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood; Theatre Arts, Inc., 1936) is (in literal translation) "an actor's work on himself" (Russian: Работа актёра над собой (Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1938) – romanized: Rabota aktyora nad soboy). “Which is a better title, I'd say,” replied Kirk to my reminder. I’ll also note further that a 2008 retranslation by Jean Benedetti of that seminal acting text is entitled An Actor’s Work (Routledge).
[Regarding the things Kirk specified that actors work on, "Self, script, other actors," I asked if he would consider that "place," meaning the work space (i.e., not just the theater and the stage/acting space, but also the set), is important, too. I contend that Ihe space in which actors work, both in rehearsal and in performance, has an effect on the acting. I offer some illustrations:
[When the Group Theatre was doing Johnny Johnson (1936; see “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson," 18 November 2019), their only musical, they rehearsed in a small, intimate theater. When they moved into the much larger theater where they performed, many witnesses reported that the production suffered.
[In his Homework class, to impress upon us the importance of establishing a sense of place, Aaron Frankel recounted that when Jack Klugman (1922-2012) took over the role of Oscar in the Broadway première of The Odd Couple in November 1965, he actually lived in the apartment set at the Plymouth Theatre for several days to establish a relationship with what was supposed to be his home.
[Years ago, in an acting class, I was assigned the Watchman’s opening monologue from Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-456 BCE) Agamemnon (ca, 458 BCE). When I read the play, I realized that I had visited the ruins of the place where the play is set, the city of Mycenae, of which Agamemnon was king. I’d stood atop the Lion Gate, which is restored, looking out over the Plain of Argos down to the Aegean Sea. I’d been in that place in real life only a year or two before this class, so it wasn’t hard to envision what the Watchman sees when he spots the signal fires from Troy telling the Greeks that the war was over.
[(As a director, I have worked on this aspect of a performance once or twice, most memorably in Ward Six (Drama Committee Repertory Theatre, NYC, 1979), a stage adaptation of a short story by Anton Chekhov (Russian; 1960-1904) in which most of the cast were patients in a psych ward, but the performance space was a store-front black box with suggested, non-Realistic scenery.)
[Kirk responded to my point: “It’s very important, probably next in line, but I wanted to limit my list to what the actor brings into the room, so to speak. You’re certainly correct about its significance.” In Respect for Acting, Hagen includes “place” as one of “the essentials to examine in order to define” what makes any given moment in a character’s existence “real.” She wrote, “Since place is crucial, let me remind you [to] examine every aspect of it. . . .”
[Kirk quotes Butler’s statement in The Method that “actors alternate between the third person and first when discussing their characters,” depending on what training system the actor follows. For instance, Uta Hagen, and therefore Carol Rosenfeld (my teacher), stressed the first-person relationship to the character. They felt it reinforces the identification of the actor with the character, which was their interpretation of the Stanislavskian approach to creating a character. (I can’t remember if Hagen says anything about this in Respect for Acting—Kirk said he couldn’t either—but Carol said it to us in class.)
[Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), on the other hand, and therefore Leo Shapiro (a follower of Brechtian theater theories, alongside Grotowski’s), eschewed character identification, both for the actor and the audience. Kirk agreed, asserting, “Yes, Brecht loved using the third person.”
[Leo said frequently that he didn’t see the dramatis personæ as “characters,” but as “roles,” by which he meant their functions in the story/scene. For example, in Children of the Gods (Shaliko Company, 1973; see “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973),” 19 November 2021), his collage of several Greek plays, he didn’t see Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Menelaus, Orestes, or Electra as characters, but as “[t]he greedy King, the unforgiving Queen, the sacrificed Virgin on the altar, the stormy Uncle, the wounded, disillusioned Young Hero, the Sister who has been unhinged by the thirst for revenge.”
[I
try to explain this dichotomy from Leo’s perspective in “Acting: Testimony
& Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013. Kirk’s response to this comment: “That’s an
extremely interesting comment. By the
way, I find in working with actors that even the most method-oriented actors
will literally alternate between ‘s/he’ and ‘I’ constantly in discussions, with
no reason for the differentiation that I can tell.”]
