How to Write a Play

by Kirk Woodward

[As frequent readers of ROT will know, my friend Kirk Woodward, who contributes often to this blog, is a multi-tasking theater talent.  He’s an experienced actor and director, he composes music and writes lyrics, he’s written reviews and criticism, and he teaches acting.  When Kirk sent me “How to Write a Play,” I noted that I’d already published his advice on directing (“Reflections On Directing” – four parts on 11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013) and my commentary on his book The Art of Writing Reviews (another four-parter on 4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009).  But principally, Kirk’s a playwright, as you can tell from his website, Spiceplays (http://spiceplays.com/).  If you check out Spiceplays, you‘ll see that Kirk writes many different sorts of plays for both adult audiences and for children and, if my word means anything, they’re delightful, surprising, charming, and exceptional.  If Kirk knows something about reviewing and directing from his years of experience, he knows even more about writing plays, straight plays and musicals, mysteries and comedies, children’s plays, religious plays, and adaptations of classics.  He’s also wise enough (or, perhaps careful enough) to know that any advice about something as individual as writing a play may be one man’s meat but another’s poison—and he says so.  That’s no reason, of course, not to listen to it and make your own judgment.  Furthermore, Kirk points out that most how-to guides for writing plays are really advice about reading plays.  Since that’s so, what he says here is useful for those of us who aren’t playwrights but avid playgoers.  Give “How to Write a Play” a read and see if it ain’t so.]

Have you ever written a play? If not, do you want to? Do you have an idea – maybe it’s just a fleeting thought or a fragment of an idea, or maybe an incident or even a full story – that you think would make a good play?

The effort to lay out principles for writing a play has led a large number of people to write articles and books on the subject. When I began writing this article, a  Google search provided over eight hundred million hits on the subject (and its related theme, writing screenplays); by the time the article was finished, Google listed over nine hundred million hits. Amazon lists dozens of similar books.

Some of this information is specialized. There are numerous pieces of advice on the web about playwriting for students and beginning writers, for writers of plays for children, and for writers for the deaf and disabled. Some of this information available is undoubtedly useful – basically, the more specific, the better.

However, it’s easy to see that behind much of the guidance being offered is the hope that by taking the proper advice you will be able to write a play that goes somewhere – that is successful, important, or in some other way worth noticing.

So before diving in to the various categories of playwriting advice, here is a general observation: Much that’s written about playwriting is actually about play reading.

The reason for this observation is simple and logical. A formula will never create important works of art. But by looking at such works, one can see commonalities in them. (A book about reading plays that I highly recommend, as useful for playwrights as anything else, is Backwards & Forwards by David Ball, Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.)

But listing commonalities will only go so far. Do you really want to write a play that someone else has written? For money, maybe – but if so, good luck! It’s certainly possible to get rich by writing a successful play; it’s also possible to get rich by winning the lottery, and the odds aren’t all that different.

And what is a playwright’s aim, anyway? Art or money? Success or creativity? Surely, both; but there’s no sense trying to write the plays of Neil Simon, because he’s already written them. Why write somebody else’s play? There may be a play in you that’s more interesting to you, and maybe even to others.

(Unless, again, your focus is entirely on a commercial market, and you treat a play as purely a marketable commodity. Like much else about theater, this has been successfully done, but it may not be as easy as it sounds, unless you have a specific talent in that direction.)

One can certainly learn a lot about plays from reading Simon’s works; the man knows his business. But at some point a writer has to write.

Nowadays, many playwriting guides recommend writing plays with very small cast and set requirements. A two character play, with one chair, the idea seems to be, would be ideal, if you can just write a great play within those limits, and why not?

The thinking behind such advice is easy to follow: plays are expensive to put on stage, so the less they cost, the more likely they are to be produced.

In the 1930’s, when George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote their great comedies, a cast of twenty on Broadway, with multiple sets, was financially feasible. (I’m thinking of Once in a Lifetime, first performed in 1930.)

Today even musicals try to keep their cast sizes down.  Theaters that don’t pay their actors – university and community theaters, in particular – don’t face those restrictions, but may have their own limitations – for example, they may only want to perform Broadway hits.

Current practice suggests shrinking the length of the script, as well as size of the cast and the complexity of the set. In 1930, plays routinely had three acts, with two intermissions. (Shakespeare’s plays, of course, are divided into five acts, but those are editors’ decisions, not necessarily Shakespeare’s; we don’t really know when his audiences took their breaks.)

But today, as Linda Winer points out in an article entitled “Farewell to the two act play” in Newsday, playwrights in the second half of the Twentieth Century typically wrote in the two-act form. By the time she wrote her article (21 Nov 2010), however, even that one intermission was disappearing, with more and more plays lasting only eighty or ninety minutes, with no break at all!

(Does that make those plays long one-acts, or short full length plays? An existential question!)

So, gone are the days when Eugene O’Neill could write Strange Interlude (written in 1923, first performed in 1928) in seven acts, leading Alfred Lunt, whose wife Lynn Fontanne was in the play, to remark that if O’Neill had written just two more acts, Lunt could have sued his wife for desertion. . . .

Or are those days gone? The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby, a success in England and on Broadway in 1980, took 8½ hours to perform in two parts, the first with two acts, the second with three. The next multi-set, large cast play that everyone wants to see could be written at any moment – not necessarily will be, but could be.

As Philip Pullman said of the Harry Potter series of books: before it was written, no one was saying, “I wish someone would write a seven book series about a boy wizard and his adventures in school.” After J. K. Rowling wrote the books, of course, everyone said the thing was obvious.

So, in today’s theater, one of our outstanding playwrights is Tony Kushner (b. 1956), whose Angels in America (1993), in two parts with multiple acts in each, with a minimum cast of eight (including much doubling of roles) and multiple locations, if not sets, has won numerous awards, achieved a series of successful runs, and provided HBO with a memorable broadcast version.

Tony Kushner shows no inclination to follow the current advice about the size and complexity of plays. He has written the play(s) he felt he had to write. What’s more, he has succeeded artistically and financially, and that, of course, is the hard part. A mediocre large play is no better than a mediocre small one.

But how to write at Tony Kushner’s level will not be learned from books. Angels in America is not based on any published principle of playwriting, except perhaps the “rule” that says a play must be worth something.

Imagine, now, that you are reading a treatise called How to Write a Play in ancient Greece. You would read about the necessity for a chorus, three characters, elevated language, unities of time and place. (Some feel that such a guide exists, written by Aristotle: The Poetics.)

However, if articles were written on the same subject in the comic Roman writer Plautus’s time (254-184 BC), they would have had a different slant – and Seneca (4 BC-AD 65), who wrote tragedies, would undoubtedly have objected to them.

Medieval drama playwriting advice would have had chapters on Mystery, Miracle, and Morality plays, which we don’t see a good deal of today. The Elizabethans in their handbooks on playwriting would have laughed at medieval limits. The Restoration would have had new definitions of what to laugh at. Brecht and Beckett would have rewritten everything (Brecht did his best).

This excursion into playwriting advice isn’t entirely imaginary – people in many periods have tried to define what a play should be. Then someone has demonstrated a new approach, and the “rules” have changed. Shakespeare owed a great deal to medieval theater; but he didn’t stop there. The moral should be clear: artists don’t achieve important work by looking backwards. The principle for writing a play is to have a play inside you that has to be written.

So: here’s how to write a play. Go to your word processing program, on whatever platform you choose, or, if you feel more comfortable with an alternate method, take pen or pencil and paper, or even use a typewriter if you can find one. Begin writing, and write until you have a play. Then stop.

That’s step one. If you are satisfied with having written a play, and feel no need for further satisfaction, then you’re finished and you’ve succeeded. You’ve written a play! If however like many you feel the need to have your play produced, you will want to begin show it around and try to get other people to read it.

You will soon learn – hopefully but not necessarily to your delight – whether other people think you’ve written a play. As the Duke of Wellington said, “Publish and be damned.” Or not. Theater, as is often said, is a collaborative art. So yours will not be the only voice involved in the production of your play. But it has to be the first voice, not the second or third.

My advice in playwriting classes is: just write. Write it before you worry about it. Playwrights write (or “wright” – fashion, make) plays, so write one. Nothing else – editing, formatting, printing, circulating, marketing, weeping, applauding – can happen until the play is written. Get it written. First things first.

A hundred fifty years or so ago, this advice would not have been considered sufficient, but then a century ago it was generally assumed that successful plays were written according to certain principles that were – and usually still are – based on the idea of a realistic theater.

(For an entertaining view of the accepted principles of playwriting of that time, see the 1909 essay “How to Write a Popular Play” by George Bernard Shaw, available on the web.)

Today we have the examples of Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, Caryl Churchill, and many others to remind us that the realistic model of a play is by no means the only option. It works brilliantly for Neil Simon and what he wants to say; it may not work at all well for you.

So don’t write based on any principles at all, at least not consciously. If you have an idea, good or bad, follow it to its logical conclusion. Don’t even assume that it may end up as a play. It may end up as a screenplay, a novel, a short story, a haiku, or a crumpled piece of paper. First, write.

It is however worth noting that, although the first thought brought to mind by the topic “How to Write a Play” probably isn’t formatting, once you’ve written your play, if you want to have it produced, you’re going to have to show it to other people, so it will help for it to be readable. It will help even more for it to have a professional looking format, the same way that a business resume does more good if it looks professional.

Also like resume formats, few recommended playscript formats are exactly alike. But if your script is readable and looks like a play – as opposed to, say, a screenplay, which has a radically different layout – you may be okay. A Google search of “playscript formats” will turn up plenty of samples. The publishing company Samuel French, Inc. also can provide its preferred format in a play amusingly titled “Guidelines” by Sam French.

As you circulate your play, one thing you may learn is that many play readers have no idea how to read it.

There are many possible reasons for this fact. Sometimes the readers are business people rather than artists. Sometimes the readers are theater beginners, interns, students, relatives, or other well-meaning folk assigned to the job of evaluating scripts, often when they would much rather be doing something else.  Agents are crucial to the process of Broadway production; few if any have a dramaturg on staff.

More than one author, therefore, recommends putting massive amounts of description within stage directions in plays, so the most unimaginative reader can get some idea of what it is they’re reading. This advice will not help you write an important play; but it may help you get it read by somebody.

You have undoubtedly heard the saying, “Plays aren’t written, they’re rewritten.” Translated, this means: “Many people will want to rewrite your play.” They will. You will particularly discover this if your play receives a “workshop” production, in which an audience watches a reading, a semi-staged reading, or a fully staged reading of your play, and afterwards tells you how you ought to have written it.

At this point a playwright must be very, very careful. Other people’s opinions are valuable if they point out places where your intentions are unclear, or where they are clear but not fully carried out. But you wrote the play, and they didn’t; if they could have, they would have. Comments like “I’d like it better if it had a happy ending” or even “It’s too long, my attention wandered” have to be taken with a grain of salt.

A theater may offer to produce your play only on the basis that you make the rewrites it demands. In that case, obviously, you have a choice to make. You will be on slightly firmer ground if you have joined the Dramatists Guild, which I highly recommend (you don’t have to be a produced playwright to join), and you can have the Guild review the contract the theater offers you.

The Dramatists Guild insists that the playwright is the owner of the play, and has the right to approve or reject any changes. After that it’s a matter of negotiation, of course. When in the middle of those discussions, try to remember what your play was about in the first place.

Needless to say, the advice to “write as you are guided by the play within you” is not sufficient for the authors of articles and books on the subject, so following is a brief survey of what has been said. Just bear in mind that “principles of playwriting” (and of everything else) are there to be violated. No one should read this or any piece on the subject and assume that following rules will make a good play.

If that worked, there would be plenty of good plays, and there aren’t. There are some, but the heyday of principles of playwriting (I’m thinking of the era of the “well-made play,” the Nineteenth Century) was hardly the golden age of theater.

On the other hand, what if there is some underlying structure, or mainspring, or spirit, that’s necessary in order for a play to “work?” We should keep that question in mind. But the quest is inductive – as the dictionary says, “characterized by the inference of general laws from particular instances.” Or, as I have already phrased it, most that’s written about playwriting is actually drawing conclusions based on play reading.

There is a fairly basic consensus about what a play is. Jiwon Chung and Mariana Leal Ferreira [in an article on the web: “Give Wings to Your Imagination and Change the World: Write and Perform Your Own Play!” Chapter 3 of Acting for Indigenous Rights: Theatre to Change the World by Mariana Leal Ferreira (Human Rights Center, University of Minnesota, 2013; http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/edumat/hreduseries/TB7/Chapter%203%20P15-P28.pdf) put it this way:

The basic process is to create an engaging story from an idea that involves an encounter

and a conflict of wills. This story is told through a sequence of physical and emotional actions. . . .

Their definition is wide enough to include a wide variety of dramatic works – any play that begins with a conflict and develops that conflict through action. It is difficult to think of plays that do not fit this general formula in some way.

However, the problem is that the formula is general. (Chung and Ferreria, for example, employ it in terms of politically oriented theater.) What sort of conflict, what sort of action? A definition of this sort has the advantage of ruling out a number of things a play is not – it is not a lyric of appreciation, not a novelistic description, not a series of abstract movements. But the definition is hardly a recipe.

A survey of the literature on “how to write a play” shows that a great deal of what’s said is basically negative. In other words, much advice on how to write a play is really advice on how not to make mistakes in writing one – even when the advice is phrased positively.

For example, “Write small” – advice that I mentioned above – means “Don’t use so many characters or scenes that they scare producers.” “Know your characters” means “Don’t start writing without knowing who your characters are.” “Tell your story through action” means “Don’t just hand the audience big clumps of information, but work them into the scene.”

Some advice is flat-out negative: Don’t overload your play with plot or ideas. Don’t preach to your audience. Don’t use a narrator unless you absolutely have to. Don’t write scenes that are impossible to stage. Note, though, that all these suggestions have been broken by one worthwhile play or another (in order: The Way of the World; several plays by Brecht; Our Town; Suzan-Lori Parks’ play cycle 365 Days/365 Plays).

Here are some other gleanings from the web. Just remember that each one could be followed by the words “or not.”

Have an idea.

Start with a situation.

Start with an action.

Start with characters.

Write profiles of your characters before you write the play, so you know them.

Say something about humanity.

Have actors read your play out loud.

See lots of plays and read them.

Think of a main character.

Think of a conflict.

Figure out where the play should start.

Do lots of rewriting.

Have a setting.

Figure out the psychological story behind the play.

Act, so you know how actors work.

Design, so you know how designers work.

Direct, so you know how directors work.

If the story changes somehow, let it. Or don’t.

Write scenes that go somewhere.

“Kill your darlings” – if you’ve written a passage you particularly like, take it out.

Write dialogue that sounds like the characters do (individually).

Make your characters real people.

Make the story cause and effect.

Give your protagonist a strong cause. Make your antagonist a strong obstacle.

Write characters that actors (especially big name actors) will want to play.

Show it, don’t tell it.

Have time urgency.

Write by yourself.

Write with others.

Start with a familiar story.

Start with your own inspiration and build your story.

Absorb ideas, images, words, then let the story emerge.

Find out “what’s wrong” – what problem the main character must solve or try to solve.

Put yourself inside the characters’ minds.

Write characters that people can relate to.

Playwriting is rewriting. (Or not.)

Leave white space on your script (for comments).

Don’t describe the characters too much. (Or describe them thoroughly.)

Motivate everything a character does.

Don’t write about characters that never appear.

Tell one story.

Write your “one great play.”

Present the problem in the play right away.

Use people you know as your characters.

Make a statement about the human condition.

Don’t judge yourself as you write.

Read lots of plays.

A mixed bag! Some are obvious (“Have a setting”). Some are fundamental (“Make the story cause and effect”). Some may or may not have validity (“Kill your darlings”). Many need a great deal of discussion. Not a single one is absolute – every one of those suggestions may be and has been successfully violated. One or more may strike you as valuable. Mazel tov!

Let me offer three suggestions in closing.

First, the best use of advice on writing plays, like advice on any technique, is to help you re-start yourself when you are stuck. An idea, a phrase, a word, may poke your imagination and get the writing going again.

Second, Broadway is not the only place that produces plays – not by a long shot – and you may find a great deal of satisfaction in writing plays that particular theaters need. Limitations are stimulating. I wrote a play once to meet the following requirements: it had to be set in a library, it had to be a mystery, it had to have a certain number of characters, it had to be of a particular length. I wrote exactly such a play, and it won a production! And a prize!

If you do plan to pursue this approach, make sure you understand what a given theater really is looking for. Tools that help in this effort include annual resource guides published by the Dramatists Guild and the Theatre Communications Group (TCG).

Third and finally, remember the sentence that the playwright Robert Anderson (1917-2009) wrote and posted over his desk: “NOBODY ASKED YOU TO BE A PLAYWRIGHT.” If you are one, or will be one, you will be one no matter what, and hopefully at least have a good time. There are stages of success in playwriting, and they build on each other:

·         You try to write a play.

·         You write a play.

·         Someone reads it.

·         Someone likes it.

·         Someone produces it.

·         It opens.

·         It runs.

·         It runs a long time.

·         It is critically acclaimed.

·         It wins awards.

·         It is produced in numerous theaters.

·         It is published.

·         You make money on it.

·         It is immortal.

·         You are immortal.

We can achieve one, several, or even, in the farthest stretch of imagination, all of these. Whatever we achieve, we can enjoy it.

Playwrights would be well off to read the introductions Neil Simon has written to his collected plays. They are as useful as anything about playwriting I’ve read for this survey, because Simon writes from the inside – from his insides, actually. He tells himself:

“I must take my work seriously, but not the results. I can control only what I write and not what others write about my writing. To agree with the ayes and negate the nays is a foolish pastime.” To get gastric lesions because four people walked out of your play, or euphoric because someone asks for your autograph, will eventually misdirect your intentions and you will work to please rather than be pleased with your work. . . . I am most alive and most fulfilled sitting alone in a room, hoping that those words forming on the paper . . . will be the first perfect play ever written in a single draft. . . . I have either fed and nurtured those who are hungry for whatever it is I have to offer, or I am simply a carcass to be clawed open and ripped apart. The point of view is yours.

True words.

[In his first paragraph of “How to Write a Play,” Kirk asks a series of questions.  If truth be told, I could answer yes to every one of them!  (I’ve even shared some of my “fleeting thoughts” and “fragments of ideas” with my friend.  They didn’t impress him.)  But, believe it or not, I did even write a play once—well, a script, anyway.  It happened sometime back in the late ’70s or early ’80s.  I was killing time one evening watching a spy movie on TV, a 1970 adaption of a Mickey Spillane novel called The Delta Factor starring Christopher George and Yvette Mimieux.  I thought it was lousy—and unintentionally funny.  It made me think: I know something about the espionage biz—I was a counterintelligence officer in the army for almost five years and spent 2½ years in West Berlin, the spy capital of the Cold War.  I could write a spy story that would be more realistic than the dreck I was watching and, what’s more, if I wrote in the jargon we actually used in military intelligence, it would be funnier than the made-up lingo of this movie.  So I sat down and wrote a play based on an actual incident in which I was involved in Berlin in the early ’70s.  (The plot was taken from the story of the time the city of West Berlin was shut down on my account, described in “Berlin Station, Part 2,” 22 July 2009.)  Well, to skip to the last scene—the play was pretty awful and I’ve never shown it to anyone.  Of course, I didn’t have the benefit of Kirk’s sage advice at the time . . . .]

'Why Acting Matters,' Part 2

[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.

'Why Acting Matters,' Part 1

[My report on David Thomson’s book Why Acting Matters is published in two parts.  Part 1 below covers the background of my interest in the book and my introduction to it, a brief bio of the author, and then my appraisal of the “extended essay,” as Thomson labels it.  Part 2, to be published in a few days, is a discussion of one of Thomson’s points, the one I think is the most interesting and meaningful, acting in everyday life.  I won’t say more about that now, though I touch on it in Part 1; I’ll let readers come back and see what I (and to some extent, Thomson) have to say on the subject.]

When I first read about David Thomson’s Why Acting Matters (Yale University Press, 2015) in the Washington Post last March, I thought, ‘What a great topic to write about for the blog!’  After all, I was trained as an actor, I worked in that profession for a number of years, I’ve taught it and written about it, and Charles Matthews’s review made the book sound absolutely fascinating—right up my alley for ROT, if you will.  Asserting that Thomson launches a discussion of the “deceptive nature of acting,” Matthews writes, “Acting is, for better or worse, universal,” and, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, declares: “We all prepare faces to meet the faces that we meet.” 

I even know something about that.  First, when I was getting out of the army, where I’d been a counterintelligence officer in Cold War West Berlin, friends confronted me when they heard that I was planning to go to acting school.  “Isn’t that a huge change?” they’d ask—“From the army to acting?”  My response was always the same: “Why?  I’ve been acting the part of an army officer for five years.”  Because I wasn’t really the guy I’d been pretending to be since I started active duty—especially the persona I presented in Berlin: Special Agent K*****, the spook.  Then, when I started teaching acting, I told my students that we all act in real life.  We aren’t the same people when we’re with our boss at work as we are with the cop who’s pulled us over on the highway, I explained.  We’re different people with our spouses or lovers than we are with the store clerk or the waiter in an upscale restaurant.  We don’t think of it as acting, but it is.  Shakespeare told us we’re all “merely players” and that “one man in his time plays many parts.” 

The Bard, in fact, provides us with excellent models of this phenomenon.  Leaving aside the actual actors, professional (the Players in Hamlet) and amateur (the Rude Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), the transformations by magic (Lysander, Demetrius, Titania, and Bottom in Midsummer), and even the overt disguising (all those women who pass themselves off as boys or men, such as Viola in Twelfth Night, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and Rosalind in As You Like It), there are fine examples of characters playing different roles with respect to specific other characters.  Shakespeare’s villains are  arguably the plainest instances of characters taking on assumed personae: Iago in Othello and Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, who both dissemble effectively enough to everyone but their henchmen, to whom they reveal personalities more like their true ones, engage in what one of my acting teachers called “Mask or Face.”  In “An Actor’s Homework, Part 2” (22 April 2010), I defined this acting tool as “the latter our true and honest selves revealed without pretense or disguise, the former a role we choose to play for the outside world to protect our vulnerabilities or conceal our motives,” and I explained, “Most of us have several ‘masks.’”  (Persona, Charles Matthews points out in his review of Why Acting Matters, is the Latin word for the theatrical mask.) 

Two of Shakespeare’s most complex “maskers” (another word of actor or player) are Richard III and Hamlet.  Richard is perhaps the more contrived dissembler in that he dons his alternate personae for the purposes of deception and we know he’s doing it and why.  He pretends to be the loving brother to gain Clarence’s and then King Edward’s trust, he becomes the ardent lover to woo Lady Anne, he plays the reluctant heir apparent as he rejects the offered crown, and so on.  I’m sure we all know people who can do this (we call some of them “politicians”; I was reminded of the crown-refusal scene when Paul Ryan repeatedly demurred when his party beseeched him to accept the speakership of the House of Representatives).  Hamlet’s transformations are more like our own—sometimes conscious and contrived and other times natural and spontaneous: the good and trusting companion to his comrade-in-arms, Horatio; a distracted but concerned suitor to Ophelia; the outraged but conflicted son to Gertrude; the suspicious and angry nemesis to Claudius; the distrusting and watchful companion to his school chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; with the Players, the conspiratorial conniver “to catch the conscience of the king”; and of course, the young man who’s “but mad north-north-west,” yet sane “when the wind is southerly” with Claudius, Polonius, and Ophelia, to give himself cover.  Don’t you recognize yourself in such guises—if a little less dramatic and extreme? 

That’s what I imagined I’d be reading and where I’d begin with my post. 

So I went out the first chance I had and bought Thomson’s little (178 pages) monograph and started to read it.  I quickly began wondering if I’d thrown away my $25 plus tax.  I couldn’t grasp Thomson’s prose, much less his ideas on acting.  His writing’s so loose, I had trouble actually following Thomson’s thread.   (I’d never read anything by Thomson, but my friend Kirk Woodward had and when I described my trouble, he observed, “Thomson strikes me as—how can I put this—as an expressionist writer,” an author who depicts his subjective responses to objects, events, and experiences, and further characterized Thomson’s writing as “woozy,” a term of W. H. Auden’s the poet defined as “too dependent upon some private symbolism of his own to be altogether comprehensible to others.”  In my opinion, Kirk nailed it.)  I had no idea where Thomson was going or what he was getting at.  If my intention was to read Why Acting Matters and then comment on it and pick up Thomson’s discussion for my own insights on acting in everyday life, which is what I thought the essayist was going to get into, I was apparently operating under a misapprehension.  I felt as if I was on a boondoggle, a wild-goose chase.

I put the book down in disappointment, and also because personal matters were intervening and I had to divert my attention pretty much full time to other things.  Then there were other posts for ROT that seemed more pressing or timely, including several performance reports to which I always give priority, and Why Acting Matters got shoved to the bottom of the pile.  I didn’t get back to Thomson for many months.  I did find it easier to read on the second try, but I still had trouble seeing where he was headed.  

Thomson, a British film critic and historian based in the United States, was born in London in 1941; in the 1950s, Thomson attended Dulwich College in southeast London, a school founded in 1619 by Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn.  He lives in San Francisco with his family and in 2014, the San Francisco International Film Festival presented Thomson the Mel Novikoff Award, “bestowed upon an individual . . . whose work has enhanced the film-going public’s appreciation of world cinema.”  He’s also served on the committee of the New York Film Festival.  Thomson, who studied filmmaking at the London School of Film Technique and is the author of several unproduced screenplays, taught film studies at Dartmouth College and has published more than 30 books including reference works such as Have You Seen . . .?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Knopf, 2008) and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (6th edition: Knopf, 2014).  Other books include biographies of David O Selznick, Orson Welles, Warren Beatty, and Nicole Kidman, and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, as well as books of essays and several novels.   As a journalist, Thomson’s been a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Independent, Film Comment, Movieline, Sight & Sound, the New Republic, and Salon.  Thomson scripted the 1988 CableACE Award-winning documentary The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind, directed by David Hinton for Turner Network Television (TNT).

Why Acting Matters is part of Yale Press’s Why X Matters Series, which aims to champion the cause of important disciplines and influential thinkers that are perhaps under-represented in modern discourse.  The series features pairings of authors with subjects and each volume, which already includes such titles as Why Architecture Matters by Paul Goldberger; Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman;  Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini;  Why Arendt Matters by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl; Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley; Why the Constitution Matters by Mark Tushnet, presents a concise argument for the continuing relevance of an important person or idea.

As I see it, there are two ways to look at Thomson’s monograph.  I can try to discuss his view of his stated topic, the significance of acting in human society, or I can dwell on his outline of the history of acting, theater, and film and the performers’ profiles he uses to illustrate that chronicle.  (This aspect of the monograph includes a simplistic but extensive—it threads throughout the book—discourse on the contrast between the British traditional approach to acting as modeled by Olivier and Vivien Leigh and the Stanislavsky-derived American Method, exemplified by Brando and Dustin Hoffman.  Thomson isn’t subtle about his preference for the British style.)  I find both approaches unsatisfactory.  In the first instance, Thomson’s own discussion of why acting is important is skimpy and unfulfilling.  I doubt I could wring more than a page or two out of it at the most.  In the case of the writer’s principal focus, however, I find Thomson’s coverage disjointed, digressive, and diffuse.  Most of it is anecdotal with a lot of questionable conclusions and a number of fanciful scenarios he makes up.  Besides, a history of performing isn’t what I wanted to write about for ROT.

The biggest difficulty I had with Why Acting Matters, however, is that Thomson’s writing almost exclusively about actors (Olivier, Brando, Leigh, William Holden, Daniel Day-Lewis most prominently) rather than acting, and it’s almost exclusively stories about their performances (screen and stage) and lives (especially their love lives).  (The author’s focus on the affairs and marriages of his actor-subjects, along with the manners and circumstances of their deaths, seems largely gratuitous and entirely gossipy, in spite of one reviewer’s assertion that “Thomson does not gossip.”  You better believe he does.)  Thomson states early in the book, a warning, I suppose, to readers like me: “So let us be quite clear—turn to some other book if you do not share in an uncritical love for actors; we revere them . . .” (p. 9).  Indeed, the book’s almost exclusively about Thomson’s own responses to actors in various roles; Olivier’s Archie Rice on stage in John Osborne’s The Entertainer (1957) when Thomson was 16 was a watershed moment for the writer.  Essentially, Why Acting Matters makes David Thomson seem like an inveterate star-fucker.  I didn’t get much of a point concerning why the art or craft of acting is important on some kind of universal level. 

Perhaps the cover illustration for Why Acting Matters is revealing of what I find problematic about this book.  It’s a photo of the head of an ape in three-quarter profile, looking sideways at the reader.  Why an ape on the cover?  “Acting is baked into our primate DNA,” asserts the dust jacket blurb.  Is Thomson going to propose that apes were really the first actors and that they passed that drive along to humans as we evolved and “flung ourselves down from the trees and began to walk upright,” as the front jacket flap has it?  But no, the photo’s not actually an ape at all.  It’s actor Andy Serkis as Caesar in 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  This fact is noted nowhere in the book (where Serkis or Dawn  aren’t even mentioned) or on the jacket, and I find this emblematic of Why Acting Matters:  Thomson doesn’t like to tell us what he’s really on about.  (Yes, I know that the author probably wasn’t responsible for selecting the cover art for the book.  But he certainly approved it.)  Thomson calls his “extended essay” Why Acting Matters (though, again, I know that the title was handed to him), but he writes about why actors matter—to him.  He also explores a little why acting matters to actors—which is a lot like looking at why carpentry matters to carpenters or cooking matters to chefs.  It’s like that GEICO ad on TV:  If you’re an actor, you act.  It’s what you do.  But that doesn’t help the rest of us much, does it?

(Now, Thomson does make a little something of this in his continuing contrast between Laurence—“Larry,” the writer likes to call him occasionally—Olivier and Marlon Brando.  Olivier, Thomson says, always relished acting and the rewards it garnered him, working at it until he couldn’t do it anymore.  Brando, on the other hand, not only gave up performing in his later years, negotiating the least amount of work he could get away with on his last films, he gave up on acting, having come to distrust it.  It’s a plausible analysis of an aspect of the characters of Thomson’s two recurring figures—the evidence of their lives and careers seems to bear it out as true—but I fail to see what this revelation—if it’s even that—has to tell us about the importance of acting to you and me.  A lot of what Thomson finds worthy to report leaves me asking that question.)

In addition, I feel Thomson makes pronouncements that aren’t just subjective (and states them as established Truth and Fact), but made-up: he’s prone to inventing scenarios that are pure fantasy—or “fancies,” as he likes to call them.  (One, to be fair, was purloined from a Nabokov story, but he doesn’t acknowledge that except in an endnote.)  They’re meant to illustrate something (about acting, I daresay), but I’m not sure what exactly.  (They’re mostly about filmmaking—not film acting, but the technical process of shooting a movie.)  I don’t have the expertise or historical knowledge to determine for myself if, say, John Osborne, playwright of The Entertainer which he wrote for Olivier, actually composed the play out of retaliation for the famous actor’s request, “Perhaps you could write something for me,” as Thomson asserts, “as if to say, ‘Well, see if you dare play this’” (pp. 24, 23).  While Olivier’s suggestion is backstopped by a citation from Arthur Miller’s Timebends (the American playwright and the British actor had just attended Osborne’s Look Back in Anger together), Thomson’s depiction of Osborne’s attitude is undocumented.  The book is chock full of assertions like that, and I can only take or reject Thomson’s word for their veracity. 

The fanciful scenarios are a different matter.  Although the first time I encountered one in Why Acting Matters I thought Thomson was repeating a documented passage from one of the several actors’ biographies and autobiographies he cites, the problem isn’t that they’re presented as fact.  They’re not once the reader twigs to the gimmick.  But they’re airy and aimless from my perspective—one’s a fantasy of Marlon Brando and David Garrick, the 18th-century actor, in the back seat of a New York City taxi, playing a scene from On the Waterfront  They’re not about acting and they’re not about real actors, or even real situations in which actors might sometimes find themselves.  They’re imaginary, and a writer—remember that Thomson’s also a novelist—can manipulate fiction to come out any way he wants, to make any point he wishes to make.  So what’s the purpose?  Some of these go on for pages; one makes up nearly an entire (short) chapter.  As one reviewer quipped about one of the author’s “fancies”: “Does he secretly hanker to write a novel?”

Even further, out of the blue Thomson imagines Spanish soccer-player Christiano Ronaldo playing Hamlet.  The essayist posits that footballers Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Pelé, Diego Maradona, George Best, and Johan Cruyff are like actors playing “themselves,” which, as much as their tremendous athletic skills, is why fans are fascinated by them.  (Indeed, Thomson admits that Ronaldo, “the contemporary soccer player with perhaps the sharpest sense of show business” [p. 12], reminds him of silent-screen heartthrob Rudolph Valentino or swashbuckling matinee idol Tyrone Power.  On that last comparison, the writer revised his assessment: “He’s Carol Burnett doing Tyrone Power.”)  Of course, this side trip mostly demonstrates Thomson’s own obsession with soccer, since he could say the same thing about any category of celebrity from industry leaders (Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Anna Wintour, Elon Musk, Lee Iacocca) to chefs (Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse, Julia Childs) with whom we become captivated.  It covers everyone who manages Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame.  Then we are indeed all actors—and no one is genuine. 

(Thomson seems to have composed his own author’s bio for the end of the book, and it’s in a similar vein as his other windy diversions—except that I assume it’s intended to be whimsical.  He relates that after film school, he went on to  “a rather overdone obsession with movies that was barely rescued by his career as a celebrity podiatrist”; I can only presume Thomson was, as he asserts, a foot doctor.  “Between soles and toes,” he tells us, he “conceived and wrote strange books on the lives and works” of actors and “a legendary study of Nevada.”  “Retired now from feet,” he concludes, one of his current occupations is “a researcher on left-handedness.”  “To hear” this, reports Tim Robey in the London Telegraph “is to feel a forced writerly eccentricity being rammed down your throat.”)

There’s something precious about these detours and the gossip, as if Little David were letting us in on his very private fixations, the things he keeps in a cigar box under his bed.  I felt the same way about the structure of Why Acting Matters.  Instead of chapters, Thomson divides his book into acts like a play script.  The chapter headings have titles like the scene descriptions of a script, too: “Act I: Towards the End of the Day”; “Act II: Twilight”; and so on.  The act titles don’t seem to have much to do with the content of the sections themselves—each one’s just as meandering as the others and contains essentially the same material.  The titles are pretty much arbitrary, and each one (along with the untitled epilogue) is followed by an epigraph made up of stage directions from a play or movie script (which also has little connection to either the act title or the chapter contents, and the source is only identified in the endnotes).  These are all little shiny objects that aren’t worth much, but Thomson finds them irresistible.

Now, I have to admit that some of the anecdotes—and even some of the gossip—is interesting, or at least titillating.  Thomson’s so enraptured by Olivier’s Archie Rice that his description of that long-ago performance (captured for posterity on film in the 1960 movie adaptation), which he says seemed only feet away from his seat in the balcony, is nearly as mesmerizing as the live experience must have been.  I was less engaged by the tales Thomson tells out of . . . well, the theater, I guess.  Olivier’s affairs (one, allegedly, with American comedian Danny Kaye) or other Hollywood cover-ups (Clark Gable once killed a woman in a drunken-driving incident).  Do I need to know that?  I think not.  And now I can’t not-know it. 

I don’t even begrudge Thomson his idolatrous attachment to certain actors and certain performances.  I trained as an actor and worked briefly in the profession so I share Thomson’s love for the practitioners of Thespis’ art.  I even used to keep a memory-list (never committed to paper) of individual performances that I thought were astonishing: James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope (Arena Stage, 1968), Stacy Keach in Indians (Arena, 1969), Alec McCowen in Hadrian VII (Broadway, 1969), Virginia Capers in Raisin (Broadway, 1975), Pat Carroll in Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein (Off-Broadway, 1980).  The list went on, though I no longer keep it, even in my head.  But I understand—and appreciate—Thomson’s enthrallment.  I also get how certain roles will always be associated with one actor no matter how long ago we saw it or how many good actors have assayed the part since.  I’ve copped to that feeling several times, most prominently in “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010).  But that’s all eye-wash: it looks good and hypes up the content, but doesn’t add any substance. 

As far as what David Thomson seems to think makes acting matter, it’s hard to pin down.  One reason, illustrated by his at-length reminiscences of stage and screen performances he’s witnessed, is that some of us soak that stuff up like sponges.  Especially since the advent of film, first still photography, then moving pictures a little over a century ago, and finally talkies after World War I, actors have become a fascination of much of planetary society—even in places where TV is rare and movies aren’t made.  (Video, DVD’s, and finally the Internet have spread access to movies—and, hence, the images of actors—to the farthest recesses of the earth.)  “For some of us, on some days, we spend more time with acted figures than with real people” (p. 149), asserts the writer. 

The “marketable celebrity of actors” has made them important to society and Thomson demonstrates this by delving into their sex lives, marriages, peccadilloes, and the bizarre or gruesome circumstances of their deaths.  (The frequency, in fact, with which the essayist mentions or alludes to death or dying makes me wonder if he’s not just a little morbid.  The significance to him of the advent of cinema, for instance, is not only that it allows performances to be captured for future generations of spectators to see, but that it endows the actor with “the beginning of eternal life” for, Thomson avers, “it’s not going too far to call” being recorded on sound film “life after death.” [p. 17])  But that’s hardly enough to declare that acting matters outside a small circle of devotees.

The next step, according to Thomson, is that the people the actors play in those ubiquitous movies and TV shows become our surrogates for, in the words of actor Simon Callow, “We see them as prototypes of ourselves and the people we know; their stories become our stories.”  “Don’t we go to actors as we might seek analysts or witch doctors or forgiving lovers,” asks Thomson, “on the chance of being made whole? . . .  If they can be extraordinary for an hour, we may dream of a new life” (p. 9).  Acting, he insists, “is a model for our existence and collapse” (p. 168).  Instead of the actors trying to behave like us, or others in the “real” world, we have begun to behave like the actors on the screen; they’ve become our models for everyday behavior in a kind of endless loop of who’s copying whom. 

Thomson seeds his book with a dozen or so more reasons for acting to matter, but with respect to the kind of acting we associate with show business (plays, movies, and television), the overall reason is, “because of our dying attempt to believe that life is not simply a desperate terrifying process in which we are alone and insignificant.  Acting may matter because we resist that atrocious plan” (pp. 7-8).  In Thomson’s final analysis, “the best everyday reason why acting matters” is: “It’s a way of getting through life” (p. 84).

I have some small problems with this rationale for the importance of acting in the lives of all humanity—for Thomson never restricts his field to, say, Western or developed cultures.  Yes, movies and TV have spread acting and actors’ images all over the globe and I imagine there are very few spots on the planet left where a George Clooney or a Julia Roberts or their counterparts from other filmmaking societies, isn’t at least vaguely familiar.  But I wonder how influential they are as models for behavior and demeanor in places like, say, Tibet, Tierra del Fuego, or Nunavut.  Would any of the male inhabitants be driven to try to launch a romance with a woman by taking two cigarettes from a pack, putting them both in his mouth, lighting them both, and then handing one to the lady—like Paul Henreid famously did in Now, Voyager?  Somehow I doubt it, even though it inspired many a fellow in the West to try it.  I doubt that many Inuit or Tibetans are so taken with actors and acting to the extent Thomson posits we are—even if he is right about the rest if us.

[With my mini-review of Why Acting Matters, I end the first part of my report on David Thomson’s monograph.  (A monograph, by the way, is a scholarly essay of book length on a specific, often limited subject.)  I hope ROTters found it engaging and provocative enough to come back in a few days and read Part 2 which, as I said above, contains my discussion of the real reason I think acting matters: how we use performance in real life.]

Fighting for Free Expression

[Last fall’s issue of Censorship News, the newsletter of the National Coalition Against Censorship, contained two articles about current struggles for the freedom of expression in U.S. society.  One is an aspect of academic freedom, the apparent proliferation of so-called trigger warnings in university course descriptions; the other is in the realm of artistic expression, the rise in charges of “cultural appropriation” by an imperialistic society.  As readers of ROT know by now, I consider myself a First Amendment absolutist: with the few well-defined and accepted limitations, we should be allowed to say, write, or depict pretty much anything we want to—as long as we’re then willing to accept the consequences.  (The First Amendment doesn’t protect anyone against public opprobrium or, more significantly, counter-speech.)  So it won’t be surprising that I stand with NCAC on these issues, and for that reason, I’m posting the two CN editorials on my blog.  ~Rick]

“WHAT’S ALL THIS ABOUT TRIGGER WARNINGS?”

[The following article is republished from the Fall 2015 issue of NCAC’s Censorship News (No. 123).]

Survey reveals a complex picture: threats to academic freedom are not just about ‘political correctness.’

If the headlines are correct, college students everywhere are demanding professors provide so-called “trigger warnings” to flag material that might make them feel uncomfortable, and in some cases to allow students to avoid the material. If this is happening widely, the free speech implications are enormous: A broad range of works, from a documentary about sexual assault to an historical account of slavery, could be considered ‘triggering,’ along with the possibility that many professors would steer clear of potentially controversial work.

But how prevalent are these demands? Is a resurgent tide of political correctness threatening higher education, or are the media jumping to conclusions?

To shed some light, NCAC worked with the Modern Language Association and the College Art Association this spring on an online survey of their members. While the survey is not scientific, the over 800 responses we received offer a birds’ eye view of the debate over trigger warnings, and the pressures on instructors.

The survey finds that formal university trigger policies are extremely rare: Less than one percent of respondents say their schools have them. But there is abundant anecdotal evidence suggesting that something is going on. It appears to be a bottom-up phenomenon: Students make complaints to individual professors or administrators, and instructors—many of whom are reasonably nervous about job security. As one survey respondent put it, “After teaching a course for the first time, a student complained in the anonymous evaluation. Ever since, I verbally include a trigger warning at the start of each semester.” Fifteen percent of respondents reported that students had requested trigger warnings in their courses, while over half reported that they had voluntarily provided warnings for course materials, with 23 percent saying they have offered them ‘several times’ or ‘regularly.’

So who is doing the complaining? In much of the media commentary, the focus is on left-leaning students using trigger warnings to chill speech they find offensive. One widely-read essay on the subject was titled, “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.” While this is certainly happening, and many respondents reported sensitivities to content depicting rape and sexual assault, the survey paints a more complex picture. Contrary to conventional thinking, warnings are sought by both conservative and liberal students. “I used trigger warnings to warn about foul or sexual language, sexual content, or violence in order to allow our very conservative students to feel more in control of the material,” wrote one instructor. Another teacher was aware of “religious objections to nude models in studio courses” and “homoerotic content in art history.” Another teacher noted the use of trigger warnings “because some students were upset by the realization that certain artists were homosexuals.”

Another common theme is that it is impossible “to be able to predict which topics will be problematic for students, or will ‘trigger’ a response.” “I’ve had students want pretty detailed and specific trigger warnings for, well, everything...,” including violent imagery in a horror film class. Reported complaints concern spiders, indigenous artifacts, “fatphobia,” and more. Many respondents draw a distinction between ‘trigger warnings’ and course or content descriptions. The latter are widely accepted as ways to convey information about the scope, substance and requirements of a given course. As many instructors have pointed out, offering students information about course materials does not necessarily flag content as disturbing or offensive, or offer students an opportunity to avoid it, but simply provides an explanation about what material will be taught.

The strongest findings in the survey are that instructors believe that trigger warnings, if widely used, would threaten academic freedom and inquiry. Nearly half of respondents (45 percent) think trigger warnings have or will have a negative effect on classroom dynamics; on the broader question of academic freedom, 62 percent see a possible negative effect.

Those who oppose warnings say they reinforce taboos, infantilize students, “tend to impede conversation,” “stifle meaningful discussion,” and send a message to students “about what it’s ok for them to get upset about.” In contrast, supporters say they build trust and “create a positive classroom environment,” show respect for the “individual needs of students,” create “a positive and safe space for dialogue,” prepare students “to engage with the material in meaningful ways,” and prevent them from feeling “blindsided.”

The survey revealed that many instructors are deeply concerned about their students’ wellbeing, and how best to fulfill the mission of higher education. And the demand for trigger warnings may reflect a desire by students to be more engaged in their education and their communities, which has positive aspects. However, the trick is to ensure that such an interest is not expressed in ways that preclude discussion, debate, and even disagreement.

What is a trigger warning?

[From the National Coalition Against Censorship website’s “NCAC Report: What’s All This About Trigger Warnings?” (http://ncac.org/resource/ncac-report-whats-all-this-about-trigger-warnings).]

For purposes of the survey, trigger warnings were defined as “written warnings to alert students in advance that material assigned in a course might be upsetting or offensive.  Originally intended to warn students about graphic descriptions of sexual assault that it was thought might trigger post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in some students, more recently trigger warnings have come to encompass materials touching on a wide range of potentially sensitive subjects, including race, sexual orientation, disability, colonialism, torture, and other topics. In many cases, the request for trigger warnings comes from students themselves.”

[A report on the survey, including a breakdown of the results, appears on NCAC’s website at http://ncac.org/resource/ncac-report-whats-all-this-about-trigger-warnings.

[I’ve posted previous articles on ROT concerning freedom of expression.  See, for instance, “The First Amendment & The Arts,” 8 May 2010; “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015; “The Return of HIDE/SEEK” with Contributions from Roberta Smith (New York Times) And NCAC, 4 January 2012; and “How To Free Speech” by Lee C. Bollinger (Washington Post), 23 November 2015]

*  *  *  *

“THE WAR ON CULTURAL APPROPRIATION”

[The following article was originally published in the Fall 2015 issue of Censorship News (No. 123), the newsletter of the National Coalition Against Censorship.]

Can a group claim ‘ownership’ of particular cultural traditions? And what is the effect on artistic expression when groups seek to protect certain ideas or practices from being absorbed or co-opted by the dominant culture? These questions arise as we seem to be in the midst of what one writer called a “new war on cultural appropriation,” with protests and social media campaigns forming against what is seen as inconsiderate or even offensive cultural “theft.”

Cultural appropriation is generally understood to be the use of imagery or expressions from another culture without permission, often in ways that misrepresent or stereotype a particular group. The term is generally applied to the taking of minority or indigenous artistic expression by dominant culture. What if the intent is not to steal but to honor particular traditions? And how does appropriation square with artistic and cultural traditions that heavily rely on borrowing and tribute to forge new modes of expression?

In March, a class of art students at Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) built a wooden teepee to create a space for connectivity, engagement, and reflection. But complaints from several indigenous students led to its prompt removal; to them, the project represented unauthorized appropriation of their culture. The art students, after meeting with the protestors and the college president, agreed to remove the structure ahead of schedule and to hold a campus forum to discuss the controversy. Coming only after the removal—a kind of admission of guilt—the forum seemed stacked from the beginning.

In July, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts planned to celebrate Claude Monet’s 1876 portrait “La Japonaise” by introducing “Kimono Wednesdays,” where museumgoers could try on an authentic replica of the kimono in the painting. But a small group launched a protest, arguing this was a form of racist “yellow face…that would compel members of the public to participate in Orientalism.” The protesters, employing rhetoric about the need to “decolonize” the museum, brandished signs next to the painting with slogans like, “Try on the kimono: Learn what it’s like to be a racist imperialist today!” One protester likened the display to exhibits “where visitors would come see people in cages brought from Africa.” One writer who supported the protests argued “this was not cultural exchange, but the exotification of an object for publicity.”

After initially standing by the project, the museum apologized and discontinued “Kimono Wednesdays.” But even that did little to satisfy the critics, who argued that the displaying of the kimono was still “inappropriate without proper mediation and acknowledgement of the Orientalism of cultural appropriation of dress.”

The journalist Cathy Young, writing in the Washington Post, referred to this dynamic as the “new war” on appropriation. And while the rhetoric deployed against those perceived as appropriators can be quite severe, the decisions as to what counts as “offensive” appropriation rather than the age-old cultural give and take can be difficult to discern. As Young put it, the “fine parsing of what crosses the line from appreciation into appropriation suggests a religion with elaborate purity tests….When we attack people for stepping outside their own cultural experiences, we hinder our ability to develop empathy and cross-cultural understanding.”

So how can artists or institutions present culturally specific material without being accused of colonialism? The Metropolitan Museum of Art faced similar dilemmas with a show on Chinese fashion. The exhibit, “China: Through the Looking-Glass,” did not avoid discussions of Western appropriation of Chinese iconography and expression—it made appropriation the focus of the show itself. The Met even presented the argument that the exhibit could represent a “rethinking of Orientalism as an appreciative cultural response by the West to its encounters with the East.” While that interpretation could be contested—and it was—the museum’s decision to confront the issue of appropriation head-on was commendable. It provides a model for other institutions and artists facing similar dilemmas.

[The Washington Post article by Cathy Young mentioned above is “To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation,” posted on 21 August 2015 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/to-the-new-culture-cops-everything-is-appropriation/2015/08/21/ed30de1c-4740-11e5-8ab4-c73967a143d3_story.html.

[Regular readers of ROT will recall that I’ve run into something of a “cultural appropriation” buzz saw on this blog.  When I published “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite” on 22 October 2010, I raised the ire of several Commenters who felt I shouldn’t have written about the Shalako ceremony at all.  (I have also posted articles on the Navajo healing rites, the Plains Indian Ghost Dance, and the Taos Pueblo—including the San Gerónimo Festival) without complaint.)  Those Comments are still posted for the interested ROTter.]