True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor Read Online Free

director, the opponent on the stage, with, bravely, shoulders squared. And then, rather than pretending, we can
discover
whether or not we are courageous.
    ——
    Most of us, in the course of a day or a week, treat ourselves to the fantasy of the Bad News at the Doctor’s Office in which we are invited to sit and hear our fate. And in that fantasy we are stoical and simple, and that is of course what makes the fantasy so pleasing to indulge in—we wait to hear the verdict on our future bravely.
    Similarly onstage. The actor is placed in that position somewhere between regularly and constantly. He or she needs something the other person onstage has (in the case of the Doctor’s Office fantasy it is information). The actor is given the opportunity to be brave and simple in difficult circumstances.
    Here’s a hint. The opportunity for bravery is always there—it is always in the play itself.
    Let me explain. The actor says to himself, “I can’t play this scene because I am unprepared; I can’t play it because I don’t like the other actor, who is a swine; I feel that the moment is wrong as the director has interpreted it; I feel this flies in the face of my preparation; the script isn’t as good as I thought it was,” and so on.
    All of these feelings are engendered by the
script
and they are always and only engendered by the script. The fantasy that the play brings to life (the bad news from the doctor, begging for the child’s life, refusing the crown) supplies everything we need to act—and all our excuses, all those supposed “impediments” to acting are, if we listen closely, merely the play asserting itself. The actor creates excuses not to act and attributes her reluctance to everything in the world except the actual cause. The play itself has brought her to life in ways she has not foreseen, and she doesn’t like it one small bit. I realize this observation may seem simplistic and even Pollyannaish, and I wouldn’t credit it myself except that I have seen it to be true over too long a time spent in show business.
    We say, “I can’t play the scene in
Hamlet
because I am unprepared, I can’t play the scene in
Othello
because I don’t quite trust those around me; I can’t play Desdemona because I don’t believe the fellow playing Othello would actually act that way. I can’t play Bigger Thomas because I am furious at everyone around me. I can’t play the Madame Ranyevskaya scene because I simply don’t care about this project anymore.”
    All of the above and every other “I can’t” excuse is engendered by the play because our suggestibility knows no limits. Our minds work with unbelievable speed assembling and ordering information. That is our protective device as animals, and it has enabled us bothto defeat the woolly mammoth and to vote for supply-side economics—we are infinitely suggestible.
    As much as we theatre folk like to think of ourselves as intellectuals, we are not. Ours is not an intellectual profession. All the book learning in the world, all the “ideas,” will not enable one to play Hedda Gabler, and all the gab about the “arc of the character” and “I based my performance on …” is gibberish. There is no arc of the character; and one can no more base a performance on an idea than one can base a love affair on an idea. These phrases are nothing but talismans of the actor to enable him or her to ward off evil, and the evil they attempt to ward off is the terrifying unforeseen.
    The magic phrases and procedures are incantations to lessen the terror of going out there naked. But that’s how the actor goes out there, like it or not.
    And all the emotions and sense memory and emotional checkpoints will not create certainty. On the contrary, they will only dull the actor to the one certainty onstage, which is that the moment is going to unfold as it will and in spite of the actor’s desires. The actor cannot control it; he or she can only ignore it.
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