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

suggestibility. The script is going to live in its own unforeseeable ways. The other people onstage will be acting in this rehearsal, in this performance, in this moment, in this take, in their own unforeseeable ways. Therefore you the actor, as you will be dealing with both the script and the others, as you are
seeing
something you did not expect, will likely befeeling something you did not expect. You will be brought to feel, as I said, “I cannot play that scene in
Hamlet
because I am unsure; I thought I understood it and now I just don’t know. Also, the other actors seem to want something from me I am not in the position to deliver”—which is, of course, the same situation in which the audience discovers Hamlet—what a coincidence.
    How can the actor know that that which he or she is feeling in the moment is not only acceptable but an eloquent and beautiful part of the play? The actor cannot. When onstage it’s not only unnecessary but impossible to attribute one’s feelings, to say, “I feel A because I am overtired, and I feel B because the ‘character’ should feel it, and I feel C because the fellow playing the king opposite me is a ham,” and so on.
    Actors like to attribute their feelings, as this gives them the illusion of control over them. Everything they try to wish away is the unexpected; which is to say again, the
play
.
    The question is, how can an actor know or remember that? And the answer is, the actor can’t. Time onstage moves too quickly; and the moment, if one has time to consider it, is long gone by the time the consideration begins.
    So wisdom consists in this: do not attribute feelings, act on them before attributing them, before negotiating with them, before saying, “This is engendered by the play, this is not engendered by the play.” Act on them.First, although you won’t believe it, they’re
all
engendered by the play; and second, even if they were not, by the time you feel something, the audience has already seen it. It happened and you might as well have acted on it. (If you didn’t, the audience saw not “nothing,” but you, the actor, denying something.)
    The above is true and it’s difficult to do. It calls on the actor not to do more, not to believe more, not to work harder as part of an industrial effort, but to
act
, to speak out bravely although unprepared and frightened.
    The middle-class work ethic: “But I did my preparation. It is not my fault if the truth of the moment does not conform.” That ethic is not going to avail. Nobody cares how hard you worked. Nor should they.
    Acting, which takes place for an audience, is not as the academic model would have us believe. It is not a test. It is an art, and it requires not tidiness, not paint-by-numbers intellectuality, but immediacy and courage.
    We are of course trained in our culture to hold our tongue and control our emotions and to behave in a reasonable manner. So, to act one has to unlearn these habits, to train oneself to speak out, to respond quickly, to act forcefully, irrespective of what one feels and in so doing to create the habit, not of “understanding,” not of “attributing,” the moment, but of giving up control and, in so doing, giving oneself up to the play.
    Acting in my lifetime has grown steadily away from performance and toward what for want of a better term can only be called oral interpretation, which is to say apageantlike presentation in which actors present to the audience a prepared monologue complete with all the Funny Voices. And they call the Funny Voices emotional preparation.
    In life there is no emotional preparation for loss, grief, surprise, betrayal, discovery; and there is none onstage either.
    Forget the Funny Voices, pick up your cue, and speak out
even though
frightened.

I’M ON THE CORNER
    T he best advice one can give an aspiring artist is “Have something to fall back on.” The merit of the instruction is this: those who adopt it spare themselves the rigor of