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

the artistic life.
    I was once at a marriage ceremony where the parties swore “to try to be faithful, to try to be considerate …” That marriage was, of course, doomed. Any worthwhile goal is difficult to accomplish. To say of it “I’ll try” is to excuse oneself in advance. Those who respond to our requests with “I’ll try” intend to deny us, and call on us to join in the hypocrisy—as if there were some merit in intending anything other than accomplishment.
    Those with “something to fall back on” invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternativesee the world differently. The old story has the mother say to the sea captain, “Take special care of my son, he cannot swim,” to which the captain responds, “Well, then, he’d better stay in the boat.”
    ——
    The most charming of theories holds that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays—that he was of too low a state, and of insufficient education. But where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?
    It is not folly to ascribe the
oeuvre
to the unlettered, but it certainly is so to ascribe it to the nobility, whose entire lives were, to torture the conceit, “something to fall back on.” It is both comfortable and prudent to have a fall-back position; and those possessing the happy same cannot help but have their work colored by it—such work must be more rational, considered, and possessed of the communitarian virtues than that of an outsider. Such prudent work would tend to shun conflict … well, you get my drift.
    The other side of the coin is pride. One could say, “I am a fool, for I have not provided myself with an alternative”; one could also say, “I see nothing else worth my time,” which is, I think, a rather strengthening attitude.
    The cops say, “I’m on the corner.” Young folks in thetheatre might have it, “Molly can go home and John can go home, I am
never
going home.” Bravo. And good luck.
    Those of you with nothing to fall back on, you will find,
are
home.

BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
    T he prospectors of the Old West were in the mining business whether they knew it or not because they enjoyed the life of the outdoors. None of us is going to take it with us when we go, and all of us are going to go; and the prospectors, had you put them in a room which had billions of dollars of gold in it, and told them the gold was theirs, would they have been happy or sad? Or had they been given everything that that billion dollars could buy, would they have been content, or would they have longed to be back in the wilds with their burro, so to speak?
    It’s the same with the quest for fame and recognition. Certainly the drive for them is real. But let us exercise a bit of philosophy.
    We’d all like to be thought well of, to do noble things, to do great things, and to be respected. But is it worthy of respect to act in a manner we ourselves feeltrivial, exploitative, demeaning, or sordid? How can that command the respect of others; and would we value the approval of someone who is taken in by behavior which we know to be shoddy, grasping, and mercantile?
    And yet our truly noble desire to do good work, to contribute to the community, becomes warped into an empty quest for something which we call success—that quest where many of you and many of your peers will squander your youth, your simplicity, and whatever you may have of talent—that quest in which you might be sitting for literally years in the outside offices of some casting agent begging for a role in a trivial manipulative piece of what is finally advertising and may not even be entertaining advertising at that.
    An actor friend of mine moved to L.A. and did not work for three or four years. One day I asked how he was, and he told me he was angry, as he had just spent the day waiting to audition for a