"THE ACTING LESSON": fiction

The old woman writer sat at her keyboard sipping her steaming coffee, grateful for it since she was up so early that even in August the air was cool.  She had set the sprinkler and would try to remember to change its location in a half hour.  Her self-assigned task for the morning was to make a moment in the life of a “Method” acting coach come alive.  The “Method” was a way designed by a Russian named Stanislavsky who somehow knew -- before modern research had proved it -- that memories are stored in humans by sensory information and that properly managed memory will cause the body to signal emotion that other people can recognize, which is what acting is all about.  Well, some kinds of acting.  She began.

The phone rang.  It was a director who was working on a play -- still early days but no one ever had enough rehearsal time.  “This woman looks perfect for the part and she auditioned pretty well, but as we work it becomes clear that somehow she is guarding emotion.  She seems willing, but she doesn’t appear to know how to get in touch with herself.  Will you see if you can break through that glass shell?”  She agreed and met the young woman mid-morning at the theatre. Carrying take-out coffee, she glanced around to make sure no one else was there in the dark auditorium.

The girl stood on the lighted stage, not knowing where to put her hands, just like all the rest of them.  The coach slung her bag onto a seat, then went to sit in a row against the back wall to force the girl to project.  She asked the usual questions:  where did you grow up?  What is your favorite play?  All were answered in a clear, projected voice.  

“What makes you feel like shit?”   The girl froze.  “Oh, nothing.  That would be terrible!”  She was very poised, very Miss America.

“Maybe you are shit as an actress?”  Rigid, appalled, but no sign of resistance.  No answer.  “Walk upstage left.  NO, that’s upstage right!  All right, return.  Your walk is stiff.  Have you had dance lessons?”

Small voice.  “Yes.”

“Show me some steps.”  Ballet first position, graceful port d’bras, some turns.  Irreproachable.  Uninspired.  The door creaked and the director slid into the seat next to hers.  “You see?  She’s supposed to be a captive in a war-torn city but she poses -- there’s no reality to it.  She signals compliance when she ought to be projecting resistance.  She’s too damned NICE.  She’s all presentation.”

“I’ll see what I can do.  No guarantees.”  The door creaked again as he left.

The young woman looked uncertain now.  She didn’t know what the director’s visit meant.

“Do you see the mover’s packing quilt on that grand piano over to the side?”

“Yes.”

“Go get it.”  She did.  

“Now wrap yourself in it.”  The girl put it on over her shoulders as though she were an Indian chief wearing a blanket.  “Wrap your WHOLE self in it! Over your head, over your face.”  She did.  It was stiff but big, almost like wearing a yurt.

“How do you feel?”

From inside: “Safe.”  The coach thought that over.  Maybe the glass plate across access to her emotions was the product of fear.  What would she be afraid of?

“Are you afraid of being replaced in this part?”   Movement.  A bit of a wait.  Then, “No.”

“As a child, what were you afraid of?”  

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

Long wait.  “Why are you being so mean to me?  You are supposed to help me.”

“Go on.  Say more.”  There was no body language or facial expression to hide behind and now her voice began to sound more real, even muffled as it was.  The coach went soundlessly up to the stage and stood behind the girl where, even if she weren’t wrapped up, she couldn’t be seen.  In a soft voice she hissed,  “You’re safe in your cocoon.  No one can get you in there.  You can be anyone, you can say anything, you can reveal who you really are because we can’t see you anyway.  We can’t even throw things that will hit you, because you are completely padded.  What do you want to do?”

Long pause.  “Did you see ‘The Black Swan’?”

“That’s a movie.  I don’t give a damn about movies.  I want to know who YOU really are.”  Activity under the quilt.  What the hell was going on in there?  “Are you sure you really WANT this part?  Are you sure you want to be an actor at all?”

“Why can’t you just help me.  Just tell me what to do.”

“The character you are playing tells you want to do.  This is a woman resisting a force that could destroy her, kill her, torture her.  We need to believe that you could face that.”

. . . . . 

Oh, shit, thought the old woman writer.  The sprinkler had overflowed onto the driveway and was running into the street.  Someone was bound to report her for wasting water.  This little ditty of a story wasn’t working.  It takes YEARS to get really guarded people to find out they can reveal themselves without being specific.  And these days everything goes to the sexual.  All moral courage is reduced to finding some sexual partner who will have the power to transform them. 

The short trip outside helped her think.  “Just jump,” she thought.

. . . . . .

The young woman suddenly threw off the packing quilt.  She had removed her clothes and stood there nude and defiant.  She wasn’t that attractive nude.   Needed work: toning, build some muscle. The defiance was useful. Then the coach saw the scars on her thighs and knew what the secret was.

“A cutter, eh?”

“Torture doesn’t scare me.  I can stand pain.  In fact, it feels good.  I do it to myself.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it.  I’m not impressed.  What good does it do you or anyone else?”

“I’m an evil person.  It’s my punishment.”

Suddenly the acting coach changed.  She was impressive even at rest with her high-bridged nose and dead-black hair, raccoon eye makeup, long-fingered hands with one big ring -- not a diamond, a citrine.  She charged straight into the girl’s face:  “You aren’t capable of anything worth punishing!  Your sin is not what you think it is, it’s that you don’t fight back!  You just accept what happens to you!  You’re a lump.  You’re ordinary.  You refuse to grow up.  You’re SMALL.”

“My mother says I’m evil.”

“Your mother knows nothing.  She is manipulating you.  She knows you hurt yourself and she is glad.”

Now the girl was weeping.  “She doesn’t know.  I hide it.”

“You hide everything.  It’s easier.  You’re taking the smooth way, pleasing everyone.”

“You’re not a therapist.”  A weak little voice.

“No, I am not.  So what are you going to do about it?”

There was a long pause, the girl standing in the middle of the fallen gray quilt so stiff that it stood up around her in peaks and ramparts.  The coach gave her a few feet of breathing room and waited for her to process.  It was a big thing to grasp so she waited a long time.  The girl’s body began to change, straighten, grow taut and strong.  Now she knew what to do with her hands.  Her face gathered light from the scoop-floods clamped to the batten overhead.

“NOW say your lines!”

“. . .all that you can do, for all your crown and your trappings, and your guards—all that you can do is to have me killed.”

“NOW you are Antigone.”

. . . . . . .

The writer stood and stretched.  Time to shut off the hose and get dressed.  Where’s that cat?

THE ACTING REVOLUTION

My core collection of books about acting starts with my high school “The Stage and the School” which is illustrated with photos taken at Jefferson High School in Portland, OR., in the years I was a kid in Melba Day Sparks’ dramatics program (Class of ’57).  The shelf continues with the texts acquired in Alvina Krause’s acting classes. (Class of ’61).  Now I own textbooks Marshall Mason (classmate), Robert Benedetti (near classmate), David Downs (later AK student) and two theorists, Peter Brook and Richard Hornby.  I’m excluding from this book roundup some arcane stuff about performance and so on that more properly belong to philosophy.

I include the years because in those decades a Great Shift in theatre was underway, driven by a Great Shift in technology and society as a whole, both triggered by the one-two punch of world war and economic reconfiguration as much as anything else -- unless you think maybe the shift came first and triggered the war.  Be that as it may, Richard Hornby in his book “The End of Acting: a Radical View” (1992) describes something I witnessed without comprehending.  It wasn’t the end of acting: it was the end of one way of looking at acting.  And the world.

Realistic, proscenium-framed, script-based, repertory/ensemble, audience theatre was just ending as the dominant medium of theatre.  Rising in replacement was film and valuing of highly emotional, often improvised, acting controlled by editing as much or more than by directing; often a critical (oppositional) witness against authorities and often cross-cultural; watched by individuals in homes; possibly staged in the round or with audience and actors mixing; possibly unexpected street performance.  This coincided with a shift from emphasis on groups of actors to individuals, often with a concentration on personal success -- Big Names.

Swept up in this was the end-career of Alvina Krause and her last generation of academic students.  The juggernaut of the university, reframed in terms of the Big Money Corporation that values athletics as an essential and research as pursuit of profit, simply eliminated her world, snuffing all objections.  AK’s career, which had begun in the semi-religious oratorical world of Cumnock, was now thrown up against the psychoanalytical émigre mystique of Lee Strasberg.  To her admirers she was the truer teacher of the “Method” theories of Stanislavsky.  Her name still appears on CV’s as a mark of quality and achievement.  Privately she disavowed Strasberg whom she felt pushed people towards madness, an accusation sometimes leveled against her!  As far as Stanislavsky was concerned, she said that every good actor develops a unique personal method.  

Hornby describes Strasberg’s version of Stanislavsky with these points.

1. Strasberg never studied with Stanislavsky, never met him, nor read him in Russian.
2. What he learned was from the American Laboratory Theatre in New York where Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, emigrés from the Moscow Art Theatre, were the teachers.  This was in the Twenties.
3. Strasberg was not an actor.  Stanislavsky was.
4. Strasberg directed very little.  He was a classroom theorist.  Stanislavsky was a stage man.
5. Neither Strasberg nor Stanislavsky was good at  dramatic literature, but the latter had a strong partner, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was an excellent advisor at the Moscow Art Theatre.  Strasberg had no such partner.  The closest he came was Harold Clurman at the Group Theatre, who pushed Strasberg to appreciate Clifford Odets.  When Clurman left, Strasberg developed an opposition to literature and pursued the personal reality of the actors, more like a therapist.
6. Stella Adler actually went to Moscow and interviewed Stanislavsky, whose theories and methods had gone on developing.  When she came back and tried to tell Strasberg, he denied her version.  The Strasberg Method did not evolve.
7. However, the Strasberg Method is more subtle than it is usually portrayed, and for actors who understand it, the results are remarkable.
8. Hornby feels that one Strasberg concept that DOES jibe with Stanislavsky is the necessity of relaxation.  (Krause often asserted this.)
9. Stanislavsky does not go beyond the idea of imitating reality, enlivened by remembered personal details of the actor.  Strasberg accepts the entering of personal reality, which is, of course, possible to do on film but not during a stage performance.
10. In sum, Strasberg’s method is NOT based on stage work.  It is classroom exercises, much glamorized by the American star system, the great emphasis on individuals and their daring to be extreme.  But it was an energizer for an active theatre scene and served experienced actors, who already had their stage techniques (esp. voice and movement) internalized enough to be automatic.

Something parallel was happening throughout the humanities:  writing, painting, music, dance, and even religion -- a movement towards individual experience and away from technique or tradition; a valuing of emotion over reason but at the same time a great leap in technology and science that exploded the powers of human beings.  Stage theatre was confrontive, experimental, jesting, cruel, and spectacular.

That’s a far cry from the original roots of universities in the teaching of medical and religious dogma.  Academia was thrown for a loop until they hit upon the idea of an Master of Fine Arts, a separated stream of learning with its own credentials and ability to generate tuition. The high theatre idealism of the first half of the century -- the valuing of the whole company, the respect for traditional humanities canons and criteria -- was replaced by personal ambition.  The NU School of Speech was completely re-organized and re-named the NU School of Communication.

I often think that the most accurate description of the sequence of events we sometimes call “history” is the cautionary tale of Simple Simon who always knew what to do for the LAST thing that had happened though it always turned out to be a disaster for the PRESENT thing happening.  You remember?  He worked as a farm hand for barter. When paid off with butter, he put it under his hat to keep it safe on his head, but it was a warm day and it melted down his neck and face.  So his parents told him next time he should put his barter in a bucket of cold water, but the next time he was paid off with a puppy, which drowned in the bucket.  So the next time -- told he should have tied the puppy to a string and led it behind him -- he was paid with a sack of flour which he dragged behind him on a string until a hole wore in the sack and all the flour leaked out.  For a relatively short time -- though it included WWI, the Roaring Twenties, the Big Depression, WWII, and the Cold War -- AK’s methods of teaching acting were in sync with stage theatre.  Strasberg was (maybe without quite realizing it) dealing with actors for film.  It was a kinder revolution than the one Stanislavsky suffered in Russia.

So what is the present and the near future?  A bucket of cold water or being dragged on a string?  It looks to me like a mix.  For those who are still “middle-class”, theatre is spectacle and escape, the Broadway musical.  In some places repertory/ensemble lives on.  But I see the world turning back in a chilling reality loop to the theatre of protest-surrealism.  IPhone witnessing to the return of oppression and violence.  The minority people I know are participating in non-threatening high school dramatics and cowboy movies.  But that’s good preparation for something far more intense that they can’t see from here.  No script yet. Prepare to improvise.