BROWSE Columns
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I. Emoting vs. Action (2016-2024...)
Affected affects are often applauded. Witness the 24/7-Ages-of-Man Act: its Lead Creep-in-Chief unwilling in responsibility, “Quick in quarrel”, who twitters from a “fair, round belly”, his “second childishness and mere oblivion”.
Even this has-been can spot the sleights-of-emotion.
All the world’s a stage, so all the world is audience: Doubled thus, some sometime players are easily played, as sometime spectators, who ballyhoo emotive Herods, laud reality re-hacked TV reactions over the reality-of-doing: that in-the-moment honest illusion also known as: acting.
Emoting steals the scene from ethos, our highest offices in hand, extorts applause, ovations, with appointment-book rehashed reaction. Projected, broadcast, replayed, streamed. Manipulation/Authenticity, they weigh the same, screened, or live, at 24 frames/second — “How did you feel?”/ “Can you tell us how it felt?” becomes the high- defining creed, upstaging character, draining us dry...
II. Method vs. Imagination ...And speaking of empty vessels, one, a myth-y player, walks off, though the lead, leaves a venerated stage... or, another instance: an actress, unmasked inadvertently in the wings, but still on the wing, neither by need, nor circumstance—she sobs after the action is played out. Or, the stick of butter-in-the-ass, unrehearsed, complotted as “craft”.
Each construed as what Art requires: stiled / fetishized as ‘Method’.
“The Method” : Ends to justify self-manipulative means; even artful ends, even masterful results realized, through affects that confound effect and fact, though no evidence that pathos must trump ethos. Or ought to. And, no – reason not the need: let be be not finale of seem by necessity. Less "Method", please, and let intention with imagination fire the act bodies forth our frenzied dreams, bridge the distance between self and truth, cast the spells on our mind’s eyes, to melt moods like ice cream.
III. A Player Speaks of Illusions
“Take paines, be perfect...” : @ Bottom... Consider the audience paying admission: Admission to what and to whom? To me? My emotion? My solitude ? : that’s misconstrued. The audience for my pains don’t attend my pain, but their own. They don’t yearn my angst, but my honesty—that they might exorcise their illusions: to become rapt, become involved apart, god-like omni-eyed and all-eared, feeling all, until
Blackout! Lights Up! (or The End)
Returned to their selves, having never left, they feel moved. It’s not their stars, risen or would-be that they fondly come to witness; it’s rather, themselves – to espy Art where their faults lie. To laugh at, to harrow, the mirror stage...and its double.
IV. Staying “in character”
The prima donna will importune the crew, to kneel, abase and efface themselves before imperatives of pretentíous pretended pretense: “My character would this, but would not, could not ever that; therefore: Carry me to the set, for my character is [in-breath] paralyzed !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thus, principled preciosity imposes all that the writer never wrought, expounds it as categorical history. Acting as re-enactment or abreaction: address the “player”, Mr. President, not by his name; discuss the current Union situation at Gettysburg, even as he texts the screenwriter, scene partners, or risk destroying this "Method" which dares not call itself illusion.
Sure: it looks good, sounds good, (maybe even feels good?) on camera, or at a distance: results are results, it cannot be argued; but at what price, at whose expense do we fill and replenish our leaky vessels with pretenses so fragile they demand obeisance?
V. November 22, 1963. ‡
New York City
Our hero: an acting student, a doubting Thomas, goes to the studio. The teacher is late and then one enters announcing: “The President has been shot!”
(Exits)
But, ever vigilant to the precept “use everything”, to see all “be” as a potential “if”, a fellow student, unable to imagine the day, supplants the messenger’s message, adding:
“It’s an improv.”
...Thusly, Thomas tells us, the agonies commence. Our hero, joins in, as best he can, though being a self-confessed connoisseur of anger, not sorrow, the “imagined” event does not ignite his auto-flagellation apparatus. His peers work-up tears and unreliable memories, conjuring Belief, or its country cousin, Pretense; then they’re egged by the messenger’s return, shedding honest tears now, to confirm the president’s death.
Emotion’s acolytes methodically redouble their doubling boiling troubles.
Only a third report, from a radio, jars them true: assassination actually, not imaginary. So, what then? Stricken faces, stricken as struck can be, can strike at what pose, after supposéd honesty exhausts every pose assumed in truth’s name? Our hero looks ‘round the studio—Punctures, I imagine, on the sharp point of Hamlet’s Advice to the Players: How it offends me to the soul to see a passion torn to tatters, to very rags. Thomas’ doubtful mind is clenched in his cohort’s faces, a mirror trap: their hypocrite homage to honesty. Nothing left untainted, no honest face available, but shame.
Exit Thomas: forsaking the scene, foreswearing the stage. But what if...?
What if action had reigned in that room over emoting? Would our hero have had cause for shame?
To wit: the same sorry moment, in Boston — the conductor changes the program to a funeral march: puts aside his own sorrow and his musician’s pains; They act, in concert with circumstance; they are present to the moment and audience - their gift. No shame to play, then, on the best information available: the musicians do not play because they feel, but in despite of their pain; they act to outface Grief and Silence, illuminating catastrophe with the truthful: A flourish that needs neither painting nor gilt.
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‡ V. 1963, November 22, New York City
Drawn from Thomas de Zengotita’s essay, “Attack of the Superzeroes”, Harper’s Magazine, December 2004, and news accounts of what happened at Orchestra Hall, in Boston, on that day.
Other acting/performance lore referenced in this advice: many bits of the Bard; moments in Daniel Day Lewis’ career as recounted in the public record; an inadvertent moment witnessed by the writer from the “nosebleeds”, after a storied production of Death of a Salesman; the notorious stick-of-butter assault of Maria Schneider during Last Tango in Paris, authored by Bertolucci and Brando.
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Le Rochefoucauld:218. L’hypocrisie est un hommage que la vice rend à le vertu.
Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
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American Heritage Dictionary
hypocrite: ...from Greek hupokritēs , actor, from hupokrīnesthai, to play a part, pretend; see hypocrisy.
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For those especially interested in the history of acting technique and wondering about those haiku summations.
Between II and III - “the bear”: In Acting Power , one of the more influential texts on American actor training, by Robert Cohen, he uses a schematic image of a bear chasing a runner to illustrate the difference between being “pushed” by the past/emotion and being “pulled” by the moment/intention.
Between IV and V - “the Ideal Actor” This image is from a TV or film documentary on the late Peter Brook, the great British director of pathbreaking productions across cultures and traditions, and author of seminal essays like The Empty Space. The name of the documentary is lost to memory and the Internet as of this writing. In it, there’s a segment where Brook shows the camera a ceramic figure depicting an actor / theatrical character: it’s brightly painted, with a wide-eyed, mouth wide open expression, and all four limbs extended. He mentions the origin of the figure (South America, as I recall) and showing the front of the figure to the camera, he says that to his mind, it embodies the ideal actor: he then rotates the figure to show that the extended limbs and body are completely hollow, whereas it appeared completely solid when viewed face-on. This image presents an interesting contrast to the explanation Daniel Day Lewis gave for why, as a young actor, he abandoned a performance of Hamlet: he said he was an “empty vessel” and had nothing more to offer. The two images, Brook’s ideal and Lewis’ apologia might not be directly contradictory images, but they do seem to herald very different ideas of what it is an actor might have to offer an audience and what demands the craft actually imposes on performers.
After V - “Think the thought”
This was the first performance maxim I tried to inculcate, from 9th grade, courtesy of Nancy Webster, my forensics teacher and coach. It’s tautological simplicity and practicality found an echo sixteen years later, in my first MFA acting training lessons from Yuri Yeremin, a highly lauded director of the Pushkin Theatre, in Moscow, when he told us: « Искусство актера - это искусство действия », or, as our class’s translator helpfully rendered it: “The art of an actor is the art of an action”.
Also referenced generally here is a clinically concise definition of acting that I came across listening to a 2016 interview on the BBC show “Hardtalk”, with Dame Diana Rigg. She defined the job of acting this way: “When you accept a part, you have to measure the distance between yourself and that part, and you have to fill it with truth.” Diana Rigg’s dictum seems cognate to Sanford Meisner’s definition of acting, “To live truthfully under imagined circumstances”. Meisner, was the founder of the Neighborhood Playhouse — ironically, or doubly ironically? this is where Thomas De Zengotita was taking his acting class. Currently, Meisner Technique is not synonymous with “The Method” (Lee Strasberg’s technique, developed at the Acting Studio.) Although, both techniques are responses to Stanislavsky’s system as innovated at the Moscow Art Theatre, Meisner came to eschew reliance on “emotion memory” or “affective memory” to prepare roles — in contrast to Strasberg. Meisner’s evolution was in parallel with Stanislavsky himself, and was akin to Stella Adler’s, the other great acting teacher to come out of the Group Theatre, with Meisner and Strasberg. Following Stanislavsky’s late career example, Meisner and Adler relied on script analysis, imagination, and physical actions as the basis for preparing roles.
De Zengotita’s account of his class raises the question of where Meisner was in his own development as a teacher— and how acting students might understand, then and now, their own training, given the outsized visibility of media accounts that purport to relay elements of “The Method”, via insider accounts of what happens on movie sets, etc.
James Spencer, originally of Detroit, lives with his family in Lausanne, Switzerland. Current stanza: teaches public speaking, recently workshopped poetry with Maurice Riordan & Richard Scott. Also, a student (again) : École de français langue étrangère, l’Université de Lausanne. His first journal-published poem, “Character“, is on La Piccioletta Barca; before that a community dance company Beacon Dance in Atlanta used his poem “Kinship / Skinship” from a Medium site and they cited it as inspiration, which made his day for a few days. Previous stanza: U.S. regional actor, MFA American Rep Theatre / Moscow Art Theatre School.
