Speaking of High Stakes....

Picture by Perry B., courtesy of B.U.Drama Dept.




I'm going to get blasted for this I know, just for sheer cheekiness, and I acknowledge it. Its true. As Peter O'Toole said, "Only civilians talk about acting." Guilty as charged. I haven't acted in almost two decades. If I'm anything its a civilian. But, I DID do some time in the trenches and do remember a few things. So it was a pleasant treat for me, after so long away from it all, to revisit it as a spectator. I was out at a friend's acting class the other week, (he asked me to audit it) and I did, and it was interesting, because, as I said, I hadn't really been around young actors for around fifteen years, and I found they really hadn't changed much. They still bounced around like puppies, still vying for some invisible spotlight, and still trying to control whatever scene they were in of their own devising. It was adorable and amusing and touching, since I remember doing that so much (too much probably) myself when I was ahem, in my early twenties. But as I sat there, I realized something suddenly, (An insight! An insight! Yes, its true, I do have them, and not just when I'm hungover) and that is, actors, except for the time when they're onstage, really have no control over anything they may or may not do professionally. They can only decide to take the job, if they're offered it, yes or no.

Think about it.

Their casting is up to someone else, where and how they move is up to someone else, hell, even the words they utter is up to someone else. They are moving dolls who are expected to provide the sound and soul of a play or a film. We sometimes think of them and their doings as crazy, but is it any wonder? Who wouldn't go crazy when you are so absolutely at the command of others? No wonder they seize the moment to command a stage when they can and or their sets and stages if they make it to the level where they can exercise control. No wonder they become directors and producers, and often have a profound distrust of writers who come to interview them. If I spent my livelihood mouthing other peoples' words, I'd be wary around people who were going to manipulate my OWN, let me tell you! It makes sense, and its logical in a way.

As Garson Kanin once said, actors need to act, that's why they're actors. So it was fascinating to watch and see how they learned. I was watching one girl in this class, who was playing a school bully and she had remarkable eyes, shining and very alive. She played the scene and you knew, just knew, she was the bitch. It was implicit in her body language, in the inflections of her voice. She telegraphed it in no uncertain terms. I was watching her, and I thought, "O.K., she's the bitch, and she plays the bitch very well. But its nothing new. There's nothing she's going to surprise me with." I wondered, what if she had played the character nicely, sympathetically and gave nothing about what she was really thinking away? If she was, in fact, all deception? What if she deceived the character opposite, the audience, everybody? She could do it in the context of the scene. It wouldn't change the point of the scene at all, but it would give it more nuance. Villains never think they're villains anyway, and even if they do know it, they're never stupid enough to tell the other characters. Look at Richard III. He acknowledges his villainy to us in the beginning of the play, and then spends the rest of his time fooling the other characters until he becomes kind and then all hell breaks loose. We anticipate it, because its fun. But how much more fun is it when we never suspect? This actress I was watching could have made that choice, and it would have the scene so much more exciting to watch because we wouldn't have known what she was up to. But telegraphing your intentions right away simply takes the air out of the scene. You're sitting there, thinking, "So what? Now I get to watch you play a stock character for the next fifteen minutes." Hardly inspiring.

Now, of course, you could argue, the part is written that way. Of course it is. Its bad writing. Bad playwrights always tell you how to act. They don't have enough skill or faith in their craft (to say nothing of their faith in the average actor) to simply concentrate on the truth of what they're trying to say, to pare it down to its bare essentials so that the actor can do his job and make it live. They don't know how to do that with their writing, and so they put a lot of exposition in the stage directions to cover up their lack. Read good plays, and you'll find that rarely do good playwrights do that. Shakespeare never did, except when somebody got killed, and then you'd see something like, "dies". in the script. But other than that? Hardly ever. Chekhov never did. Tennessee Williams describes his characters ad nauseam when he introduces them, and then leaves them alone. Eugene O'Neill, same thing. Beckett, hardly at all. Mamet writes FOR actors and makes them work at it. The good playwright may indicate slightly, but they never make a habit of holding the actor's hand through the performance. Bad playwrights do that. Good playwrights concentrate on the dialogue, and leave the actors alone to do the rest. Incidentally, THAT'S how you find good actors.

That said, I was watching this young crop of mostly twenty-somethings, the girls all strikingly pretty, the boys all jockish and virile looking. Some were good, some were bad, but I noticed they were all mumbling and underplaying. Now I know acting for the camera is a totally different animal than acting on the stage. Onstage, its the body and voice, on film, its the eyes. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that film acting is trickier. It requires greater concentration in that its a) technically more complicated, and b) you have to harness all of the same energy into a laser like focus right into that camera, all the while ignoring that it's there. It's fascinating to watch. I was watching them, and even given the fact that they were all underplaying to the camera, they were also lowering the stakes of the scene too. To put it another away, they weren't investing their scenes with the emotional energy the scene deserved. They were afraid of being TOO big for the camera I would guess, and so they threw those moments away, instead of just concentrating and making bold choices and moments that make a scene come alive, they played it safe and treaded softly and as such, the scenes were, well, boring to watch and just basically died aborning.

I've often noticed that when you tell actors to play for higher stakes, (bad actors anyway) they simply think it means they should get LOUDER. It doesn't. Upping the stakes doesn't mean you alter what you're doing. You just give it more energy. Acting takes a LOT of energy. Even if you're playing a tired, dying old man, it takes energy to push that out, to get that across the proscenium to those people out there in the fiftieth row. (Its also I think, one of the reasons I gave up acting. I just didn't have that kind of energy. I do now, but I didn't then. Shows what age can do for you.)

But back to what I was saying, upping the stakes as an actor doesn't mean that you rend your hair, scream and sob while walking through a pair of French windows asking "Tennis, anyone?" or go about slashing your wrists while commenting on the profusion of Azaleas that year.

It simply means, (so far as I've been able to tell) that you commit to what you're saying, make the scene, make the lines MEAN more. Or basically, tell the truth. Mean what you're saying. If you're talking about a cornfield, visualize the corn in your head. If you don't know what a cornfield feels like, go find one and stand in it. Do what you have to do, but KNOW what you're talking about, otherwise how will you ever be able to invest your belief in it? And if you can't believe in what you're saying and doing, how can you really expect an audience to?

The nice thing to report is that they weren't, not one of them really, a lost cause. They have a great teacher who understands all of that, and more importantly understands each of them and why some do well, and why some don't do well. What remains to be seen is whether or not they will listen to what he says and learn from it. I've seen good teachers and I've seen bad teachers, and if you've got a good one, suck up everything you can get from them, because they're worth their weight in gold. Let's hope these ones do.