Expanding Our Range

So …

The purpose of talking out your preparation for ‘something I love and something I hate’ is to help you to connect and experience everything you say as an actor. Everyone keeps commenting on how useful talking out is and I would suspect it’s both because acting is out … and also it’s easier for experiencing an impulse. You sense it’s taking hold of you. It's something than doesn’t happen when you’re ‘thinking’ about it. Eventually, maybe, you can think about it and do it … but it’s no doubt because you’re kind of doing it while you’re thinking about it. 

We should probably make a list of discoveries we’ve made by talking out. “Failing” at the exercise has also been helpful, because we’re forced into trying to figure out why it didn’t work.

A couple of reasons:

Deciding in advance the effect you want clearly leads to pushing or forcing a moment that isn’t there. I’ve even noticed it with one of the actors I coach periodically. Because he doesn’t talk out the impulse for the scene he’s doing, the first shot of him (on the audition tape) is him ‘playing’ an attitude.

I’ve caught several of you falling in the trap of “saying” something as if you’re placing the experience in front of you, rather than living off an image or responding to the circumstances of your “play". I understand that. For years and years the most difficult thing for me was letting it happen rather than making it happen. Talking it out helps. At some point you will be living off your parter (or the prop … or the place …) – and talking out your relationship to the partner makes it so much easier to live off of them.

I also think when you “see it before you say it”, you find a less cliched response and you surprise yourself.  

Donald brought up “themes” (sorry about using that word) and the concept of universal … cosmic … ideas to give your work size. When he used ‘I love my office’ as an example - and added to it the idea that his comfort in his office made it a home, it suddenly lifted the whole idea. If you haven’t watched the Netflix documentary about the making of the song, “We Are The World,” make sure you do. For several reasons. Talk about a song with a big idea! But towards the end of the documentary Lionel Richie sits alone in the room where they recorded the song in 1985. Not only was he able to sit in this empty room and say, “Michael Jackson stood over there … “, he said simply, “This room is my home.” Took my breath away.

In a private lesson with Diego yesterday, another element was added. The first time he built something he hated, it was quite a long journey. He had to talk out a lot. Wandering around to find it. The second time he built it, it took maybe fifteen seconds. It’s a big lesson to learn. The purpose of talking out is not to find something that works so you can keep using it. It’s to find something that feeds an impulse. And once you have it, then it’s yours. You don’t have to build it again. [I should have recorded it, although maybe recording forces a performance. I guess that’s something to get used to.] It doesn’t mean that you ’shouldn’t’ or ‘can’t’ use the same elements, but you’re making choices that feed you … that bring you to life … and that’s the important thing. 

I’ve always known the problem with using something from your life. I’m never sure about it. I want you to understand what it means to connect and it seems as if it’s an accessible way to do that. I don’t want to use a character from a play, because then we’d have to do script analysis before you could do the exercise. You might decide in an exercise to do, “I hate being married to an alcoholic.”, which might be helpful in The Country Girl, but until you’ve worked on the play, you don’t really know who Georgie is. Kaleb caught himself building the past of Chris in All My Sons, – and realized he was building his own personal relationship to losing a friend in battle and not the character’s. Also - really important – Kaleb realized he wasn’t ready to build that yet. He didn’t know enough about the character or the circumstances of the play.

Give yourself a break. Acting is difficult. If it were easy, anyone could do it. You can’t learn it all in an 8 week class! Not even in my class!

The work Diego did, because it was so deeply personal, reminded me of the importance of expanding beyond ourselves. And so … I would adapt this exercise as you see fit. 

One choice is to choose something you hate and build it as if you love it. Or something you love and build it as if you hate it.

Another choice: choose something that you have absolutely no relationship to: I love space travel. I love driving a chariot. I love walking my dog in the winter. [I don’t have a dog.] I love that I’m so good at math. I hated life on planet Krypton.

Some others (that used to live in the imaginary vacation exercise): (these could be love or hate)

I love having coffee at the Cafe de Flore in Paris

I loved white water rafting in Montana

I hated the Great Wall of China

I loved scuba diving in Mexico

I hated sky diving

I loved snowboarding in New Zealand

I loved art classes in Florence

Expand on the use of your imagination. Some of it borne out of research.

And another thing…

“Something I love” and “something I hate” is really forcing the connection, but you can use absolutely anything you want. Almost as if you were using a fill-in-the-blank. But you’re building what earns you what you’re talking about. I sort of use the quotes that way. You talk about what you need in order to own the experience of the quote. It’s based on the same concept of connection.

Feel free to use other phrases besides love and hate. It can be anything. 

Okay. These are thoughts on a Monday when they keep saying we’re going to have a winter storm in New York. It hasn’t happened, but I’m hopeful.

More later.

MJ

CONNECTING WITH THE PLACE: A Conversation with Kaleb

KALEB: It’s one of 2 Dick Cavitt interviews I've been watching. I really get a sense of his connection to the place.

MILTON: Kind of. The action he's playing (which is a little bit like reporting, which happens when you're interviewed) keeps him from letting us really see his connection. Think about it. The action is of paramount importance. That's the reason knowing your action and the size of your action is so important.

How we talk about our past is completely influenced by the action. If Tennessee's action were "I want you to know about the most important moment of my life" ... it's one  action. If his action is, "It was a funny life," then it's another. I can tell you about the low point of my life and, depending on the action, you probably won't have a clear idea what my connection is to it. When I went through it, I was borderline suicidal, but ... let's say, ... you're in a bad place and I tell you about the worst moment of my life, the action is probably "You'll get through this." But if I'm with a bunch of other theater people and someone talks about the bottom moments of their career, the action might be, "You think that's bad! Wait until you here this one."

KALEB: Hmm....this is a monumental thing for me to understand. This has me backtracking now

MILTON: You actually know this, if you think about it. There is your personal connection with the place. In fact, there's your personal connection with the entire play. The theme certainly. The understanding of what the playwright is saying. Any number of things. Then, of course, there's the character's connection.

Since we're talking about the place, we'll stick with that. There's the kind of connection that happens at a given moment. Hypothetically, let's say "the first time you walked into it." That's one connection. Obviously, once you've lived there you develop another connection. Like anything.

Then there is your connection based on the given circumstances of the play. It's not general. It's specific. Based on whatever your action is. The action in your monologue is so rich with possibilities. You can choose (which I would) to talk out the first time you saw the angel – as if it's happening. But, you can also talk it out as a memory. These are two different actions - and your relationship to both her and the place would be different, even though the event is the same.

Are you going to be in class today? I think it would be good to discuss this.

LABOR DAY MUSINGS, SEPTEMBER 2024

Dear class,

Happy Day of Labor.

Just in case I decide to write another definitive book on acting, a couple of questions came up that seemed to be a good opportunity to comment.

Question from Северин (Severyn) in last class: In the podcast you talk about something I love and something I hate. I’m not sure what I’m doing with those.

Email from Douglas: With the Description Exercise: I find myself being accurate instead of being brought alive? Affected. Is that the aim of the exercise? Perhaps if I understand the purpose of it as you intended, I may find a way in/a way to come alive in the doing.

Something I Love • Something I Hate

As I confessed to you in class, I’ve never really been comfortable with the “something I love” and “something I hate” exercise. I hate the idea that I am using something from your own personal life to help you learn a concept of acting. Stella told us to make a list of five things we like – and five things we didn’t like. It was meant to have us recognize that we had opinions as well as expanding our knowledge of making choices. When I was studying I recall thinking how difficult it was to come up with five different things. Stella did that all the time. When we were describing the color of something she demanded we have five reds, five whites, and five blues. I thought I was being cute by describing something as having a “Monet blue sky”. She wanted to know what that looked like. I learned early on that our job as an actor was not to be poetic.

When I began teaching, I adapted the exercise to accommodate the needs of the actor in the latter part of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century. I changed “like” and “dislike" to “love” and “hate,” because I felt we had all mellowed out a bit and we need something to activate us. I also stopped asking actors to think of five things  before choosing one. I suppose I was afraid to make actors have to shop for choices. My real issue here is that I changed the vocabulary of the exercise because it seems to me that actors today are making nice choices and polite choices, – and it’s nurturing a generation of truly uninteresting and uninspired actors.

I trace this problem to the joy of modern technology. When we began watching television during family dinners, we began to lose the ability to communicate to other human beings. When my family had the Vietnam War on television night after night (often during dinner), the horror of war left us. The war became background noise to underscore the salad course. When long distance calls dropped to ten cents a minute (now, of course, they’re free), we stopped writing letters. Writing a letter took time. It took thought. It took focus. I can put my phone on speaker and clean my bedroom while chatting. The action “to chat” is by its nature all over the place. It has no direction. It takes almost no thought at all. It gets in the way of our communication skills. Would I give up any of this? Of course not! But we need to be aware that the luxury of watching the video instead of reading the book takes away from our imagination and our creative impulses.

Feel free to skip ahead, since I’m clearly on a roll this morning, but I’m aware that we must all be aware how both our imagination and our communication skills have been warped. My brilliant son came to live with me fourteen years ago. After dinner one night he headed to his room and returned to announce he’d broken up with his girlfriend. I mentioned that I didn’t realize he was on the phone. He explained that he had done it through text. As recently as yesterday one of my actors read an email he’d sent to a girl, recanting his suggestion that they move to a new level in their relationship. He’d run it by another actor (always a mistake) who’d declare it to be “fucking brilliant”.

I should probably add to these thoughts my feeling that modern music has virtually no dynamics at all – and this is also adding to blandness in acting. Everything drones on with the same rhythm and uses a very few notes and chords. I recently was tortured by an off-Broadway musical where an actor’s high note got applause from the audience. The song hadn’t even ended; it was a suspended high note in the middle of a phrase. And it was not even remotely earned. It was just a high note. If I’m not mistaken this is a regular occurrence on America’s Got Talent, where the audience is constantly overwhelmed with a high note. I would have done quite well in today’s market with the high note that regretfully I no longer possess.

I point these thoughts out as an explanation for a what I consider to be a constant problem with modern acting. It’s bland. Completely uninspired. What Stella once said in class: 

There’s a misguided direction that apparently comes from casting directors, encouraging actors to just talk. I’ve even seen a lecture by a casting director where actors were advised to talk faster. My only thought was a need to get the audition over with faster. Casting Directors are not required to know anything about acting, so of course they freely give out acting advice. [I feel the same way about the truly dangerous Ivana Chubby! She has no idea what great acting looks like, she is pleased with watching actors being indulgent and assumes everyone else does as well.] What I think the casting director is really saying is, “You’ve got a good look and I might be able to use you, but you’re overacting.” The solution? Just talk. Or you’re pausing to take moments that aren’t filled, so the solution is to talk faster.

This is all by way of explaining why I’m trying so desperately to get you to connect. But it’s not only to get you to connect, it’s to get you to actively connect with brilliance and insight, – so that as an audience member I “stop the motion of my hand from the bag of popcorn on its way to my mouth.” I have all sorts of ideas that can help, but what we’re after is that you as an actor always bring something that no one has never thought of. If you love chocolate, then the entire audience will love chocolate. If you hate chocolate, I’ll think twice before I eat those 300 calories. 

I have tried many exercises to try to get us to bring “the text” to life. Although I consider it a mistake to exclusively use your own life as a source, I feel as if you can one time know what it’s like to connect, you will then know what you’re aiming for. We are not the only ones with this problem. One of the teachers I met at the Stanislavsky Symposium in Prague told me he constant says to his students, “Mean it”. 

Back to the two exercises in question:

I think that it’s a good idea when you build something I love and something I hate, you build both sides of whatever it is … and you take on the challenge that you’re going to do both for the class and no one will know how you really feel. It’s the reason I suggest you take something do-able. I should probably put Boyu doing “I hate Milton” on vimeo as an example. [Although to my credit, one of the reasons he hated me was because I told him he looked like a bum and he needed to get a haircut … and he did.] 

Talking Out makes sense. If you talk out and don’t worry about performance, you will begin to commit to the idea you’re talking out … or to put it in terms of Stanislavsky, you build the subconscious. It also will help you when you bust your own chops and realize that you want it to be more important, more like Marlon, you will add elements as part of talking out, rather than pushing for an effect. Also, importantly!, the talking out leads you into the text. The text does not exist to explain what you built. If you develop this ability, you will be able to build experientially the impulse for the text you’re doing.

Keep in mind:

Your talent is in your choices, But…

You must earn the choice. You have to pay a price for the choice. The fact you say it doesn’t make it true. It demands that you know the difference between “You gotta match” - and “This piece of information will change your life”

The choice must be appropriate to ‘your play’. We aren’t so guilty of that in our group. I think the biggest issue is that that we make very safe choices. And because of it we fall short of the next issue …

It must be good theater. This is where I think we really do fall short. It’s safe theater, it doesn’t offend anyone, it’s polite, but as my friend, Sally, often points out, “It’s not very excitin’.” We play it safe.

And, if we’re not happy with our work, we can dig deeper. This is where we have many tools. “The more specific the bigger the pay off."

As to Douglas’s question about the description. 

If you start by merely building the accuracy of the description, fine. You start where you start, but then you add elements so you are not just bringing it to life, but in a “good theater” way. When I described my leaf to Stella the first time, it was completely accurate. When she asked me to repeat the exercise, she suggested that I start by saying, “Stella! I’ve just seen the most incredible leaf!” And then describe it. It was a simple impulse to add and I didn’t push it.

I would say that all exercises have the possibility of rising to being good theater. One of the paraphrasing exercises I’ve used in the past was to take an editorial and put it in your own words. The exercise was essentially meant to help actors identify the sequence of thoughts. But the accuracy of it practically put me to sleep. Seriously, the actors made tearing down the Berlin Wall seem like people were talking about taking down Christmas decorations from a Christmas tree. So I suggested that everyone start their exercise with “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” Stealing from Network helped almost everyone, except the girl who said it as if she was reporting the number of cows that were on the farm of Little House on the Prairie. I was relieved to hear she’d given up acting to become a therapist.

I had a revelation watch a 3 hour tennis match last night. I never got bored. It was great theater. I want us to be able to do a three-hour play and have the audience completely interested for the entire event. The way to do this is to keep every discovery fresh and exciting. Find the enjoyment int all of this. Fall in love with your choices. If you do this, you will be thrilled to audition. You will be thrilled to bring an exercise to class. If you don’t fall in love with it, keep working on it. This is not easy work. Your brother can memorize lines, but only you can bring them to life.

I’ve sent everyone in our Saturday class a list of quotes. Build what’s behind the quote and let your preparation build into the quote. These quotes all have big ideas in them. Figure out what we’re talking about in depth. We will also continue the scenes. Also, you will all be included in the Thursday class, which meets on Thursdays for the next ten weeks from 6 pm to 8 pm New York time. The people in this class have not been with us before and I have no idea what level they’re on. One of the girls, who’d studies with a Ivana Chubb “disciple” (God forbid!) was the one who’d been taught to feel guilty if she used anything that wasn’t from her own life. I’m stunned by how appalling this is.

I haven’t heard from everyone about Saturday, but I’ll include you this week. 

We can do this, but we’re on our own doing it.

More anon.

MJ