Merging Analysis & Technique

Some thoughts on acting on a Sunday afternoon.

As I see it, and certainly from the classes I took with Stella, there are two distinct areas of exploration in acting. The ability to analyze a script – and the technique to do what you’ve analyzed. Merging script analysis with technique is the goal of a lifetime.

It is particularly frustrating because you have to be smart enough to analyze the text, but at the same time lose the logic when it comes to performance, lest it become antiseptic or accurate. A college essay. Acting is not math. Two plus Two equals four-ish. 

It’s probably more like sports than any of us care to think. In my futile attempts to learn tennis, my tennis pro Scott would explain the backhand with such clarity, such step-by-step analysis, it seemed impossible to miss the ball. But yet, not only I - but countless professionals in the field, miss the shot. It’s just not so clear. Why do I own fifty books on acting? Why were that many books even written? [For kicks I just looked up on Amazon the number of books available on acting. Apparently there are 5,470, although this includes books on auditioning, which makes no sense, since one has nothing to do with the other.] Why am I even considering writing a book on acting! We are all trying to figure it out. Stanislavsky, who has somewhat fallen out of favor, wrote some forty books on acting that have never been translated into English. 

This is all by way of saying, you must weigh carefully what an acting teacher says before you accept it as The Bible. [That is, except for what I say.] It’s not that you should question everything, but you must begin to work to allow yourself to think whether or not something makes sense. Especially if you try something and it doesn’t work. The reason I was so relieved to find out that Elizabeth Hapgood had mis-translated a Russian word that led her to come up with the word “objective” [instead of its real meaning, “problem”] was because I never liked the word “objective.” It was too tepid and wishy-washy for my needs. The word meant to me you were striving for something  you might or might not accomplish. My opinion: it leads to weak acting. It certainly keeps an actor from committing to a strong choice. Stella was adamant about our making strong choices.

My reason for bringing up the above example is by way of saying the word objective never really made sense to me as an acting term. In the same way someone insisting you use your own life hasn’t made sense to you. That one particularly doesn’t make sense. “As if” makes it even more ridiculous. Why would you even remotely waste time going a through an investigation of what if you were living during the depression, what if you had a wife and two kids, what if you were a taxi driver, what if you only made $1 that day.

But how, you may ask, do you get the experience that might be missing? Ernest Hemingway suggested the creative impulses come from three places: experience, observation, and imagination. What he suggested was you must have two of these, one is not enough. I would suggest you must have imagination no matter what and both experience and the power of observation. The idea here is that what you lack in experience, you make up in observation. Kevin Bacon was working on a part once. I think it might have been when he was playing the convict in Murder in the First  and he said to me, “you should tell your students to watch documentaries. So they can see what the real characters are like.” I think this is one of the biggest flaws in today’s actors. They’re frame of reference is most often based on films they’ve seen. [Or as an actor said to Jesse yesterday in reference to an audition he’d had, “I imitated Will Smith from a scene in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”] Actors have often asked me: ‘what movie should I watch in order to understand this guy?’ Petrovski watches countless documentaries, which is a good thing, since he’s from New Zealand and has had basically no life experience at all. Not specifically for a part … just to watch human beings. His understanding of human beings is extraordinary. I’m not quite sure how he does it. I think maybe when he watches something, he imagines himself playing the part. 

Keep in mind, I’m leaving out of this email some major essentials, like working on your body, your voice, your hair … 

Focusing on these two parts of acting – Script Analysis and Technique. Like I said at the beginning and the reason you came over in the first place, you need the ability to read a script and figure out what’s going on. Just keep in mind, there are many, many elements involved. You also have to work at it a long time to get really good at it. And Script Analysis is on-going during the rehearsal process. It’s not as if you can analyze the script and then perform it. The more you work on a script the more insight you get and it’s almost as if you go back and then analyze it again.

While not mechanical - and not mathematical, there are specific avenues of approaching a script. If you look at either Stella’s book on Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg or her book on American writers, you can see how complex the process is. Obviously you’re not going to get it instantly. In fact it’s the reason every actor I know looks back on parts from earlier in their lives and says, “now I get it!” In the Documentary Dinner Party I filmed with Eli Wallach and his wife, Anne Jackson, Anne talked about a monologue she had done as part of a fundraiser she and Eli had done the week before for the theater in East Hampton. I did this docu-dinner in about 2005. In the early 1950’s Anne had been the first Major Barbara in America. When it premiered on Broadway. There is a stirring monologue at the end of the play which she had performed for the fundraiser. She explained to us at dinner, ‘doing the monologue the other night was the first time I saw what Shaw was talking about. I really got it.’ We’re talking about a monologue she had done fifty years earlier. 

My point about this is: don’t demand of yourself that you get it right. It’s the flaw in our educational system. We are taught to get it right, to get the right answer. It completely strangles the actor’s talent. You must allow it to move slowly into your being. The two biggest mistakes an actor makes when they read a script are (1) deciding how to say a line of dialogue and (2) deciding how to perform the character. Well … there are a lot of other mistakes, but we’ll start with those. Kind of hand-in-hand with that is reading a piece of text and making a performance decision [he’s really sad, she’s really pissed off, the scene is really intense, ….] and then figuring out how to play this decision. As in: she’s really depressed - and then playing a cliched idea of ‘depressed’. 

It seems to me the approach to a script is: there is a world where the play exists. In Waiting for Lefty it’s the world of Clifford Odets during the Depression in America. Death of a Salesman is in an Arthur Miller world after the World War II, when change is taking place and the world is moving forward. In your play we’re talking a world of little people, not sophisticated or educated, who live lives of survival. Then we have a character in this world who is or is not able to function in it. And we watch him. An over simplification, of course, but it tells you that at the start of our work we need to begin the discovery of what world we’re in.

And, it seems to me, if I begin every play with the idea I know nothing, then it forces me to look specifically at all of it. If you were to be playing an aspiring actor in his late twenties, living in New York in 2016 with the idea you know nothing about that, it would make everything alive to you as an actor. You would have to explore the world of 2016. What acting is like in 2016 – a period where Leonardo di Caprio can be nominated for acting awards, where it has become a business and one that requires social networking etc etc etc. All of these pieces of information begin to stimulate your mind, your creative juices – as you begin to piece together the brush strokes of the painting that will become your performance. 

That’s where we are at the moment. We’re cobbling together pieces of information we’ve gotten from the text, which is beginning to bring you to life in terms of this character. In terms of making choices that feed him … or feed you in developing a “him”.

With all of this the secret is don’t jump to performance conclusions too quickly. Shopping for great choices takes time.

Okay … that is really [really!] skimming the surface of thoughts about script analysis. As we continue to work, we will layer in more and more explorations of script analysis. Writing this note to you brings up all sort of issues I don’t want to get into at the moment. I’m more interested in your questions about all of this.

On the other side is: The Technique. 

Once you begin to understand what your play is about, you obviously need the tools to access your understanding. There was a Russian teacher named Dimitri at the school in Los Angeles and he very smartly used the idea of tools as a metaphor for the technique. Very much the way a carpenter has certain tools he uses for certain jobs, tools he may move to the top of his tool chest, the actor does the same. Certain tools apply for various roles and there’s really no order to it. Certain things apply always, but the actor’s process is really up to the individual actor. The point is, you don’t just answer questions. And really importantly, you don’t report the facts of the play - as if in recognizing them, you can act them. It’s the reason Stanislavsky fought the idea of a vocabulary of acting. Because he realized the problem of a specific vocabulary. It cripples an actor’s talent. Trying to slot creative impulses into an outline. 

… to be continued …

THE JOURNEY, NOT THE DESTINATION

It's extremely difficult to understand the joy of the journey and not the destination. I have had the joy of teaching the same people over zoom ever since we entered the pandemic. Over two years with the same people ... and for a long time there were basically no auditions so we spent our time actually working on acting ... and not worrying so much about results or "getting a job." 

I bring it up in one chapter. The Russian word: razbor. Digging down to what's really going on. I'm close friends with the head of acting at USC – a true Stanislavsky scholar. I called her at one point to discuss some issues that had come up in class. Her comment was, "Wow! You're really digging into that bottomless rabbit hole." It has been fantastic.

In answer to your question I really consider myself a teacher. And I have such a high regard for the concept of being a teacher that I didn't feel entitled to call myself one for the first ten years of doing it. 

I think the nature of being a teacher is someone who never stops exploring. My book is the first idea of work that went on for years and kind of came together three years go. I now know much more, because I smartly never rest on what knowledge I have uncovered. I have taken to heart Mr. Stanislavsky's belief that the method is not a guide but rather a culture, which means it constantly evolves and changes. 

The email format definitely moves me out of academia for sure. In fact I'm certain college professors will hate it. I don't reference this incredible knowledge of Russian or any translating I've done. (None, by the way!) All my work has to do with what I've learned while working with actors on various levels of involvement. I love directing, but only from the idea of being a teacher-director. 

I'm fairly sure this is not what you were asking, but I've been coaching actors fairly consistently for two days and I'm kind of in that mind set.