Chapter 21: Emotional Inner Life: Playing the Opposite

 Chapter 21

Emotional Inner Life: Playing the Opposite

Emotional states are involuntary, unless they are indulgent. 

Another paradox of acting: We actors want the direct opposite of what the character wants.

While we, as actors, want to create the emotion that the characters are experiencing, my character wants to avoid that emotion at all costs.

My character is crying. My character wants the tears to dry up and leave him alone so he can get back to life as he had known it. I, as the actor, want the tears to flow freely, so that everyone will believe that I am in character.

My character is depressed. My character wants the depression to go away so he can get back to a happy life. I, as the actor, want the depression to take hold and envelop my being so that everyone in the audience will feel what my character is going through.

I am not speaking of neurotic characters who secretly love crying and depression and want more of it. Those people are actors within their own lives. But for now we are discussing the less complex human reactions.

“But what about the positive emotions?”

All right, give me an example.

“How about love?”

Well, how about love? What do people experience as their objective when their circumstance is that they are falling in love? Can any of us remember back that far?

I remember wanting to concentrate and get back to work. There I was, thinking of her all day long, when I had a million things to do!

And then there were those occasions where my love was unreciprocated. (Okay, most of the time.) Or even those many, many occasions where I was so certain that any expression of love would go unanswered that I did not even allow myself any indulgence in the sentiment. It was not a happy feeling.

Or even when I allowed myself to indulge a little bit in the emotion, it was not a show of joy. I would pop a disc into the player and sing along to sad, sad, sad, miserable love songs. (“Every time we say goodbye, I die a little.”) If I liked anything, it was the opportunity to indulge in my misery and to feel justified, self righteous, even triumphant in my right to do so!

Which tells me that when an actor plays “falling in love,” and he gets some sort of happy, blissful smile upon his face, he has no real sense of what falling in love is.

Emotional states are involuntary, unless they are indulgent. 

I may want to indulge myself in my depression, or my love, to try to amplify the emotion, but in fact, 95% of the time, I am being thrown involuntarily into a state of being over which I have no control, and as such, choose to resist.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare depicts Beatrice and Benedick who have long adored each other, but have hidden that fact successfully over the years through insults and sarcasm. It is only when they discover that the other is supposedly secretly in love with them that they allow themselves to indulge their feelings.

But their, and our, first reaction to an emotion is to fight it.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have time to be in love right now; thanks though!”

It is a law of physics

In order to maintain balance, every action is followed by an equal and opposite reaction. When the action is crying, my reaction is to tighten my lip, hold open my eyes, widen my nostrils, stiffen my jaw. Perhaps I paste a smile on my face so that no one will know of my sadness.

When my action is laughter, I raise my hand over my mouth, duck my head, bite down on the insides of my cheeks, contract the muscles of the stomach, lift my eyebrows. I even turn down the sides of my mouth and look out from underneath my eyebrows, as if to hide my laughing eyes underneath them.

When I am upset, or angry, I try to diffuse it with uncomfortable jokes that no one else seems to find funny.

As an actor, then, the danger is in playing the emotion directly. I would have to be a pretty simple character to simply smile when I am happy, and cry when I am sad. It is, in fact, the effort that I exert to counter that smile, or that cry, that reveals to the world just how powerfully the emotion is acting on me.

And more importantly, it gives me something to play.

If I get sad and cry… if I’m good at conjuring tears, then they come and I play the tears and I’m done. There isn’t much complexity and not much of an action for an audience to follow.

If, however, I am not so good at bringing up the tears, but I spend every last ounce of energy that I have in trying to avoid the tears… trying to stop them from coming, then two things happen:

1)   The audience has a lot more to follow. Suddenly there is action as an internal struggle rages within me. Rather than an “attitude” that may occupy my face for minutes at a time, an ongoing struggle plays its way across my face as conflicting impulses occupy it for fractions of a second at a time.

2)   I fool myself. As I put up the big fight, biting my lip, brushing away the tears, tensing my neck, holding back breath that is struggling to expel, and inhaling through my nose, before long the opposite will overwhelm me. I am filling myself with the action of “don’t cry,” and the crying will rush in upon me, if only to balance my system.

If I’m putting up such strong resistance to an action, my body jumps to the conclusion that the action itself must be incredibly powerful.

Let’s look at anger.

Cognitively, I may well know you didn’t mean me any harm. The more I work to convince myself of this, the more my being notices the struggle in the convincing. The more the struggle, the less likely the truth of the explanation.

Think of someone who has done you harm. And come up with all of the reasons why you cannot be angry with them. Perhaps they are older, weaker or ignorant. Perhaps they give to charity, or support a family, or do wonderfully creative things in their spare time. I suspect that for every one reason you come up with to not be angry with them, your mind thinks up two more reasons why this reason is irrelevant.

You can’t fool your mind, however much you may try.

And your emotions are your emotions are your emotions. However much we struggle against them, there they are. They hear your reasoning, and are always there, waiting, with a “yes, but…” The more you fight them, the more powerful and uncontrollable they become, even if your prevalent action is to deny that they even exist. How many times have we heard someone screaming furiously “I’m not angry!”

We don’t like for a force that is out of our control to take hold of us. If we get pushed, our tendency is to push back in the opposite direction. Even if that force is a pleasant one, our initial reaction is to resist. If we can only capture and play that initial reaction of resistance, we capture truth, or what exists as truth, onstage.

One more consideration: When we fight something, we give substance to that something. We make it “true,” whether on stage or in life. We tend to resist a headache by tensing up our head, resisting any sudden disturbance to our aching brain. And yet it is the process of releasing the tension surrounding the head, allowing the headache to pound itself out, which will give us real relief.

What you resist persists.

In Driver’s Ed we learn to respond to a skid by turning into the skid. We lose traction and turn into the direction of the slide, where our wheels can gain traction again and steer us out. It is in the process of steering opposite to the skid that we turn our wheels at a 90-degree angle to all of our momentum, which makes the situation worse.

Maintain the fight and you will, as a result, maintain the emotion. By engaging in the fight we give the emotion its reality.

And emotions aren’t real.

There is no thing that is an emotion.

There is only a process in the being that stirs us in one direction or another. It is, in essence, a conversation that we have with ourselves. A conversation that says, “I must have her, and if I won’t have her I will die…” “That’s ridiculous, I can do quite well without her, thank you very much!…” “But look! Look at her! If I can’t have that…!”

Emotions are constructs of a conversation within ourselves. We can dictate the terms of that conversation. Usually, we play victim to the outcome of that conversation. “I just love him, that’s all! There’s nothing that I can do about it!”

It is a conversation arguing over the truth of the matter. And as we argue, an essential truth is constructed. That is: that we are having an emotion.

How do we lose an emotion? Really lose an emotion? When we actually want to stop having it, or to have something else as our emotion?

We make something else more important.

Emotions occur because we have made something very, very important in our lives. And when it moves, we move. We struggle to resist, or we struggle to have. But put another object in its place, something else to absorb our attention and our being, and emotions surrounding the first thing go away. Maybe not immediately, but eventually, acting in accordance with the more highly valued importance of this other thing, we set the first thing aside and move on.

When we see the conversation in our head as something that we can choose, then we can choose new conversations. Eventually, we mourn the dead, absorb the loss, and start again. Some mourn the loss of a loved one for the rest of their life. That’s the conversation they choose. Because they feel it’s a conversation they ought to be having. They generally insist that it is not a choice at all.

Emotions are involuntary.

Actions aimed at fighting or denying emotions, define them and give them weight and seeming reality. This is the physical manifestation of a conversation we are engaged in. And the more resistance we offer up against the emotion, the longer that emotion will stay with us.

But releasing our resistance, putting another object of greater importance in front of ourselves, initiating a new conversation, changes the emotion.

And some of that is a lesson in acting.

And some of that is a lesson in life.

Chapter 41: How Actors See the World

Chapter 41

How Actors See the World

A good actor not only believes in him or herself onstage, but also understands the specific level of belief that is relevant to the project at hand.

A true story, told with as little detail as possible...

As a university faculty member I was requested, on occasion, to adjudicate a performance for the American College Theatre Festival. The term adjudicate has, of late, fallen on hard times, smacking of judgment and finality. We now refer to them as “responses.”

But back in the day, they were adjudications, and I went to see a production of Peter Pan that was, to this adjudicator’s thinking, of less than superior quality.

We (they sent us out in pairs, then) instinctively sense that there are issues, particularly when the director is making far too much of our presence. A battery of ready excuses is presented, suggesting that sickness, politics, misfortune, conspiracy or some other forces have taken action against the production, limiting the success of the result. (All of which may be, and probably are, true.) The director is certain, however, that trained adjudicators will see beyond the adversity to the quality of the initial vision. Somewhere in the background of this conversation linger issues of tenure as the director seeks something on paper to bear witness to the quality of his or her work, while the school is contemplating, perhaps, the opposite accumulation of evidence.

This night was not to support the argument on the director’s behalf. Which is not to say that the director was a bad director or a bad person. But tonight’s show was not so great.

When a play is not executed well, the adjudicator/respondent becomes more suggestive than direct. We make very few sweeping statements about the-quality-thing,” and discuss more specifically the “choices” which might have been made in a more opportune manner.

As the evening, and our response, drew on, it was difficult to limit the many “choices” which we enumerated, so that, however delicately we may have couched our criticism, and however wittily we may have tap-danced around serious issues, the impression was ultimately left that the play did seem to lack in that ever-elusive category of quality.

The next responsibility of the adjudicator is to get out of town without doing any more damage than absolutely necessary.

But on this occasion there were people who wanted to chat, and we lingered.

Evidently everyone was walking on eggshells tonight, and I cannot say for certain that the quality issue was not exacerbated by a difficult cast, or the trap of some nasty inter-departmental politics. I simply suggest that the director’s demeanor did not start me thinking with confidence about helmsmanship.

I was approached by one of the thirty or forty cast members, one that I assume, has gone on to bigger and better things in the many years since this conversation.

“I was just wondering if you could tell – you must have been able to tell – that there was one actor on that stage tonight who had lost all the joy of performing?”  

Um… I’m sorry?

“You must have seen – I mean, how could you not have seen – that there was one actor on stage who simply didn’t enjoy performing any more.”Well, there were, like, thirty-five people in the cast.

[Thirty-five people on a monster of a stage, which swallowed them up like ants on a hill.]

“Yes, but certainly you noticed that there was someone who just wasn’t enjoying himself up there.”

Do you mean… you?

“Yes, I mean, how could you not tell? I was completely bored and put off. I just don’t even actually know if I want to be a performer anymore.”

[I looked at him more intently. Some memory of our post-show discussion (in which this actor had been an active participant) clicked in the back of my head.]

You played… the dog.

“Exactly. Yes. I was the dog. You could tell. Couldn’t you?”

You were wearing… a dog suit.

“That’s right! That was me. So. You saw.

”Um… the suit kind of covered you up from head to toe. There wasn’t any part of you that was actually showing.

“Yes, but certainly you could tell in the general… listlessness of my character, that all the excitement was gone.”

You know, given the fact that the suit pretty much covered you up… and most of your ‘lines’ were, like, barks and growls, I have to say that I wasn’t really reading that much into it. I mean, beyond a certain requisite level of… of friskiness, which, I must say, you performed beautifully, the general… malaise that you seem to be describing didn’t quite come across the footlights.

Need I explain how difficult the actor found this to believe, and how earnestly he told me of the sadness of his disenchantment with the theatre?

Nor did I have any difficulty imagining the struggles in rehearsal, as the dog questioned at length the details of its motivation.

This is the way that actors think. It is all about them. The audience must be so committed to the details of this actor’s particular, individual performance that they are, in fact, reading the actor’s mind! Even beyond distances of a hundred feet, amid a crowd of a cast of thirty-five, and through the intervening, obstructing veil of a dog suit!

If you are not an actor, you may not get what’s so funny about this. If you are, you are laughing with recognition of a significant percentage of the people you have worked with.

But this also points up the impossibility of an actor truly knowing how he comes across, or sensing the “big picture” of what the play is all about. To that  actor, the play was about him. The inconvenient presence of Peter, or Wendy, or Captain Hook, the bands of pirates or lost boys, simply took away from the story of the dog… who was now disenchanted with the art of acting.

A good actor not only believes in him or herself onstage, but also understands the specific level of belief that is relevant to the project at hand. The rules are different for children’s plays than they are for adult plays. They are different between musicals and dramas, between dramas and comedies, between farces and fantasies, and between lavish pageants and psychological explorations, and when you treat a fantasy as seriously as you would treat Anton Chekov, for instance, you are expending a lot of unnecessary, and probably counter-productive energy.

Mark Twain said “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.”

We actors are at the center of our own special universe. Some actors embrace that notion, and are actually often more successful for the fact of being unable to comprehend the crude mechanics that shape the audience’s point of view. But they are usually not very pleasant people to work with.

Preface: Acting at the Speed of Life!

Bonjour my Friends!

Welcome to the "Acting at the Speed of Life" blog!

This is my opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts about acting, many of which will be appearing in my forthcoming book, "Acting at the Speed of Life!"

In fact, I expect that most of the work that I share in this space, at least to start, will be sample chapters from the book. I want to put some of these words out into the universe, and generate interest in the work! (Current plan is to put out a chapter -- they're mostly short -- each week!)

For now, let me get out of the way. If this work lights any fires for you, and you would like to get on the list for a copy of the entire book for yourself (currently 267 pages of fun!), drop me a note at tim@timmooneyrep.com, and I'll let you know THE DAY that it's ready, and how you can get your copy!

Tim

Preface

We all want to know just why the author has called us all here tonight. … And the modern actor runs interference between us and the playwright.

What are the actors’ two most fundamental responsibilities?

I like to kick-start each workshop with this question, if only to startle actors out of their passivity. The responses fly back at me:

“Being in character.”

“Memorizing your lines.”

As a playwright I like that answer.

“Feeling the emotion.”

“Understanding the play.”

“Communicating the meaning of the play.”

As answers go, this one is actually pretty close, but too elaborate for our needs.

I encourage them:

Think simpler. Much more basic.

“Pursuing the objective.”

All these are great answers!… None of them happen to be the specific ones that I am looking for, but they’re great answers …

They’re not done yet:

“Listening.”

“Telling the story.”

Close but …

“Having fun.”

“Entertaining the audience.”

There is a moment of silence.

No more guesses? All right, here are my two, and as soon as I say the first one, you’re going to guess the second one: Are you ready? The first one is “BEING SEEN.” And the second…?

“BEING HEARD.”

Exactly.

Now, if I was talking to a group of Med Students, and asking them about what the most fundamental responsibilities of a Doctor were, they would all, pretty much, come up with the same two things: Something to do with “First of all do no harm… and second, save the patient.

If I was talking to a group of Law Students about what the two most fundamental responsibilities of a Lawyer were, they would all pretty much agree with “Don’t incriminate your client,” and “Win the case.”

But when I talk with a group of artists, and especially actors, since the art-form is so subjective, the answers that I get are all over the map. I think it’s largely because acting study has fragmented into a number of “schools of thought,” and each teacher that comes along has their own school from which they have emerged, and they also have their own reaction to that school, to the extent that they are rebelling against it, or promoting it, and they also have a wide variety of practical applications of this material, as each individual student has their own very specific needs, which forces the teacher to impress the importance of different elements of the system to different degrees, so that multiple students of the same teacher will come away with a variety of impressions about the relative importance of fundamental responsibilities.

“Being Seen and Being Heard.” Everything else, yes, everything else needs to build on top of this.

You say you’ve got the most textured, detailed, nuanced, passionate inner life ever witnessed on stage? Great. Bring it on. Use it. But if you aren’t being seen or heard, nobody will be able to penetrate the wall of incomprehensibility enough to care.

Why isn’t this very simple statement the most important thesis of our acting textbooks? Maybe it’s just so damn obvious, and we feel like we’ve got to have something more subtle to write, or to teach about. Maybe there’s a prejudice against such “external” methods. Maybe we’re so accustomed to television or film acting that we think of this as the editor’s job. Somewhere along the line, we forgot, and the virus is spreading. Actors are infected with the disease of invisibility and inaudibility, and plays, especially classical works, are losing meaning, swallowed up in the incomprehensible garble that actors mumble.

Ask any theatre-goer, one who attends, but does not actually work in the theatre: “What is the biggest problem that you encounter when you see a show?” Without hesitation 90% of them will tell you:[1] “I can’t hear what the actors are saying.”

Ask whether they have ever missed the most important moment, or speech, or scene of a play, and they will all raise their hands. We all want to know just why the author has called us all here tonight. We may have come because our friends are in a show, but once we’re in the seat, our natural curiosity gets the best of us, and we want to know what the author has to say. And the modern actor runs interference between us and the playwright.

“Being seen and being heard” is even more fundamental than our character objectives. This is a responsibility that lies beneath any character discovery you may layer into your performance.

Think it’s too obvious? Too easy?

I spent two hours of an afternoon with actors, expressing the nature of this great responsibility. They nodded, laughing and agreeing throughout. I went to dinner, came back, and watched these same actors in rehearsal, continuing to mutter their lines looking down into the floor, being neither seen nor heard.

There are psychological factors in the way, as well as internal arguments to which the actor gives precedence, time and again. These things are both persuasive and pervasive, and it takes training and practice to counter them.

At the risk of sounding alarmist, I have adapted a rather famous poem for our use:

For the want of a consonant, the word was lost,

For the want of a word, the line was lost,

For the want of a line, the scene was lost,

For the want of a scene, the act was lost,

For the want of an act, the show was lost.

Acting happens “at the speed of life.” Once that one word has slipped by, there is no picking it up again. And subsequent lines will be lost in the cacophony of “What did he say?”

This has a domino effect. It is the simplest of responsibilities, and yet the responsibility least fulfilled. We think of ourselves as artists. We arm ourselves with “concepts” and “methods,” but we thumb our nose at the people for whom we are supposedly performing.

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[1] This statistic, like all statistics in this book… are made up.


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