How to Stop Acting Read online

  From Loose Ends by Michael Weller (Five Plays. New York: New American Library, 1982.)

  SCENE 1

  Slide: 1970. A beach. Night. Full moon. Waves. On bare stage, Paul and Susan, early to mid-20’s, naked, clothes around. He sits facing ocean (us) and she lies curled up.

  PAUL. It was great at the beginning. I could speak the language almost fluently after a month and the people were fantastic. They’d come out and help us. Teach us songs. Man, we thought it was all going so well. But we got all the outhouses dug in six months and we had to stay there two years, that was the deal. And that’s when we began to realize that none of the Nglele were using the outhouses. We’d ask them why and they’d just shrug. So we started watching them very carefully and what we found out was the Nglele use their feces for fertilizer. It’s like gold to them. They thought we were all fucking crazy expecting them to waste their precious turds in our spiffy new outhouses. Turns out they’d been helping us because they misunderstood why we were there. They thought it was some kind of punishment and we’d be allowed to go home after we finished digging the latrines, that’s why they were helping us and then when we stayed on they figured we must be permanent outcasts or something and they just stopped talking to us altogether.

  I want the actor to say what he means at that moment, with as little fuss as possible. He must let the line of the character become his own line, in a completely personal way, so he is not acting it. He must forget about the author’s intention at first, because the actor doesn’t know who the character is at this point, or what the author really wants. The actor is responsible only for what the line means to him right now, and what it creates in him. And so he must say only what he means, without embellishing it or fixing it up.

  I look down and take another breath in and out while reading the next phrase: “I could speak the language almost fluently.” I don’t force myself to read the whole line. I let in whatever is comfortable, sometimes only a phrase or even a word. I think, It would be nice to be fluent in another language, especially since I love to travel. I look up and say what I mean, without fussing with it.

  Looking down, I find the next part of the line—“after a month.” As I breathe in and out I think, Wow—only a month! I look up, and that’s what I say with the phrase.

  The rest of the line is “and the people were fantastic.” Looking down at the line, I have an image of friendly natives in a remote part of Africa or the Amazon. I haven’t been to those places but it doesn’t matter, because my imagination takes over. “They’d come out and help us. Teach us songs.” As I read this to myself while breathing, this image becomes so vivid in my imagination that I have the desire to sing some sort of work song. So before I can censor this desire, I improvise a little song and dance. Then I say the line. It is silly and foolish, but it makes me happy, and strangely enough, it doesn’t really feel wrong after I do it. What seemed like it might be inappropriate didn’t feel that way when I did it. It was my response to the line—to the image. And the line is the character’s. So maybe this is the character.

  When I’m taking the lines off the page, I trust myself to respond to whatever comes to me. An hour later, or even a few minutes later, I might have the opposite response. But I can’t let myself be judgmental. Letting the line become mine means I don’t need to justify what I do. I let the words, thoughts, and images stimulate me so that I lose myself in the lines. My imagination takes over, and I am connected to the words of the writer viscerally, not intellectually.

  I look down, laughing, and continue: “Man, we thought it was all going so well.” As I let the line into myself while breathing in and out, I feel a disappointment in the line come over me. I let the change take me, and I say it.

  The twists and turns in the feelings that the lines generate are interesting and energizing. Looking down at the page, I read, “But we got all the outhouses dug in six months.” Outhouses?! This is incredible, I think. “And we had to stay there two years, that was the deal.” I see this on the page. I breathe in and out, thinking, We’re screwed. No one in his right mind could have expected to be digging outhouses when we signed on. I feel stupid. I am reminded of many choices I made in my career without really knowing the deal or the consequences. But instead of feeding my anger, the next line—“And that’s when we began to realize that none of the Nglele were using these outhouses”—confuses me. Breathing in and out, I let this confusion take me to “We asked them why and they’d just shrug.” The next line—“So we started watching them very carefully”—gets me interested. As I breathe in and out, I see myself in a remote area, hiding behind latrines, sneaking around trees to spy on the Nglele. I look down and pick up the next line while breathing in and out—“What we found was the Nglele use their feces for fertilizer.” This sets me to imagining what it would be like to cherish one’s feces. I read, “It’s like gold to them,” and as I breathe out, I am prompted to sniff the imagined gold feces that I now have in my hands, as if sniffing a delicate flower. It’s idiotic, I know. But I’m feeling idiotic. And because I’m free, I do it. I know that if it’s no good, I won’t do it again next time, because I will have gotten that response out of my system. But I need to express my feelings as they arise, to get each one out before I censor it. I have to trust my outrageous responses as much as the subtle ones.

  That’s what taking it off the page is about—being free to let the phrase or line take me wherever it goes at that moment. I do this before I know anything much. I have read the play. But this is my first real reading of the play out loud, the beginning of my work on the character. So making mistakes, doing stupid, outrageous things, and simply exploring my responses to the text are not only acceptable but also necessary steps. The more I get out at the beginning, the less careful I am, the bigger my palette, the more possibilities for the character later on. I would rather find myself throwing away choices because I have too many than have to struggle to find enough colors for the character.

  When I recently asked Jennifer Jason Leigh about our work together on Miami Blues, she said, “I like the way you explore things. There’s something very gentle about it that allowed me to be myself within the part and create a character at the same time. The way you would have me breathe into a line, just stay inside the breath, and let the thoughts come. Not forcing yourself to think anything. Not forcing yourself to figure out what your objective was or anything else. But just stay[ing] inside the moment and see[ing] what that brings.”

  What the process revealed to her “was a tremendous amount of life and things that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought. Because it wasn’t about a thought process.” By just living inside the character, “just breathing and allowing your mind and your body to free associate—within the confines of the material—you’ll surprise yourself in a way that’s really lovely and feels organic.”

  It’s easy for an actor to think he is past this initial step, but he never is. Even highly experienced actors struggle with the beginning of their work. I have to remind them to be patient, to let the line come to them before they say it, to make sure it is theirs. Glenn Close says that after all these years, she still begins her work on new characters by taking it off the page. “I tend to go too fast,” she says. “What that does is force me to go slower. You can find moments. You have to give yourself time.”

  Christopher Reeve is an actor for whom establishing an immediate connection to the text became the key to a radically different way of approaching acting. Chris had become a big star very early. He came to me when his career had begun to fizzle a bit. He recalls, “I was always employable but never really, really nailed it, probably because I had so much success so early—first Broadway with Katharine Hepburn, then Superman, and then on to big roles in movies. Unfortunately, what happens if you’re the star and they’re paying you a ton of money is they stop directing. They think, Well, he knows what he’s doing—he’s a big star. And that’s really, really dangerous. I was good enough to get away with it an
d get the next job. But I still had that problem of not really being in the moment.”

  When we began to work together, Chris remembers, “The first job was to get rid of a kind of analytical sense, intellectualization—my habit of approaching a scene as though I was doing a paper for college. I had to make room for something that might be more interesting.”

  We’d sit there and read back and forth, simply listening and then looking down to see what the line is, and then, without thinking, responding. We got rid of any idea of how it ought to go. We worked on being inappropriate sometimes, just to bend things out of shape, because I’d come in with all my ducks lined up in a row—everything organized and a lot of ideas about how it should be.

  I’d read, and you’d stop me every time I was doing something that had a plan to it, that was “appropriate,” that didn’t just happen immediately and spontaneously, that didn’t just come in the moment. The best piece of advice—the mantra for me—became “I don’t care.” It is an oddly backwards approach that I learned you need to take. If they would give out Oscars for being on time, knowing the words cold, and never missing a mark, I’d clean up. And what you always said was, “Look, you have got to do what you are going to do and they have to find you.” So in other words, what might seem in me like carelessness—“I don’t care”—really was the beginning of freedom. “I don’t care, I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t know what’s going to come out of me—I’m just not going to worry about it.” This was a major breakthrough from being sort of a good boy into being more reckless, more in the moment, and more daring in my acting. Not caring how it comes out creates moments that actually work. It’s like when you step on a garden hose and then you release it and the water flows again. That’s really what needed to happen to me. Because I had plenty of stuff to bring, but there was a kind of blockage because of this sense of responsibility, and my work wasn’t flowing.

  I believe the actor’s relationship to what he says—his dialogue, his words—is the most important connection he makes. The text unearths previously hidden places within the actor, giving him a broader range of choices and characters, stimulated by the texts of many different and brilliant writers. It teaches the actor to see acting as exploration of the character rather than definition of the character.

  Here’s how the process might begin with a less experienced actor. Ellen Wolf has been studying with me for a couple of years, following a good deal of acting training. She is very talented, full of emotion and energy. She has a very good mind but sometimes uses it to cover herself. Her instincts and imagination are readily available to her, but she sometimes rushes because she’s afraid to trust her responses. Her problem has always been a desire to act too much.

  I hand Ellen a copy of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and point out a monologue in Act III. “You’re too young for this part,” I say, “but let’s try it.” I know she doesn’t know anything about the character, Ranevskaya, or the monologue. She hasn’t even read the play. This is a deliberate choice on my part. For the moment, I want her to have nothing to hold on to but the dialogue, no preconceived ideas about the character or the situation. I want her not to act, but simply to respond to what she sees, thinks, and says. I want her palette clean so that this response is her own, and immediate. I want to throw her into a confrontation with herself—to get her to trust herself. And I want her to get used to beginning this way.

  From The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. (Chekhov: The Major Plays. Translation by Ann Dunnigan, New York: Signet Classics, 1964.)

  ACT II

  RANEVSKAYA. Oh, my sins … I’ve always squandered money recklessly, like a madwoman, and I married a man who did nothing but amass debts. My husband died from champagne—he drank terribly—then, to my sorrow, I fell in love with another man, lived with him, and just at that time—that was my first punishment, a blow on the head—my little boy was drowned … here in the river. And I went abroad, went away for good, never to return, never to see this river … I closed my eyes and ran, beside myself, and he after me … callously, without pity.

  Ellen looks down at the page, takes a breath, looks up, and says simply, “Oh, my sins.” Then she quickly looks down, takes a breath, looks up, and says, “I’ve always squandered money recklessly.” She repeats the process with a couple more lines, each time too quickly.

  I stop her. “Wait a minute. What’s the first phrase?”

  “Oh, my sins,” she answers flatly.

  “What?” I ask.

  “My sins,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My transgressions, the bad things I’ve done.”

  “Transgressions?” I repeat, disbelieving, as if the word were from a foreign language. What could such a word really mean to Ellen? She’s in her head.

  “My sins,” she yells, as if talking to a deaf person. “What I’ve done badly.”

  “Anything come to mind?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she replies, laughing.

  “So is that what you mean?”

  “My sins, yeah,” she answers simply, no longer laughing. She is getting closer to the word but she isn’t there yet.

  “So if I said, ‘Why don’t you tell me some of your sins? Would you be pleased to do that?’”

  “No,” she says, uncomfortably, “I doubt it.”

  “Right,” I say pointedly.

  And as if a light has turned on, she exclaims, “Oh!” And mumbles quietly, as if to herself, “Oh, my sins.” A long pause follows. Then she looks down, breathes in and out, looks up slowly and says, almost as a confession, “I’ve always squandered money”—pause—“recklessly …”

  She looks down, breathes in and out, looks up and says, “Like a madwoman.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Well,” she says, “Just like overdoing things, buying things that I don’t really need.”

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “Large exercise equipment … Like a madwoman,” she says, disgusted with herself.

  “Stuff you don’t need?” I ask.

  “Yeah, insane stuff,” she says angrily.

  “Breathe,” I remind her.

  “And—”

  “No, breathe before you talk.”

  She breathes out. “And I married a man,” she says, “who did nothing—” She stops.

  “Release,” I prompt.

  “—but amass debts,” she goes on, still disgusted with herself

  “Just breathe and let it out.”

  “My husband died from champagne.”

  “Wait a second, what?” I ask.

  “My husband died from champagne. He drank.”

  “What did he drink?” I ask.

  “Champagne,” she says, laughing—a whole new feeling has popped up in her. It makes me laugh.

  “He drank, terribly,” she goes on. “Then, to my sorrow.”

  “Breathe,” I coach.

  She looks down at the page. She seems confused as she breathes. “I fell in love with another man. Lived with him.” She looks down, breathing in and out, then looks up and says, “And just at that time—[louder] that was my first punishment.”

  I stop her because she seems to be rushing again. “What is that line?”

  “That was my first punishment.”

  “What are you saying?”

  She takes a moment, then says, “That was the first time I got caught.”

  “That’s what it means to you?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “So that’s what you say.”

  “That was my first punishment,” she says, now meaning it.

  “Wait until it means whatever it means to you,” I say. “That doesn’t mean I want it soaked with emotion. You want to get inside the material so that you take responsibility for the line. For whatever it means to you. It’s okay if it’s not what Chekhov means. You’ll figure it out at some point. The two of us know you haven’t read this. You don’t know anything about it.
It’s all a big surprise to you. Okay? So, no cover … no cover … no cover.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “The whole thing is just to take your chances,” I go on. “You breathe, you look down, you let it in, and you say whatever it really means to you at the moment, including nothing. But also including—”

  “Something.”

  “Right,” I say, grinning. “Champagne? If what it means to you is, ‘Hey, he died from champagne. He died good,’ then great!” I sniff an imaginary glass. “Mmmmm, champagne. I think I’ll go that way. If it means that, that’s what it means, no matter how stupid or trivial. Maybe it is deep, like when you said, ‘Like a madwoman.’ You knew exactly what you meant—buying that stuff you don’t want, but you’ve got to have it.”

  “Got it,” Ellen says.

  “Breathe. Next line, piece by piece.”

  There is a long pause, as Ellen breathes in and out. “A blow on the head,” she says, and all of a sudden she starts to cry. “My little boy was drowned … here in the river.” She tries to stop crying but can’t, as she says the next lines. “Then I went abroad, went away for good. Never to return, never to see this river. I closed my eyes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I closed my eyes … I just closed my eyes … and ran.” This line comes out with real power. When she says “and ran,” I can feel her desperately wanting to run away.

  We continue through the monologue together. Once Ellen stops rushing and lets the phrases and lines into herself, her emotions come leaping out. She goes all over the place while exploring Ranevskaya’s lines, because she is totally in tune with herself. There are moments when she loses herself and weeps. At times she is angry. At other times she laughs at herself, at her foolishness. Occasionally she disagrees with a line and is angry at having to say it. So she speaks the line with her annoyance. The next time she says the line, or after she reads the play, she may no longer have that feeling, but for the time being she must accept it and express it, twisting and turning with whatever the text provokes in her.