How to Stop Acting Read online

  That is why I make such a big deal of starting one’s work with the line—taking the line off the page and into oneself. As you will start to see, this idea of character is an extension of taking it off the page. We not only start there, we end there.

  There is no difference for me between exploring the role and playing the character. Everything I do in my coaching is about freeing the actor to explore the character, continually and spontaneously. That, to me, is what acting is all about.

  In later chapters, I will explore the specific problems actors encounter in theater, in film, and in television—problems that block the actor’s ability to freely explore the character. This chapter presents a strategy to maximize the actor’s instinct, imagination, and emotions in order to become the character in any of these arenas.

  As actors, we are always searching for the truth—the truth of the character, of the script, and of ourselves. But as Kevin Kline so gracefully puts it, “Some truths are more important than other truths.” The truth that we are searching for is the one that will leave us free to explore creatively throughout the process, from first reading through performance. That is why not all truths are valuable for the actor—only the ones that stimulate him personally.

  When I have let the lines of the character into me, I feel I am inside the character as well as myself. And once I have done that, I find that these characters often talk to me while I’m taking their thoughts and images off the page. Sometimes they tell me I’m wearing the wrong clothes when I’m saying their lines. “Why are you wearing sneakers when I’m talking?” they’ll say, or, “Why are you talking so loud and fast?”

  I know it’s my imagination playing tricks on me. But I listen. I never question it, because I also know it’s my instinct at work and I’m just exploring. I let the character talk to me, tell me what to do, not only when I’m taking it off the page but as I’m walking down the street or talking about the character to a friend. In fact, I want this to happen. That’s why I start my work by verbalizing the character’s lines. So my instinct and imagination are in connection to his words, so he will talk to me. It sounds simplistic but I trust that.

  At the same time, the actor can’t force this. Choices like rhythms and character traits must be explored continually by trying out different choices while preparing and performing. The good choices keep coming back even when the actor is not trying to repeat them, and the bad choices are so obvious to the actor that he’s the first to know it. He can hear it as it comes out of his mouth, or feel it when he makes a false move.

  It takes a lot of courage not to settle things early. Actors always feel pressured to come up with results. But rushing only makes their choices predictable.

  By opening yourself up to the character by taking his lines off the page, you give the character a chance to affect you early in the process. That’s what the actor needs to start his work of finding himself in the character. Everything that happens in our work must be coming directly from the character’s words and actions. But sometimes the character isn’t talking to us.

  For instance, Bridget Fonda found herself “having a hard time” as she was preparing her character, Maggie, in Point of No Return. We had been reading the script back and forth, and it was not working for her. She couldn’t find the anger behind Maggie’s actions—killing a policeman who was trying to help her, as well as creating bloody havoc wherever she went. Maggie is young, violent, uncivilized. Her lines didn’t feel true in Bridget’s mouth, and her behavior felt unreal to Bridget.

  So we stopped to talk about this young woman.

  “I remember discovering the essence of the character while working with you one day,” Bridget told me. “The question was how do you maintain a sense of compassion for so vicious a character? It was very hard for me. How do I have so much rage and horrific behavior and do it honestly and yet still feel for this person?

  “Basically, I thought of this character as an attack dog who has been discarded. She had been trained to be distrustful, vicious—a puppy born into a world where someone mistreats it over and over and over again so it doesn’t trust anybody. It becomes a guard dog—unhappy, bereft, and unable to trust anything good. It’s ruined. And yet, the dog wants to belong. It can’t. It was this perfectly neurotic state of being that I needed. And it completely informed everything. It was the only way I could be all those things.”

  Maggie had not been talking to Bridget because she couldn’t find “a sense of compassion for this character” until that day. Once she found that—an emotional truth that really spoke to her—she was in tune with the character and free to follow her instinct. “I became less scared—to the point where I was bossy on set. ‘I’ve got to do it like this—let me show you!’ Which is what you want at that point.”

  Once the character is really talking to you, you’re on your way. Gradually, in the response moment by moment, the character becomes clear to you. There’s a sense of the character in your body, in your reactions, in your words. But you must not force it. If we trust what we hear from the character and from ourselves, the script will take us the rest of the way. We will feel it and not have to act it.

  Actors always want to know how I come up with interesting and creative takes on characters, characters that aren’t like me as I appear in daily life and that aren’t like each other. It’s simple: I let the lines and images connect with my imagination. I don’t worry about consistency; I let myself respond moment by moment, piecemeal, to the character’s dialogue and actions. Then I let my responses take me wherever they go, making mistakes and discarding them until choices start repeating themselves on their own no matter how arbitrary they seem at first. Then I know I’m on to something. But I don’t try to put the character together. I leave it in pieces. The script and story put the character together so my moment by moment performance seems like a creative take on the whole character.

  Of course, something usually gets in the way of this process. I can see where the character is going when I read the script. Or I think I know what will be expected of me. Or I fall into a comfortable, familiar pattern of speaking or moving. Or I feel that I already know the character too well—which, believe it or not, can be a serious handicap.

  Work from the Negative

  The most effective way I know of getting through these obstacles is to work from the negative. In order to find out what a character is, I have first got to find out what he is not, exploring without fear or self-censorship. Exploring the role is like sculpting in marble. There is a huge block of marble. The character is somewhere inside this block. All the actor has to do is get rid of the marble that doesn’t belong. What he is left with is the character, and it’s himself. Then the actor is the character. And he doesn’t have to act!

  If I find a right choice for the character in my exploration, it still may not be the best choice. But if I find a wrong choice, one that doesn’t work, then I know something about the character. The character is not that! When I find a truth I can’t negate, then I’m home free with this character—I can stop thinking and just play him. I don’t have to Act. But how do I know a wrong choice is wrong? I know when the choice doesn’t do anything for me. I get it out and it just plain feels wrong. That’s part of my instinct as an actor. A director may disagree, but it makes no difference. If it feels wrong, it’s wrong. Nothing will make it right. If I continue to do it, I will have to fake it, Act it.

  A right choice is right because it does something for me. I feel it in my bones. But I may not be finished. There may be a better choice ahead for me. So I keep exploring.

  How do I know when a choice is the best and have it play on me throughout the many scenes I have to act? I think of it this way: something that seems right about the character may pop up in my work. I don’t say this is what the character is yet, because I’m just exploring. But if it keeps popping up, at a certain point, my focus becomes clear. I sense who the character is underneath!

  I know and feel who this charact
er is, but not how I am going to act it. Eventually, though, the character is inside me. So it doesn’t matter what scene I am doing at the moment, the thing that kept popping up in my exploration is playing unconsciously in the scene as well.

  Bridget told me that in Single White Female she didn’t want to play a victim. “I wanted to play this person who was completely unconscious of how she was bringing everything down onto herself,” she told me. “It was beneath the lines, but there was room for it.

  “If there’s something that’s hidden, in the moment of trying to make a scene work on the surface, I can forget my deeper [hidden] course of action. Through constant exposure, it’s become ingrained and planted a seed in my core. That won’t be washed away by a ‘surface-y’ little scene.”

  Often, the best way of starting to work from the negative is to do the opposite of what conventional wisdom suggests. If I see what the character should be, or if I know how most actors would play him, or if I’m playing a role made famous by an actor—Brando’s Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, or Olivier’s Henry V—I invariably head straight off in the opposite direction. By negating what I see and know, I put myself in a no-man’s land where almost anything is possible, because I only know what I’m not going to do.

  Let’s return to the character of Masha in Chekhov’s The Seagull as an example.

  As we saw in the last chapter, Masha’s first line is, “I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.” In Act II she is described by the writer Trigorin: “Takes snuff and drinks vodka … always in black.” She is the daughter of an overbearing, unaffectionate man who is the steward of the estate. Masha’s mother is not in love with him, and is somewhat openly in love with the doctor, Dorn, who does not return her affections. Masha grew up on the estate with Konstantin Treplev, the son of the great actress Arkadina and nephew of Sorin, who owns the estate. She is in love with him. But Konstantin not only doesn’t love her, he barely notices her existence. Masha’s love is as unrequited as her mother’s.

  So it is easy to see Masha as a depressed person who hates her life and is always unhappy. And this is how most actors play the character—dark and teary. They may even do research on depression and the effects it has on personality, and then try to play Masha in what they think is the right way, stuffing the facts they have discovered into the performance.

  Unquestionably, depression is a truth about the character. But is it a truth that can sustain the actor’s interest in exploring and playing the role? I think research has its place, which I’ll discuss later. But to approach the behavior of any character as a case study seems too single-minded, too obvious, too binding, and not stimulating enough for me. So I negate that choice. Then I am free to go deep into my imagination, thoughts, and feelings. Once I am working on instinct, I can use anything that strikes me for Masha, ultimately even those things I negated at first—things I discover from research or from other actors’ portrayals, or things I rejected as being too obvious.

  So how might one explore Masha? Work from the negative. Suppose that, instead of hating her “dark and dreary” life, she embraces it. She is used to misfortune, she grew up with it and she’s comfortable with it. Could she see her unrequited love as making her special—a romance novel heroine in her own eyes? After all, unlike her mother and many other women, she drinks and uses snuff openly, to boldly distinguish herself. Maybe she sees herself as an individualist and she’s proud of it—a woman breaking the rules for women. She has a tragic purpose. Here’s how it might play out in the moment:

  At the beginning of Act III, Masha jokes to Trigorin, “I’m telling you all this because you’re a writer. You may be able to use it.” She could become the tragic heroine of his next novel. Yes, she’s unhappy about her lovelessness, but she can be dramatic about it, or at least self-dramatizing. Her drinking allows her to weep openly, to laugh, to rage one moment and be sexy and flirtatious the next. Instead of whining about her life as her mother does, she jokes wryly at her own expense. I find her a fascinating character who can be unpredictable—childlike, cynical, thoughtful, petulant, realistic, and yet lost in her fantasies.

  Masha continues her conversation with Trigorin, referring to Konstantin’s recent attempt at suicide. She says, “I tell you honestly: if he had seriously wounded himself, I would not have gone on living another minute.” In my imagination, she heard the gunshot and ran to Konstantin, fearing he had finally killed himself over the loss of Nina’s love and intending to shoot herself with the same gun so she could die next to him, proving her love for him even into eternity. The beauty and tragedy of the image are still enough to make her weep. But Konstantin had only grazed his head with the bullet, and his failure at suicide left her to face her own stupidity and inner rage.

  “But I have courage all the same,” she says angrily. “I’ve made up my mind to tear this love out of my heart—” she tries to stop her tears “—tear it out by the roots.”

  Trigorin asks, “How are you going to do that?”

  She takes another drink, hums “Here Comes the Bride,” and answers lightly, “I’m going to get married. To Medvedenko.” She knows this choice is foolish, so she jokes about it. But then she says, about this doomed unloving choice she has to make, “To love without hope …” and, going deeply into her pain, “to spend whole years waiting for something …” and then, trying to convince herself it makes sense, “But when I marry, there’ll be no more of that, new cares will stifle the old.” She’s too smart to believe this, however. She becomes bored with her own tears and tosses off, “Anyhow, it will be a change. Shall we have another?”

  Oh, God, how she needs a drink. As she pours, she notices his disapproval and laughs it off. “Oh, come! Women drink more often than you can imagine. Only a few drink openly as I do, the rest do it in secret and it’s always vodka or cognac. Good luck.” And down the hatch it goes.

  There is a truth to both ways of looking at Masha. And of course there are possibilities beyond either. But if we are too quick to jump to analysis, we are apt to go with the obvious assessment, and the character may from the outset be too familiar for us to explore with any feeling, interest, or freedom. If we negate that choice, we may discover a second possibility, or a number of others. Unsure of where we are going, we allow instinct and our imagination to take us to places we didn’t expect. The mystery of the character creates possibilities that will be a joy to explore.

  Use the Double Negative

  Working from the negative means negating not only what you assume a character is but also what you assume he is not. For example, if you are playing Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, you may take it as a given that Stanley is an insensitive lout. But the only way to find out if he is not sensitive is to try out the possibility that he is.

  Let’s take the scene where Stanley possibly overhears Blanche describing him as an animal to his wife, Stella. Blanche says, “Don’t hang back with the brutes.” Is it possible that Stanley pretends he hasn’t overheard, in order to hide how devastated he is at being described this way, even by someone he doesn’t like? This could open up some interesting qualities that aren’t immediately apparent. Stanley could turn out to be a “brute” with delicate feelings—a vulnerable brute. If the actor tests it, he will find out. If it doesn’t work, the actor will know it in his gut, not just his head, and he will throw it away. But if he thinks a choice is wrong and doesn’t try it out, it will continue to play on him until he does. Always explore a wrong choice that strikes you in some way—that comes into your head and keeps intruding on your impulses. It is like a repressed feeling that wreaks havoc until it is uncovered and dealt with. You might as well get it out as soon as it comes to you. And if by chance this “wrong” choice works, it will probably be not just a good but a great choice, because it is so unexpected.

  Make Strong Choices

  Aidan Quinn told me about an early rehearsal of A Streetcar Named Desire when he was playing Stanley at the Ci
rcle in the Square revival. At the very beginning of the play, Stanley comes on stage bellowing, “Hey there! Stella, baby!”

  “Don’t holler at me like that,” Stella says.

  “Catch!” Stanley yells.

  “What?”

  “Meat!”

  As he yelled “Catch!” Aidan reached down, unzipped his pants, pulled out a bag full of something that could have been meat, and tossed it to Frances McDormand, who was playing Stella.

  Everybody laughed as she tried to catch the flying package, considering where it came from. The director said to Aidan, “You’re not going to do that, are you?” Obviously, this wasn’t his idea of Stanley, and it didn’t make it into performance. Perhaps that was as it should be. But I thought it was a wonderful choice. Coming from Aidan’s sense of humor, it seemed perfect for the character—he’s crude but he’s funny. And I am sure that it was essential that Aidan get that possibility out, whether it was used in the end or not. We have to respond personally to the script with whatever comes, no matter how foolish it is to others or even to us. The only rule is you must never physically hurt another actor or act out in a physically threatening way that enters into the other actor’s space—touching or moving him—without having discussed and staged the physical encounter. That is not acceptable in class, rehearsal, or performance, no matter how much you may want to act on an aggressive impulse when you are in the moment.