Introduction

Very occasionally throughout my career I have taken small roles to attempt to stay in touch with the task of acting, and found it utterly confounding and deeply, deeply difficult to relax into.

As a man with scoliosis, I know body tension. If I even mention a certain stressful teacher I had in high school and then reach for a high shelf, blam, there’s an icepick in my back. When I teach or direct actors, I can often see with the naked eye that there are imbalances in tension all over their bodies. It’s as if the transverse muscle, in the pit of the gut, is where all the emotion comes from and it’s got to get past three check points on its way out: the stomach, the shoulders and the jaw. And if an actor is clenching one of those (like I do) for reasons beyond his control or awareness, perhaps in a very understandable attempt to remain civilized and control the emotions trying to blast their way out of him, you can bet he’s got an energy leak somewhere else, like blinking too much, or shifting his weight, or over-endowing props. Which then leads to unwanted, undirected energy belying his performance.

On the witnessing side, as human beings, and as audience members, there are a million languages of the face we don’t realize we already speak. When an actor blinks too much, or blinks not in a way that the character would blink given his dialogue, something bugs us, and we decide we don’t believe them. When an actor acts like he’s listening, rather than truly picturing the imagery of what is being said to him, we see his face tense into handsome listening face, and we stop rooting for him. And finally, given that (I believe) we think in images, not words, if an actor has not connected deeply with the images within his own dialogue, and is not using his tongue as a paintbrush to paint these images onto the mind-canvas of the listener, we hydroplane along with him, over his moments, unaffected.

To combat this, I have devised, over the years, the above handy-dandy diagram of the human body while acting. A treacherous landscape of tension-moguls forming and releasing. Blocking the path of the emotional truth as it emerges from its home in the pit of the gut, where our weakest muscles are, that are only deployed when we cry. Beginning with the imagination, and working counter-clockwise, I will attempt to double-click on the human body, that it might be deployed in its entirety to our artistic ends.

The Imagination

Okay, if you’re playing the Prince of Denmark, and your uncle killed your father and married your mother, how in the hell are you supposed to play that believably. You aren’t a prince. You live in a country where there’s never been such a thing as a royal family (apart from the Kennedy’s) so culturally you’re at a loss, you’re not Danish, and even if you were, Hamlet was written from the British perspective of the Danish, i.e. that they are barbarians, 400 years ago. (Not the black-sock-with-running-shoes-good-taste-in-furniture-scooter-riding image we know and love of our exchange student Gregers today.)

So an actor has three choices… (a) substitution, a la Lee Strassberg Method-y stuff, (well, I did witness my dog get run over so I’ll flash on that when I’m really mad at Gertrude for marrying Claudius); (b) just focus on making your scene partner feel something, a la Atlantic Theater, Uta Hagen, emotions are by-products, how are you trying to make them feel?, or (c) use your imagination to invent memories for Hamlet, endow the loss of your father with ad hoc imagery of the good times (if there are indeed such things for royal families). This is the Warner Loughlin, Michael Chekhov-style of igniting the imagination to create vivid raw material with which to break your own heart, as necessary. Or, some combination of all three may work.

It is my personal, perhaps controversial opinion that there is no way in hell you’d be able to come up with a substitution effective enough to equal the magnitude of what poor Hamlet is going through. And even if you’ve led a charmed life and the most traumatic thing ever to happen on your suburban cul-de-sac was Fido’s flattening, which, proportionally, should theoretically be enough, it ultimately limits the emotional scope of the performance to the trials you, as a comfortable American, have endured. So the imagination for the actors is blocked by autobiography. On the other hand, you have a human heart, capable of infinite feeling of loss, sorrow and rage, and if you deploy it into the gauntlet of imagined loss, i.e. vivid imagery that can pluck your heart strings when faced with the task of letting your mother know you know, then the possibilities for your performance are endless…

The Eyes

Your eyes can see a candle at 14 miles away. There are 2 million working parts in each one. They are the only part of the body that work at 100% of their capacity, 100% of the time. The muscles around your eyes are 100 times stronger than necessary for their intended purpose of tugging the iris around. Why all that extra braun? To convey meaning.

And oddly, the part of the eye we focus on, when we make eye contact with another person, is the only part that isn’t there: the pupil. The hole. And as we look at that hole, we subconsciously take in endless amounts of delicate data from the musculature around the eyes, that inform us of the inner life of the other.

Science has shown that when we look at another person, we look in their right eye when we need information about what they’re thinking or how they’re feeling. Dogs do this too. But only when they look at humans, not when they look at other dogs. There’s just tons of data streaming off of this area of our heads, even dogs pick up on it. 70% of our brain connections are devoted to facial recognition and a lot of that processing happens subconsciously. There are, I think, therefore, several languages of the face, and of interaction we don’t realize we already speak.

Walter Murch was editing The Conversation with Gene Hackman on a Moviola machine and was using his typical technique of playing the shots in real time and seeing if he instinctively wanted to cut them on the same frame through multiple attempts. Doing this on Hackman’s coverage, he found he would often hit the stop button exactly when Gene Hackman blinked. This lead him to study the science behind blinking wherein he realized that we don’t blink merely to moisten our eyeballs (or topballs as we called them in Wellfleet). We blink to edit our thoughts.

So if you’re an actor trying to seem authentic, you have to concentrate really hard on the thoughts the character thinks. Because if you are thinking: “Christ what’s the next line;” “I’m blanking;” “the director’s a tool;” or “I’m a tool,” then chances are, you’re blinking a lot. Chances are you’re blinking after each of these little thoughts. And chances are, you look frantic. And unpresent.

The problem is, as I mentioned above, we all speak the language of blinking and don’t know it. They count blinks during presidential debates, and generally the person who blinked less is considered the winner, because they are widely perceived to be more trustworthy.

If there is a discrepancy between the speed at which a character must be thinking, and the frequency of their blinks, the audience, without knowing why, will not buy your performance.

As an actor, you must blink in sync with your thinking. If you watch tremendous performances closely, you begin to realize how rarely anyone blinks, particularly in feature films where you eye might be ten feet wide on the screen. And if, in life, you begin listening to people without blinking during conversations, they will suddenly feel deeply understood.

The Tongue

Shakespeare wrote at a time when two languages, two versions of English, Latinate and Anglo-Saxon, were smashing together. Latinate words were a vestige of Roman occupation: polysyllabic, fancy, multiple meanings, centuries old. And then there was Anglo-Saxon, the pidgin words of the serfs: shoe, bucket, fish, fuck, shit. Onomatopoeia. Words that sounded like what they were, and were invented daily, ad hoc.

Although fuck may have been an acronym for “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” (a criminal charge) and shit may also have been an acronym, for “Store High in Transit” (because sewage had a tendency to explode below decks, sinking ships). But the point is, there was a low language and a high language. The nobility had only recently stopped speaking French as it was, and Shakespeare cherry picked from both. Sometimes embedding low jokes in high speeches, so the balcony fops would have no idea what the groundlings were laughing at.

A modern example of this smashing together would be if you described something as “fucking exquisite.”

The tongue is the strongest muscle in the human body. And it’s the only one attached at only one end. Back then at the turn of the 17th century, as we were making the switch to secular humanism from the divine right of kings (thank God (so to speak)), your English speaking tongue would have been like a paint brush, and its very position in your mouth would hold meaning. We have lost, for instance, thee and thou. But they were our familiar form of you, like tú in Spanish. And our tongues would come all the way out toward the listener. So familiar. Lost.

When we listen, we listen for the nouns. When we speak, we leap from image to image in our sentences, as we form them, and our tongues leap from noun to noun. We do this naturally. We paint an image on the canvas of the listener’s brain. But when we speaking words written for us, and attempting to make them sound extemporaneous, it rarely happens naturally, because we are suddenly trying to remember our lines, and thus thinking in words, rather than images.

The following is the most beautiful sentence in the English language (in my opinion). From a short story by George Saunders.

“Soon I’m daubing her eyes with tissue while she weeps at the beauty of the fishermen bowing from their little boats, as they realize it’s the prince himself trying to retrieve her corsage from the river.”   — from Offloading for Mrs. Schwarz by George Saunders.

The images are gorgeous.

“Soon I’m daubing her eyes with tissue while she weeps at the beauty of the fishermen bowing from their little boats, as they realize it’s the prince himself trying to retrieve her corsage from the river.”   

And we who speak English are at a disadvantage. We put the adjectives before the noun, unlike Spanish and French. Little boats. You know how the speaker feels about the noun before you know what the noun is. You are at the mercy of the opinion of the speaker about the images he is igniting in your head. It’s not fair.

So it’s our job to, as Peter Francis James says, make the chicken kiev. Make the chicken kiev. Endow the noun with the quality of the adjective. Make the boats sound little. Make the bowing fishermen sound beautiful.

Watch your nouns splat on the inner slideshow of the listener. Watch as they tend only to blink (see above) after the image in their mind is complete.

Lick the nouns like lollypop heads. Paint images with the paintbrush that is your tongue. Endow the image words as they come out of your mouth.

And the world will hang on every word that comes out of your mouth.

Part two coming soon. PDF of the above chart here.

I’m the Pollyanna and it kills me. In 2004, I was in my third year of grad school, studying theatre directing. My thesis production was of an Irish play about two warring brothers and the priest who tries to reconcile them. In a certain way, it amounted to a very expensive diary entry. I watched from the back row on closing night. The jokes were popping, the audience was laughing, it should have been a dream moment in my career. The four actors I had grown to deeply adore in the two months of rehearsals demanded I join them for the curtain call, which I was thrilled to do, despite the very appropriate school-wide ribbing it earned me. What could possibly be better?

But the nagging hollowness I experienced that night was the beginning of the realization that I had directed so many plays, run two theatre companies and even attended an incredibly expensive graduate school, in a desperate and juvenile attempt to prove I was talented. Every instinct in the rehearsal hall, every design whimsy, every adjustment of timing was all done with the audience’s estimation of me in mind. I’m embarrassed to even type it.

My choice of thesis material was proof: Irish, sarcastic, a priest father figure (see other entries of this blog), deeply buried sorrow, it had every ingredient of the conversation I was having with myself, yet didn’t recognize. I was drunk on self-mythology. I was trapped in the story I was telling myself about me.

I was thus subject to delusions of grandeur about contributions to the art form, while deeply invested in all of my collaborators’ enjoyment of the process. But the more I leaned into making feisty collaborators happy, the less I got results I was looking for. And the more lofty I made my language in directing, i.e. the more I used German words like gestalt, zeitgeist, and verfremdung (or my favorite weltschmerz), the looser my grip on the details and nitty gritty we all needed to work on.

Sometimes your collaborators are mixing cement, sometimes they’re building a cathedral. And both actions look exactly the same. The trick is to know which action to address.

There was another director at school who was widely grumbled about, who was extremely direct and evaluative with the actors, and put no stock in being their friend. While most of us were caught up in the quagmire of reputation, this director said “fuck it” and got what he (or she) wanted. His productions were compelling, odd, daring and filled with a gusto mine could never have. While I endeavored to get the best from my collaborators (while remaining their friend), this director was only interested in getting the most from them (eschewing any personal connection in favor of the final product). I was always jealous.

Based on these choices, between grand vision or details, between results or morale, a director will inevitably locate themselves somewhere on the graph above. She may be like I was back in grad school, combining lofty, cosmic pursuits with the desperate need to be liked and end up the Pollyanna. Or perhaps she was born in September and as a Virgo was gifted with a flare for detail. She knows just how to get things done as expected, but remains a cheerleading enthusiast… then she’d be the Journeyman.

Maybe she’s a misanthrope, and has cracked the code of what makes a satisfying night of theatre, but harbors no illusions about what her current project will do for the world, she’d then be the Assassin. Or maybe she’s a once in a generation dynamo of leadership, who’s got a complete life outside of her artistic career, and an intact ego in no need of validation from these earthly flailings. Then she’s the Dictator.

Each archetype has its pitfalls. Most directors I show this to insist they are “all of the above.” And true, you can switch up your strategy as often as sentence by sentence, sometimes even nest a direction towards a particular detail within a thought about the grander vision of the thing, but in my experience, you tend to aggregate into one quadrant or another.

However …

When you allow this notion to happen, and hang with the cons of such a thing, and even give permission to the creeping feeling of mediocrity—that wolf we spend so much time keeping from our brain’s door—which inevitably follows… a strange, relaxing freedom is born. A tiny window opens in our potential, on the other side of which may indeed be the ability to be truly all of the above. When you own your own subconscious archetype, and bring it up to the level of consciousness, its grip will gradually begin to relax, and you can begin to know how to inspire a shared vision, to build morale, to achieve perfection in the details, and to produce a seismic result.

Or better yet, knowing exactly when to be which.

When to talk cement. And when to talk cathedral.

As I typed the first paragraph of this piece, I received an email informing me that a first-time-feature-director-development-program had rejected my application. Confronting one’s own potential mediocrity is a dish best eaten never, but no such luck today. But what am I going to do, cry?

Maybe I lean Pollyanna, maybe one dav I’ll find out I’m mediocre, maybe I struggle with getting the most out of my collaborators, and prefer instead just to get the best out of them, but knowing all this gives me a chance to look up at the steeple for a moment’s reflection, and keep mixing.

PDF of the above chart here.

It is here that I discovered not only do my shoes match the buildings and trucks, but the donuts are the best in the world.

Photos: Emily Topper née Topper.

Spending the week at the American Film Market, and watching $800 million worth of narrative morsels whiz around the beaches of Santa Monica, can make you think many cynical things about what makes a movie popular. It reminded me of this old graph I created five or six years ago to try to encapsulate all human consciousness on one piece of paper.

Here’s my stand-up performance in Wellfleet on August 28, 2010 discussing it:

 
It seems like we all start within the A ring, the story you tell yourself about you, or, The Ring of the Narcissist: your mirror face, your hopes for the future, circumstances that you assure yourself are not your fault, your memories, and the impact you notice yourself having on a room.

Then we enter the B ring — the story you tell the world about you, or, The Ring of the Braggadocio — your photo face, what you choose what to wear, the angle you hold your spine, your behavior in traffic, how long you take to answer questions, and how many stories you tell in which you are the hero or the victim.

The C ring — the story the world tells you about you, or, The Ring of the Consumer — is all advertising, movies, magazines, and media. You are the center of the universe, it all tells us, and you are going to need equipment. Like toothpaste.

The D ring — the story the world tells itself about you, or, The Ring of the Paranoiac — feels like a cage if you focus on it too long: your credit score, gossip about you, photography of you that you don’t like, your nation.

The D ring feels so much like a cage in fact, that very few people venture past it to the glorious E ring — the story you tell the world about the world, or, The Ring of the Participant — the art you make, your carbon footprint, how you will participate in the world, and what you give away.

It’s all about where you put most of your preoccupations. When I put on clothes in the morning, are they to assure myself I’m okay looking? To assure others I’m successful? To sport the latest brands? To give the finger? To not get fired? Or to keep me warm while I tend my planet?

The truth is, I think, if you focus on the story you tell the world about the world, it will influence all the others, and your life will inevitably improve. But if you get trapped in the psycho-emotional rat’s nest of the inner circles of self-consciousness, and spend all of your time pursuing sensations (e.g. the sensation of being famous, or being correct, or mighty), you will have missed out on incredible opportunities to contribute a verse to the great human experiment.

When I get caught up in the movie of my life—and start to dwell on what people might think—I try to remember…

No one is watching. The cinema is empty. And it is such a relief.

Oh, and the oomphalos (Greek for navel) is the unknowable belly button of existence. That’s the one in the middle. The actual you enshrouded by all this narrative tomfoolery. The you anyone would fall in love with, if only they could see it.

And download a pdf of the above chart here.

Eventually, some realize the past is safe. It already happened. And we begin to protect the future from the dooming ignorance that surrounds us.

Protectors of the past: the only constant is change, and if you spend too much of your time trying to prevent it, you will eventually feel like a fool.

Protect the future. Protect it from the closed-loop notions of the past. Protect it from institutions that prioritize their own survival over their purported missions. Protect it from cavalier ignorance of the dire consequences of our consumption. Protect it from the primitive human instinct of power-grabs and exclusion.

Eradicate certainty.

Embrace change.

My screenplay was selected as a finalist in the Oaxaca Film Festival this November. I couldn’t be more thrilled. Oaxaca has meant a lot to people I love for years. I knew one day I’d go and now I have the best reason in the world! As part of the application, I needed to submit a synopsis in Spanish, for which I solicited the help of, and am deeply indebted to, Joseph Hughes, David Noles, Maya Parra, Tony Kahn and Gloria Garcia. In so doing, I suddenly realized this this story — a renegade priest takes on the government — is extremely Central and South American in flavor. Like red mole.

I received this message from Ramiz Adeeb Azar, the festival’s endearing founder: “You are the BEST OF THE BEST-THE FINAL SELECTION. There are 19 of you. The winner will be announced at the award ceremony on Nov 19, 2011. Thank you and good luck!” Every communication of his has been filled joy and spirit, and by all accounts this matches the city from which they’re sent.

My current title in English is The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives.

My current title in Spanish is Por los Himnos que Gritamos (or, “For the Hymns We Shout”).

¡Ya Basta!

Having been invited to San Francisco by good friend Michael Hoch, now the Executive Director of Killing My Lobster, a brilliant sketch comedy concern founded by many of my brother’s friends from Brown University, I endeavored to condense a couple of my monologues from Low Tide last summer into tight five minute routines. I had the aid of a giant screen for Keynote slides, which kicked some serious tail. This marks a new direction for all that bizarre material I developed last summer.
The show was brilliant. The braintrust of comedy in the Bay Area is pretty staggering. But I will say this. That is one foggy town. Very noir. Even on Pride Weekend.