Mother of Invention Acting School - Hollywood/Los Angeles and San Francisco

ivana chubbuck and objective

2009-12-18T19:41:00.000-08:00

When I came across Ivana Chubbuck's book The Power of the Actor a few years ago, I was pleased: here was the first book on acting that I had seen that discusses the all-important innovation created by some of my teachers at the Yale School of Drama. The innovation has to do with the notion of objective. Objective is a concept that has been around since Stanislavsky, and it is in fairly widespread use in one form or another. The concept of objective is, most simply, this: that the actor can be liberated from self-consciousness by focusing on a goal that she, as the character, wishes to accomplish in a scene or situation. By focusing on the goal, the actor partially forgets that she is being watched, and is, as a consequence, free from the paralyzing effects of self-consciousness.

So far so good. The innovation created by David Hammond at Yale, and developed by Mark Brokaw and Evan Yionoulis, was to distinguish between two kinds of objectives: plot objectives and underlying objectives. The "plot" in plot objectives refers to the plot of a story or play or screenplay: a character's plot objectives are the changes in the world that she wishes to bring about. A plot objective expresses the way in which a character wants to change some piece of their world. Plot objectives might include getting you to buy my house, to accept my marriage proposal, to stop playing the drums at night in your room so I can have some peace and quiet, or to join me in robbing a jewelry store. All of these involve my attempting to change my circumstances for the better, or, put differently, to solve a problem. Pursuing a plot objective activates those parts of an actor that are involved in solving problems: the mind, and to some extent the heart, as often solving problems involves influencing others emotionally.

What these teachers at Yale recognized, though, is that the mind and the heart is not all there is. There is also the gut. In the gut lives the appetites, and also, our capacity for locomotion, for fight or flight (in the hips). It's entirely possible for an actor to be engaged as a problem solver, in the head and heart, and to be asleep in the gut, at the visceral level (viscera is Latin for the guts, quite literally, the bowels, so to eviscerate someone is, colloquially, to rip them a new one).

So these teachers recognized that a conception of objective as a problem that you need to solve, a change in the circumstances surrounding you, is incomplete, by itself. Solving these problems is important -- that's part of the fascination of stories, is seeing people contend with adversity. But we as spectators are not going to be viscerally engaged by this problem-solving alone.

Unless.

We conceive of another type of objective. Let's call it the "underlying objective." The underlying objective is is the NEED that lives in the belly, the proverbial fire in the belly, that drives us to enter into the fray, influence people, and solve problems. It is the motor that drives us forward, the motor of appetite, hunger, need. My teachers recognized that the underlying objective was the thing that impels us to take up plot objectives, and then to put them down in favor of other plot objectives. The underlying objective is the need which stays constant, even as circumstances shift and plot objectives change accordingly. One of the consequences of this is that the underlying objective is not phrased in a way which involves another person, because other people are part of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and so an objective that involves another person will be some form of a plot objective. If my underlying objective is to get "respect as a true healer", then the plot objective "getting you, my client, to confide in me, your therapist" will give me a piece of the underlying objective, but the underlying objective is something that exists in me APART FROM who or what is around me. The changes I will seek to bring about in the world (my plot objectives) are ways of getting my underlying objective met, of ANSWERING that need. We always look for the need to be met from others, but naming the need itself is saying something about us, not about what we want other people to do.

This distinction between plot objective and underlying objective is very powerful, and it is not simple. I realize I have provided only a very preliminary sketch of it here. And I don't intend to to try to say too much more about it here, because I believe that a classroom setting is where it can be best presented and understood. Without the context of a scene and actors to work with, there is a limit to how much can be made intelligible about it. But I think I have said enough to be able to make clear what Ivana Chubbuck gets right (not that much), and what she doesn't (quite a bit).

She does say "Always Make the SCENE OBJECTIVE about Relationship, Don't Play the Plot", and with that, I am in 100% agreement. And she says that a scene objective (which is another form of the underlying objective, any distinction between them is not important here) should not be "rational" or "cerebral", that it should be "basic", "needy", and "primal". I'm down with that. She also says the scene objective doesn't change-- that's good. And that every scene has one, good too, and that it is an actor's most important tool. But that's about where my agreement with Ivana Chubbuck ends. I fundamentally disagree with her on her criteria for what makes an underlying objective. I don't want to do a big recap of her criteria for picking an objective, because I think it is mostly foolish. So I will focus on one important point: she says the scene objective (or underlying objective) should be worded in a way that requires a response. From her examples of what that would look like, I am going to go through a list of "good" scene objectives (underlying objectives) that she provides, and say specifically what I think is wrong with each of them.

"To get you to love me"
The problem with this is that it describes what we want the other person to DO (love us). We want, with an underlying objective, to say what it will mean to us or give us if the other person loves us. It will give me my...(something). By knowing that we need our (something), we can constantly be monitoring in the scene to see whether the other person is giving us our "something", we can HARVEST our "something." To get the other person to love you? So what if they don't? THAT is the question an underlying objective needs to answer.
"To get you to give me a job"
Plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot. This is nothing but an attempt to impact our circumstances, our situation in the world. It says nothing about what is AT STAKE in the situation, what it will cost us if we don't get the job, what we will GET if we do get the job. Chubbuck might argue that this is addressed in what she calls the "overall objective", but she muddles things badly by saying that the actor should not play the plot in the scene objective, and then suggesting...wait for it...PLOT OBJECTIVES...as scene objectives. She speaks of the need to get beyond the plot to the relationship, but her scene objectives ARE the plot.
"To make you validate me"
In my class, we call "validate" "the V word." I write off "validation" as what I call "Oprah talk", which is a particular form of what Chubbuck calls the "rational" and the "cerebral". Validation is not a part of our everyday ways of describing our needs. Can you imagine any advertiser (advertisers understand all about language and the visceral) asking you to see a movie described as "one man's quest for validation"? I didn't think so. Also, we don't look on validation as a very legitimate thing to pursue: someone who needs a lot of validation is considered needy, insecure. Not buying it.
"To make you my ally"
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, an objective that gets beyond the plot, whether you call it overall, underlying or scene, needs to not be phrased as a way of changing our circumstances, as changing our circumstances IS the definition of the plot. An objective that goes beyond the plot is something you can HARVEST in pursuing your plot objectives. What will you get if you make the other person your ally? Not only what will you be able to accomplish if you make the other person your ally, but what will it mean about you that you succeeded in making someone your ally? That is getting beyond the plot.

I think I've made my point. Chubbuck talks a good game about the need to move beyond the plot, that is, beyond problem-solving, but her recommendations about how to do that are confused and misleading. Getting the gut activated involves something beyond naming what you want to see other people do, and yet Ivana Chubbuck seems to think it involves precisely that.

what to do when you are not acting

2009-12-16T22:52:00.000-08:00

Many of us have had to take on ~~a day job~~ unwanted obligations at some point to support our creative pursuits. This can be a drag, but there is good news: this kind of activity provides great opportunities for paying attention to habitual ways of doing things that you would like to change, and by changing, help your acting.

Suppose you are in a class and in the course of the work the teacher has called attention to a physical or vocal habit that is blocking the flow for you: preventing you, in one way or another, from fully engaging.

It might be habitual tension in your lips or jaw or brow or around the eyes. It might be a habit of standing with your hip popped to one side or the other, so that you are not over your center of gravity. It might be habitual throat tension when you speak. It might be shallow breathing. There are any number of things it could be.

These kinds of habits can seriously undermine your efforts at entering in to the moment, integrating mind and body, and going for it. The trouble is, while you are acting is not the time to put your attention on addressing these things, because while you are acting, you want the majority of your attention to be on the scene at hand, your partner, and whatever you are pursuing in the scene. You want to be ABSORBED by these things. You don't want to be thinking about your jaw or your shoulders or whatever bugaboo of habitual tension you are struggling with. So what to do?

While you are about the aforementioned "unwanted obligations" is a great opportunity to address those things. Thinking about your jaw or your breathing is unlikely to significantly detract from these things, in the way it might while you are acting. So you have the opportunity to monitor whatever the problem area is, and continually make the adjustment that is called for. In order to change a habit, you will have to notice the unwanted habit MANY MANY TIMES and make the adjustment MANY MANY TIMES before the change starts to become automatic. If you are having to give significant chunks of time to your unwanted obligations, then you have lots of time to try to address these things.

Furthermore, not only are you given the opportunity to practice noticing and adjusting, but you have the opportunity to notice and adjust WHILE DOING SOMETHING ELSE. This adjusting-while-doing-something-else is vital, because that is what you want to be doing while acting. Once you have enough awareness and facility at making the adjustment in question, you will be able to go through that process with less and less of your awareness required for it, until you can do it without skipping the proverbial beat. When you are at that point, then your acting will truly benefit. Either you will make the adjustment automatically while you act, or the process of noticing the problem and fixing it will require so little awareness as to be no intrusion at all on your primary activity of acting the scene.

Notice the role that the teacher plays in all of this: she points out some habit, brings you to an awareness of it. The bulk of the work of changing the habit is yours. There are many students who come to an acting class wanting the teacher to make them into a good actor. There is no teacher alive who can do that. Only the student brings about transformation of himself or herself. It is the ones who take charge of their own learning process, of making that process happen, that truly grow. As much as learning to act, the student needs to learn to learn to act. A student who has that is unstoppable.

Chicago is a theater town. And how.

2009-12-13T17:00:00.000-08:00

I am visiting Chicago for the Memorial Service of my first great theater teacher, Robin Bennett. This morning I met her daughter Jenny and Jenny's partner for breakfast. When I met them Jenny handed me the copy of the Riverside Edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare that my school had won when we took our ensemble developed "Songs and Sonnets" to the Folger Shakespeare Library's High School Festival in 1988, pictured here. Apparently Robin had wanted me to have it. The place we went to breakfast was an Irish pub type place called Hackney's I believe, with lots of carved wood and ketchup bottles on the tables. It was full of people in Chicago Cubs regalia, who were headed to a football game. During the meal, the Riverside sat on the table, but I had set my black leather gloves down on top of it, obscuring the title. While we were eating, not one but TWO waitresses stopped by the table, guessed correctly what the book was based on familiarity with the decor on the binding (the title was obscured remember), and voiced their enthusiasm for its contents. Can't really picture this happening in another American city. Although I suppose we should make some allowances for the fact that the spirit of Robin Bennett was probably working her voodoo on the waitresses to make sure they noticed.

sundry digital ephemera

2009-12-13T15:30:00.000-08:00

These digital drawings for the Green Movement by architect Soheil Tavakoli to honor Iran's Freedom Fighters are pretty great.
If you had to work for the Man, these offices would be where you'd want to do it.
Al Pacino is getting his Shylock on in Central Park
See these butterflies try to fly in space and fail massively
Note to self: if building a replica of San Francisco, toothpics are the wrong materials. It takes to too long (34 years)!
This poor slob's conjugal bed was tweeting his, uh, activities, thanks to his best man.
I want my own Fortress of Solitude desk. I just don't know how I can ever feel complete without one.

15 minutes a day

2009-12-11T21:19:00.003-08:00

I didn't actually read this book, but someone explained the principle to me -- that accomplishing a little something everyday can add up to a lot -- and I embraced it, in writing my dissertation on Thomas Bernhard in German studies at Stanford, and I found it to very effective. The biggest enemy of the writer (I'll get to actors in a moment) is procrastination. The magnitude of the task at hand just feels so great, that you just don't want to start. This procrastination persists over time, and then guilt starts to set in, which in turn compounds the procrastination, and creates a vicious cycle. By telling yourself that you ONLY need to write fifteen minutes a day, and NOTHING MORE if you don't feel like it, you eliminate the difficulty with facing the daunting magnitude of taking on the whole project at once. By only needing to take on a little bit at a time, the fear factor is greatly diminished.

But there are other substantial benefits to the fifteen minutes a day plan: by staying connected, if only in a relatively small way, to the project at hand, the mind stays engaged with the project, so that when you are doing other things, washing your hair, mowing the lawn, walking the dog, a part of your mind will be chewing on the problem, even if it is not in the foreground of your mind. You will find that when you return to your writing the next day, things that may have seemed intractable or puzzling the previous day will have sorted themselves out. I used to experience this all the time when I worked as a software engineer: I would puzzle over some bug for hours, finally give up and go home, and then, over the weekend, while I was eating a hot dog or cutting my toenails, the answer would come to me, like a bolt from the blue. The thing that had eluded me was suddenly visible, and the bug dissolved before my eyes. By exposing yourself to your work on a daily basis, you keep the unconscious mind churning, and you maximize the likelihood that it will spit a solution out into your lap.

This is an extremely valuable principle for actors. I require my acting students to meet once per week to rehearse. Some of them meet more than that, but that is the minimum. Some of them end up meeting the day of class and rehearsing before the class starts. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, it sometimes means that the student is leaving the scene alone for the whole week and then taking it up only when he comes to rehearse it. He doesn't make a conscious decision to do this, but life happens, way leads on to way, and before he knows it, a week has passed and he has not thought about the scene. In that time, the scene has morphed into a foreign, unfriendly entity; the warm glow of familiarity has not been allowed to grow through repeated exposures.

Even the actor who does little outside of rehearsal but meets her partner midway through the seven days between classes to rehearse is better off, for she is re-exposed to her work every three days or so, between rehearsing and coming to class. But the best case scenario is that the actor does some work on the scene each day, even if only fifteen minutes worth. You'd be surprised at how much you can accomplish in fifteen minutes of focused work, and that does tend to accumulate quickly as the days and weeks pass. Plus, you get the enormous added benefit of staying close to your work, so that your comfort with it grows, it begins to appear less demanding and menacing, and your mind continues to chew on the problems even as you are occupied with other things.

WHAT TO DO in those fifteen minutes depends on the actor and the process she is exploring or embracing in her work. I present a framework in my class for developing a role based on the training I encountered at the Yale School of Drama, but it is certainly not the only possible framework. That is not really at issue here. What is at issue is the actor developing the discipline to stay close to his work. This, in the end, probably makes as much difference as the precise kind of work that is done in those fifteen minutes. There is a quote that is ascribed to Aristotle incorrectly; it is actually from a man named Will Durant, who was paraphrasing Aristotle : "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Sustained excellence over time depends as much on the way the actor approaches his or her task as it does on what she actually achieves in any given performance situation. Slow and steady, and all that.

This principle dovetails nicely with the principle of units initiated by Stanislavsky, today commonly referred to as "beats." Acting students everywhere are taught to break down the scene into beats, but the justification for doing so is not often explained. In the "Units and Objectives" chapter in An Actor Prepares, Stanislavsky famously used the metaphor of a large cooked turkey that needed to carved up into manageable, bite-sized portions in order to be consumed. The only way to accomplish a monumental task (like embodying a role) was to break it down into smaller ones. He wasn't taking about the rate at which these tasks are tackled, as I am in this article, but the underlying principle is the same: what seems impossible becomes possible when broken down into its constituent parts.

I will note that I do not think classes that offer the actor the chance to "come and work every day of the week" necessarily addresses the issue I am confronting here, and that is because it is imperative that the actor to develop the ability to work on his role without supervision. The input of teachers and coaches is invaluable, but an actor who relies completely on them will be in trouble when facing a difficult or incompetent director. The actor needs to make friends with working by herself, and develop confidence in her ability to do so. I am not saying it is a bad thing for an actor to go to a class every day, but doing that does nothing to bring the actor to develop creative self-reliance. Wittgenstein used a metaphor of a ladder which can be thrown away once you have climbed it to describe the role of philosophy. An actor might look at ther training ins a similar light: ultimately, she wants to reach a vantage point where she can do her work with or without the help of well-wishers and sherpas. That is the source of true creative strength.

enough to make you wish you were in Austin

2009-12-09T00:56:00.000-08:00

This is one of the most interesting pieces of theater criticism I've seen in a while. It's a discussion of a one-man Henry V done in Austin, Texas:

On arriving at the OffCenter and receiving my complimentary champagne (apparently there was some sort of Federal holiday on) I was informed that I would be seated. This is odd for our fringe spaces, but what the hell… not my show. I waited. And Robert greeted me and showed me to a seat of his choosing.

On setting out to perform a one man version of Henry V, Mr. Faires wasn’t pacing out back trying to find his inner Dionysus, cramming scene 4, or opening his 4th chakra, he was personally greeting and seating all 60 of his guests.

Did he then run out back to compose himself 10 minutes before curtain? No. He simply stepped on stage, surrounded by 20 of those guests, adjusted his props and began when his lights shifted.

It was a piece that could have been told in a bar by as expert a storyteller as Mr. Faires. Simply a gathering of friends who asked for that one story about the time Harry went to France.

The unpretentiousness of what is described here...I could take a bath in it. The intimacy of it, the friendliness of it, dare I say the warmth of it? The author enjoins his readers to "Stop building a monolith to yourself in every production and performance". That's what we need: fewer monoliths, more warmth.

from the depths of the Interwebs

2009-12-08T23:57:00.000-08:00

Futuristic buildings Dubai had planned on but will never see. Schadenfreude anyone?
Get the recorded view of the ride down from the top of the 10 tallest roller coasters.
Now Kittycam can tell you what your cat does all day. Not so much sleeping, much looking out the window, it turns out.
Get a bus tour of the stomping grounds of Los Angeles gangs.
No, these are not from a movie. They are actual pics from the current Space Shuttle Atlantis mission.
15 Google interview questions that will make you feel really stupid.
Watch where you click: 20 Years for Accidentally Downloading Child Porn
Hermes scarves will blow you away
If you are going to bash "teh gays", be ready for your choices of apparel to be scrutinized
Ho, ho, ho! Let's hear it for creepy mall Santas
Somehow, it's comforting to know that even wikipedia can get sued for propagating untruths.

(virtual) points of interest

2009-12-05T14:54:00.000-08:00

A game show that shows what happened to all those unemployed people.
The eco-future of the Christmas tree market.
Let Beethoven accompany you on a timelapse photography tour of the Alps
The only thing you really need to know about Twilight.
John Mellencamp's son has started a Facebook Group to persuade his father to stop smoking.
Find your evil twin with Facebook's new Facial Profiler
What was Google missing? It's very own dictionary.
Be ready for the 9 Silly Things People Say when you say you don't want children
Don't miss out on the chance to get in on the ground floor of the Somalian pirate stock market
Incredible hulk cake complete with green nipples
Who know that smoldering, toxic fossil fuels could create such...beauty?
Coming soon to a sushi restaurant near you.
Move over Cirque due Soleil. now there's Circo Visuale Les Farfadais.
Thanks to this new toilet paper with a twist, you can finally get rid of those pesky piles of Vanity Fairs in the bathroom.
Tapestry spun entirely from golden spider silk.
Woman accused of setting fire to husband's penis.
One enterprising young man is using Google Street View to promote his rock band.

profile in courage

2009-12-05T13:38:00.000-08:00

We can all learn from this boy.

fox in the snow, or, playing to win

2009-12-04T18:55:00.000-08:00

This fox holds nothing back. A model for actors everywhere.

"I don't know what to do with my hands."

2009-12-04T11:18:00.000-08:00

This is a cry for help that comes up occasionally for acting teachers everywhere. I have a few thoughts about it.

Problems in the physical life of a scene invariably stem from a lack of clarity about the immediate potential future: more specifically, what you are looking for your partner to do and say next, but especially do. When problems pertaining to the physical life of the scene arise in class, I pose the question: what do you want to see happen next? Usually, the actor doesn't have much to say, thinks about it for a moment, and then comes up with something, but the something he comes up with is often lacking in HEAT or urgency, and it will often be of the form "I want her to say xyz". It may be true that xyz is what the actor in the scene wants to hear at that moment, but saying xyz is always a part of some larger development that will have a physical component, and getting clear about that is the key to solving whatever is weighing down the physical life at that moment. Do you want to see the other person embrace you? Take your hands and dance you around? Leave the room? Leave the room with you? Sit down and confide in you? Once the actor has clarified this, then usually, without further ado, her body adjusts accordingly to prepare for the expected outcome. These are calculations that we make instinctively for ourselves in our own lives, but when we are pretending to be someone else, they don't always come as readily.

It's often important to be clear not only about what you want to see happen next, but what you are afraid will happen next, and what you may need to be ready to act to prevent. DO you need to stop someone from leaving the room? From picking up a gun? From leaving the bed? Clarifying these possible negative outcomes can have an equally clarifying effect on the actor's physical orientation towards the partner.

The actor is not sure what to do with his hands because he is not sure what he is waiting for or looking for to happen. She is so focused on the verbal interaction with her partner that she forgets that that verbal interaction is wrapped in a physical context. Usually, by reminding the actor of the nature of her physical engagement with her partner and her relationship to the space, her phsycal life sorts itself out.

If the actor is involved in a section of the scene where there is a back-and-forth discussion or debate or argument happening with another character, and they are in a kind of standoff, where they are confronting each other in a kind of deadlock, then there will naturally be some gesturing involved. When an actor is seeming or feeling self-conscious about these gestures, the answer is usually to clarify the desired or feared physical outcomes, as described above, and to remind the actor to consistently receive of his or her partner, which, most of the time, involves sustained eye contact. Tha partner's eyes, as I have written about elsewhere, are the surest antidote to self-consciousness. I know this from firsthand experience. When I meet prospective students for coffee, I have a "spiel" that I do for them about the purpose of the class and the expecations involved. I have been doing this pitch for five years now. I typically gesture as I speak, to help make my points, the way that people who are explaining something typically do. However, I sometimes can feel a bit of self-consciousness about my gestures: I notice that the timing of the gestures relative to the words is off somehow, and I anticipate the gesture I will be making next, which distracts me. However, I have found that if I consciously look directly into to my interlocutor's eyes, not vaguely in the direction of the eyes but right into the pupils, unwaveringly though not aggressively, then the self-consciousness vanishes. There is some vulnerability in doing that, but it's worth it: my gestures then arise spontaneouly and line up perfectly with my words, I feel myself plugged into the "flow", and I am aware of all of this without being self-conscious about it. In other words, by fully giving myself over to connecting with my partner and communicating with her, I forget about what I look like and how I am being received, and I feel free. Or, as a wise person once said, the only way out is through.

Some people need to work to develop freedom in the joints of the arms. In his "advice to the players" speech, Hamlet warns about "sawing the air too much with your hands". If the actor has not discovered the requisite freedom in these joints, his arm will move monolithically, and he will seem to be sawing the air too much. The Alexander technique can be a great help with this, and studying T'ai-Chi is also enormoulsy beneficial in developing the expressive potential of the arms and hands.

In the end, it comes down to being in the moment. Paradoxically, though, being able to be in the moment successfully as someone else usually involves thinking things through.

from the great flux of the cosmic Web

2009-12-02T11:37:00.000-08:00

Some points of interest that have shown up in my browser recently:

Holy Big Brother Batman: My Mom's on Facebook
What is your Internet drug of choice?
When you read about what acting class did for this autistic boy, scratch your head and wonder: what might it do for me?
For the first time ever, the complete manuscript of A Christmas Carol is available online, edits and all.(HT Jenny Bennett) And there's even a contest to pick the best edit!
"Old Europe" is old. Really old. Older than ancient Egypt. Older than Mesopotamia. It's OLD. Someone please tell Donald Rumsfeld.
A wake-up call for your friendly neighborhood TSA
Jesus Christ excused from jury duty for bad behavior
Evolution f*cked their shit up.
New place to pimp your creative wares:
Who knew you could do THAT with a beer can?

when it's important to be an adult

2009-11-29T17:20:00.000-08:00

Acting teachers famously emphasize the importance of "play" for actors, and rightfully so. The give and take of doing a scene involves actors "playing" off each other in the manner of jazz improvisation. Ask and answer, receive and respond. And with the advent of the nineties, we learned of the "Inner Child", that part of all of us which hungers for spontaneous, positive, playful, connected interaction with others, which many look for (and find) in acting.

However, there are aspects of an actor's work where the wisdom and insight that come with life experience are called for. Interestingly, this fact can be seen clearly through looking at a way in which adults are at a disadvantage in comparison with children There's a recent Wired Science article that reports on how children fare better in not getting tricked by optical illusions in which there is a misleading context. Consider the following:

In each of the three cases, the orange ball on the right is larger. However, in a study cited in the article, adults were more likely to be deceived by misleading contextual information than young children were.

This unusual triumph of kids over grown-ups suggests that the brain’s capacity to consider the context of visual scenes, and not just focus on parts of scenes, develops slowly, say psychologist Martin Doherty of the University of Stirling in Scotland and his colleagues. Even at age 10, children lack adults’ attunement to visual context, Doherty’s team concludes in a paper published online November 12 in Developmental Science.

As a result, visual context can be experimentally manipulated to distort adults’ perception of objects’ sizes. But Doherty’s group finds that children, especially those younger than 7, show little evidence of altered size perception on a task called the Ebbinghaus illusion.

In other words, the adult's tendency to consider context to make judgments, in this case, works against her. The scientists involved attribute this to the nature of the development of the brain, and they are no doubt right. However, I would also suggest that in general in life, assessing situations and making judgements well depends on an awareness of the importance of context, and acquiring this awareness is a part of the maturation process. Unlike the situation with this example, awareness of the value and importance of context is an enormous asset. I can remember an incident from when I was a child. It was Christmas, and my cousins and their parents had come over for the afternoon and evening. My cousins' parents were less protective than mine, and they had seen the movie Grease! I must have been 8 or 9 at the time, and my two cousins were a year older and a year younger than I was. They told me about the drive-in incident in the movie, which ends with Sandy slamming the door on Danny's "nuts", as my cousins referred to them. I understood what was meant by that, but I had no awareness of how the contexts in which this might be appropriate are limited. Within a short time, I had repeated the story for the whole company, adults and all. My cousins were mortified, which surprised me, and amused, and the adults were not pleased. In this incident, I learned something about in what contexts talk of "nuts" might be appropriate, and contexts where they aren't.

I wrote previously about what a huge role, in working on a scene, that considering the context that is invoked implicitly (not explicitly) plays. There is always some very important part of the scene that is left implicit; otherwise it wouldn't be very interesting writing. But what's the problem? My acting students are adults. They have the requisite understanding of the importance of context that will help them understand what is involved in a scene, what is at stake, and what to do with that information, right? Well, in truth, no. All of us tend to regress in unfamiliar and challenging situations, and for most people, acting, getting up in front of people and pretending to be be someone else, is an unfamiliar and challenging situation. Also, preparing to act a scene is another unfamiliar and challenging situation. Challenging for different reasons, but challenging nonetheless. In these situations, in my experience, actors often lose their hard-won sensitivity to context that they have acquired from their years living their life, and they cling to a hope that what they need to do to act the scene will be handed to them by the writer; that they only need be careful students of what the writer has laid out for them, and they will have everything they need. They seldom are able, of their own initiative, to activate their own sensitivity to context and do the imaginative work necessary to project themselves into that context and see things the way they need to so that the scene comes fully alive.

An example. A play I like to work on in the class a lot is Neal Bell's Cold Sweat. There is a whipsmart, tough woman at the center of it, lots of two person scenes, a range of types of characters for both genders, lots of wit, depth, and passion, what's not to like? There is one scene in which the main character, Alice Franklin, in a moment of crisis, goes alone to a graveyard to visit her father's grave. Her sidekick and close friend, Fay, has followed her secretly, and makes her presence known when the graveyard gates are about to close. When asked to account for how she happens to be there, Fay tells Alice that she followed her there, and when questioned on this, she says "I saw you buying a bottle of rotgut wine, and wondered if you were sad. Are you sad?"

After the students do their scene, I question them on a lot of things. I ask the actor playing Fay why she chose to follow Alice rather than greet her when she saw her buying the wine. The actor is always pulled up short, because this point is not explicitly addressed by the writer. The answer is that somehow, Fay knows that Alice is avoiding her. The whys and the wherefores of that are too complicated for this discussion, and it is also not explicitly addressed in the scene. Many other things are, such as the fact that Alice hasn't written the lecture she is supposed to deliver that night. However, it is contemplating this particular point, that Fay knew that Alice was avoiding her, that can bring the actor playing Fay into consciousness that her problem in the scene is that her friend is pulling away from her, not whether or not Alice writes the lecture. "The scene is about the relationship, not about the plot" is a mantra in the class. The lecture is part of the plot, and the plot is always what is foregrounded. The plot is, however, never the key to unlocking the scene for the actor. The key is the relationship, and the relationship is related to many things outside the scene, i.e., the context of the scene.

When we get through the discussion to this point, the actor playing Fay is invariably nodding her head. The "adult" part of her, the part of her with aforementioned sensitivity to context, knows the truth of what I am saying intuitively. The "child" part of her, the part that wanted to avoid the work of imaginatively addressing the context of the scene and work only with what the writer had made explicit in the dialogue, had won the day in her preparation process, though.

In the Alexander technique, the first step in changing a habit is "inhibiting", or obstructing the habitual response. Actors need to develop the ability to inhibit the child-like wish for the plot to be the answer, for the writer to hand them all they need to know on a silver platter. They need to be able to recognize when they are reaching for such "ready-to-hand" answers to fundamental questions about the role, and the need to set those answers aside and see what arises from further introspection and study. Recognizing the need to do this, and the act of doing this, are hallmarks of an actor who brings the wisdom and experience of adulthood to bear on their role.

the wayward "Messenger"

2009-11-28T23:46:00.001-08:00

I really, really wanted to like this movie. I hate feeling so disconnected from the wars this country is engaged in. I went to the movie ready to be kicked in the stomach and take it, and feel some of the pain that the people who have been robbed of their loved ones by our foreign interventions. For a while, it seemed like I was well on track to experience just that. The first third of the movie is tightly focused on the initiation of Ben Foster's character into the practice of informing families that their loved one has been killed. The able Woody Harrelson is his Virgil, guiding him through the perils and pitfalls of this series of emotional minefields, where the soldier delivering the message is confronted with his own impotence to do anything in the face of the wrenching, profound loss the recipients of the bad news experience before his eyes.

But by halfway through, it becomes clear that the director does not know where to take the story. In the end it seems the story was supposed to be about the bond between these two men, but by the time we get there, there have been several digressions and false starts, and waters have been substantially muddied. The catharses intended in the final scenes disappoint, in a word. Ben Foster may well win an Oscar for his work in this, although not because the acting is extraordinary, but because he did a serviceable job on a role that cannot but elicit enormous sympathy, given the type it embodies: the troubled soldier, hounded by wartime loss and perceived failure.

But what is even more disappointing than the movie itself is the apparent lack of hunger for narratives like this one. We have been at war for almost a decade now, and inside Fortress America we are largely shielded from the horrors and costs of these episodes. This movie opened two weeks ago, and is playing in only one cinema in San Francisco, and even then there are only two showings a day, sharing a theater with Boondock Saints II. The theater was about three-quarters full at a 7:30 showing on Saturday night. People are busy with Black Friday and Twilight and Ninja Assasin, I guess. Perhaps the buzz on the movie is not good enough, but the reviews have largely been kind to it. I feel a bit of frustration that the moviegoing public does not seem to feel any urgency about engaging with these issues, even as President Obama weighs what the course will be in Afghanistan. Flawed as it was, this movie should have a greater audience. Time for the citizens of this country to step up.

Bob Dylan-- Must Be Santa

2009-11-28T00:24:00.000-08:00

This is one Christmas song I won't resent hearing. As a kid, I absolutely loved it. I would sing it shamelessly, at the top of my lungs, even though I can't sing very well.

The video reminds me a lot of the video to the song Jonathan David by Belle & Sebastian. Since B&S have a song about Dylan, and to me they seem to be totally kindred spirits, it wouldn't surprise me if Dylan had actually seen their video.

William H. Macy is a written page guy. That's good, but...

2009-11-26T21:37:00.000-08:00

From a profile of Macy done accompanying the release of Bobbie:

Macy, like his friend, mentor and longtime collaborator David Mamet, does not believe in delving into his characters any further than the writer has already delved. He doesn't believe that creating a back-story - a cherished aspect of the Method school - does anything for the performance.

"I'm a written-page guy," he says. "The writer gives you everything you need."

And in one very important sense, I am with him. I quoted that same remark of his in a previous posting in which I take pretty much the same position. For me, acting is about touching the same impulse in yourself that prompted the writer to invent the character in the first place. The text is the alpha and the omega. When Mamet and Macy make remarks like this, their targets are approaches such as Method acting, which relies heavily on the actor's personal experience, and, to a lesser extent, Meisner, which gives primacy to the immediate connection to the partner, and the circumstances and text are built up around that.

Before proceeding, I'll point out that Mamet and Macy are not quite the textual purists they sometimes make themselves out to be. Part of their approach, as described in the Practical Handbook for the Actor, involves finding what they call an "As If", a kind of equivalence between the challenge facing the character in the scene and the actor's own life experience. They are still STRONGLY oriented towards the text, much moreso than the Strasberg "method" is, but they do advocate this kind of extra-textual reflection as part of the actor's process. I advocate something similar in the approach I teach, so I do not fault them for this. I have made my reservations about Mamet's Practical Aesthetics known elsewhere. I have something else I want to focus on here.

While I consider myself a "written page guy", as well, I think that there is a way in which Mamet and Macy make things sound deceptively simple. I had been thinking about discussing this for a while, and then, in one of those marvelous moments of serendipity that all creatives know and cherish, I came across a brilliant exposition of the difficulty with what they are saying, in quite an unlikely context. That context was a book by technology guru Clay Shirky called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations , which, by the way, is a great read if you are interested in what's coming next in the way we live now. But here is the Shirky passage I found deeply relevant to this discussion:

There's a story in my family about my parent's first date. My father, wanting to impress my mother, decided to take her to a drive-in, however, he had to borrow his father's car. Once they were at the movie, my mother, wanting to impress my father, ordered the most sophisticated drink available, which was a root-beer float. Now my mother hates root beer, always has, and after imbibing it, she proceeded to throw up on the floor of my grandfather's car. My father had to drive her home, missing the movie he'd driven fifteen miles and paid a dollar to see. Then he had to clean the car and return it with an explanantion and an apology. (There was, fortunately for me, a second date.)

Now, what part of the story is about the internal combustion engine. None of it, in any obvious way, but all of it, in another way. No engine, no car. No cars, no using cars for dates. (The effect of automobiles on romance would be hard to overstate.) No dates in cars, no drive-in movies. And so on. Our life is so permeated with the automotive that understand immediately how my father must have felt when my grandfather let him borrow the car, and how carefully he must have cleaned it before returning it, without thinking about internal combustion at all.

Now imagine, if you will, that someone had written a script of the scene in which Shirky return the car keys to his father, explains what happens, and apologizes. Depending on what his dad was like, this scene could have gone a lot of different ways. But the important point is that the stuff that Shirky mentions about how central the automobile is to the way we date now would have gone unmentioned in such a scene. It would be understood. It does not belong to the text, strictly speaking, but to the context, in this case the historical context.

I am now going to make a categorical statement: all fiction derives its power, to some extent at least, from the rub, the friction, between the text and the context in which the actions it depicts transpires. If you take a screenwriting class, and you write a scene in which a character explicitly states everything about his or her situation, you will be told that this is too "on the nose." It is part of what is mysterious and awesome about storytelling that it engages our understanding of the world in presenting itself, without making its reliance on that understanding explicit. The story is told, and in the process aspects of the context of the story are invoked, in the way the primacy of the automobile is invoked in the above anecdote, without our even being aware of their evocation. Henry James, in the preface to his novel The Wings of the Dove, spoke of wanting his characters to

assert their fulness and roundness, their power to revolve, so that they have sides and backs, parts in the shade as true as parts in the sun

The terms in the sun are the aspects of the situation or circumstances that the writer makes explicit, in the dialogue in the case of a play, and the terms in the shade are the aspects of the situation that we grasp without knowing that we grasp them. They are alluded to or evoked on the written page, but they are not stated outright; then they would no longer be in the shade. Everything would be in the sun, and nothing would be in the shade. There would be no mystery, no enigma, nothing miraculous about the unfolding of the story. Everything would be open to view. Shirky says above that we "instantly understand" what is true about the car and its significance and value, and in one sense we do, although Shirky himself felt the need to spell it out in his discussion, so while we may grasp that importance in experiencing the story, we may also have a difficult time articulating that importance if prompted.

Uta Hagen famously remarked that "every good actor has a secret." The only meaningful way to understand that remark, in my view, given that Hagen herself was a believer in the importance of the text, is that the actor has somehow unlocked those aspects of a situation or a scene that the writer has not made explicit, but are critical to recognizing what is actually at stake in the scene. Actors continually want to believe that everything important in the scene is laid out for them in the script, and it is in the script, but it is not laid out for them. They have to unearth it. Let me be clear: I do not mean that they have to psychoanalyze the character in order to discover what is driving them, unless the writer herself has included psychoanalysis in the play itself. Wittgenstein wrote that "The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. We fail to be to struck by that which, once seen, is most striking and powerful." It is these aspects of the situation that are so familiar that they are hiding in plain sight that we need to discover, and then we will have earned the "secret" that Uta Hagen calls for.

It turns out that no less an eminence than Aristotle understood the importance of the relationship between text and context. (I like to read the blog of Nobel-Prize winning Princeton economist Paul Krugman, and he mostly writes for general consumption, but he'll sometimes write a post that gets deep into the economic weeds, and when he does that, he labels the post "wonkish". My post is about to become a little wonkish, but only a little, so bear with me ) In a groundbreaking new study of Aristotle's aesthetics, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, scholar Richard Halliwell writes that, in addition looking at the form and structure of a play,

...one can also speak of the agents and actions represented by the play, and for this one relies...on the same range of concepts that are used outside the work of art [emphasis added]—concepts, for example, of purpose and choice, success and failure, prosperity and suffering, good and evil, guilt and innocence. Nor, on this model, do we speak descriptively of the work in these terms; we experience it through an understanding that depends on them, and we respond to it with evaluative judgments, hence with emotions, that presuppose and are informed by that understanding.

The concepts he speaks of are elements of the context. In Shirky's case, it was the concept of having "wheels" when romancing a woman in the mid-twentieth century. That these concepts play a role is so much a part of the process of reading or encountering a text that we are not even aware of it. We need it to be brought to light.

So it is in this sense that I take issue with what Macy says he is a "written page guy." He is right that the writer gives you everything you need, but some of it, he gives you so subtly and deftly that you don't know you are getting it. It's learning to become aware of what is essential but not explicit that is is the key to really penetrating any scene.

And how do you that? By learning to pose and answer some pretty tough questions about the character and scene, which can only be learned through lots and lots of practice. The good news is, the fact that it takes lots and lots of practice means that if you do learn to do it, you cannot help but distinguish yourself.

Thanksgiving 2009

Happy Turkey Day, Charlie Brown!

2009-11-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

the actor and GTD

2009-11-25T23:43:00.000-08:00

In my travels through the twittersphere (I just made that up!), I kept seeing this acronym pop up: GTD. I had no idea what it meant. I imagined it was some type of software that required special skills to operate. Well, I was wrong. GTD stands for Getting Things Done. It's an approach to, well, getting things done. The core principle is summarized by wikipedia:

GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.

When I read this, it resonated immediately. One of the most important things I have ever done was a year of private lessons in the Alexander Technique. I worked with this remarkable instructor. She noticed my occasional "absent-minded professor" tendencies, and suggested that I get a planner to carry with me, so that I could record things I needed to do as they arose. She explained that this would reduce the mental strain involved in my day-to-day existence. I took her advice, and found she was right. Things were much easier when I knew that I had recorded things. I knew I had the information SOMEWHERE, so there was no pressure to keep it all in my head. I felt free to be more present.

Another example: when I am watching students do a scene in class, and I write down notes as I do. Sometimes, I will notice something very minor: a slight error in the lines spoken, or some of the actor's hair getting in her face. The hair is actually kind of important, because if it continues to distract me as I watch the actor, I am less effective as an instructor. Also, if the student is not made aware of the issue, she will eventually get up in front of people when the scene is presented at the end of the class with her hair getting in her face a bit, and this will distract everyone trying to watch her work. It's not significant in terms of her craft as an actor, but it does constitute an intrusion of sorts. I used to find myself having little debates with myself about whether to write such things down. After all, while I was writing this down, I would not be watching the actors, and so I would be missing out on some other possibly much more significant part of her work or her partner's work. But I have learned that no matter how minor the issue, the best thing to do is to write it down immediately. By writing it down, I let the issue go, for the moment at least. This frees me to return with a clear mind to what is happening in the scene. If I don't write the issue down, then it will continue to nag at me, and I will be less fully available to what I am looking at. And if I do write it down, I can address it once the scene is over, and hopefully it won't be there to distract me the next to time through.

A third example from my own experience: I try to keep the production of content for this blog pretty steady. However, I never know when ideas for posts are going to come to me, and I also never know I am going to get to the actual writing. But as soon as an idea occurs to me, I go to my blogger dashboard and I create a new post. Possibly it will just be a title or a title and a link, but then I have a placeholder for it. I can come back and actually write the piece when I am ready to do so. I can come back to it whenever I need to. And my unconscious knows that too. It knows it can let go of that issue for the moment, and move onto new things, which will, we hope, lead to new ideas being generated.

What does this have to do with the actor? Well, in the approach that I present in the class, the process begins with a careful, thorough study of the text, to attempt to glean as much information as possible about the character from what the writer has provided. There is a framework for organizing this information as it is collected, called the "Who-am-I" or the Five Questions. Interestingly, this is very close to the first phase of the GTD work sequence. According to wikipedia:

The notion of stress-free productivity starts with off-loading what needs to get done from one's head, capturing everything that is necessary to track, remember, or take action on, into what Allen calls a bucket: a physical inbox, an email inbox, a tape recorder, a notebook, a PDA, a desktop, etc. The idea is to get everything out of one's head and into a collection device, ready for processing. All buckets should be emptied (processed) at least once per week.

Allen doesn't advocate any preferred collection method, leaving the choice to the individual. He only insists upon the importance of emptying the "buckets" regularly. Any storage space (physical inbox, email inbox, tape recorder, notebook, PDA, etc.) that is processed regularly by the individual is acceptable.

It's of course essential that the actor actually WRITE DOWN the information that she is gleaning from the text. No matter how much I stress that, though, both explicitly and by example, it's often difficult to see the importance of doing that up front. It's only later in the process that assuming that "Yeah, I read the play, I know what happens, I don't need to write it out" has consequences, and the need for discipline and exhaustiveness at this phase is made indisputably clear.

The benefits of writing down the information are manifold: first of all, by engaging in the physical act of writing, the body is engaged, and this begins the process of transforming textual information into experience grasped in a bodily, physical way. Once it is written, the actor can look at it, and this may trigger valuable questions or intuitions. That particular bit of information is then out of her head, and she is then fully receptive to other pieces of information. She can move through all of the scattered information in the text that may be relevant in a somewhat linear way, dealing with one issue at a time, and placing it in a "bucket" where it can be found easily later.

The hardest part of all of this, probably, is the fact that you don't necessarily see the payback right away. But it is precisely this recognition, that learning to act well involves sustained work over time, which doesn't always immediately result in a payoff, that is the beginning of the actor taking command of her own working process.

human rainstorm

2009-11-25T19:53:00.000-08:00

the dance with the director

2009-11-24T23:47:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, I think that much of the time actors view the director, consciously or unconsciously, as someone who needs to be endured until the show opens, and then, so the thinking goes, the show is really the actors', and they can really relax and enjoy themselves. Don't misunderstand me: I don't fault actors for this attitude. I fault directors. The director has authority, and with that authority comes the opportunity to define the relationship with the actors in such a way that the actors enjoy the interaction, and are nourished and emboldened by it.

William Ball, the legendary founder of the American Conservatory Theater, has this to say in his book A Sense of Direction:

You have known directors to come into rehearsal crying "I want this. I want that. I see it this way. My entire concept...I need so many people on this side. I want you here." This is an amateur at work. He once overheard himself being praised as being a director who "knows what he wants." He uses the rehearsal as an endless opportunity to tell everyone what he wants. He puts the word "I" at the beginning of all his sentences...If he uses the word "I" recklessly and compulsively, the likelihood is that he is untrustworthy.

And what, according to Ball, does a good director do? He follows Ball's principle of positation, by which:

we say yes to every creative idea...we say yes because we understand that to do so is the practical way of sending a message to the intuition that every creative idea will be valued, respected, and used. And when the intuition gets that message often enough, it will send us its most perfect and most pure creative ideas. That is why, whether we like it or not,saying yes to everything is the most creative technique an artist can employ.

I'll let that sink in for a moment. Ball is saying that the skilled director says yes to everything that an actor attempts or proposes, not just the ideas that are congenial to the director's vision or understanding of the script.

A tall order. Directors do have vision and points of view (famously), and being willing to put this aside to promote the actor's flourishing and intuitive expression requires a lot of maturity and patience. It's kind of like good parenting.

Ball claims that the director does not need to prune the bad ideas, because the bad ideas will "fall out of orbit by their own weight." This is probably sometimes true, but it may be a trifle utopian to think that it always works this way. However, Ball's vision of the role of the director sets a benchmark against which directors can be measured, even if absolute conformity to it is unrealistic. The bottom line: a good director is very generous, very patient, and very appreciative of those with whom he collaborates. An actor who finds herself working with a director who does not comport himself with these virtues knows that she is working with someone with some major professional liabilities. I encourage my acting students to read Ball's book, so they will know what a real pro looks and acts like.

Interestingly, the punditry at Harvard Business School is catching on to what William Ball knew long ago:

An oft-quoted proverb says: "The best leader, the people do not notice. When the best leader's work is done, the people say, 'We did it ourselves.'"

Truly great leaders...recognize how silly it is to believe that a coach or a leader is the key to an organization's success. The best leaders understand that long-term results are created by all of the great people doing the work — not just the one person who has the privilege of being at the top.

And sadly, most directors harbor this false picture about leadership. I actually think that in this regard we are better off in the US than they are in Europe. Living in Germany, I often heard tales of directors who were notorious for screaming at those who worked for them, and the fact that they behaved in this way was offered almost as a badge of their "realness". In the US, there is less tolerance for this outright abusiveness, even if the director is still able to put himself first, much of the time.

So, if you are an actor, and you find yourself working with a director who falls short of Ball's vision for the director, what do you do? Evan Yionoulis, the Obie-award winning director who chaired the Acting Program at the Yale School of Drama for 5 years and who still teaches there, had this to say: "Render to Caesar, that which is Caesar's, and render to God, that which is God's." These words were originally attributed to Jesus Christ, of course, when the Pharisees were attempting to trap him into recommending Jews pay taxes to imperial Rome. For actors,this means: the director is an authority that has to be reckoned with, and you will make your own life very difficult, as well as damage your future employment prospects, if you do not supply him with what he wants.

However.

Having this obligation to please the director does not relieve the actor of her obligation to "God", so to speak. That is, to her vocation, to her spirit, to her own integrity. The actor must take care that she is appropriately invested in the cares and concerns of the character, that she is engaged in arduously pursuing what the character needs, and that she is doing this moment-to-moment. The truth is that there is almost never a conflict between giving the director what he is asking for, and doing what the actor needs to do to make sure she is living up to her own high personal standards. The director, in some sense, should be seen as an extension of the writer: the director is continuing to define what it is that the actor must do. The actor must then find the need in herself to do what must be done as the character in the scenes in which she appears, and then she must do it.

The actor must take care to safeguard her own passion for her work, and not to allow anyone to snuff that out. An abusive director who will not mend his ways is a reason to quit a job. It will not often come to this, but an actor facing a truly abusive director should always keep in mind that quitting is an option. Creativity is too precious a gift to allow someone to squash it with contempt and abuse.

Finally, I'll mention that while directing and teaching have much in common, they are not exactly the same endeavor. A director is on a timetable to produce a finished product; a teacher's primary concern is the growth of the actor's command of the of the practice of acting. Because there is no final product for the teacher, there is more opportunity to challenge people to shed habits and re-examine their most fundamental beliefs about acting and about themselves. You can do very little of this as a director before you run the risk of undermining someone's confidence as they attempt to prepare to appear before the public. Never a good idea.

As an educator, I still regard it as important to express appreciation for my students' efforts, even when they are not the most successful efforts, even as I challenge them to fulfill the role more fully. But the imperative for appreciative expression is not as great as it is for the director, who, without it, will very quickly run aground.

Ball dedicated his book "to the well-being of actors everywhere".

I'll leave you with a video from William Ball's 1976 production of The Taming of the Shrew. It's plain as day here: the man knew a thing or two about directing. (PS This is only a short snippet, but if you click through to the youtube page you can watch the full scene).

immersive macbeth -- Sleep No More

2009-11-24T12:19:00.000-08:00

This is almost enough to make me wish I was in Boston.

Almost.

muppets do bohemian rhapsody

2009-11-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

Definitely good for some chuckles. Especially love Animal and the Swedish Chef.

Wow. Just, wow. No, really!

2009-11-24T00:04:00.000-08:00

Talk about invention.

the actor and the lizard brain

2009-11-22T19:21:00.001-08:00

Famous brain scientist Paul McLean came up with a model of the brain that still has some currency today. In this model, there are three areas. The first is called the "R-complex", so named because it is the part of the brain that resembles the brains of reptiles. It controls "the four F's" (fighting, fleeing, feeding, and f*cking). The so-called "lizard brain" is attuned to primitive matters, matters of survival. The second portion of the brain is the portion we have in common with other mammals: the limbic system. The limbic system is the source of pleasure and pain, of maternal behaviors like nursing, and the urge to play. Finally, the "neo-cortex", or new brain, is most developed in humans, and is the source of reason, logic, and abstract thinking.

The activities of the R-complex (lizard brain) and the limbic system are largely unconscious.

Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, in Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, writes that our five senses at any moment take in over 11 million pieces of information. Our conscious minds can handle about 40 pieces of information per second.

This unconsciousness presents a challenge for the actor: this means that an actor can be mentally alert and engaged in a scene, but his limbic system and R-brain can be disengaged, and it won't feel at all unusual to him, since he is used to those being unconscious processes anyway. However, if the limbic system and the R-brain are asleep, those of us in the audience watching the actor will feel similarly disengaged. We will see an actor who appears to be engaged and responsive from the neck up: the portions of the anatomy that have to do with forming intelligible language, with talking and listening, may be active, but the rest of it will be inert. The truth is that when we watch something, our lizard brain and our limbic system are watching too. And if the corresponding portions of the actor's brain are not engaged, we are likely to disengage as well.

It is common to see actors whose "limbic" or emotional system is alive and well, they are not only talking and listening but visibly "feeling" things as well, and yet, they leave us largely uninvolved. In watching them, we are aware of some kind of activity in their chests: they register emotional pleasure or pain in that part of the body ("the heart"). We recognize the range of emotions that they pass through, but we are not moved to feel with them, to empathize. This is very common. Such acting can be totally "believable" and totally uninteresting at the same time. It often suffices in television and film, where editing and musical accompaniment can compensate for the shortfalls of the actor. But it is not acting that inspires anyone, it is not acting that is particularly memorable, it does not make anyone feel more alive.

The actor whose R-brain is engaged is viscerally alive. We sense a vitality in the actor's stomach and pelvis that we register in those regions of our own anatomy. It is in this part of the body that the four F's actually take place (eating in the belly, operation of the legs (for fight or flight) in the hips, and the genitals for sexual activity) Our lizard brain is very attuned to the state of those around us, and when we sense that they are viscerally alive, engaged, or threatened, we come to life as well. It is this level of engagement that prompts us to say that we were "gripped" or "compelled" by an actor's performance.

I remember, long before I knew anything about acting, being in an acting class and watching a student do a monologue from The Matchmaker. This student, I recognize now, was viscerally engaged. At the time, all I knew was that it seemed like something was happening inside her body while she was acting, in a way that seemed totally different from what went on when everyone else was acting. I don't mean inside her body in the sense of "feelings", but rather it seemed like there were moving parts that were moving for her but that stayed still for most people when they act. Looking back, I can now say with certainty that what I was registering was the engagement of the Pilates core, that network of muscles in the pelvis which are responsible for supporting the spine and maintaining balance.

The imperative of getting the R-brain or lizard brain active is the reason why in the approach that I teach, we attempt to understand every scene through the prism of need. If we can find a "hot" need to pursue, and truly understand the way in which we attempt to influence our world in the scene in order to get the need met, we are well on our way to waking up the sleeping serpent. And who doesn't want to watch something in which a sleeping serpent is roused?

Woody Harrelson on acting

2009-11-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

NPR did an interview with Woody Harrelson in anticipation of the release of "The Messenger", a movie about soldiers assigned to inform designated Next of Kin that their loved ones have been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In the first part of the interview, they discuss the film and his preparation for it. In the second interview, they discuss his earlier career.

Part I

Part II

Here were a couple of highlights that stuck out for me:

And yeah, he asked me to shave my head. So, yeah, I did that. And, I mean, just
did the most - in reading a book, Tim O;Briens The Things They Carry, really helped. And, you know,
there were a lot of things, but nothing really helped as much as just spending time with the soldiers. I
felt like that really helped me humanize them in such a way that I felt like, oh, you know, they're not
that much different from me, you know.

Harrelson describes the most important part of his preparation as the part that forged a bond of identification between him and the people he was to portray.

Also:

But certainly, I remember standing back offstage, waiting for that red light to go on and, you know, I
could hear the dialogue and I could tell I was getting closer. And then, boom, the red light goes on
and I'm entering into the bar, in front of a live audience, and obviously a show thats going to be seen
by a lot of people. So it was pretty I was nervous, I got to say. But thankfully, you know, I'd done
enough theater in college that I think it really helped me get through that.

Harrelson credits his experience acting in theater as preparing him for the high stress of making his first entrance on a popular national TV show.

Worth a listen.