ACTING

"All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts" - William Shakespeare, As You Like It, II, 7

I have made my living as an actor for fifty-six years. When asked what I do I have always instinctively said, “I work as an actor.” A friend, the deeply brilliant actor John Heard, once pointed out to me that most people would say, “I am an actor.” He thought, and it caused me to think that it was more accurate and open to say, “I work as an actor.” I do work at it. We all do. I am not an instinctive actor. And an actor is not all that I am. Some are. Some people live to be in front of a camera or a crowd of people and to entertain them by revealing themselves. I am not comfortable in front of a crowd, everyone looking at me, expecting something from me, wanting to be entertained. I am much better, happier, more comfortable one on one. Which explains why I have always liked rehearsal more than performance. In rehearsal you ask questions, you probe, you go over scenes and lines beat by beat, by that I mean moment by moment. There is no expectation of perfection. It is a process of searching. Nothing is expected of you except that you be actively curious, creative, and relentless. And you are doing it in a family of people who are all focused on the same thing. It is the community, the collective energy that the theatre offers that really draws me in and keeps me coming back.

As I said, I have been doing this with some regularity for fifty-six years and I am only just now getting to the point where I think that performance is just like rehearsal only in a bigger community. The same searching, probing curiosity goes on only in a bigger room with some of the people, mostly strangers, sitting in the dark while we are in the light on the stage or in front of the camera. But we are all in the same room, all focused on solving the same problem, all trying to unravel the same mystery, all feeding each other clues about the human condition, and, perhaps, if the play is well written, coming to some conclusion that opens more doors than it closes.

Creating a character is the process of the individual actor meeting the person written on the page. Words are all the playwright, or screenwriter, has to offer but words give us a lot. As do silences, which we learn quickly from Harold Pinter, the playwright. From the first time the actor reads the words on the page an image begins to form in their mind of a person, an individual, with a family, a job, living in a certain time and place, while facing certain obstacles in their life, as people do. The process of rehearsal is to explore that person and come to a place where you feel you know them as well as you know anyone whom you love and spend a lot of time with. There is a misconception that the actor leaves themselves behind and becomes the character they are playing. That is literally impossible. What the audience witnesses is the meeting of the actor and the character. The friction that happens when one person meets and rubs up against another is what makes the energy that is the theatre. So the actor’s personality, their life experience, their flaws and their exceptional points are revealed in the way that they encounter the person the writer has put on the page with their words. The words tell us a lot but the actor’s body - I include the voice as part of the body - as they experience the person who has been written in the words embellishes the story at a different level. And together they tell a story. As Shakespeare has Theseus say in Act V, Scene 1, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing /A local habitation and a name.”

The magical part for me is that, in the theatre, this all happens in thin air, in “airy nothing.” The people and the story they live and tell happens in midair and is gone again to nothingness; the lights come on and the audience drives home while we go to the bar but the images and ideas live on only in the consciousness of those people sitting in the dark lending us their ears, their eyes, their hearts for a scant two hours. All of that only if we in the light have done a good job.