Chapter+3

When Raymond Massey scored his huge success playing the title role of //Abe Lincoln in Illinois//, he was so lifelike and earnest that George Kaufman remarked: “Massey won’t be satisfied until he’s assassinated.” Quoted by Peter Hay in //Theatrical Anecdotes//. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 298.

After his triumph as Lord Illingworth in Oscar Wilde’s play //A Woman of No Importance//, the author noticed that Tree was starting to behave like the character, adopting his mannerisms, and dropping witticisms as he did in the play, ‘Ah, every day dear Herbert becomes //de plus en plus Oscarise// ,” said Wilde, ‘it is a wonderful case of nature imitating art.’ Quoted by Gayles Grandreth in //Great Theatrical Disasters//. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982, 118. __CHAPTER III__ __Acting__ __What is Acting?__

“Stop acting! Just be yourself.” How many times have you heard that admonition when you were a kid? I heard it many times. Not that I knew what “acting” really meant, at that point in my life, or even how to identify “myself,” although my parents seemed to know well enough how I //should// be defined.

Webster says that acting is “a thing done or being done.” and provides some synonyms to contemplate, such as “behave, work, operate, function, and react.” All of these terms seem very different one from another and none of them are particularly revealing about acting.

To some, acting means to pretend, which is possibly what my parents were getting at when they commanded me to stop doing it. To them pretending was considered artificial and they equated it in their minds as something “bad,” whereas being yourself was thought of as inherently “good.”

Tyrone Guthrie, the great British director, elucidates and expands these fundamental points better than I can in his book //On Acting// (London: Studio Vista, 1971), pp. 7-8 and I quote: By definition Acting is no more than Doing, Taking Action. But in a specialized sense, the term Acting is used for the Art or Craft of Acting. This implies pretending to be someone or something other than yourself; or even, while retaining your own identity, expressing thoughts or feelings which do not in fact correspond with your own thoughts and feelings at a particular moment. Indeed in this sense of the word we all spend a great deal of our lives in acting, a greater part, I suspect, than most of us realize. Most of it is done in a good-natured endeavor to lubricate the creaking mechanism of social intercourse. This is particularly the case in business or professional dealings. Employees have to make a show to employers of being industrious and respectful, while employers have to make a show of being kind and just and taking an interest. ‘How’s //Mrs// Wetherbee?...Oh, not //again// (in a tone of extreme concern)...that’s her second this winter.’ (With even deeper concern) ‘ //Has// she tried those sort of inhaler things?’ Fortunately at this moment the telephone rings and the actor can switch from the role of Considerate Employer to that of Jolly Fellow-Rotarian and by the time the ‘kidding’ and the roars of assumed laughter have run their dreadful course, old Wetherbee, thank God, has slipped out of your office and Miss Scales is ready to take dictation. Whereupon yet another Act begins: the iron-clad, ice-cold Man of Affairs creating order and profit out of chaos; and, at the self-same time, yet another impersonation: the dominant Male allowing a Female to help him, so far as such a flighty, fluffy little thing can be a help in business.

Is this kind of hypocrisy really acting? I think so, because, though you are not pretending to an identity or appearance other than your own, and though you are inventing your own dialogue and choreography, you are, nevertheless, expressing many different facets of yourself, and this, I believe, means that from time to time you are forced, if the facets are to be convincingly displayed, to think of yourself as many different kinds of people, similar only because they all look like you, wear your clothes, speak in your voice and are limited by your, admittedly considerable, limitations.

Yet isn’t it possible that most of us are not quite so severely limited as we suppose, and that this sort of acting, which can also be called social adaptability, is a considerable help in expanding our limitations? Incidentally, most of us perform these tricks of adaptability so habitually that we are hardly conscious of them as not being our absolutely ‘natural’ behaviour.

Of course, practically no social behaviour is ‘natural’. It is natural to rush and grab what we want like a baby or an untrained animal; it is natural to growl and scream when our desire is thwarted, be it for a bone, a rattle or a bishopric. Socially acceptable behaviour is a highly unnatural performance, only attainable after considerable training. I sometimes think that if professional actors reflected a little more on how we all learn acceptable social manners, it would be a valuable guide to many of the techniques of their craft.

To return to the definition of acting: in general we use the word to signify pretending to be somebody else in the particular context of drama, a character in a play, of which the theme, the sequence of events (or plot), the nature of the persons and the very words which they speak have all been previously conceived by an author, then written down, then rehearsed (or repeated over and over) by actors. And even this more artificial kind of acting bears a resemblance to the less conscious pretenses of social life: the success of the performance depends upon being ‘convincing’. In the one case your cheery ‘Good morning’ must convince Mrs. Arbuthonot that you sincerely wish her well. In the other case you must convince an audience, even many successive audiences, that your Hamlet is sufficiently interesting to justify the considerable effort which is demanded of them at this particular play. You must also convince an audience that your assumption is plausible in the given circumstances; that a person, who looks and sounds as you do in the part, might have said the words, felt the sentiments, done the deeds which the author has indicated.

Emphatically this is not the same things as convincing an audience that you actually are Hamlet. Quite obviously you are not. The intention of the actor should never be to try to deceive the audience into confusing fiction with fact. He should, rather, go through the //ritual// of performance in such a manner as to make the fiction acceptable–not as fact, but as an interesting and pleasurable experience.

Assuming for the moment that Guthrie’s definition is correct, all of us take on many roles in life. Just now you are a student and a son or daughter, grandson, granddaughter, and so forth. Perhaps you identify yourself in terms of your major, your discipline, your class status, college or university affiliation, your religious affiliation, your fraternal affiliation or club or honors organization, and so forth. You go through life assuming different and various roles and accepting the labels they imply. These labels may also include special dress, hair styles, and other identifying markers of a “role.” Not only may you play the part, you may even dress the part.

We are expected to exhibit behavior patterns consistent with these roles -- a Georgia Bulldog fan, a senior majoring in Music, who attends the First Baptist Church of Athens, who is a member of Golden Key, Phi Alpha Theta, etc. At football games you behave one way, at church another, in class still another, among your friends and pals yet another, etc. To behave like a Dawgs fan at church services would be inconsistent with what is expected of you in your role, at that point in time, and visa versa.

Over time, some of these roles end, fade, or disappear completely. New roles manifest themselves. You assume new responsibilities. How many times have you heard members of the press corps describe the President of the United States as behaving “presidential” or “unpresidential?” What does it mean for him to behave in one way or another? Obviously, it means something to the press person who made the comment and he/she assumes it will mean something to the reader or listener, as well.

Webster, like Guthrie, says that the term acting has other implication. Acting is “the act or practice of representing a character on the stage or in a motion picture or radio or television play.” It is this definition of acting which is crucial for us as we discuss acting in the following pages. Yet it is good to consider the broader sense in which acting is used to describe people in life, at work, or at play.

As noted in Chapter I plays need actors to bring them to life before audiences in specific performance contexts. Actors are the vehicles for the words, thoughts, and ideas of the playwright or author who conceived them. Otherwise, those plays simply lie on bookshelves or on tables waiting to be fully realized. The play NEEDS actors, as much as actors NEED the play.

__Brief History of Acting__

Acting is an old and noble activity dating back many thousands of years in most world cultures. The first actors may have been priests who broke away from the tribe and enacted the hunting of animals. If this were true, then the role of actor is closely associated with the rituals and perhaps even the religion of ancient man. Certainly, the act of performance was then regarded as a sacred and magical act in which men attempted to control the elemental powers of the universe to assure them food, protection, and to sustain their lives.

The first famous actor in western theatre history was Thespis. Thespis stepped out of the Greek chorus to perform a role. He won the first competition awarded for the writing of tragedies in 534 B.C.E. in Athens. Thespis enjoys a place of honor among western actors. To this day actors are called “thespians.” Aeschylus, the most important early playwright of tragedy in ancient Greece, author of //Agamemnon//, was also an actor and performed roles he had created out of the Greek myths. Aeschylus won his first victory in tragedy at the City Dionysia in 484 B.C.E., when he was forty years old. Aeschylus introduced a second actor, thus broadening the possible scope for performing dramatic action. Sophocles, author of //Oedipus Rex// 430 B.C.E., arguably the greatest tragedy ever written, introduced a third actor to his plays allowing for further complications in the development of the dramatic action. Sophocles also broke with tradition and did not act in his own works, as had Aeschylus and poets of previous generations.

Leaping ahead many centuries, the commedia dell’arte, literally the comedy of professional performers, evolved in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Italy. It established a tradition of improvisation using stock plots outlined in the form of scenarios and stock characters, such as the young lovers, the braggart but cowardly warrior, the pretentious doctor of law or medicine, the lecherous old man, clever and stupid maid and man servants, and so forth. Arlecchino, also known as Harlequin, was a popular comic servant in the mid-seventeenth century whose escapades later found their way into scripted dramas. Stock bits of stage business were comic devices to hold the attention of the public.

In late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England William Shakespeare is presumed to have acted in his own company and played roles in his own plays, although he was not known as a great actor. The chief actor in many of his plays, especially his tragedies, was Richard Burbage, well known for his powerful acting style. Burbage originated Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and many other great roles which Shakespeare may have written especially for him to play.

In mid-seventeenth century France, the playwright Moliere was also known and highly regarded as an actor. He died while playing the lead in his //The Imaginary Invalid//.

Women first had the opportunity to perform on the English stage in mid-seventeenth century London, opening the door for a succession of great female performers. The history of western theatre is full of great actors and actresses whose histories have been the subject of a countless books and articles. We need not explore the wide variety of men and women who have earned a respected place in the annals of theatre history except to say that many of them have shaped the direction that acting has taken in the past.

Today, acting is thought of by some as a glamorous and romantic profession. There are fan magazines and many WWW sites now devoted to chronicling the work and private lives of many of the “stars” of stage, screen, and television. Talk show hosts make a handsome living interviewing these performers probably because of the public fascination with many of them.

Few people realize just what hard work acting really is. Few understand the training that is required to learn the art and craft of acting.

__Training of Voice and Body__

Since the actor performs the role of a character in a play (sometimes, depending on the play, he or she may be called on to perform more than one character in the same work!), it stands to reason that the body and the voice of the actor are important to conveying that character to the audience. The voice and the body are the actor’s primary tools. Shaping both so they may serve the actor in playing a range of challenging roles requires continual training throughout their lifetime.

Careful and systematic training of the voice and the body are basic in any training program, particularly in the formative years of study.

Vocal training:

Many systems have been developed in modern times to expand the vocal range of an actor. Among the things that an actor needs to work on is pronunciation, articulation, value, relaxation, quality, flexibility and energy. Faced with the prospect of playing many different characters during his/her career then the frontiers of the actor’s voice must be explored. The limitations of the voice must be understood or overcome. If an actor is to play in many different performance spaces, from a space housing thousands of people, to the intimacy of acting for a movie or television camera in an extreme close-up, the actor must be ready to deliver a captivating performance. Playing roles from different periods in time pose unimaginable challenges to an actor. It is virtually impossible for an untrained actor to play Shakespeare, or Shaw, or Mamet well, for that matter.

Body training:

Training the body requires the same degree of attention. Like an athlete the performer must be able to develop a supple flexible instrument, ready on call to perform at his/her best in any given circumstance. Acting is no place for the lazy. The frontiers of movement and expressiveness must be explored. The range may include dance, stage fighting, and mask work, as well as training that emphasizes naturalness or artificiality of movement.

Training methods:

There are many teachers and many schools which continue to attract student of all ages. Undoubtedly, the most influential of these has been that of Stanislavski. The ideas of Constantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) have dominated acting training in Russia, the USA and many other countries throughout the world since he first introduced them through his work as an actor and director for the Moscow Art Theatre, which he helped found in 1898. Stanislavski put emphasis on a balance between external and internal elements of the actors resources. The external elements concern such things as knowledge of the theatre and techniques that are appropriate for the stage. He advocated that an actor should have a well trained body and voice. The internal elements concern the development of the powers of concentration, observation, imagination, and emotional memory.

Stanislavski advocated that the performer should score a role as carefully as though he or she was scoring a piece of music. The entire roles should follow a through line of action so that all the parts are understood and tied together into small units of motivation centered around physical action and intentions.

He wrote three important books which fully explore his approach–//An Actor Prepares//, //Building a Character// , and //Creating a Role//. Taken together these three books provide insights into the method of training he advocates.

Beyond basics training of the voice and the body performers may benefit from the study of character interpretation, mask work, martial arts, fencing, period style, acting for the camera, and so forth. The list of explorations is seemingly endless and all the while the human personality is the center of focus.

__Examples of Characterization–A Midsummer Night’s Dream__

The work of Shakespeare has often been regarded as among the most challenging for contemporary actors to tackle, principally because of the depth of his characters and the wide range of potential interpretations they offer. Shakespeare’s comedy //A Midsummer Night’s Dream// is no exception. The play provides intriguing and challenging roles for men, women, and children, as well. It is particularly appealing for student actors. The play is often read and performed at colleges and universities and at high schools because it has something to say to young people about love and obligation, desire and jealousy, among other matters which are important to them and to audiences of all ages, for that matter. The plot of the play is provided below as a prelude to the following exercises. It is outlined by Matthew Black in “Cliffs Notes on Shakespeare’s //A Midsummer Night’s Dream// ” (Lincoln: Cliffs Notes, 1996. pp. 8–10).

The action of //A Midsummer Night’s Dream// takes place in a mythical Athens. Theseus, the reigning Duke, has conquered the Amazons and has fallen in love with their beautiful queen, Hippolyta. As the play opens, he proclaims that their wedding is to take place in five days.

At this point, Egeus, a wealthy Athenian, brings his daughter Hermia before the Duke. Having fallen in love with Lysander, a young man of whom her father disapproves, Hermia has refused to marry Demetrius, who is her father’s choice. Demetrius had been in love with Hermia’s friend, Helena, but had abandoned her for Hermia.

Angered by Hermia’s disobedience to his will, Egeus demands judgment on his daughter. Regretfully, the Duke tells Hermia that according to Athenian law, she must marry Demetrius or die. The only other alternative is a life of chastity as a virgin priestess. She has until the Duke’s wedding day to decide.

After the others leave, Hermia and Lysander determine to meet in a wood near the city the following night. Then they plan to leave the city and go to a place outside of Athenian jurisdiction where they can be married. Helena promises to help the lovers, and they leave. When Demetrius returns, Helena, who is hopelessly in love with him, tries to win his favor by telling him of Hermia’s plan to elope. She is bitterly disappointed when Demetrius hurries away to stop the elopement, but she follows him.

In another part of Athens, a group of common laboring men, led by Peter Quince, a carpenter, are preparing a play to be given at the wedding feast of Theseus and Hippolyta. The “star” of the group, Nick Bottom, a weaver, struts and boasts of his ability to play any and all parts and is finally cast as the hero in a “most lamentable comedy” about “the most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby.” All the parts are assigned and the rehearsal is set to take place the next night in the wood outside of Athens–the same wood in which Hermia and Lysander are to meet.

The night in question is Midsummer’s Eve, a time of great rejoicing and mischief among the fairies who live in the wood. Oberon, their King, and Titania, their Queen, have quarreled over possession of a little boy, the child of one of Titania’s priestesses. To resolve the quarrel, humble his proud Queen, and gain the boy for his own group of followers, Oberon enlists the aid of Puck (Robin Goodfellow). This clever and mischievous fairy delights in playing tricks on mortals and is a faithful servant of Oberon.

By putting the nectar of a magic flower on the eyes of the sleeping Lysander, Puck causes him to fall in love with Helena and forsake Hermia. Into this confusion come Bottom and his amateur acting troupe. Puck turns Bottom’s head into the head of an ass, frightening off all his friends and leaving the weaver alone. He comes upon Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, and awakens her from her sleep. Her eyes, like those of Lysander, have been anointed with the magic nectar, and she falls in love with the first creature she sees. Her new love is, of course, Bottom–with his ass’s head.

After playing various pranks on Titania, Bottom, and the two pairs of lovers, Oberon relents and has Puck set things right again. Lysander and Hermia are reunited, and Demetrius, with the aid of the magic juice, rediscovers his love for Helena. Titania and Bottom are released from their enchantments, and she agrees to give Oberon the little boy about whom they had quarreled.

Unsure whether what occurred was fact or nightmare, the lovers come upon the Duke and his party hunting in the woods that morning. After hearing their stories, he proclaims that to his wedding will be added those of the four young lovers.

Bottom awakens, is confused, but returns to Athens and, with his friends, prepares to give their play at the Duke’s wedding.

After the triple wedding, the play, “Pyramus and Thisby,” is presented as part of the entertainment. It is performed so earnestly and so badly that the assembled guests are weak with laughter. After the performance, the newly weds adjourn to bed, and the fairies appear to confer a final blessing on the happy couples.

__Views of Practitioners__

Countless actors over the centuries have put their thoughts into words about the art and craft of acting. It is useful to analyze what a selected few contemporary actors regard as important aspects of their work. The following randomly chosen brief remarks illustrate the opinions and observations of stage, screen, and television artists, who are probably familiar names to most of you.

Sir John Gielgud

Sir John Gielgud was born in 1904. He was knighted in 1953 and is regarded among the most important British actors and directors of his generation. Although his parents were not performers his great aunt was Ellen Terry, one of the leading British actresses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sir John was educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). He first performed on stage in 1921 and on screen in 1924. He began to play leading roles for the Old Vic theatre in 1929 and has played most of Shakespeare’s leading characters since that time. He received an Oscar for his role in the film Arthur (1981) and a Grammy for the spoken word in 1979. His remarks are found in //The Player: A Profile of an Art// by Lillian Ross and Helen Ross. (New York: Limelight Editions, 1984), pp. 436-437.

There’s life for an actor in the characters he plays. Being another character is more interesting than being yourself. It’s a great pleasure to me. I love putting on the costume, putting on the makeup. When I did //The Ages of Man// [1958], for which I wore an ordinary dinner jacket throughout, I missed putting on the costume. I missed it very much. It’s such a beautiful physical escape. I enjoy the transformation of personality. The regularity, the routine escapism of going into the dressing room at the same time every day, is very satisfying to my nature. And I particularly love the beginnings, with everyone wearing ordinary cloths. All the beginnings are tremendously exciting–thinking of the way you want to come through a door, of the way you want to move across a stage.

An actor is really no good to anything except the theatre. Actors are the most selfish people, especially in domestic life. We can be such bores. We are tediously self-examining. An actor has nothing but himself to take counsel with, because nobody else really cares what is going on inside him. Communal work troubled me as a young actor. I didn’t want to rub shoulders with other people. In real life, I’m not very communal; I have a tendency to cut others off and be by myself. Now I find that in the theatre I can work communally and at the same time be private. I can give a stage performance when I’m ill and not feeling it. I never notice when I’m hurt on the stage until the play is over. On-stage, it’s not terribly difficult for an actor to put troubles or worries out of his mind. Even outside the theatre, if there’s unhappiness around you, you’re likely to be observing it rather than feeling it directly. You constantly catch yourself trying to study how people really feel emotion. You store it up for future use; you reproduce it later in other forms. If I see a bad accident, I watch the expressions on the faces of the people. The dramatic side of every emotional experience seems to be always first with the actor. You jot it down. When you see somebody dead for the first time, you can’t resist making notes of the way you yourself feel. It’s one of the poignant things you can remember when poignancy is called for. Almost as soon as you get a feeling, you begin to observe it. It makes you rather a monster, I think.

Paul Newman

Paul Newman was born in 1925 and is regarded as a major actor, director, and producer. He studied at Kenyon College in Ohio where he played football and acted in Speech Department plays. He was educated at Actors’ Studio in New York and at Yale. When he was younger he played in summer stock. He began to perform on stage in 1953 in the Broadway play //Picnic// and on screen in 1955 starring in The Silver Chalice. He played in the following major films -- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Among his recent films is Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990). He won an Oscar for his work in The Color of Money in 1986. His remarks are found in //The Player: A Profile of an Art// by Lillian Ross and Helen Ross. (New York: Limelight Editions, 1984), p. 248.

There’s a tremendous fascination about the idea of acting–trying to be the kind of person you’d like to be, or wouldn’t like to be, or think you are. Everybody does it to a certain extent–runs for President or makes imaginary speeches before the United Nations. I love acting in the theatre. I love taking a script apart and trying to find the true person in the written character. The reward of acting on the stage is the continuity. We took three weeks to rehearse the Broadway production of //Sweet Bird of Youth// [by Tennessee Williams]. For the most part, I relied on the director, Elia Kazan, for what I did. He has broad shoulders. His invention, imagination, and patience are extraordinary. He helped me see that I had four things to comment on in portraying the character of Chance Wayne: the beauty of the relationship between men and women; the social disaster of a family that has lost the esteem of others; the fetish of youth and the importance of the fetish in our in our country; and the loving remembrance of youth. Well, that was a lot. But there were areas of Chance Wayne I never really got, including the aspect of the male whore. So it was always interesting to see what I could do with him. Nevertheless, after ten months of playing him on Broadway it got so that going to the theatre each night was like facing the dentist. I’d try to get to the theatre early. I’d have to have my dinner at five o’clock. Before every performance, I’d drink a couple of jiggers of honey for energy and for my throat; I’d lose three pounds every performance. I’d sack out from about seven to five minutes to eight. Then I’d sit in the shower at the theatre and collect my wits. As I was going to the theatre for my last performance of the play, I thought, I feel utterly exhausted. And all of a sudden I started bawling like a baby. I thought, I’ll never say these words again. I’ll never have this specific laugh again. I’ll never have this kind of quiet near the end of the third act. Never this specific quiet.

Tanya Berezin

Tanya Berezin studied at Boston College. She has appeared in television programs such as //St. Elsewhere// and //Law and Order//. She is the resident acting coach for ABC-TV daytime dramas and coaches private clients as well. She was one of the cofounders of the Circle Repertory Company in New York City. Her remarks are found in //Acting Now; Conversations on Craft and Career// by Edward Vilga. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 30.

There are some people who know how to either become someone else or to absorb another person’s experience or believe in another person’s circumstances. They are just able to do hat and make it real and truthful. An actor who is uneducated or uncultured but who has a raw talent is going to be limited. His or her horizons are too narrow. There are, on the other hand, actors who just learn–as there are writers who learn–just by being in the world. They simply absorb knowledge and use it in their work. You don’t know where it came from, and yet they have a great sense of the theatrical, an amazing ability to concentrate, and a natural ability to believe. I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone not to train, but every once in a while one of those people pops up and surprises you.

I think anybody can become an actor, but I don’t think anybody can become a good actor. I believe that the purpose of all–you should excuse the expression–”art” is to throw light on the question, the problem, the dilemma of human existence. A good actor–and certainly a great actor, but even a good actor–becomes an actor because of their interest in human behavior: what makes people tick and live and thrive and what makes people not. A good actor, and certainly a great actor, is able to throw light on that in some sort of inexplicable way when living a character. Somebody who’s not gifted can learn how to do it and learn how to be sort of believable and learn how to get a laugh and all of that, but it’s never lifted, it never becomes transcendent.

Sidney Poitier Sidney Poitier was born in 1924. He took drama classes at the American Negro Theatre. He has had a distinguished career on stage from 1946 and more importantly on screen from 1949. He has the distinction of being the first African-American film star. His films include //The Defiant Ones// (1958), //A Raisin in the Sun// (1961), and his Oscar award winning performance in the //Lilies of the Field// (1963). He is also well know for two films in 1967 -- //In the Heat of the Night// and //Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner//. He had this to say about acting on the stage. His remarks are found in //The Player: A Profile of an Art// by Lillian Ross and Helen Ross. (New York: Limelight Editions, 1984), pp. 110-111.

When I act on the stage, it’s a total experience. With me–as with other actors, I believe–it’s quite a job to prevent the work from becoming mechanical. You have to find ways to keep refueling the impulse. You can’t hang an impulse up on a peg and then take it down the next night. It’s instantaneous. It cannot be repeated. If you try to harness it, you take away the nowness of it. But it has to be manufactured synthetically when things aren’t going right–when your energy is low, when you’ve eaten too much, when you haven’t cleansed your mind of your own thoughts and worries so you can flood it with the part you’re playing. You cannot will a response. When I feel good and right, I experience complete communication with the audience. But each performance is different, and if I expected to feel that good every night, I’d be disappointed. There’s no one way of acting, but my way is to try to feel the experience of the moment and to have each moment flow out of the last and into the next.

There is a sense of self that is important to me when I try to work creatively. I find it in what I think of as the gears of the mind. So far, I’ve discovered only three speeds, but maybe there are more. At the most common speed, the mind is open to all distractions and sensations. It is giving constant attention to one or another of a thousand different things. At the second speed, the mind is working between two opposites, feverishly, because it wants something and is evaluating things in order to put them to use. The third gear is the idle gear. That’s the gear we live in all too little, the gear we shift into after a hard day’s work, when we couldn’t care less whether anything happens or not. That’s when all your thoughts are held momentarily in abeyance. You have just enough of a buzz on to encourage the opposite of good sense. I get myself into a part by shifting my gears in that order. When I go from second to third, I’m shifting from the battle of the opposites to a state of timelessness. All I know about it is that that’s what happens when I act. It feels good. For me, acting is a refuge and a respite from the battle of the opposites: to be successful or not to be successful, to go home or not to go home, to smoke or not to smoke, to eat lobster or not to eat lobster–to be or not to be. The only way I can transcend the battle is to act. When I play someone else, I am no longer caught in the battle; the person I’m playing is caught. I accept someone else’s circumstances and I cease to function as Sidney Poitier. I have peace. I feel it. It’s now. It’s great. It’s encompassing. It’s got you. You’re secure. Everything you do is absolutely meant to be done. It leads you, every now and then, to transcend the battle so completely that you give a performance that is absolutely shattering, even to be yourself.

Walter Matthau

Walter Matthau was born in 1920. He studied at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research run by Erwin Piscator in Manhattan. He also worked extensively in summer stock. Mr. Matthau has been an important U.S. actor on stage since 1948 and on screen from 1955. He won a Tony award for his role in the popular play, //The Odd Couple// (1965) which went on to become a major motion picture and a TV show. He received an Oscar for his work in //The Fortune Cookies// in 1966. His remarks are found in //The Player: A Profile of an Art// by Lillian Ross and Helen Ross. (New York: Limelight Editions, 1984), p. 421-422.

It’s on the stage that I feel comfortable, relaxed, fulfilled, delighted. I’m happy doing stage plays. Working for the screen is almost like being in the Army; you set your mind to it and you do it. On the stage, you’re wide open. There are no tricks with the camera to make you look a certain way. Nobody is going to cut you out, either. The people are sitting out there, and they’re going to see you full on. Nobody can fool around with your face. Nobody can fool around with your voice. You can taste and smell what the audience feels. You know if you’re coming across. You know if you’re being heard. You know if you’re being understood. An audience deviates about a yard compared to an actor’s performance, which deviates about an inch. An audience of ladies is good if you’re in a hit. The critics have told them they have permission to laugh, so they start to laugh before the curtain. They come in laughing at the ushers. Theatre benefits at a comedy make the worst audiences, because people have paid forty-eight dollars for a seat and when you’re paid forty-eight dollars for a seat it’s hard to laugh. I love to feel I have the whole stage in the palm of my hand. It’s what every actor looks for. On the stage, you have a chance to work on a part, and then to work on it some more. Sometimes it takes me six months before I find out what a line means, even if the writing is superficial. Six months after I opened in //Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?// I stopped seeing the printed page, with all the commas and notations. The printed page can remain with you for months and months, until you are experienced enough and relaxed enough to forget it early in the run and make what happens seem to be happening spontaneously.

To do a play right, really, I’d like to take two years of rehearsal. You study a character by living with him. When you rehearse, what the character is saying and how he’s saying it begin to work in you. You’re developing the character. Even when you’re sleeping, you’re developing the character. It’s solidifying in your unconscious. An actor shouldn’t think on the stage. He must only do. I don’t mind being in a bad play as long as I have my chance to take the character and make a real person out of him–a three-dimensional character. I can always feel the audience reacting to the natural things I do on-stage.