The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd

[mr_bad_example]

Once I finish the books I'm currently reading (those would be Foucault's Pendulum, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, for those of you keeping score at home), I'm going to dig up a copy of David Mamet's True and False : Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. From what I can fathom, I suspect Mamet's philosophy of acting jibes with my own acting style.

Before I go any further, let me disclaim the hell out of this by saying that I have very little in the way of theatrical experience. I was on a couple of makeup and costume crews for a couple of Theatre UNI productions, and I acted in a couple of Interpreters Theatre shows. But my undergrad program was Radio and Television Production, Performance, and Writing, so I spent a non-trivial amount of time learning things like movement, voice, and diction.

I often describe my style of acting as "saying the right words in the right order." I was always a little neurotic about concentrating on such a thing when I'd then see actual acting students plumbing their emotional pasts. Then Mamet comes along and writes, "The actor is onstage to communicate the play to the audience...That is the beginning and the end of his and her job," and "The 'work' you do 'on the script' will make no difference...That work has already been done by a person with a different job title than yours. That person is the author." Vindication!

One of the best times I ever had was when I helped out a friend with a scene for her directing class. Each directing student had to pull together some actors and do a scene for the professor. I was still dabbling in theatre at the time, which, dabbling was really all I ever did, so I helped out a couple of people in exchange for a couple hours of academic credit. One student--an acting student--has us do a scene from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We spent most of our time in a darkened room listening to King Sunny Ade and "relaxing and becoming comfortable with the way our bodies moved." Well and good, and I suppose there's some deep dramaturgical purpose behind it, but I remain unconvinced that the key to a convincing portrayal of a man trapped in a disintegrating but oh-so-witty marriage is to have George acting the part of a factory machine and describing precisely what he's building. (Fortunately, I had watched a lot of Charlie Callas by that time.) In contrast, my friend the technical theatre major and I had approximately this conversation:

"How does your character feel?"
"He's tired."
"Act like it."

I don't really have a point in discussing this. Goodness knows I'm not seriously thinking about acting again. But if there's one thing I can pass along, and feel free to apply this to your own lives, it's that Method actors got stuff seriously wrong with them.

Comments

[elkabong.livejournal.com]

My brief acting career consisted of forgetting words and replacing them with telepathy.

It didn't go over well, especially at the high school level.

[gismonda.livejournal.com]

Bahahaha!

[archangelsk.livejournal.com]

"I remember Laurence Olivier asking Dustin Hoffman why he stayed up all night. Dustin, looking really beat, really bad, said it was to get into the scene being filmed that day, in which he was supposed to have been up all night. Olivier said, 'My boy, if you’d learn how to act, you wouldn’t have to stay up all night.'"

—Robert Mitchum on Method acting

[gismonda.livejournal.com]

Me = not an actor.

I did one act play once in high school (The Insanity of Mary Girard), and just remembering the lines was tough enough. There were five of us playing "Furies". Most of the play we were standing behind barred doors so there wasn't a lot of moving around, thank God. And for line delivery, we pretty much just had to sound sort of hysterical and deranged, which wasn't too difficult for our particular bunch of high school girls. Is it method acting if already embody the particular essence of the character being played? :D