STOP ACTING LIKE THAT

Blog number 130                                               Nov. 15, 2007

I took some acting classes back in my Joe College days.  I liked 'em.  If I had started earlier and hadn't been so shy, I think I would have enjoyed the stage.

One very important thing brought home to me in acting class was that someone can tell us something - give us information, and we can think we understand how to use that information, but until we have a related experience in which to ensconce the information, it will all go for naught.  

Let me explain.

In an improvisation class, one of the things we were told was to watch when a setup began to veer into an emotional field based upon something in our past, and to go with that emotion because there's where the magic of acting lies. 

If an actor can make the scene seem real, that it is really happening, there is a kind of "losing" of one's self, bringing about a heightening of one's awareness.

The first time I was aware of this phenomena, I was watching Dick Cavet interview Richard Burton.  Dick asked Richard if he would do a few lines from "Camelot," a play that Richard was in at the time. 

Richard started describing how it came to be that he -- as a young lad, had come to pull the sword from the stone.  When he was done with the scene, I realized that I really thought that Richard was describing something that really had happened to him.  And then Dick Cavet said to Richard, "When you were doing that scene, I thought that that had really happened to YOU."

Magic.

In the improvisation class, I was placed in a scene with a young man.  We were supposed to talk about something with a radio.  I forget the setup, but because of what seemed to me to be smart aleck posturing coming from the young man, I began to get very angry with him and I kept trying to pull back from that so that I wouldn't wind up shouting at him. 

What I was unconsciously doing was putting that lad in place of another lad that often treated me in a smart-alecky manner.  I couldn't shake it and had to stop the scene.

After the scene was stopped and we went back to our real selves, I realized that that was what the instructor had been talking about.  I had the opportunity to do acting magic, playing on the emotions raised by the circumstances, but due to my not having any prior experience with a false emotion, I didn't recognize what was happening and missed it.

In another case, I was going to an audition and I asked the drama teacher if she had any advice for me.  She told me, "Give them something."  Yeah, OK.

So I did my audition, read my lines in my voice, using my expressions, and only while walking out of the building did I realize that I should have lisped, pursed my lips, scowled, anything.  I should have given them something. 

I did not know what the drama coach meant when she said to give them something.  I thought I knew, but I didn't.  After I didn't give them anything, after I had that experience, then it was very clear to me exactly what she meant.  But too late, naturally.  Story of my life.