Justin Spencer: "The Intent to Live" by Larry Moss

One of the most important things I’ve learned about acting is that you can't separate how you live your life and how you practice your art.
You now you’re in the presence of the best actors when you forget that you’re sitting in an audience watching make-believe and instead you are catapulted on to the screen or stage and blasted into the lives of the characters.
That’s what we do as actors as we bring a script to life.
I’m going to teach you acting from the beginning, and the beginning is script analysis.
Everything I’m teaching you about acting has one aim only: to fire you up emotionally and behaviorally so that you can give a vivid, involving, and memorable performance. So when I talk to you about using your mind, ultimately it’s to use your mind to carbonate your emotions and imagination.
Given circumstances is the term used in acting for everything the writer tells you in the script about your character and the situation they find themselves in. Given circumstances are the facts; they are the information that is not subject to debate.
Anything the script tells you about who your character is or about what the character has done before the story starts is part of the character’s given circumstances.
Taken altogether, the given circumstances--the facts that the writer gives you--are the foundation of the performance; what you add to that foundation is your specific interpretation.
That is the actor’s job: to interpret. But you cannot change the basic facts of the script, and if you ignore these facts your performance will begin to fall apart and the play or film will not make any sense.
You have to study the text very diligently until you can say, based on what the script tells you about the character’s history, how the character is treated by others, the characters reactions to that treatment, and what the character actually does--not just what they say but what they do--that the character sees the world in a certain way. IN this way, your character’s point of view is part of , and inextricably tied to, their given circumstances.
All good interpretive choices build on the given circumstances--the facts the writer gives you in the script.
Here’s an exercise I often give to actors when they prepare for a role. After they have digested the material in the script, I ask them to express the character’s point of view of the world in the following way: “My name is [character’s name], and the word is[six descriptive words or phrases.]”
You must walk into every script with this kind of specificity about who you are, why you’re there, and your whole unique life experience.
The given circumstances for your character are constantly changing and you must be diligent in recognizing the changing facts.
Don’t anticipate.
As you study a script, write the given circumstances on a list, scene by scene. Ask yourself:

Where does the scene take place?
Who is in the scene?
What do I as a character know about the other characters in the scene?
What are my relationships with them emotionally?
What do the other characters say about me?
Given what the script tells me, is it true?
What do I as a character know about myself that is relevant to the scene (My background, my attitude) as I enter?
What does my characters literally do during the scene?
What do other characters do to me? How do they treat me?

When you’ve gone through the whole script and written down every piece of information it tells you about your character, you will have a list of your character’s given circumstances and you will see the way they change as the story develops.
This is all about homework.
When you are actually performing the scene, you forget everything you know except for the specific need and point of view of your character at the beginning of each scene.
Don’t bring into the scene something your character doesn’t know yet.
Don’t distance yourself from the role you’re playing by thinking of it as a character if that word doesn’t convey to you a flesh-and-blood human being.
When you’re doing script analysis, you’ll find that what your characters says is not always the same things as what they do, and you have to note this as part of the given circumstances.
Characters, like people in your own life, say a lot of things, but we understand them primarily through their behavior, which is why I said earlier that you have to define a character’s point of view primarily by what they do, not necessarily be what they say.
The given circumstances are always the same, no matter who acts the part.
One of the talents you need is to be able to break down a script and to identify all the facts that the writer gives you that help you understand your character, what each scene is about, and what the whole script is about. These given circumstances may make you emotional when you read them, and that’s important, because that shows emotional response is being completely clear about the actual facts of the story. Because only by identifying and investing in these facts can you bring your truth--your interpretation--to your performance.
Root your performance to the earth (the given circumstances), and you can begin to fly.
The objective is what your character want in a certain scene in order to try to fulfill their needs.
As a character you walk into a play or film from a prior life, and something has happened in that prior life--something deeply emotional-that has created for your character a wish or dream that is called the super objective.
The objective of each individual scene is connected to your overall superobjective, your driving passion. The super objective is the engine that propels you through the journey of the play or film; it is the dream that moves you through the story, for in plays as in life, without dreams we don’t take action.
This system of wants for each character means that character’s desires--objectives--in each scene. It is vital to every play of film you will act in, because without objectives, and without obstacles in the way of those objectives, you have nothing to act.
Each scene will have a particular, specific objective that I pursue in order to attempt to fulfill my dream, my super objective.
Every super objective has a justification, an emotional reason for its birth.
The super objective is to emotionally powerful to your charater that it will make you try to obliterate any obstacle in your path.
The reason I”m using the word obliterate, which means to destroy, is that the super objective is intensely passionate; it always comes from deep pain, deep joy, or deep fear.
Where do you find the super objective that drives your character? You find it in the script--the same place you find the objectives of each scene.
This super objective, this dream, and these wants drive the story forward, and as an actor your job is to tell that particular story.
The opposite of love is indifference, not hate.
Remember, you use yourself to act, but the character is not you; the character comes through you.
If you don’t separate the character as written from your own life you will miss qualities that are imperative to capturing that person’s personality.
If a really powerful super objective is never obtained, you never arrive at your destination. That keeps you in a state of wanting and aliveness until the curtain comes down or the screen flashes “The End.”
What we want, what we desire, what we must have: each scene has at least two opposing objectives--one coming from your character, the other coming from another character. These create conflict and raise the scene to heightened reality.
As I’ve said, you identify your superobjective by finding is in the script.
It’s not enough just to identify the superobjective intellectually, you have to justify it, to find the emotional drive behind it. You need your own specific interpretation of the super objective of your character so that every time you think of it, it makes you emotional and drives you into action.
I believe that when you’re playing a part, the justification for your super objective should be so emotional, so passionate and alive to you, that when you think about it, it makes you weep, rage, or burst into joy and fall on your knees in gratitude. In performance, just reminding yourself of your justified super objective may be all you need to keep you emotionally galvanized for the whole play.
One way to discover your emotional justification is to ask yourself, “What if I don’t get my dream?” and imagine what would become of your life if you didn’t.
The emotional justification for the super objective cannot be general; it must be specific.
Sometimes the emotional justification is in the given circumstances of the script, and sometimes it’s only hinted at.
The superobjective, the dream, tells you how you feel about everything in the play or film, including the other characters, and in every scene it drives you to actions that you believe will help you to get what you want.
Sometimes a character has a conscious and an unconscious super objective.
Whenever you get confused about what you’re doing in a part--whether you’re working on it at home, auditioning, rehearsing, or in performance--say to yourself, “Wait a minute, what’s driving me? Oh, right! My dream, my super objective. Now what is happening in this scene, or with this relationship that I’m involved in, and how is it connected to my super objective?” You have to keep asking and answering these questions for yourself to keep your performance on track and alive. If you stay clear about your super objective and objectives, and are emotionally connected to them through your justification as you relate to the other characters, you will always feel the emotional carbonation that gives you a reason to be in the story.
Sometimes a character has a double-pronged super objective.
Remember that the objectives of your character in each scene are ribs on the spine of the super objective. Start observing your own life and see that this is true and just of plays and films but of all of us.
You can begin to see in a very practical, very human way that every day of your life you have a system of wants, desires, objectives from the moment you get up in the morning till the time you go to sleep at night. Understanding this about yourself will make it much easier for you to break down a script and identify the wants of characters in different scenes.
Go through a day in your life and write down every single thing you want. Throughout the day, also be aware of how your body feels: when you are hungry, when you are tired, when you are sad, joyful, lustful. Then observe what you do about it.
I want, I want, I want--objective, objective, objective--all day long, every day, every second. That’s why super objectives and objectives are so fundamental to your work as an actor; they, along with given circumstances, are the bedrock of life--and every part you will ever play.
Drama is created by wants--objectives--but it can’t really be drama unless there’s an obstacle standing in the way of achieving the want.
Having obstacles is basic to dramatic structure.
To ingratiate, to joke, to plead--these are all verbs, and in acting they are called intentions or active intentions.
Intentions are active doings aimed at overcoming obstacles and achieving your objectives. They are how you go about getting what you want. The degree to which you overcome an obstacle with your intention is the degree to which you’re successful in achieving your want. Once your character achieves what they want, a new want is immediately born with a new obstacle, because that’s what makes the story develop. Objective, obstacle, and intention are the triad of all acting. They are in every scene you will ever play. Once you discern the wants and the obstacles in the scene, you then begin to discover and define the active intentions your character uses to try to remove the obstacles and gain your objective
Active intentions are aimed to get reactions from the other characters in the scene. It’s by getting them to react in specific ways that you gain your objectives. When on intention doesn’t achieve your objective, you may find that the writer transitions into another intention or gives you the opportunity to choose another intention, and you have to be sensitive to the writing in order to see where a new intention is called for or may by appropriate and exciting.
The life has to do with what you want (your objective), why you want it (your emotional justification), and how you go about getting it (your intention) to overcome the obstacles.
The diversity of human behavior offers you many specific choices of intention to make your characters live.
Clearly, as an actor playing a character, you must try to accomplish getting what you want in some specific way. That’s what moves the story forward and makes it interesting to the audience: the ways you try to get what you want.
It all comes down to active doings, behaviors toward other characters to remove obstacles and get what you want.
By breaking down a script into given circumstances, a super objective, objectives, obstacles, and intentions, you make your own personal map of the text, and that is the basis for your interpretation of a role. It will tell you your point of view toward your lines and it will help you to discover behaviors for your character.
Being spontaneous in the moment is vital to good acting.
This means observing moment to moment to see how they’re reacting to the active intentions I’m playing.
You make your choice of active intentions in rehearsal and then you are alive in the moment during performance to see how they are working on the other characters.
In rehearsal you are exploring the most interesting and provocative ways to reveal your character by the way they try to achieve their objectives.
We all try to manipulate the world from the moment we’re born.
If you advertise or wear your point of view more theatrically than you would in life, it pushes the audience away.
When you commit to a character’s given circumstances and objectives and to your choice of intentions, that commitment will stir your emotions and make your characters live.
You have to know what kind of person your character is so that you can know the amount of emotional intensity you need to bring your character alive.
You have to pick an intention because of its emotional heat; that’s what makes intentions so actionable. Sometimes in a play you won’t find the most provocative intention until you’re in rehearsal examining the material. In a film, because often you don’t have rehearsal time, you’ll have to do this on your own as homework and then the director may give you an adjustment between takes.
Sometimes you’ll find that your intuitive understanding of your characters is so strong that you make effective choices instinctively. That’s your raw talent and your affinity for certain roles--but not all roles.
Hunt for interesting choices of intention, choices that are specific to your character and to the text and that stir you toward interesting, provocative human behavior. But make sure you don’t cement a choice too soon. A more specific and active choice may occur to you as you work on a scene. Explore the full range of possible intentions: treating the other person like a servant; inspiring them; flattering them; treating them like royalty; tickling their funny bone; hitting them with the knife of truth; confronting their lie; persecuting them; threatening them as though they were a little puppy.
As you explore the intention, commit to it fully, because it’s only by committing fully that you’ll find what works best. You’ll feel when you’ve found the choice that sizzles when the scene becomes so active and involving for you that you’ve stopped trying to act and are just living.
Remember: an intention is never an end in itself; it is a means to overcome an obstacle and get what you want.
Be aware that your acting partners are doing specific things to you to get what they want, and when they do, it’s going to create an absolute need in you to treat them in a new way based on how you’re being treated. This is one of the ways in which you discover intentions in rehearsal.
Remember: the play of film script is what’s important to deliver.
Describing your characters’ intentions in words that they would use will help to excite your emotions and imagination.
Another way of looking at intentions is that they are created to help you send ideas to another character. Now hear this: acting is about sending ides to other people--not just emotions but ideas.
It’s the active intention you choose to send your idea with that makes your idea live instead of being just a bunch of words.
I’ve found that the best way to work with intentions is to make notes on the side of your script. Intentions will change during a scene and writing them in the margin lets you see at a glance how you’ve scored the scene for your character, just as a conductor may make notes in a musical score.
You have to be sure to examine the subtext--the emotions that are taking place beneath the surface--to know which intentions are appropriate for a line. You can’t always take a line literally.
The intention is picked in order to make the other character feel or do something that you want. You can only determine if your choice of intention will work by testing to see if the script supports it and trying it in rehearsal.
Sometimes characters face their own inner obstacles to getting what they want. Inner obstacles include, among others, shyness, fear, stubbornness, being thin-skinned, and lack of self-worth.
Remember, an intention is chosen to create a specific emotion in the other character.
An intention is always active. Even a character who is passive is active in their intentions.
You can’t and should never try to act a mood. Again, you have to find active behavior.
Remember, you can’t play an emotional condition; you have an emotional condition, and because you have that condition, you try to overcome it with active doings (intentions).
Start by choosing one active verb that you think is right for a specific moment in a scene, then find all the synonyms in the thesaurus for that verb and try out the dialogue as one by one you ply the different possibilities. Each word will create different emotions within you and different physical impulses that will translate into behavior. You’ll find that this is a gold mine of inspiration!
You have to find the right verb or verb phrase for you.
Don’t resist using the thesaurus because you think it’s an intellectual exercise; words were invented to express feelings, that’s why we have language. But you have to find the words that are emotional for you.
Remember, the thesaurus is always there in your back pocket for your creative use.
How important is it for your character to get what they want? What lengths will your character go to to get it? What will happen if they don’t get it? These are your character’s stakes.
As you explore a script, ask yourself, how far would my character go to achieve their goals? Would they sacrifice their pride and self-respect? Would they kill? Would they die? Would they rob, cheat, ruin other people’s lives? What do they do--again, not say but do--in the script? This tells you want the stakes are for them.
The reason I object to teachers, writers, or critics saying that a character or a performance is bigger than life is that nothing is bigger than life.
But high stakes aren’t just important in dramas; the intensity of high stakes also gives comedy its charge.
Don’t ever judge or underestimate or dismiss a character you play because at first reading the character’s concerns seem unworthy to you or you can’t immediately relate to them; respect the character’s life experience and find a way to identify with their plight.
If you analyze the script and come to understand your character’s emotional stakes, you’ll play them with depth and insight, whether the story takes place in the sixteenth century or the twenty-first. For the actor, every play or film takes place now. Compassion and empathy, actors, these are the keys for getting to the soul of your character.
The difference between a really great performance or even a good performance and a mediocre one is how much the actor makes us feel and care.
The actor has to not just know the stakes but make us feel emotionally how important they are.
In analyzing the plays and movies in this chapter, I’m sure you noticed that I reviewed the concepts of super objective, obstacle, and intention. In my thirty-two years of teaching, I’ve discovered that repetition is absolutely essential to breaking through actors’ defense mechanisms.
Because once you understand how to apply these lessons, you are no longer in the dark and you are responsible for committing fully to any role.
Many people fail because they don’t set their sights high enough and raise their own artistic stakes.
You will give something to the audience rather than waiting for somebody to give you your dream of fame and fortune..
I’ve stressed that it’s vital to read the entire script until you understand it thoroughly, but what if the people you’re auditioning for give you just one scene? And say you have just ten minutes to look at the scene before you have to read for a part. You can still identify your character’s given circumstances,, objectives, and obstacles, and choose active intentions, and at least get a sense of your character’s stakes.
Ask yourself:

What does the scene tell me about who my character is: their age, physical condition, or any other defining details, including socioeconomic class that is vital for the scene to work?
What literally happens to your character in the scene?
Why is my character in this particular scene? What would be missing if I weren’t in it?
What does my character actually do in the scene?
Who is my character with?
What is my character’s emotional relationship to each person?
What are the other character’s relationships to my character?
At the beginning of the scene, what’s my character’s point of view?
How and why does it change, if it does?
What do I want (what’s my objective)?
How high are the stakes?
What’s standing between me and what I want (what’s my obstacle)?
What does my character do to try to overcome it (what are my intentions)?
Above all, trust your impulses and intuition. Fly with them in the audition.

Script analysis helps you digest the script so that you understand it as the writer wrote it. The interpretive choices you make, including how you express your super objective and active intentions, come from how the script affects you personally and how it fires up your imagination. The next step is to use your imagination to fill in the flesh and blood of the character. This is what helps you create an internal life for that character that makes the person you’re playing live.
When we look into the eyes of actors giving fully realized performances we can see the thinking.
How do you create that eternal life? One way is through inner imagery--your internal pictures that play through your mind as you speak.
Inner imagery is the thing that makes the audience plug in to their own unconscious.
When the actor has inner pictures inside them, it releases the unconscious of the audience to show their inner pictures.
If you’ve never worked with inner imagery, I suggest you find a monologue with descriptive imagery or a passage from a book that’s very descriptive. It’s vital for actors to read excellent fiction so they can exercise their ability for making movies in their mind’s eye by bringing to life in their imagination what they're reading.
Please don’t tell me that you don’t want to go to these painful places and see these horrible images because it upsets you too much. Just close this book now and don’t be an actor.
Acting represents all that human beings experience, and if you want it to be “nice”, you will never be a serious communicator of the human experience.
Every script contains dialogue where you character will talk about things they’ve seen, done, or have otherwise experienced that you must bring to life when you deliver the speech. There are two ways you can do this: you either imagine it as the writer describes it and thereby give the lines an inner life or you find a personal experience of your own that you can match to the writer’s imagery to bring it to life.
Many actors believe (and are taught) that their imagery must come from their own personal life. I think this robs them of the possibility of being deeply moved and affected by something that is different, and perhaps more complex, than their own life experience. Our life experience is powerful, but none of us has lived everything. So when I say imagine it as the author wrote it, I’m inviting you to open the door to emotional riches as young children do automatically, because they have so little experience and such easy access to their imaginations.
In acting, it doesn’t matter whether you actually lived it or you imagine it fully, because if you imagine it in detail in your imagination, and you commit to believing it, it is as if you’ve lived it. It’s yours forever. When you’re sitting at a dinner party hearing a story about someone else’s life, what captivates you is not only the words they’re saying, but the energy in their eyes as they recall it in front of you.
If you don’t have inner pictures for what you’re describing, your performance will be dry for the audience.
That’s called personalization or substitution: saying the author’s words while sensorially connecting to a specific memory from your own life that will emotionalize you in the way the play calls for at that moment. But I’m asking you not to go to your own experience right away unless it just seizes you as you read the script. If that happens, of course you should grab it.
Once you create your own inner pictures for everything you talk about,, you will have the memories that the character has and you’ll be living a specific life.
When you do your work on the inner imagery, you may find that the words you first use to describe your active intentions change because your intentions become more emotional and real to you.
Now let me make a very vital point: once you’ve done the imagery work,, you don’t have to consciously bring it up during performance.
Let me repeat: work on the imagery consciously as part of your homework, work on it in rehearsal, and then it will simply be a part of your performance.
If you think about something personal and it takes you out of the story; it’s not helpful.
There can be a danger if you try to find a parallel experience in your own life that doesn’t really parallel the play emotionally, because your acting work will not correspond with the specific world of the script.
You have to live it in your own mind. It has to be sensorially real so that you can see the experience, touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it.
Any images that come to you that fit the writer’s imagery--images from a movie you saw, people you glimpsed walking down the street, a photo from a newspaper, your grandparents, or people completely imagined from scratch--are usable possibilities.
If you build your performance like this, if you create it with as much sensory detail as a real memory, you will be sending that imagery to your partner when you speak.
In performance, you don’t do an acting exercise to call up inner imagery,, you play the intention to achieve your objective.
Doing your homework with inner imagery will give you the conviction of truth with everything you’re saying.
There are certain moments in a play or film where you can consciously bring up an image for an emotional response.
That’s a specific emotional trigger for a specific emotional response at a given moment, which I’ll discuss in detail in Chapter Seven.
An “as if” is a combination of imagination and personalization; it’s something from your personal life that could happen but has not happened and you imagine it as if it had. Many actors work with “as ifs” all the time and, once again, as long as it doesn’t take you out of the circumstances of the script but rather invites you in them emotionally, they are without doubt one of the great tools that have been invented for acting. If a play or film requires you to have a reaction of grief or shock or hysteria and nothing in the script provokes you to this intense emotion, an “as if” will solve the problem.
You can’t stay clean and tidy and be an actor. You’ve got to use imagery of things that upset you, things that make you laugh things that arouse you sexually, things that rush through your inhibitions.
Making it real to yourself is part of the actor’s job. You have to commit to every word you’re saying, and that’s what inner imagery helps you to do. So you either have to create from your imagination the imagery that the writer gives you, make that real and believe in it, or you have to find personalization or substitution that fits the script, or you have to find an “as if” to bring you to the emotional place you need to be. The truth is, you’ll probably use all three. But again, you must believe something--and the something you believe has to be specific.
Everything is specific. Only bad actors are general; life never is!
The specific inner imagery you use is part of your interpretation and part of what makes you unique.
As Stella Adler said to us again and again when I studied with her, “It’s not the lines, it’s the life.”
Affective memory is a tool for calling up an unusually intense personal experience to stir up emotions when you need them for a role. You sit or stand and begin the exercise by breathing and relaxing your muscles; then you re-create your experience by recalling the sensory details. As you go deeper, eventually you get to the moment where the emotion (or affect, in psychological terms) emerges. The goal of the exercise is to know that you can use that sense memory to create that emotion when you’re doing a scene in a play eight times a week or for the twenty-fifth take in a film. This can be an excellent way of working. But it’s just one technique; it’s not the only technique.
All the exercises and techniques of the master teachers have value.
It’s about what’s best for the actor and for the script.
You want to use whatever techniques help you to become the most specific and alive in a part.
Without some kind of specific inner imagery, you could never sustain the audience’s interest, their belief that you are living or have lived what you are talking about.
Your emotional life is your personal palette of colors that you can use to interpret a part, but you can’t start interpreting before you understand the play--and honor the writer’s words.
Learning to act is learning how to make the choices.
If you’re a young actor, you may be asking yourself, “How do I find my way to make choices like that?” My answer is that you try in food classes and in professional situations. You work on many different plays and many different scenes from those plays, you work on inner imagery and intentions, you do everything I”m telling you and you work and work and work. I’ve very adamant about this: you’re not simply entities to be an actor--you’re not an actor just because you call yourself one--you earn it. And you earn it by working.
You don’t use your intellect to be clever, that’s not what acting is about; you have to reach your emotions so that you can use them in the service of the play, and if you’re not reaching and activating your emotions with the choices you’re making, then you have to make other choices.
Whether you believe in telepathy or extrasensory perceptions or auras, there's something that we see as audience members watching a great performance that goes beyond just a person speaking words and moving.
The degree of your commitment to gaining what you want in the scene (your objective) is the degree to which the audience is moved.
One of the things I learned from Sanford Meisner was that emotion is the result of active doing.
As an actor, it’s not your job to judge the amount of emotion you’re revealing as good acting or bad; it’s your job to commit and concentrate and invest yourself emotionally in getting what you need.
Again, concentration is the key to powerful acting, and what I mean be acting is living.
In this case, you solve it by preparing yourself with an emotional trigger. An emotional trigger is the choice that can cause emotion to arise within you when you need it.
An emotional trigger can be a sensorial memory from your life, it can be an “as if”, it can be completely from your imagination, it can be a physical gesture--like clutching your stomach, putting your hand over your mouth or wiping your eyes with the tips of your fingers. It can be anything at all as long as it will ignite the emotion you need to make the script work.
The reason I talk about a physical gesture at this point is that when you use an emotional trigger, it will probably cause you to do a physical movement.
Our bodies store emotion, and physical gestures are often the key to unlocking it.
There are specific things that trigger specific emotional states in everybody, not just crying but joy, laughter, tenderness, sensuality, anger, and fear. As an actor you have to have a list of things that you know will cause you to be emotional at a moment’s notice.
Remember, when you do this work, you must re-create it sensorially. I reiterate: seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing.
You trick yourself into being emotional by staying out of the way and not demanding emotional but inviting it.
You have to work them as you would rehearse a difficult piece of music over and over again until you master it.
You can work on emotional triggers as homework when you’re alone. You can also work on them in public.
A seriously committed actor will find their emotional triggers and practice tricking themselves to get emotional, because it’s not magic, it’s not about psychology or therapy, it’s simple meat-and-potatoes work that you do on a daily basis.
A violinist, a professional tennis player, a Wall Street broker, a lawyer wouldn’t think of not spending six to eight hours a day or more working on their craft. So don’t be entitled babies: acting is a job that you can learn to do well, and it takes an enormous amount of practice to be good at it. Working on emotional triggers is part of this practice.
Choosing the right emotional trigger means knowing yourself, knowing what triggers you. Commit to coming up with five emotional triggers for weeping, for example, as well as five emotional triggers for other intense emotions that may be called on for a part. These may be affective memories or “as ifs.”
If a certain room or object frightens you, see if you can stay with the work and dare yourself to explore it.
Don’t ever judge or edit what triggers you. Be curious. There is no reason to be ashamed or intimidated by your own responses, whatever they are. They are for you to know and use in your acting.
One rule of thumb when working emotionally in your acting: be gentle and kind to yourself but thorough and hardworking.
I’m in favor of therapy for actors, because I believe that the more you understand and resolve deep family hurts, the healthier you become, and the less frightened you are of your creativity.
The healthier you are, the better you can use the techniques I’m teaching you.
Here’s the key: for something to be an emotional trigger, the image or the memory or whatever choice you make must not stay in your head; it should urge you to be physical. It has to become a sensory reality because that’s the only way it can be an emotional reality.. You may not act on the impulse, but it should cause one. That’s the rule.
Remember, the audience will never know or even be interested in how you got there. They just want the story.
In acting, the worst thing to be is indifferent.
The character may aspire to not caring or try to convince other people that he doesn’t care, but there’s no drama if he really doesn’t care.
As an actor you have to find what the character does care about and you have to invest yourself in it emotionally.
You have to care, you have to image, you have to trigger, you have to know yourself, you have to be interested, curious, passionate.
Good actors go to emotional places where nobody else wants to go.
A good or great performance is like peeling an onion; in every scene you reveal another layer, something the audience hasn’t seen until then. They stay involved because they are constantly learning about and discovering the character they are watching. They can’t take you for granted--and it keeps them hooked.
So far we’ve looked at three techniques that contribute to interpretation: choosing your own carbonating words for your super objective; choosing your own words for your active intentions;; and creating your inner imagery.
These tools are: choosing a private secret for you character; making behavioral choices based on your character's social and economic background; making choices based on your character’s blood memory, including choosing an accent; physical choices; finding the humor in drama and the dramatic underpinnings in comedy; making choices in rhythm, tempo, and nuances of meaning in your delivery of lines; and determining the size of your performance.
The first step of interpretation is to study what the writer wrote.
The second step of interpretation is your primitive emotional response to the material.
It’s the interplay of your subjective reaction with the point of view and content that the lyrics give you that creates your performance.
When you’re interpreting a part in a play, your first two steps are the same as with a song. First, you have to deeply understand what the writer has written. This includes understanding the given circumstances, the objectives, and obstacles that are clearly written into the script. It also means you have to try to understand the ideas that inspired the writer to write the story; the ideas are emotional because they have the writer’s passion behind them.
Second as you read through the script, find what moves you most strongly and make a note of it in the script so you begin to find your own personal reason for playing the part.
For an interpretation of a character to work, it’s vital to understand the socioeconomic level of the character.
All you have to do is look at your own life and see how important these factors were in shaping your identify and point of view about life. You can’t be general about these factors or about their effects on the character; you have to be very specific.
Social class an economic circumstances affect every character you play, affecting how you dress, talk, move, and feel about yourself and the world.
Another aspect of interpretation has to do with the blood memory of the character--the nationality, the ethnic roots of the character.
When you have an accent--and I’m going to say this several times in this book because it’s so important--it’s not just an accent, it’s a way of life. It affects how you express yourself physically and emotionally.
A vital part of interpretation is the physicalization of the character.
When you’re playing high drama, look for where you can find the humor in a scene.
The reverse is also true: it’s dimensional to find drama or darker tones in a comedy.
A fundamental part of interpretation is being sensitive to the rhythms of the writer, understanding the Eugene O’Neil has different rhythms from Tennessee Williams, from Shakespeare, from Shaw.
Keep your focus on your active intentions.
Sanford Meisner taught actors never to look at the punctuation in a script. His belief was that it would force you into giving a particular line reading that might not be your own--meaning that you would get stuck in a certain way of saying it instead of following the impulses arising from your intention. It’s a good idea to experiment with Meisner’s rule, but be careful! You might miss something valuable that a smart writer give you in his punctuation. The essential point is that your reading must come from a real, organic desire to reach the other person in a certain way.
Sometimes words or whole lines are repeated by a character in a script. This is a particular interpretive challenge. If you don’t bring out the nuances of meaning, the repetition will be emotionally empty. For every line, you always have to ask yourself internally, Why am I saying that?
It’s interesting to consider what goes right for some actors wand wrong for others in the same role.
Size is an interpretive choice: How much energy and intensity will you give your character, and how will that energy and intensity be expressed?
You have to find something in every script that ignites your own passion.
Don’t ever play a part without some personal investment; it’s better to get a regular job that’s just for the money.
Never underestimate that impact that positive energy has in our business.
If you are having trouble finding emotional heat in your role, go back to the idea that you think provoked the writer to write the script.
If you read a script that you don’t like at all but you see something in the part you’re up for that excites you, go for it. Even in a very small part you may hit on an interpretive idea that turns you on.
Where does interpretation become misinterpretation? When it hurts the text.
No matter how successful you become, your job as an actor is to interpret the writer, not to “improve” the work, not to fit it to your preconceptions, and not to tailor it to your self-image.
Always remember where interpretation ends and the desperation to be loved by an audience begins. And remember that when you serve the script, you also serve the audience and yourself as an actor.
You read the script throughout at least three times-once as audience, and simply respond; the second time on your lips; to get a sense of the language; and the third time you read it out loud to hear the story and language. And starting with the very first reading, you make notes in your script of how it affects you personally and ideas about what you might want to use to bring it to life.
Let me clarify: I’m not saying you should think of your roommate onstage while you’re acting the play; you have to work with the actress who’s in front of you. But it might help you to think of a particular moment when you envied your roommate right before you walk on stage, and you would use sense memory of events involving your roommate as part of your homework and during the rehearsal process.
Besides writing personalization, memories, and “as ifs” in the margins, you can write down your objectives and intentions.
Like a musical score, your annotated script helps remind you of the active doings for different moments in the test. It helps you when you’re learning the part and also during the long run of the play. If you forget your original choices and start acting on remote control, then you can always go back to what we call the bible, your original script, for note to remind you.
I suggest always writing down your objectives and intentions next to your lines.
You also have to define in every scene who the other character is to you emotionally and how that changes from scene to scene. This is called the redefinition of a relationship. As you read the script, keep asking yourself, Who are they to me now emotionally? Then write the answer at the top of each scene.
You emotionalize the redefinition of the relationship scene by scene with emotional language and with specific images.
Emotionalizing and writing down the redefinition of relationships scene by scene is especially vital for films, because you will film out of sequence.
Another part of your homework is to physicalize these emotional reactions to the other character.
As a preparation, use that emotion to activate your body in a kind of dance. What I mean by dance is a series of physical gestures or movements.
You do the dance as homework, but the day of the shoot or before you go onstage, you might do that dance again because if you remind your body of the physical behavior catalyzed by your emotions, you will bring this into the performance.
It’s fascinating to watch on film the face of an actor change because internally they’ve redefined the relationship with the other character in the scene from trust to mistrust, from attraction to repulsion, from friend to enemy. If you have these redefinitions clearly inside you, the muscles of you face will automatically reveal the change in increased or decreased muscular tension.
Don’t finalize your emotional map too soon. During rehearsals , you may find you’ve left something out.
That’s why it’s important to stay open and to always really listen to whoever is speaking to you and take nothing for granted, no matter how many times you've rehearsed and played the scene.
For now, in defining and playing your relationships with other characters, be aware not to leave out aspects and feelings of the character you’re playing because you are uncomfortable with them personally.
Relationships are multi leveled, multilayered, multicolored: as an actor you are looking for those things that make a relationship faceted like a diamond.
We all have a loving side and a dark side and to deny it or want to deny it cripples you as an actor.
Loving someone is to some degree being dependent on them, which means it’s not okay for you if they leave. If you’re dependent, you’re vulnerable, so you love them but they may also be a chunk of resentment: you fear that if they leave, a part of you will die.
Regardless of your own judgements or those of others, feelings are not realities.
Don’t judge your humanity, be curios about it, and find in yourself the truth of all the characters you pay, both the light and the dark.
The information that the author gives in the script is always just a skeleton.
It’s a skeleton until you identify your personal understanding and visceral connection to all the specifics of your character and lall their relationship with the other characters in the script.
A helpful exercise that I give my students is an incharacter improvisation, which is staying in character and creating your own dialogue is an event that’s separate from the play. This exercise help you to find behavior and specific emotional colors in your relationship with other characters.
In my experience, rehearsing a play for four weeks over and over again without any in-character improvisations make it harder to open the door to experiencing human life in the given circumstances, unless the director asks questions of the actors that encourage them to go deeper into the behavior aspects of the relationships. If the director doesn't do this, you have to--because the play depends on the audience’s believing that the relationships are real, that if characters have known each other, those relationships existed before the curtain went up, and that the behavioral idiosyncrasies of those relationships are indelibly true to life.
Sometimes define your relationships with a character that’ not even mentions in the script is essential in filling out a performance. This is part of the flesh and blood that you as an actor must add to the skeleton the writer provides.
Good actors are good detectives, and don’t make the mistake of believing people who say, “You don’t have to do a back story for your character.” Asking and answering questions about the character’s past will never hurt you and it will often help you enormously.
You have to get down and dirty because that's what makes people behave in violent and extreme ways.
In his excellent book Audition, Michael Shurtleff says that every scene is about love. I think he means the celebration of love, the need for love, the absence of love, the yearning for love, the betrayal of love, the missed opportunities for love. And not just love between men and women but the love between all human beings.
Remember that you always have an emotional stake in your relationships with the person you’re playing opposite, even if your character claims indifference.
Just as you can’t play passivity as a n actor, you can’t play indifference--you can’t play trying to be above feeling, trying to make the person feel they’re being dismissed, but that’s because of feeling in the relationship, not because of a lack of it.
There’s one more relationship that as an actor you have to define, and that’s your relationship with the audience.
The lesson here is that in order to have a healthy relationship with the audience, you don’t try to get the audience to love you, you don’t try to get them to laugh or cry, you just play the reality of the scene.
Don’t court the audience, play the play!
Find the center of energy in the character’s body.
Sometimes something as simple as finding the character’s physical life based on the character’s job can be the key to finding physical behavior for the entire performance.
Emotion unconnected to physical life doesn't reach the audience and doesn’t teach them about the human being they’re watching.
The three primary ways of creating physical life for your character are destination, business, and gesture. Physical destination on a stage or soundstage is where you move your body to, how you move it, and why you move it.
Business is any kind of activity that engages your body in something other than moving from one place to another.
Gesture, as I mean it, is an unspoken, bold physical choice that may or may not be repeated throughout the play or film; gesture is psychological, and it helps the audience to understand something about the character’s inner life.
First lesson: observe life. Second lesson: observe the best acting you can find.
Begin by spending an entire day being aware and keenly observant of your body, how it feels and how it moves.
Notice that my physical destination has an emotional point of view that is described with an adverb, saying not only where I move but emotionally how I move.
Besides observing yourself closely, be keenly observant of others. Keep a notebook with you at all times, and as you discover an interesting behavior that catches your eye, record it.
Watch [great] performances without sound. Wow! Believe me; se a performance once with sound and once without--it is a revelation.
Notice how different the same actor can be in different performances largely based on their choices of physical life.
A private moment is a moment alone on the stage or screen when you do something that you wouldn’t want someone else to watch.
A private moment always reveals character.
When students in my class fail to ignite a scene with physical behavior, I ask them to stop talking and do the scene without words.
Do this as an exercise. Take a scene and work on it with a scene partner without saying the lines.
Remember: every human being moves specifically based on class, education, nationality, gender, and psychological bagged. Without the dialogue, you have only your physical behavior to embody these characteristics and to pursue your objectives.
Come up with your six descriptive words or phrases for any character, then physicalize them. Remember that in performance these physicalizations can be used broadly, moderately, or very subtly.
Class, education, and social standing powerfully shape physical self-presentation.
There are plays and films like Betrayal where the dialog is so riveting that too much movement damages the material, and in those cases, specific, subtle choices are even more important.
A great deal of filmed television drama is done in medium shots and close-ups, and the blocking is done by the director, which is the reason some young actors who have only done television are so helpless onstage.
The more homework you do on physical expressiveness before you show up for filming, the more ideas you will be able to bring to the director.
The key to destination is that whenever you move, it has to be for a reason you believe in.
Whether it’s for stage, screen, or television, you bring in your ideas, and don’t ever let any director tell you that they’re not valuable, because if your ideas are coming from a deeply felt and thought-out justification, the director should--and the good ones will--see them as a gift of gold.
If you have a small part in a film, don’t discuss your physical choices, just do them.
You would be wise, actors, to lose your false pride and get to a jazz class, a ballet class, or any dance class that makes you move in a way you’re not used to.
Learning new ways to use your body opens up your range of physical choices in playing characters and gives you the courage to make choices that you’d never have dreamed of before. It also opens up the range of characters you can play.
Olivier always said, “If I play a beggar I look for the king, and when I play a king, I find the beggar.”
When you see a performance that rivets you, it is because you believe that what you are watching is actually happening in front of you.
This prior life is the character’s back story or biography. Even if the back story is not in the script, creating one can help ignite your performance.
Sometimes part or most of the back story is in the script.
You have to understand deeply that a great many people spend most of their lives relating to their childhood; if that childhood is abusive, they will self-destruct in some way--unless they do something to heal themselves.
In playing a role, you must never judge your character, good or bad, unless in the writing the script specifically demands as part of your character that your character judge themselves. If text doesn’t demand this, then don’t make a judgement.
It’s a basic rule of acting that villains always have a justification for their actions that makes their behavior tolerable, and sometimes completely acceptable, to themselves.
If you’re playing a heavy, find reasons that are emotionally justifiable to you for taking whatever actions the character takes.
If you’re interested in exploring a role through the behavior of an animal, I suggest you rent James Foley’s After Dark My Sweet.
Whether we are normally conscious of it or not, we are always affected by where we are. Our deportment, our manner, even our choice of language adapt to the setting.
So as we talked about redefinition of relationships through a script, there’s also redefinition of place.
As an actor you always have to ask yourself how you feel about the place your character is in.
As an actor in the play you have to ask, “What does the place mean to me in terms of creating possible behavior for my character?
Your physical focus cannot always be on your partner, and that is why endowing--investing--particular places in the pub with memory give you other focuses that will feed you as an actor. It also gives the audience unspoken nuances of the characters’ past relationship.
Because in Betrayal the place is vital to memory, as an actor you can make great use of the fourth wall. This is the downstage wall between you and the audience, which doesn’t exist physically but needs to exist in your imagination for a full performance.
How do I live in the space is the question you must ask yourself as an actor; why did the writer place me here and what is my job in living in this place? What behavior can I find that grows out of my relationship with the place?
Tennessee Williams blew the lid off sexual repression and changed the face of theatre by talking honestly and openly about homosexuality and sexuality in general.
Each prisoner has his own space, and the space is defined by the temperament of the prisoner.
I hope this chapter inspires you to always be interested in asking of every place your character is in: What behaviors can I create in response to that place that make the story emotional and alive for the audience.
One of the most important aspects of creating a believable performance is the behavior that stems from the sensory realities of a scene.
Never forget this rule of thumb in the acting business: nobody in the audience praises or blames the director for your performance; they praise or blame you, the actor.
As an actor playing someone who’s drunk, you have to first understand what alcohol does to the brain and then how it affects your muscle responses. For the most part, it slows you down, although there are some people with a different chemical makeup that alcohol actually speeds up. The script will help you to decide on the kind of response your character has to alcohol or drugs.
Alcohol can increase your sensitivity to touch, or it can make you numb. Drunkenness also goes in stages according to the amount of alcohol you’ve consumed and your individual sensitivity to it.
Once you know the specific drunken--or stoned--behavior that the writer seems to suggest for your character, you have to use acting techniques to provoke those behavior in your body. This involves finding where in your body tension is released or increased by the particular stimulant or depressant that your character has ingested.
The Memories of Home exercise in Chapter Seven is a way of doing sense-memory work to help you discover your emotional triggers.
The more you do sense-memory work, the more you will be amazed at how memories are stored in your body, waiting for you to activate them. If you do daily sense-memory work as homework, you will be prepared for whatever you need to do in a performance--whether you have to come up with a toothache, symptoms of the flu, or be raging drunk.
For more help, read Edward Dwight Easty’s excellent book on sense memory, On Method Acting.
In Los Angeles I taught four nights a week for thirteen years and we did a half hour to forty-five minutes of sensory work at almost every class.
All sense-memory work starts with a muscle-relaxing exercise.
Silence gives us a medium in which we can get to know ourselves and our instrument intimately--and that is essential to acting.
Re-create in your imagination where you were when you experience this intense cold. It’s important to use all five sense since you don’t know which sense will most powerfully trigger the memory.
It’s important to understand that the images come and go, but stay with it, and continue exploring your five sense to experience the cold.
One of the things that allows you--and eventually the audience--to believe that you’re cold is that being specific about where you’re cold causes specific physical behavior.
Remember, cold makes you want to move to warm yourself up. It creates energy, as opposed to heat, which slows you down.
The reason it’s vital for you to do the sens-memory part of this exercise with your eyes open is that you will almost surely be keeping them open on stage! There’s no point practicing sense memory without making it practical in performance.
The more you do this exercise, the more adept you become at sensory work. When you’re preparing for a part, use the exercise to work on the specific physical sensations you need. Then try out and refine each sensory choice you are making by rehearsing with it at home before bringing it into rehearsal. You’ll find that if it’s the right choice for the moment in the scene, the physical sensation will join you easily.
It’s important to know that sometimes you can create a physical sensation for yourself sensorially in an instant.
Remember: sense-memory work is not magical; it’s just sensorially remembering sensations you’ve already experiences or can imagine in an “as if.”
Once you begin to respond sensorially to the physical memory, your behavior will begin to change if you believe yourself. Don’t judge your responses, explore them.
Only bad acting is general; life never is.
Examine your body’s reaction to different weather conditions during the year, then use that behavior for a character. But never thin in cliches.
Sexuality is a very complex emotional-physical response and quality that people exude.
Obvious physical attractiveness is only hot for a short period of time but passionate need, honest sensuality, and exploring of your own nature sexually without shame can make you very desirable regardless of what you look like and what age you are. When you are doing an intimate sexual scene, of course you should use what’s attractive about the other actor--it’s a biological reaction that you can use creatively in your performance--but don’t confuse it with a real relationship.
One of the techniques you can use to create a character sensorially is to play a condition of weather.
You can also use work based on any of the five sense to help you create a point of view of your character.
The sense of sight can help you create a character experiencing life with an enormous sense of discovery.
Whenever you walk onto a set, be sensitive to objects that catch your eye in a special way, for you may find physical business or spontaneous emotional reactions that you can use immediately on the day of the shoot or that you can incorporate into your character’s behavior in a play.
Sensory realities and sensory work lead you to many explorations and discoveries that can illuminate the characters you are playing.
Never judge or try to alter your response because you think they’re inappropriate.
Your job as an actor is to find for yourself the emotional meaning of every object, person, place, and event in the script that your character talks about or relates to. There are two steps to this process. First ask, What does the object mean to my character emotionally? Second ask, What can I use to provoke that emotional response in me?
Remember, actors, the prop department gives you objects, but they are dead until you endow them.
Choosing the specific memory is your work as an actor. You have to endow the object with meaning before the performance. Then in the moment you don’t have to think about your choice. When you touch the object, it comes to life for you.
Even the history you build for the watch has to affect you emotionally; it can’t be dry.
Your job is to be subjective--to make choices that work for the script and for you.
Good artists always push boundaries, and when a talented actor comes along who takes that extra step into the vulnerability of human needs, it jolts the audience into feeling.
Sometimes you’ll have an instinct to touch or handle a part of your costume or a prop or part of the set in a certain way, even when the script doesn't specify it. You endow the object with special meaning for your character so that it makes you more specific and alive in the material. Trust the instincts, they are very good.
If you want to act in films, it’s vital to have the ability to endow with your imagination a place or an object that’s not there at all.
The moment before--the time immediately preceding your entrance.
Creating behavior based on a moment before makes you more involved with your character, and it involves the audience too. They care because you have built their belief that you have a full life offstage. That’s why it’s a mistake not to do the work that’s required to build what happens to you right before you walk into any scene on a stage or on a film set.
In life, we are always on our way from somewhere to somewhere else to accomplish something. That’s why the moment before is so important when you’re entering a scene; without knowing specifically what the moment before entering was, and bringing that experience into your performance, the performance will lack real depth and truth. We come from a specific point of view based on our literal moment before.
If the script doesn’t specify or give you clues to a moment before, you could have a good creative time coming up with one on your own.
Words are very powerful, but they are more powerful when the sense are added.
In the right hands, the specific use of sensory work intensifies the meaning of a scene and brings the writer’s world alive onstage.
Moment to moment means that you don’t miss a moment, that you’re so present in the scene, monologue, or soliloquy that you never miss a truthful impulse within yourself.
When you’re acting moment to moment, you’re in the now emotionally; you never get lost in your own thoughts instead of listening to the other actor; you never become self-conscious and start to wonder how you’re being received by the audience or whether you’re doing what you planned. Moment to moment is about investigation, it is about exploring a choice in performance, not simply repeating it from rehearsal; moment to moment allows you to discover the scene fresh every time as if for the first time.
Doing your homework gives you a foundation for your moment-to-moment work. Once you have done your script analysis, created the backstory for your character, and have chosen active intentions based on their wants, then you use moment to moment as the performing technique that keeps you alive and improvisational onstage or during the shooting of a film.
To be moment to moment, you have to be available to your own impulses and to what the other person gives you. This means to be without an inner censor, to be wide open.
One of the keys to “playing tennis” in acting is listening.
Listening, truly listening, to the idea that the other character is sending to you, and the nuances of how they are sending it, provokes you into your performance, so you must listen every time you act as if for the first time.
If you lose concentration during a performance, truly listening can ground you and bring you back. When you’re acting in a film, if you listen fully enough the editor may feature your performance because your listening may be a lot more interesting than the other person’s speaking.
Whether in film or onstage, truly listening and being affected by what you hear propels you forward to all of your next moments and adds to the peeling of the onion of your character.
Even when a character doesn’t listen or only half listens, the actor needs to know why they’re not listening and where their attention goes. And the failure to listen is always a provocation to the other character.
An essential part of good acting is reacting.
If you stay open and observant, you’ll become hyper aware of your subjective response to the person sitting opposite you.
The discipline of the exercise is never to comment verbally on your subjective judgments but just on what you actually see in front of you.
In fact, before you come to a teacher like me, who is deeply into script analysis, structure, and character, it would be smart to take a course from a really good Meisner technique teacher and to learn the sense of being in the moment and solid in your freedom of impulse.
Once you’ve learned the Repeat exercise in a Meisner technique class, get together with an acting partner and do the exercise at home.
The moment is the pinch, the reaction is the ouch: pinch, ouch, punch, ouch; action, reaction, action, reaction.
One of the biggest obstacles to moment-to-moment acting is having an idea of how you should come over to the audience, an image of yourself that you want to protect.
For good actors who stay in the moment, there are no mistakes.
That is the point of moment-to-moment acting--you are living, and therefore a so-called mistake is turned into real human behavior that you and the other actor are excited to respond to.
Again, it’s the precariousness of being in the now that makes a performance vibrate with light.
Pauses are part of the rhythm of the line; silences are part of the rhythm of the scene.
One of the jobs of the director and actor is to understand the inner life--the mind of the characters, why they’re not speaking--and the physical behavior that may go along with it.
Everyone who knows comedy will tell you, comedy is about rhythm and correct tempos.
If you’re moment to moment in performance, you are open to things that you weren’t expecting to happen.
By this he meant that the body should be as relaxed as possible and the emotions inside should be ready and available to boil.
As actors, it’s our job to be aware of the difference and to help ourselves to release emotional and muscular tension that can interfere with our performance.
There is a lifelong connection between emotion repressed and the physical consequences of repressing it.
As actors, we must be aware of the physical image we're presenting because that is the physical embodiment of the characters we play. The minute that your body walks on a stage or in front of the camera or into an audition, people are already responding to your carriage, your facial expression, and your physical energy.
The most helpful thing I can say to you about tension, whether you are onstage, filming, or in an audition, is to keep breathing--don’t hold your breath.
The thrill of acting is in the amount of aliveness you bring to the characters you play.
To become relatively relaxed as an actor, you must go through an examination of where your body holds unwanted tension. You must also be observant of where others hold tensions in their bodies because observing them will help you to eliminate physical behavior for the characters you play.
Releasing tension is one of the primary beneficial effects of meditation.
A muscularly relaxed body is far more attractive than a body stuck in one attitude--and for an actor being stuck in one physical attitude means that your career is likely to be stuck and limited to typecasting.
As I said, some degree of physical tension will always be present. The key is to make an effort on a daily basis to become acquainted with your tension so that it doesn't stop you from performing the character fully and richly.
If you need more help to release yourself physically--which will also help you to come alive emotionally--find a good teacher of the Alexander technique.
The Alexander technique deals with physical awareness.
Once your body is muscularly release, then you can begin to choose specific areas to hold muscular tension in order to reveal a character.
It’s the tension, the conflicts, the obstacles in a very quiet scene that make it potentially so riveting and that, along with the character’s objectives, move the story forward.
I’ve said you cannot play a mood (remember, mood spelled backwards is …)--it is really not a mood.
Perhaps the emotional state that create the greatest amount of physical tension for actors is fear--fear of public humiliation.
Your job is to give the best performance or audition you can. If you concentrate on your acting tasks and are more interested in your creative contribution than in your fear of being judged, you will be doing the work you need to do to give a good performance or audition.
Being open and trying to find the truth of the scene and interesting choices for your character is the name of the game.
If you’re specific in your work and nervous at the same time it can give your performance a kind of shimmer, because your internal stakes are so high, but it all goes into your performance and works for you.
All of the work that you do in analyzing the text and committing to choices is your protection against fear.
So the lesson here is that you are only a victim of your fear if you are passive about finding ways to confront and solve the problem.
What you’ll find is that underneath most anger is sadness or fear.
If you don’t unblock your emotions before a performance, you are in danger of being closed and fake.
If you feel you’re physically tense before a performance or an audition, find a quiet place and do the Release exercise.
Actors who seem to the audience to be exciting and electrically alive seem to be fully physical even when their whole body isn’t visible.
The last idea I’d like to share with you is that if you’re emotionally alive while you’re filming but your body feels tense to you, and you are self-critical about that, you may be surprised to see how good you are when the scene is cut together.
What makes the close-up work is your intense concentration on your acting tasks, which may have been overzealous and caused your body to be physically tense but which registers in a positive sense on your face.
If you concentrate instead of giving in to your self-judgement and fear, your concentrated is likely to pay off.
80 percent of their performance in a film is on the soundtrack.
But one of the reasons some careers don’t have longevity is that work on the voice has been relegated to the province of live theater and the vocal element of film acting has not gotten its due respect.
These actresses chose these voices the way you make choices about the physical behavior of your character.
It’s fine to sound youthful, but the voice has to have tone and variety to keep the audience interested on an aural level.
The voice should take on the sound of the emotion you’re revealing in a part.
First, you have to recognize what kind of a voice you have.
You can work with a good vocal production coach on specific exercises to train your voice so that it has power, flexibility of tone, range, emotional connection.
The point of getting vocal training is so that you can make choices. You don’t want to lose your distinctiveness, you want to increase your options because in the long run, this will enrich your career.
Vocally, it’s vital that your throat and neck muscles are relaxed, that the tongue is relaxed, and that you understand that you speak on the air and not on a lack of air.
Where you take a breath depends on your interpretation of the text as well as your need for breath.
The resonating cavities that are in the cheek area parallel to your nose and your upper head resonance bring the voice forward and you should train and exercise specifically for producing more resonance on a daily basis.
One of the best exercises is simply to use air to vibrate your lips, making sure that your jaw is relaxed at all times.
Start your vocal exercises gently and avoid pushing it; don’t try for big sounds until you’re warmed up.
It’s important that you work on your voice as soon as possible and that you take it seriously, because if you don’t I promise you that someday you will get a part that you are vocally not equipped to play and you will be at the throat doctor every day in order to give your performance.
When your whole body is connected to making sound, your emotions automatically begin to join you. Patsy’s exercises for producing a healthy voice filled with emotion and air capacity are described in detail in her three excellent books, Working with the Voice, The Right to Speak, and The Need for Words.
One of the things that studying singing can give is strong breath support that you can then learn to apply to your speaking voice.
Don’t ever underestimate the importance of complete commitment to an exact accent for a role you’re playing.
Actors make significant breakthroughs because of one performance that is so specific it catches the audience’s eye and they become intrigued by the actor who created it.
As I’ve said before, life is never general, only bad acting is.
Ultimately, serious actors take on the challenge of being dedicated to absolutely authentic, specific dialects.
If you’re stumped on a specific accent, just make a phone call to a shop in a region your character lives in and ask questions and tape-record the call.
Blood memory is a concept Stella Adler felt was absolutely necessary for actors to grasp. It is related to language and accent; it means understanding the history of the people your character is descended from and the land they come from because that’s how their language was born and , to some degree, how they became the person they are when the script takes place.
A large amount of humor in the Jewish tradition stems from terror, suppressed rage, a love of language, and a huge desire for freedom and mobility that was denied to most Jews in most of the European societies they came from.
Being a good actor is not about being comfortable, it’s about having a vision of your own potential and having the desire to learn about and appreciate many other cultures that you can illuminate through your work.
To realize your potential as an actor, you can’t limit yourself by making yourself or your world small.
A classic theory of comedy that has proved very useful to me is that much of comedy is derived from rigidity.
The truth of comedy is that it’s usually about pain, and we are grateful that it’s somebody else who’s going through these trials and tribulations and not us.
When you approach comic texts, find the rigidity of the character you will be playing and the physical behavior that you can create from that rigidity. And then watch, too, to discover whether the character's rigid point of view begins to soften and change.
Whether you’re in a drama or a comedy, you always have to play human truth.
All comedies require that you play the human truth but each requires its own way of playing the truth.
One of the exciting things about being an actor is working with directors who have a unique and unusual vision and exploring a text from there.
Certain scripts demand broad comic choices.
Early in rehearsal, in grounding your performance in truth, you can go through a stage where your rehearsal process doesn’t necessarily concern itself with being funny because you are simply going for the truth. Then you begin to find the behaviors that come from that truth that are funny.
In most comedies, the stakes become very high and it’s the passion of your needs that are part of the comic structure of the text that begin to percolate the comic behavior in you and, eventually, the laughs from the audience.
Even in a farce, you have to play with full truth and commitment and to let inventive comic behavior grow out of that.
One of the richest sources of comedy is reactions--how your character reacts to another character or to a given situation--and these reactions are often silent.
Again, my desire for you to understand clearly that what's funny must always be from human truth. And what I mean by human truth is human feeling. “Are you feeling glad? Mad? Sad? Scared? Or ashamed?” These five emotions are underneath every comic choice--as well as every dramatic choice--you will ever make.
A cardinal rule of acting in comedies (and dramas, though it seems to come up more in comedies) is that you have to play in the same style as the other people in the cast.
When I coach actors in comic roles, I always suggest to them that they get on with the line and don’t stop the ideas until the scene demands a pause.
By fast, I don’t mean rushing. I mean picking up your cues unless you have a damned good reason for taking a pause.
One rule I can give you is when you get a good laugh in a scene in the theater, you allow the laugh to reach it’s height, and just as it begins to descend in energy, you come in with your next line.
One more addendum to the fast rule: you cannot be fast until you know what you’re saying and why you’re saying it. That’s why script analysis is as vital to comedy as it is to drama.
Jokes are written with a setup and a punch line.
You must learn to hit the right words, stay humanly truthful, and stay in character.
You don’t always have to work hard, but you have to work intelligently.
Watching silent comedies is a wonderful tool to learn about comedy’s physical side, because being an entirely visual medium, all these films have to be funny with is physical behavior.
Learn from him, as from Sid Caesar, how to make a bold comic choice, stay truthful to the need of the character, and take the choice to an extreme with no apology.
Drama is twice as effective when you find the jokes.
I tell my students, go and do television, do films, but do a play a year, minimum. Always go back to the theater.
Career survival, over the long run, depends on your commitment to developing a command of your craft.
The rehearsal process gives you the opportunity to study and explore the play scene by scene eight hours a day with other actors and a director.
Working on the stage is the best training ground I know for growth as an actor, but don’t make the mistake as some movie stars do of going straight to Broadway without prior work in the theatre.
One of the most important technical things you need to learn in the theatre is when to take a pause and when not to.
You can’t grow into true excellence without falling on your face sometimes.
Theatrical performances often have to communicate to an audience of eight hundred to fifteen hundred people, so physical choices can be larger and bolder--that’s one of the things that makes theatre so exciting.
In motion picture acting as opposed to dramatic filmed television there is the opportunity for an extra element of energy and expressiveness simply because the screen is big.
In live theatre, you must have strong vocal ability and an awareness of the vocal energy you need to fill the theatre.
How much physical and emotional energy do you have to have to be heard by every member of the audience? Then stand there and practice speaking to be head in that particular space.
While keeping this in mind, a key element of being successful in acting in general, and especially in the theatre, is sending your lines to your acting partner with enough vitality and breath to get the complete idea across, which includes getting to the last words of a sentence without running out of energy, focus, or intent.
But smaller choices do not have to be less varied or less interesting; they just have to be more subtle.
Your voice can convey as much emotion subtly as it can loudly.
To be a leading player in feature films, television dramas, and even in certain roles in theater, there is a quality of stillness and simplicity that you must have. It’s called presence. Particularly on film, whether on the large or small screen, that presence must be conveyed through the eyes and not by the larger, voluntary muscles of the face.
What’s thrilling on the screen is to see someone with enormous emotion in them contain it and then send it through their eyes to the audience.
But one thing remains true whatever the role: when a camera is close to your face, stillness becomes mandatory--not a holding of tension but allowed the camera to come into you as you relax your face completely without any extra tics or grimaces that put a wall between you and your audience.
If someones tells you that you’re indicating your performance, this is what they mean: you’re using your face or body to signal your feelings to the audience instead of actually feeling them.
Meticulous choices in acting are crucial in every medium. Meticulous choices are specific emotional points of view about everything you say and do.
One of Sanford Meisner’s greatest sayings was, “Don't’ cry or get angry unless you’ve done everything you can to hold it back.”
There’s a lot that happens behaviorally to your body and your voice before the emotional explodes. Holding back emotions until you can’t repress them anymore is human reality, and it also give you more to act.
When you’re silent in a close-up, it’s your job to be aware of how that close-up advances your character in terms of the story that’s being told.
I want to warn you about this because concentration, preparation, and an ability to conserve and use your energy correctly are crucial to your survival as an actor. You can’t count on getting more than one take for your performance.
Being positive, hardworking, and a team player gets you a lot further in advancing your career than being difficult, snotty, self-important, or argumentative.
When you’re not being paid to act, there’s no reason or excuse for you not to be acting in theatre, even if you do it in your own house.
Whatever kind of director you encounter, don’t be a victim!
A director is not an acting teacher or a coach, and beginning actors need to know this right away.
Most small roles exist either to impart information that advances the plot or to bring out certain aspects of a major character.
Remember that sending that information is your main job and be truthful as a human being while you do it.
It’s just as detrimental to work too hard on a part that doesn’t require is as it is to under prepared when you know you have a creative mountain to climb.
Since there’s little or no rehearsal in television dramas and most films, getting a coach to assist in your preparation can be a good way to feel confident when you show up on the set.
For film work, remember that you have to be ready to shoot out of sequence.
The sooner you can work in the costume, including the shoes, the better.
Don’t look for other people’s approval.
When you learn people’s names on the set and are friendly and easy to work with and then do an excellent job, you are building your career.
The most important word in acting is yer. Why do I say that? Because if you are negative about what you attempt in acting, you’ll never be good at it.
The antidote to self-criticism and fear is yes.
Nerves are about desire. Being nervous is about needing something or feeling you’re lacking something.
Sometimes political correctness isn’t helpful.
What we are afraid to reveal about ourselves to the audience is sometimes our greatest breakthrough when we do reveal it because it unclogs a torrent of powerful feelings and gives us freedom.
As an actor, the moment I let shame cut me off from any part of who I am, I am literally disabling myself.
Any part of you--your socioeconomic background, your nationality, your race, your color, your sexual identity--that you dissociate yourself from is destructive to your artistic freedom. Any emotion or behavior that you disown because you identify it with part of yourself that you judge, because you feel that others judge it, will be difficult for you to express and you will have to work through it as Nina did.
No actor should ever play a racial stereotype. The word stereotype implies generality and a lack of human specificity, and as I’ve said, acting is all about specificity. Even if a character as written seems stereotypical or cliched, it’s your job to make sure they’re not. You do this by giving them a specific personality and unique emotional life.
Straights actors’ problems with playing gay characters may have to do with what they fear about public perception or with their own difficulty expressing feelings they consider taboo.
The actor’s dilemma can be, “I must wait for someone to give me material so that I can excel.” This infuriates me. I will not tolerate actors being victims because it is completely unnecessary and destructive.
An actor is only as great as the parts they get to play.
Find out what you do well, and do it like Hercules.
I learned that one must always invite the most intelligent and compassionate people to workshops, for their comments can be profoundly helpful.
You have to love what you’re working on and keep at it until it pleases you and an audience.
The story exercise gives you a way of exploring your own life through specific memory and seeing what you can give to others and, perhaps, discover other abilities that lie dormant within you as you develop a memory into a performance piece.
Start with the Release exercise, allow a memory or a string of memories to come forward, and fill them in with specific sensory detail.
You have to know what your strengths are as an actor but you also have to know your weaknesses. That’s self-knowledge. Confidence comes from self-knowledge combined with the ability to stand behind your choices as an actor when you believe in them, fight creatively for choices that you know illuminate the play or film, even if the director disagrees with you. Believe in yourself even in tough times when your career isn’t on an upswing.
Real growing artists are excited by and open to new ideas.
The reason self-knowledge is so vital is that once you admit the truth about your weaknesses, you can change them.
One of the most important ideas in pursuing an acting career is being able to work for your own excellence because you want to.
Self-knowledge is important for every human being. But as an actor, it has a peculiar relationship to your professional life because you are your instrument. What you can play is limited by your personal limitations and your willingness or your unwillingness to work in areas that are uncomfortable but necessary for taking the next step in your career.
If you can play a certain kind of part very well and one movie or television series becomes a huge hit, you can become a star without any self-knowledge. Now, that’s what I call frightening.
I tell my students that they must accept the reality of being a professional actor, the reality that “I will be criticizes both negatively and positively, and I can’t let either of those stop me from what I perceive to be my potential.”
If you can’t tolerate looking at your own weaknesses as well as your strengths, you will not reach your potential or even have an idea of what your potential can be.
Translate criticism for yourself; see if it’s apt. If it is, don’t deny it, learn from it. If it’s not, move on.
Essential questions for working on a part:

What does the scene tell me about who my character is: their age, physical condition, or any other defining details, including socio-economic class, that is vital for the scene to work?
What literally happens to my character in the scene?
Why is my character in this particular scene? What information or events would be missing if I weren’t in it?
What does my character actually do in the scene?
At the beginning of the scene, what’s my character’s point of view? Hostile? Loving? Friendly? Competitive? Supportive? Humorous?
How and why does it change?
What do I want (what’s my objective)?
How high are the stakes?
What’s standing between me and what I want (what’s my obstacle)?
What does my character do to try to overcome it (what are my intentions)?
What inner imagery do I have to create?
What emotional triggers do I need?
What are my specific emotional relationships to all persons, places, objects, and events in the script?
How do my relationships change emotionally to the other characters within scenes and from scene to scene?
What personalizations or “as ifs” do I need to create for these persons, places, objects, and events? (Remember: sometimes the specifics of the script stir you emotionally every time you work on the material so that you don’t need personalizations and “as ifs.”)
What physical choices do I need to make? Does the character have any specific impediments? A specific walk or carriage? A habitual gesture or a gesture at a specific moment? What physical business can I create to illuminate the character and the text?
What is my character’s back story? (Remember: by specific and detailed, and if you create a back story, make sure it triggers you emotionally, not just intellectually.)
Can I do an animal exercise to help me with my interpretation of the character?
What piece of music would you pick to symbolize the character? (Listening to the music can be used as part of your preparation. It can be especially helpful as you explore movement for the character.)
How does the location where the scene takes place influence my character's behavior?
What are the sensory realities of the scene and what preparations can I do to bring them to life?
What is the moment before each scene?
What accent and vocal choices do I need?
What size should my performance be for the medium that I’m working in?

Don’t ever allow anyone to say destructive or competitive things to you, and by the same token, don’t take criticism so personally that it ever stops your creative process.
It would be educational and I think exhilarating for you to learn four new monologues every three months.
My System of Wants Exercise:
Go through a day in your life and write down every single thing you want--and I mean the subtle things like, “I want to get the sleep out of my eyes,” “I want a cup of a particular kind of coffee,” “I want to call a particular friend for a particular reason,” “I want to mend an argument with my sister and therefore I will make the call I do not want to make because I will have to hide my anger and try to get her to understand my point of view.”
Throughout the day, also be aware of how your body feels: when you are hungry, when you are tired, when you are sad, joyful, lustful. Then observe what you do about it. Sometimes we want things and we know that they are bad for us so we do something else instead. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t want the thing that was bad for us, but that for some very specific reason we choose to do what is better for us. The system of wants my start with, “I want to eat that pint of Haagen-Dazs,” but it will switch to “I will eat an apple instead so I can fit into my clothes.”
Memories of Home Exercise:
Sit in a chair, leave your eyes open or close them if it’s easier, and in your mind’s eye go back in your imagination to the house or apartment in which you lived for the longest time during your childhood. Start be walking down the street where the house or apartment building was. You’ll notice that you will see it at as a specific time of day, which I always find fascinating. You never just think of your house at some limbo time; it’s either in the morning light or in the afternoon or at dusk. I think the time of day is very emotional for people.
As you walk down the street in your mind’s eye, you do a sense memory: the outside of the house looks like this; my feet on the pavement sound like this; the temperature feels like this (I remember it as hot or cold or windy); the air smells like jasmine (or smoke from fireplaces, or garbage from garbage cans out on the street, rotting in the heat); I hear the bell of an ice cream truck or a siren from a fire engine or the sound of the subway; I taste the salt from the sea breezes (or the soot from a nearby factory or the sweetness in the air from apple trees with apples ready to pick). I see my gate, my fence (is it newly painted?) Is it peeling paint? Is it rusted?). I walk up to my front door and look at it: I look at the color and the texture of the door, the handle, the knocker or bell; I look at the window next to the door.
You see, smell, hear, taste, touch, everything you can remember, then you can actually put your hand out and touch the doorknob of that house, feel the coldness or the warmth of the metal knob, feel the weight of the door and open it. Then imagine the first thing you see after you open the door, which is probably some sort of foyer, and then you being the Memories of Home tour. You walk through the house to every room, and you remember everything you can, every object, the carpet, the linoleum, the furniture, the painted or wallpapered walls. Some rooms will have more emotional triggers than others.
If a certain room or object frightens you, see if you can stay with the work and dare yourself to explore it. Listen to me now very carefully, because it’s important that I say this. I know well that some people’s childhoods have intense, painful trauma, and if you know this about yourself, it would be better to do this with a therapist so that you can feel safe. For those of you who have only the normal amount of trauma, press on with your work and continue to look for emotional triggers.
You may find an emotional trigger on your mother’s perfume tray, as I did when I remembered a particular bottle of my mothers’ French perfume with a tiny red bow around the bottle. It was the embodiment of a certain kind of glamour that my mother possesses and it made me remember sadly a time when she was vividly alive. You may find your father’s ties are emotional triggers. Don’t ever judge or edit what triggers you. Be curious. There is no reason to be ashamed or intimidated by your own responses, whatever they are. They are for you to know and use in your acting.
In-Character Improvisation:
Read through the script you’re working on and identify a key relationship with another character. Then identify the critical issues in that relationship. Keeping these critical issues in mind, begin to imagine scenes from the past and present that aren’t in the script but are connected and important to fleshing out the relationship and fleshing out events that the characters talk about and/or participate in in the script.
Now, with your scene partner, choose one of these imagined scenes that your intuition tells you would be helpful to your playing the character, and improvise the scene in character. Make the same kind of full commitment to playing it that you would if it were scripted.
Initially, you may feel resistant to doing this, but once you get the hang of it, it will be a technique you will use forever, because it solves problems and creates useable, interesting physical and emotional life that you can bring into performance.
Using The Glass Menagerie, you could do an improvisation of Laura talking to Tom about her glass menagerie. Or of a humorous conversation they have together about their mother’s eccentric Southern affectations This can lead to behavior that you then incorporate in glances at each other and physical gestures during the play. Even an in-character improvisation of Tom and Laura playing a card game together could help you define particular behavior that you will help to truly believe this brother and sister’s closeness and need for each other.
As you work on in-character improvisations, you will see how they contribute very specifically to developing your character and your character’s relationships when you go back to rehearsing the text. You will find that your performance has new life because, through these improvisations you will have developed ways of looking at each other, touching each other, laughing or crying with each other, and you will increase your investment in your character and the relationship.
The Animal Exercise:
Pick a specific animal and learn all about its behavior. You can go to the zoo, watch documentaries, and read books about the animal; if they’re domesticated you can watch them in your everyday life. Study their breathing patterns, their musculature--where the most powerful muscles are for attacking and eating prey and running from predators--how they eat, defecate, urinate, have sex, and what kind of alertness they have when not in captivity. Study the sensory perceptions they need for survival, which can include extraordinarily intense smell, hearing, seeing, tasting, or touching; remember that any animal you play is either prey or predator or both. If you visit a zoo, you can also study the sadness of animals in captivity. You’ll probably think of mammals first, but don’t forget birds, snakes, fish, or even insects as possibilities for a particular character.
Once you know the behavior, then bring it into class, create as much of the habitat as you need onstage, and live as the animal for a period of five to ten minutes. If this is not an exercise your class does, you could videotape yourself at home. When you see the tape, do you believe yourself as the animal? When you do, pick certain characteristics--like the breathing, hyperalertness, and bark of Wuttke’s dog--and use them as part of your physical behavior for a character.
The Physical Sensation Exercise:
Choose a physical sensation that you want to work on: toothache, sitting in a warm bath, sunbathing, intense cold, being sexually excited, postcoital pleasure. The possibilities are endless. Choose a monologue that you’ve memorized to use with the physical sensation, it’s just text to use for the exercise.
Turn off the phone and all electronic devices that produce noise and learn how to embrace and explore the power of silence. Silence gives us a medium in which we can get to know ourselves and our instrument intimately--and that is essential to acting.
Sit in a comfortable chair with your eyes open or closed and concentrate on your breathing for about five minutes. Notice your inhalation and exhalation; don’t try to change your breathing. If it’s shallow, be aware of it and allow it to move down into your diaphragm. You’ll start to be sensitive to the sounds of birds, cars, people outside, and even the creaking and settling sounds of your floors and walls. Being aware of these sounds is the beginning of teaching yourself how to ready your instrument for a sens-memory exercise.
Now begin to be aware of where in your body you are holding uncomfortable tension You may be so used to holding this tensions that you don’t even feel the discomfort until you get quiet and take the time to observe it.
You can start looking for tension at the top of your head or at your feet, it doesn’t matter. Then go all the way through your body checking to see where the tension is hiding. Once you’ve located it in your forehead, chest, haw, eyes, stomach, feet, tongue, or anywhere else, inhale into that tightness, and on the exhale gently ask the muscles to let go. You may have to repeat the inhale and exhale several times before the muscle has released, you’ll move that part of the body with more freedom and expressiveness. Be open to the release of tension also releasing different emotions: laughter, tears, anger, or whatever feelings come up.
Once your muscles are released, if your eyes are closed, open them. You are now ready to begin the next part of the exercise.
If you are re-creating a physical sensation that you’ve experienced in your life--say, intense cold--first you have to fully experience with your five senses the feeling of comfort of sitting in your chair in your warm room. Then choose a particular time when you remember experiencing intense cold. That way you’ll know the specifics of where the cold is coming from and what parts of your body are exposed more than other parts.
Re-create in your imagination where you were when you experienced this intense cold. It’s important to use all five sense since you don’t know which senses will most powerful trigger the memory.
What did your surrounding look like? As you allow yourself to see in your mind’s eye where you first experienced the cold, the room you’re in when you’re doing the exercise will begin to change and take on your inner visual. That’s when the work begins to live. It’s important to understand that the images come and go, but stay with it, and continue exploring your fives senses to experience the cold.
What did your surroundings smell like? When you breath in, do you feel the cold air coming into your mouth, throat, chest, and lungs? One of the things that you experience when a particular part of your body feels cold is that it tends to make your whole body cold. If the back of your neck is exposed to a cold wind, you’ll feel the temperature in your body drop.
One of the things that allows you--and eventually the audience--to believe that you’re cold is that being specific about where you’re cold causes specific physical behavior: pulling your coat up around your neck, trying to pull your hands inside your coat, keeping your face away from the icy wind. Remember, cold makes you want to move to warm yourself up. It creates energy, as opposed to heat, which slows you down.
Then, once you have created the cold, start to speak the monologue you’ve chosen out loud. Don’t act it; just say the words simply. See how your voice and body are affected by the physical sensation that you’ve created through the sense memory.
Once you have finished the monologue, sit quietly, releasing the sense memories that have created the physical sensation, and just breathe and relax. Then you are ready to re-create another physical sensation if you want to.
The Personal Object Exercise:
Here’s an exercise I do in my class to help actors find their emotional relationships to objects. We start with a relaxation exercise, like the Release exercise. Then I ask, “Allow yourself to remember an object that was given to you in childhood that you can hold in your hands. Let it drop into your hands. Begin to create it in your imagination as if it were there--the look of it, the smell of it, the taste of it, the texture of it, the sound of it.” By sound I mean the object scraped or tapped against another object. Sometimes, if an object is a locket or a necklace or a ring or a religious symbol, you might have fondled it or even put it in your mouth while you were thinking, without realizing it, and now the taste of it will come back to you--whether it was metallic or glass or wood--and your tongue will feel the shape of it in your mouth. The point is to use all the senses you can to recreate this object. Then I ask the actors a series of questions while I ask them to keep the object alive in their hands. The visual sense--visualizing it in your hands as if it were actually there--is extremely important at this point in the exercise. Then you ask yourself as you’re looking at the object and exploring it, who gave you the object? When did they give you the object? What time of day was it? What were you and everyone else in the memory wearing? What are the sounds you can recall? And the smells?
I then instruct them, “As you explore the object in your hands, feel the weight of it, the texture of it. Hold it in one hand, then the other, and play with it, exploring it from every angle visually. Sometimes you will allow yourself to remember a small nick in the object or you will remember when it was new, when it was perfect. The visual memory of it will sometimes even travel from seeing it when you first got it to seeing it later, when it’s aged. How has your feeling toward the people who gave it to you changed since that time? What is it that you’ve left unsaid toward this person or these people? On your lips, silently, or, if it’s comfortable to you, out loud, talk to these people while you hold the object in your hand and see how that affects you.” I next ask, “Where is this object now? Do you still have it or has it been lost? If it’s been lost, what would it mean to you if you could hold it now?
Finally, I ask--and this may seem odd, but it’s gotten great response from actors--”If this object had a voice, what would it sound like? And what would it say?” That’s truly making that object live. Actors have said to me that when they’ve allowed their object to have a voice, the object came to life, and said, “I’ve missed you. Where have you been? Why did you throw me away?” Or, more humorously, “You fucking son of a bitch, who do you think you are to treat me so badly!” The first response might make you cry, the second might make you laugh--and that’s the goal: responsiveness.
The Repeat Exercise:
Two people sit in chairs facing each other and each observes the other. One of you will start the dialogue by saying aloud what you see about the other person. For example, “Your forehead is creased” or “Your lips are tense.” The observation must be an objective fact--not something you think about them or project onto them: “You are sweating” as opposed to “You are nervous.” The other actor will then acknowledge the observation by repeating it. If you’ve said, “Your forehead is creased, “ they repeat, “My forehead is creased.” You would then repeat again, “Your forehead is created.” When they repeat “My forehead is creased” the second time, you note if there are any subtle changes in the way they say it, and when some behavior of theirs catches your attention or some behavior of yours catches their attention, that person introduces a new line of dialogue describing that behavior.
For example, if the other person’s saying “My forehead is creased” and the absurdity of repeating that line to each other makes you laugh, then the other person might see this, and say, “You are laughing,” and you would agree heartily, “I’m laughing.” Interesting things can happen in this exercise: right after you say “I’m laughing,” you might start to weep and then the other person would say, “You are crying”--and they might burst into tears as well.
If you stay open and observant, you’ll become hyper aware of your subjective response to the person sitting opposite you. You may be attracted to them, you may not like them, you may think they’re a terrific actor, a terrible actor. The discipline of the exercise is never to comment verbally on your subjective judgments but just on what you actually see in front of you. If you leave yourself alone and don’t try to manipulate or censor your emotions, your emotional response to the other person, and theirs to you, will come out anyway as you say what you see--and it will be authentic. In other words, what you feel about what you see about the other person as well as in their behavior creates an emotional reality in the moment. The point of the exercise is to be authentic--which means to not act but to discover in the moment.
The Release Exercise:
Sit in a chair as you do at the start of the Memories of Home and the Personal Object exercises. As you allow yourself to breathe naturally and deeply, allow yourself to become super aware of where your obvious muscular tensions are located. Start with the muscle that you feel is most tense. Breathe into the muscle and on the exhale ask the muscle to relax and allow it to let go of the tension--awareness of tension, breathing into it, and breathing out to release.
Let’s say the tension you’re most aware of is in your throat. What muscles are involved? How tight are they? You can, if you want, bring your hand or hands up to touch or massage the area as you breathe into it, and hold them there as you breathe out and ask the muscles to let go. You may have to do this several times as you feel the muscles release. You may feel emotion start to rise in you as you become conscious of the tension and release it, since often the tension is unexpressed emotion stored in the muscles. So don’t be frightened if you feel you want to laugh, cry, or get angry. Allow the emotion to express itself in sounds and movement as you keep breathing and allowing muscular release. Move through your body and be acutely aware of even the most subtle tension. Give each muscle that you’re aware is holding tension the amount of time and breathing it needs to release before moving on to the next. As you work on this exercise on a daily basis you will start to be conscious of subtle tensions in your eyelids, your scalp, calf muscles, ankles, toes, the back of your tongue. Exploring and releasing these tensions is excellent care for any person but absolutely mandatory for the actor. The exercise should last a minimum of fifteen minutes, and of course you can do more.
The greater the variety of the texts that you read, analyze, and commit to working with on your own, the more your technical abilities grow between professional jobs and the readier you are to take on any new job that comes your way.
So what I suggest you do at some point every day of your life is to go into a room by yourself and move in a way that expresses what you’re feeling.
By choosing an opposite or seemingly inappropriate intention, you can find original, stimulating choices that are not cliched and you may find meaning in the text that more obvious choices don’t illuminate.

Justin Spencer

Pages

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"The Intent to Live" by Larry Moss

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