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Let's End the Specious Argument of Beloved Dead Masters

In particular, let's end the "argument" between Adler and Strasberg.  There is no substance to their false reasoning upon whi...

Saturday, November 21, 2020

HANNAH ARENDT - DRAMATIC ERRORS

 "I don't believe any thought process is possible without personal experience; that is, every thought is an afterthought, a thought on some matter," Hannah Arendt remarked in an interview on YouTube.  I often refer to thought process and life experience on this blog.  I made note of the remark especially because it wasn't expressed by an actor or acting coach.  I then, for the second time, viewed the 2012 film, Hannah Arendt, because I couldn't recall exactly why I didn't like it initially, and also because it seems that during these last four years I've heard her ideas and writings mentioned often.

Plot, theme, conflict, exposition, progression, actions, climax, and journey of discovery are defined in western dramatic literature as the basic elements of drama; the first known analysis of most of these elements in Aristotle's Poetics.  It's the application of these elements that's used by dramatists, directors and actors to tell a story.  Except for a few scenes, most of these elements were missing from Hannah Arendt, which makes it an excellent example of error when all the creators involved in a production are unaware of how to apply them and unaware of their absence from the film.  The screenwriter, Pamela Katz, wrote episodic scenes of information instead of dramatic conflict.  The director, Margarethe von Trotta accepted this construction and did not organize the visual syntax so that it might mitigate this flaw, and the leading actors, with a few exceptions, did not have the skill to turn expository dialogue into actions.

Here are a few examples:  an opening scene, below, is expository as it shows us that Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt are intimate friends who share details of their private lives.  Hannah discovers nothing; she already knows not only her point of view, but doesn't need to think about what she wants to convey; she states, matter-of-factly, conclusions that have no progression in the scene, nor in the rest of the plot; the subject is dropped from the story.  The entire scene is expository instead of an exploration of a conflict-ridden dilemma.  Actors often come upon expository sentences and need to turn them into actions; it's one of the skills of technique. This scene is an excellent example of error because it's indicated/shown by the writer, director and actors.  It is not dramatic.

 

The following scene doesn't need much said regarding its lack of dramatic structure except that the remark about how Hannah feels about soap operas is unfortunately the substance of the scene itself.
 


The unique explorations of thought by Hannah Arendt that led to her realizing the banality of evil; its originality of thought processes, of her individual struggles and conflicts - ah, now there's a subject worthy of drama!  In the following climactic scene, the scene that should be the highest point of the conflict in  which the character's journey of discovery is realized, even when the character is certain of the idea she wants to express, unless she's reading from a prepared lecture, she would need to find the right words to express the thought process from her lived experience, the right words that will make her understood by the disparate members of her audience.  As thought-provoking as the ideas were in this scene, it lacked conflict because the actor performed as if her character didn't need to think about how best to convey her thoughts.

Here's a snippet from an interview with Hannah Arendt:  please note that even though she knows well what she wants to convey, she must think, she must find a way to reach her interviewer.  But in particular, I chose this snippet from a much longer interview because it contains Arendt's remark that she isn't sure she's correct, she's conflicted, she doesn't know if she's right, she has doubts about a certain idea.  In the film about an episode from her life that doggedly pursued her for the rest of it, one that continues to be controversial and discussed because of how contemporary it is, none of that process was explored.

Sunday, October 11, 2020

WHEN THE ACTOR IGNORES THE ACTION

There's an odd habit that I've noticed in young American actors, mostly women, that gives me the impression that they copy each other; they shake their heads negatively, negating their positive action.  I think they do this instinctively in an effort to connect to the thought, whereas, if they didn't perform by instinct, and understood the purpose of the action (what is my need, what is the verb that best describes my need), their heads wouldn't be bobbing back and forth, their heads would be still; they would be concentrating on the need to reach their partner with the thought.

There are many examples of this error.  I happened to see Ginnifer Goodwin in Something Borrowed.  If you view this film, you'll notice that she doesn't do it consistently, but in the two snippets below, she provided good examples of this error:



Another pitfall of ignoring the action occurs when the actor understands the pain of the character and tries to convey that pain.  The unfortunate result of this choice is that the actor performs the quality of the pain in an effort to show it to us.  The result of this error is indicated acting and a reminder of Uta Hagen's apt caution that there's a big difference between having sympathy for the character or participating in the actions of the character.  Mira Sorvino in the film, Between Strangers made this error almost throughout her entire performance.  The snippet below is a good example of her error.  She tried to see the images by looking away from her partner, instead of finding the action, and trying to get her partner to see what she sees in her mind's eye.  She did do it once when she said, "What have I done?" It was more effective even though her overriding choice was to consistently zero in on the pain.  Notice that Klaus Maria Brandauer looked directly at her with specific actions throughout the scene.  

Please note that I'm aware that some actors instinctively perform specific actions, and that I'm repeating myself when I state that technique provides a foundation, a support for one's talent so that it can feel safe to soar, to risk, to be able to uniquely express oneself instead of being stuck in a cliche that we've seen hundreds of times.


Wednesday, September 9, 2020

JENNIFER'S SOLUTION AND INDICATED / NARRATIVE ACTING

                                      
There is much in this story that could be of interest to the general public as well as actors:  technique of detectives skilled in interrogation, treatment of a 24-year-old as a fully mature adult in spite of the fact that the human brain isn't fully developed until at least 25 years of age -- impulse control and complex decision-making among other important late-stage maturation behaviors, or more narrowly, for actors, a character study.  However, please pay close attention to the narrator's remarks about data that's collected to determine the truthfulness of the witness.  It begins at 9:00.
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The subject is dialogue and its relationship to thought.  Even though, in this case, high stress is a factor, the narrator points out that processing thoughts into dialogue, conveying them to speech -- the wording of a sentence -- is a difficult process and distinct from finding words easily and executing a sentence perfectly.  In addition, aside from her body language (aka Stanislavski's physical actions!), it was noted that Jennifer concentrated on how she's being perceived.

Everything in the above paragraph describes indicated / narrative acting that is practiced by many actors who very intelligently read the script to us, and show us the character.  They listen to themselves, set their lines, and are more concentrated on how they want us to see them than on what the needs are of the character they're trying to portray.  Most importantly, among the detectives' clues as to innocence or guilt, is the delivery of thoughts to speech from a witness - or its absence.  It's also the clue to the difference between indicated / narrative acting and dramatic acting in the attempt to artistically interpret human behavior from the printed page of dramatic literature.

Saturday, August 22, 2020

DILEMMAS OF DOGMA - PART II / STELLA ADLER / LEE STRASBERG

I have said and everybody can say everybody might say that knowledge is what you know.  Knowledge is what you know and there is nothing more difficult to say than that that knowledge is what you know.
                                                                                                       Gertrude Stein

The topic of my lead post, Let's End the Specious Argument of Beloved Dead Masters, which is also in the drop down menu dated 1/7/16, seems to hold  continuing interest from my students as well as the professional actors I work with who have trained extensively elsewhere.  Notice that I've also discussed it separately in several posts on the blog.  Recently, a friend asked me to read something she'd written, and in it she had inserted the above quotation from Gertrude Stein.

Okay, Gertrude Stein made me do it:

Actors who work with me know that I quote freely from Adler, Strasberg, Hagen, Lewis and Meisner and that I continually point out that the members of the Group Theatre and their students learned the basic elements of Stanislavski's system, practiced it, and that their influence continues to this day.  However, the popular view that they each developed their own unique method or technique is erroneous and has led to damaging confusion. None of them had separate techniques; they devised divergent exercises in order to achieve the same result.  This myth has evolved and been reduced to a definition of the original work as "The Method," attributed solely to Lee Strasberg, and quoted, misquoted, in acting studios, major institutions of higher learning, and throughout the world wherever this acting technique is taught.

In the 1941 film The Lady Eve, the actor William Demarest (Muggsy), upon seeing Barbara Stanwyck (Eve) impersonate a different character from herself, says, throughout the second half of the film, "It's the same dame."  It's also the last line of the film.  Okay, IT'S THE SAME DAME, and it's the last time it will be addressed here.  If you need further clarification, please contact me.

What is most troubling is the dogma that emerges, emanating, sadly, more from egotistical competition than from substantive disagreement.  In particular, imagination or affective memory/substitution, when, obviously, they're one and the same thing.  Let any one of these masters loose on their non-existent disagreement, and one hears some really silly statements; too bad they're taken so seriously that to this day they confuse actors (see post Do You Use Substitution or Imagination? dated 1/11/19).  Stella Adler contradicts herself, says profound, useful things, and can make us laugh; there's lots more of her on YouTube.  But for her to tell actors that they must use their imagination instead of their life experience is silly, especially since imagination is derived from one's life experience.  Adler, and now her disciples, contend that because she traveled to Paris to study with Stanislavski, her definitions are more accurate than Strasberg's definitions.  Yet, Sonia Moore, who, in 1920, studied at MAT's Third Studio under Vakhtangov, told a student, "...you must have your own real images of a party and people that are right for Olga.  When you say 'It was cold and snowing,' you must see New York or any other place that means to you what this town means to Olga.  Do not try to see Moscow, for it does not mean a thing to you..." (Stanislavsi Revealed, Sonia Moore)

The clip of Strasberg coaching Ellen Burstyn is chosen because it demonstrates that he was cognizant of the need to perform the character's actions.  I was unable to find the clip I once saw of him riding roughshod over an actor to get her to relive a painful personal life experience, all needless, unfruitful, as it was painful to watch, as were the emotional recall exercises that I observed at the Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles, upon which hours were spent recalling a teddy bear being snatched and hidden from the student, or some other early childhood trauma.  You come to class knowing, remembering these traumas -- or joy, or love, or wonderment -- it's written all over you!  Bobby Lewis was correct when he pointed out that you don't need to know it consciously in order to remember it.











IMAGINATION has become an iconic dogma that can dangerously lead to thinking that doesn't even reflect the teachings of a particular master, as for example, the time an Adler teacher disagreed with me when I pointed out that certain ancient carved artifacts, heads with facial features found on the east and west coasts of Mexico, were Asian and African, suggesting that those ancient peoples must have arrived on the continent long before it was assumed:  "Oh, no," she said, "Stella said you can imagine anything, so those features could have been imagined by the ancient indigenous people of Mexico."

I revere Stella Adler's insistence on the theme and social context of the drama; she published two books on the topic, and although her ideas emanated from the POV of the Group Theatre, that she insisted on its relevance is, in my opinion perhaps her greatest contribution, regardless if one might disagree with her analysis of a particular play.  However, the character is fictitious, emanating from the imagination / life experience of the author.  How to access the thoughts of the character that emanated from the images/thoughts of Shakespeare, or Ibsen or Chekhov or Fugard within their social context when you live in 21st Century England, Russia, France, USA, or all the other countries where my readers reside -- ah, that's the challenge!  In Jean Benedetti's book Stanislavski and the Actor, in the index of principal terms used, translated from Russian:  THE THIRD BEING: The actor/role, the product of the marriage between the actor's personality and the character the author has written. 

Finally, if you go to the 7/4/18 post regarding Dianne Wiest's scene from In Treatment, I think it's clear that seeing the image is necessary, not the origin of the image, which neither Adler nor Strasberg nor Moore would have been able to discern.

Thursday, August 13, 2020

HE WAS TOO GOOD TO ME - BARBARA COOK / CARLY SIMON



I've quoted Barbara Cook elsewhere in these posts.  I took a few minutes just now to listen to songs and came across Carly Simon singing He Was Too Good To Me.  I remembered Barbara Cook's quote somewhere in these posts about the most dangerous place to be is the safest [for the performer].  Carly Simon is a wonderful performer, yet, what did Barbara Cook do with the same song?  I think she risked going to that dangerous place -- I leave it to you to see if you agree with me.  Regardless, when we work, I hope I can inspire you to reach for that safest, most dangerous place.

Thursday, July 9, 2020

DILEMMAS OF DOGMA - PART I / STILL LOOKING FOR RICHARD

When the Red Bull Theater sent invitations to its podversation with Matthew Rauch regarding his preparations and performance of Richard III at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. last year, I cancelled sessions in order to participate.  I didn't see the production last year, but I admit to a dogged interest in the interpretation of the play and the character.  Actors who study with me know that I may, at any moment, even when it's mildly tangential to something we're rehearsing, bring up the importance of theme, social framework and structure, and point out my prime example of what I think is a traditional misconception of The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, its full title when it was first published in 1597.  Richard is traditionally defined as the most heinous villain created among all the characters in the extant Shakespeare canon, and that his actions are exceptional, therefore defining the other characters as his victims; villainy in conflict with righteousness.  But this play is a tragedy, not a melodrama.

The play takes place during the War of the Roses.  Queen Margaret, a woman who commanded armies, schemed, manipulated, lived in exile while setting her own agenda for claiming the throne, known to "execute her enemies asking her 7-year-old son for his opinion on how they should be killed," was only one of the combatants in this war. The extreme strife of that period in England at the end of the Hundred Years' War and during the years of the War of the Roses created an incredible instability in the monarchy - five rulers in a span of 25 years, three of them executed - everyone "clawing at each other for the throne," as Frederic Kimball noted in Al Pacino's Looking for Richard.

As I understand the structure of Shakespeare's tragedies, they're modeled after the Greek tragedies in form, but in content, they reflect the thinking of the English Renaissance; the main difference being that the tragic character is not a victim of fate, but of choice (The Tragedy of Julius Caesar - Cassius: "The fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.").  In  tragedy the character doesn't die piteously unaware of their tragic flaw, but through their journey of discovery, they become consciously aware of it in the climax, whether they're Oedipus or Richard. 

Impressive to me about Matthew Rauch's discussion of the role, were the careful considerations he made as he grappled with the complexities of the play and though he was asked to show us the end of Act I, Scene II, after Lady Anne's exit, he chose instead to present part of the climax of the play, which is indeed a puzzle and challenge for the actor given the traditional interpretation of the play.

Matthew Rauch's reading reminded me of Ralph Fiennes' Richard from Henry VI.  Speaking of previous circumstances!  How well this monologue articulates the impending struggle Richard has set for himself.


There's one scene in the play, aside from the climax, that perplexes everyone who adheres to the traditional interpretation; as well it should.  It's the seduction of Lady Anne, of course.  There are many examples of this scene on the Internet.  All of them are performed as follows: The murderous villain seduces the moral, ethical, innocent victim.  I chose a few.  I might have enjoyed Mark Rylance's spoof of this play, but spoof it must've been.  I chose his version because for me, it's an example of what actors might do when they haven't a clue what the play or the scene is about.  A concerto isn't a polka and a tragedy isn't a comedy just because it contains humor.  When the actor makes himself more important than the play, ignoring its structure, whether it's Richard II, Henry V or Richard III, examples from Mr. Rylance on the internet, he's free to interpret those characters as he sees fit, but in my view, he doesn't give a damn about the play.  The sentence, "I wasted time and now doth time waste me," (Richard II) said as an unimportant statement of fact instead of a realization, indeed that entire speech being a grappling with the character's conflicts, masked in a naturalistic, colloquial delivery displays a reading of the play, no matter how different it is from other interpretations.  Here's a portion of his version of the seduction of Lady Anne:


Here are two more versions, among many others available on the Internet.  When directors cut important sections or lines from a scene, it indicates to me that they couldn't make sense of it; but the key to the writer's intent is contained in those sections or lines!  Some productions were performed as if the play takes place in other centuries, but consistently, the interpretation of the conflict in that scene is the same, rendering Lady Anne as an innocent victim.  For Al Pacino, she must be very young, naive enough to believe his "rap."  Olivier broke the sequence of the rising action of the scene in order to make sense of it, and justified Lady Anne's action to be based on her succumbing to his eroticism.  Olivier and Pacino addressed Richard's eroticism as if he was used to seducing women of her rank.  But was he?  Not according to what he says of himself in Henry VI, Part 3, and not according to what he said in his opening monologue.  Releasing his sexual energy on Lady Anne, needs, I think, a very particular behavior, not a Hollywood love scene.  If the scene were performed in the sequence in which it was written, and every note of the score were played, I think we'd discover that Lady Anne is an ambitious opportunist; that the scene evolves into a cat and mouse game between equals.  "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd..." was performed by Olivier and Pacino as if Richard believed her rap!  I think Richard mocks her hypocrisy, delighted that he was able to expose it.  As a result of his success, I think he ironically, facetiously, shares with the audience how it will now affect his demeanor. 

The climax.   The night before the battle; the thoughtfulness that Matthew Rauch gave to the result of the nightmare while sitting in his office (a nightmare, BTW, that Lady Anne described earlier in the play), reminded me of Al Pacino's search for the character in that monologue.  Note the correction Pacino made of the sentence, "I am a villain."  The conscious realization, acknowledgement of it as opposed to the cynical way the actor might choose to say the word in the opening monologue.  Olivier did a visually effective sequence of the appearance of the ghosts, but he omitted the monologue of discovery, which makes me think that he didn't understand the central idea of the play:


I think that the climax confounds actors who assume the traditional interpretation of Richard because they overlook the title and don't consider the possibility that dogma has reduced the play to a melodrama; they don't consider the possibility that this isn't a play about a villain at all, that it might be a play about ambition and the lust for power, and that Richard III might be a viper in a den of vipers, and is a tragic figure because as he becomes conscious of it:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain:
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;
All several sins all us'd in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, 'Guilty, guilty!' 
 
He is now painfully aware, yet he chooses to ignore his conscience, his "humanity," as Frederic Kimball noted - a tragic figure, not because he's a treacherous villain who must be punished or eliminated - or because his horse was slain.  But because:

Go, gentlemen: every man unto his charge!
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on!  Join bravely.  Let us to it pell-mell -
If not to Heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE : DITTO...

...because I'm still convinced that every story, and certainly every dramatic story, whether a play (regardless of how many acts comprise it), or a screenplay, has a theme, a series of rising actions that lead to its climax and that within the climax that theme is most profoundly expressed.  Or, as an old-time Hollywood screenwriter* once told me, "Whenever I'm in trouble, don't know how to continue, I leave my desk, go out in the hall, start pacing, and ask myself, 'why am I telling you this story?'"

I think that I Know This Much is True is one of the rare productions in which great care was taken with its dramatic structure, casting and direction.  I don't know the novel that Wally Lamb wrote, so I don't know if the drama faithfully told its story, but the series, as dramatized by Derek Cianfrance, was careful and deliberate about the story it wanted to tell.  In addition, Mr. Cianfrance is a director who understands visual syntax, a rarity among current film directors and discussed here on 2/22/19, Visual Syntax, the Role of the Director.

I've chosen a few scenes that repeat topics I've already addressed on this blog;  that bear repeating because of how necessary I think they are, and how rarely we see them performed or executed.

Taken out of sequence because it's part of the resolution, the scene below is an example of active listening, the processing of the ideas/images that one's partner is trying to convey.  Kathryn Hahn accomplished, and she consistently does so in other scenes and other performances, the concentration needed that goes beyond hearing what is said by one's partner.  Please read my discussion of this aspect of technique regarding Michelle Williams.


The scene below is an excellent example of the rising action that leads to the climax; the actor's sharp focus on the character's need (objective, action), clarity of images, progression.


Lastly, the climax:





*Someone who worked for a major studio on its lot during the '40s and '50s, had an office, and was assigned one script after another.  A writer who went to the commissary for lunch, schmoozed with other writers, drove home and didn't think about the script until the following morning.




Thursday, April 9, 2020

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICAN ACTORS SEASON 1 EPISODE 3 - Evelyn Finkel/Winona Ryder

Aside from accusations of anti-Semitism, Philip Roth has also been accused of misogyny.  Google him on these topics; you'll find a long list of critics accusing him, if not of one, then the other of these repulsive characteristics. I've extrapolated his description of Evelyn Finkel from The Plot Against America.  

The following is all the writer/director and actor had to go on:  

 "Alvin was the renegade on my father's side, Evelyn was the maverick on my mother's, a substitute elementary school teacher in the Newark system who'd been active several years earlier in founding the left-wing, largely Jewish Newark Teachers Union, whose few hundred members were competing with a more staid, apolitical teachers' association to negotiate contracts with the city.  Evelyn was just thirty in 1941, and until two years before, when my maternal grandmother died of heart failure after a decade as a coronary invalid, it was Evelyn who'd cared for her in the tiny top-floor apartment ...and when Evelyn went to New York to see a play with her intellectual friends on a Saturday night...Many nights Aunt Evelyn never made it home from New York - even when she'd planned to return before midnight...And then there were the afternoons Evelyn didn't get back until hours after school was over, because of a long-standing off-and-on love affair with a substitute teacher from North Newark, like Evelyn a forceful union advocate, and unlike Evelyn married, Italian and the parent of three children. --- Her large nose didn't prevent people from calling Aunt Evelyn "striking," and it was true, as my mother observed, that when tiny Evelyn walked into a room -- a vivacious brunette with a perfect, if miniaturized womanly silhouette, enormous dark eyes...crimson lipstick guaranteed to dazzle -- everyone turned to look, the women as well as the men.  Her hair was lacquered to a metallic luster...and when she went off to sub, she donned a brightly colored skirt with matching high-heeled shoes and a broad white belt and a semisheer, pastel-colored blouse.  My father considered her apparel in poor taste for a schoolteacher, and so did the principal at Hawthorne...my mother....was incapable of judging her sister's boldness harshly, even when Evelyn resigned from teaching, quit the union, and seemingly without a qualm, abandoned her political loyalties to work for Rabbi Bengelsdorf in Lindbergh's OAA.

It would be several months before it occurred to my parents that Aunt Evelyn was the rabbi's mistress and had been ever since he met her at a reception..."

These introductory scenes are what they came up with:


In a few pages Roth described a woman that any actor should be thrilled to create:  A bold, sexually active woman who's aware of her physical attributes, knows that men and women find her attractive, and dresses accordingly.  A maverick, independent, who manages to care for her ill mother, teach, organize a "left-wing" opposition teachers' union that might ostracize her or cause her to lose her job; who's interested in the theatre (BTW, I mentioned Clifford Odets in my first post on this character; she might very well have gone to a production of one of his plays at the Group Theatre!).  She took risks having affairs with colleagues, and had a "long-standing, off-and-on" love affair with a married "forceful union advocate".  Can't you just see this like-minded pair?  Sure, you might decide that he's "taking advantage," lying,  promising marriage; how's that for an original idea?  But couldn't you also justify, given the description, a woman who loves a man and allows him his freedom as she takes hers?  After all, the affair was "off-and-on".  And then!  Inexplicably, she quits her job, her "left-wing" labor ideals and "political loyalties" and takes up with a right-wing sixty-year-old rabbi from the segregationist South!  How delicious can you get?!  Maybe it was her Italian lover who sat there on the bed like a weepy weed when she called it quits!  Instead, "I finally have somebody," is the line written for her in the scene with her sister.  What does that reduce her to and how does it line up with Roth's description of Evelyn?

Did Ms. Ryder consider these discrepancies when she read the novel?  Clearly, the spine of Evelyn's actions in the arc of the drama is focused on the abandonment of one political point of view for its polar opposite.  What drives a person to do that?  Whenever it's observed, it's curiously mysterious except for obvious reasons like ambition or conformity or something -- Mussolini comes to mind.  But still...it's puzzling, isn't it?  What a splendidly complex person Evelyn is, what a gift Philip Roth gave some future actor lucky enough to bring her to life.   Misogynist?   Who's the misogynist in this scenario?


Tuesday, April 7, 2020

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICAN ACTORS SEASON 1 EPISODE 2 - Actor's Responsibility

Please refer to interviews with Philip Roth on YouTube for more information on his approach to his work.  I've posted this one about another novel because it's short and gives us a glimpse into his writing process.  He wrote a page a day and often struggled with just one sentence.  Regardless of how long writers spend on the stories they create, once the actor is challenged to perform the character created by the writer, it's the actor's obligation to understand that they're collaborating with the writer; that they bring their life experience to the to the life experience of the writer and that the character on the page becomes the third entity between them in performance.  The challenge for the actor is to make each written word from the writer sacred in the process of building the portrait of the character. 



From the novel, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA:   "It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion.  Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outdoors or in the houses I routinely floated through with my boyhood friends.  The adults were no longer observant in the outward, recognizable ways, if they were seriously observant at all, and aside from older shopkeepers like the tailor and the kosher butcher....hardly anyone in the vicinity spoke with an accent.  By 1940 Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talked to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs."

What was the purpose of the following scene that depicts the family's observance of the Sabbath and explicitly indicates that it was observed every Friday night?  Aside from making Philip's lack of knowledge about the orthodox men who came to the door asking for donations nonsensical, it directly contradicted the novel's description of the family's secular lifestyle, and made Evelyn's remark to Rabbi Bengelsdorf (discussed in the Episode 1 post) puzzling regarding how non-observant her family was.  It may seem minor to some, but please note the facile decision to speak in a cliche semblance of a New York twang instead of the accent clearly defined by Roth.  One need only listen to his accent above, even after living many years in London, and notice that over a lifetime it remained the same -- in case one didn't know how American English was spoken in Altoona in 1940!  The accents in performance weren't consistent, but the affect on the creation of character resulted in cliches that often lead to caricatures, to stereotypes, particularly by the women.  Funny; from the beginning of his career,  Roth was often accused of being anti-Semitic; a "self-hating Jew."  I'm not an avid reader of Roth; I've read a few of his novels, some I enjoyed; others not so much even though I admired his talent.  It seemed to me that he created complex, neurotic men and women who were products of, and in conflict with, their social environment -- that is, their central conflict was with the society, the particular social context in which they lived.  If an adaptation of his work doesn't rigorously adhere to it, even down to the way his characters pronounce words, then it runs the risk of expressing the anti-Semitism of which Roth was so unfairly accused.


Did the cast notice omissions and contradictions in the script from the novel; details that were painstakingly crafted by Roth to depict the social environment?  Did they consider the result of omissions and contradictions that would affect their ability to create the characters in the novel?  If they did, what did they do about it?

Saturday, March 28, 2020

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICAN ACTORS - SEASON 1 EPISODE 1 - Winona Ryder

The slow dilution of the technique rigorously taught by the members of the Group Theatre has sadly most permeated, of all things, the work of many American actors so that only a few are either so talented that they practice it by instinct, or they have been correctly taught, and use the technique habitually, or a combination of both.  Yes, I'm repeating myself.

With the exception of the children, and through the second episode of The Plot Against America, the performance of John Turturro, the entire cast demonstrated that it doesn't know the difference between narrative and dramatic expression of a sentence.  None of them, through the second episode seemed to comprehend action, the choice of a verb for each sentence, the idea of which must begin with a thought.  The result of this error produced, for all of the occasional histrionics, indicated acting.

Ms. Ryder's performance was of particular interest to me because I've seen her perform excellently, especially approximately thirty years ago when she exhibited the innate talent we marvel at in children such as Azhy Robertson.  I recently discussed Scarlett Johansson's work as well in this regard.  Regardless of the measure of a child's talent, once they reach adulthood, I think it's imperative that they learn technique in order to understand what they intuited when they were children.  If Azhy Robertson will still want to be an actor past the age of eighteen (not before!), his work will only improve, deepen, if he learns how to read the notes and not rely on his ability to play by ear.

For a discussion of the following scene, let's go along with the series' apparent interpretation of the character, Evelyn Finkel, as a romantically needy spinster who is taken advantage of by a married man.  It's late afternoon in a hotel room, and they've just made love.  Once Evelyn realizes that Angelo didn't make the reservation for a steak dinner at _______(I didn't get the name of the restaurant), Ms. Ryder said, "I gave you the number," as if it were a statement of fact.  It's never a statement of fact!  The actor is free to choose an action, but an action it must be!  Accusatory?  Part of the rising action after this is the accusation that she "brought a suitcase."  Instinctively, Ms. Ryder was somewhat accusatory when she said this, but it wasn't specifically related to the progression/rising action of the scene, therefore nowhere near the importance it needed.  Ah, and then, Ms. Ryder was given sentences to say that were indeed a mouthful, and if the writers' attempt at those sentences was to channel Clifford Odets, I sympathize with Ms. Ryder, they fell vastly short:

                        "You see me, and all the blood leaves your head.
                          You get a taste of fruit and everything changes."

Then, "Angelo, I thought you knew the_______."  Sorry, I didn't understand the last word of that sentence, but whatever it was, it needed an action related to the rising action that began with the restaurant's phone number. 

Again, those first two sentences should not be said as statements of fact, and they are separate thoughts, neither of which Evelyn knew she was going to say, correct?  The first sentence/idea is that when he sees her, all the blood leaves his head and goes to his penis, right?  What verb would best convey the thought/action Evelyn might need to make him see what she sees?  "You get a taste of fruit and everything changes," needed to be the result of myriad images.

Then, the last beat after Angelo leaves; if the director encouraged a cliche action, please try to talk him out of it.  Do seek actions that aren't cliches such as looking down, hand to mouth as if about to cry; how about a simple direct gaze at the closed door, trying to understand the circumstances you find yourself in?  The actor needs to be cognizant of the character's journey of discovery that takes place in the arc of this scene.


The plot against American actors that encourages them to perform by instinct or to study absurd versions of technique none of which they know they can rely on, reduces them to manipulated ciphers who gaze with amazement at actors who defy such behavior and perform, risking all, in order to be able to marvel at human behavior.  In that vein, did Ms. Ryder ask the director/writer about a seeming contradiction that in the first episode Evelyn joins the family's Orthodox Sabbath observance, and in the second episode she tells Rabbi Bengelsdorf that her family isn't "particularly observant" when he asks her to be his assistant?  How is the actor supposed to develop the character, and play that scene with the rabbi?  Is Evelyn lying him?  A subject for future episodes of The Plot Against American Actors.

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

BLACK ENGLISH ACTORS - WHITE PERIOD DRAMAS


Josh Toussaint-Strauss of The Guardian made the following observation the other day about English dramas and today The Guardian commented on the absence of Afro-American characters in Westerns when history contradicts it.





Wednesday, March 4, 2020

WHY ARE BLACK ENGLISH ACTORS CAST AS ICONIC AFRO-AMERICANS IF TOM STOPPARD IS JEWISH?

"Leopoldstadt deserves a Broadway transfer, but New York audiences will hardly need Gretl to deliver her straight-to-auditorium explanation of what a bris is.  -- For all its Viennese setting, Leopoldstadt is thus a profoundly English play," wrote Kate Maltby in The New York Review of Books in her review, Tom Stoppard's Theatre of Memory.      
                           Link to the review in NYR Daily:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/02/14/tom-stoppards-theatre-of-memory/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR Tyranny

These two Jewish 21st-century English-speaking politicians have a very similar ancestral history,  superficially, they have similar characteristics, but I think that the deep-rooted dissimilar cultures that raised them made them recognizably, insurmountably, steeped in those very specific different cultural experiences.












House passes historic legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime
The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a federal hate crime, was passed and signed into law in 2020 -- so recently that the word antilynching is considered a misspelled word on the internet.  The expressive  historical connection to this one tip of the iceberg fact is so brutal, bloody, anxiety-ridden with fear, rage, that if it doesn't appear in our cultural expression, if it is suppressed in any way when it is lived every day to the moment you're reading these words, I think that that in itself is a crime.

Americans and the English speak the same language and understand each other's culture, but understanding isn't synonymous with being steeped in it, having it carved, literally and figuratively, into one's DNA.  There are English cultural behaviors that are foreign to Americans and would be confusingly out of place in our Congress or if performed in a "profoundly English" play on Broadway.  The talented performances of Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Oyelowo, Daniel Kaluuya and Cynthia Erivo were, for me, also confusingly foreign and out of place.  Missing or erased from their performances, not  because they haven't experienced racism, but because they only understand American racism intellectually -- that specific rage born of a specific relentless exclusion from safety to a specific everyday expectation of harm -- finds expression on the faces of all African-Americans, from toddlers to the elderly, and we Americans, all of us, are familiar with that expression, that behavior, and when it's absent from a Black face, we recognize that as well.  Nevertheless, on a personal note, even though I recognized what I thought was misguided if not worse, cynical, casting of the English actors mentioned above, about a year ago, during an audition rehearsal, an African-American actor pointed out to me that my criticisms, my clamping the lid on his manner, on his expression of the text and his physical behavior was whitewashing (my word) his concept of the character.  I'm indebted to him.  Consider how often my error makes its way into performances.

The following two scenes from the film of August Wilson's play, Fences, directed by Denzel Washington are examples of how profoundly American that drama is, and how expressively American its characters are.


 The talent exhibited here is not a rarity of the talent, both active and dormant of African-American writers, directors, actors.  I wrote, perhaps obliquely, on 6/16/17 and 3/17/19, Diversity, Talent, Technique, Opportunity and Samuel L. Jackson about this topic.  I'll be more direct now:  It is pure ignorance of acting technique for any director, producer or actor to describe the traditional training of actors in England as classical, and by comparison or inference to describe actor training in the U.S. as anything other than classical; notwithstanding the divergent distortions of Stanislavski sometimes taught here.   Further, whether in England or the U.S., institutions like RADA or Juilliard, universities or studios, charge exorbitant tuition fees that exclude the majority of both our populations.  Is elitist too harsh a word?  Naaa, I don't think so.  A lot of talent has crossed my threshold only to quit in despair because they couldn't afford to continue even with the discount of my already lower than average fees.  Add to that the bottleneck of scarce opportunity to audition, let alone perform.

Once more, as I've already offered, if space will be provided, I'll teach anywhere at Uta's rate as described by Charles Nelson Reilly in my 12/10/13 post, The Life of Reilly.  I welcome discussion and I plan to visit this topic in future posts.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

"WHADDYA MEAN 'FILMS'"? "BAUMBACH?"

A student expressed interest in why I said "films," plural, regarding Noah Baumbach's work in the post titled Character or Caricature?  Laura Dern - Marriage Story.  Admittedly, I haven't seen all of his films, but I have seen quite a few, since I like his screenplays and his visual syntax very much.  Okay, recall that in my other post titled Scarlett Johansson - Innate Talent Without Technique - Pitfalls - Marriage Story, I noted the discrepancy between correct instinctive performance and absence of technique where the actor mistakenly performs narratively rather than dramatically.  I noticed the error of narrative performance in The Meyerwitz Stories as well.  These two scenes are performed narratively; Marriage Story from the blog post as reference (above), and from The Meyerwitz Stories (below):

The reason I said there are excellent performances alongside drastic errors in Mr. Baumbach's films: In Marriage Story, Alan Alda's performance was exemplary, as was Ray Liotta's performance.  Adam Driver performed beautifully in his scenes with those two actors and also in his scenes with Azhy Robertson.  However, the pitfalls I described that occur when an actor relies on instinct rather than using the tools of technique, occurred particularly in his scenes with Ms. Johansson.  When she worked correctly, so did he, but, for example, in the climactic argument scene, because it was performed correctly in certain moments then moved in and out of narrative exposition, I think she derailed him, and ironically, his character's note to her in the beginning of the film that she was pushing for emotion is what actually happened to both of them in that well-written argument scene.

Here's a sample of the excellent performances of Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller in The Meyerwitz Stories.  This scene is near the end of the film. I included a snippet of the prior fight scene in order to note the characters' previous circumstances.  Please see the film and note the excellent creation of character through the arc of the drama, attention to the rising action, correct focus on the needs of the character -- journey of discovery -- by both of these excellent actors:

 

Monday, February 17, 2020

BARBARA COOK: SAFETY OF THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE...




I quoted Barbara Cook on an earlier post. Here it is again -- reminding my students to take the risk and explore the safety of the most dangerous places.

"If you can get to the point where you are ready to use every joy, every death, every lover who has left you...If you are willing to explore that within the song, you cannot be wrong."  And especially when her disjointed sentence told a student, "The very place where safety lies for us is the same that seems most dangerous, and the sharing - the courage to let people really, really get into what life is into -- and sets it free."



Friday, February 7, 2020

MITT ROMNEY - EMOTION DERIVED FROM COGNITION AND...

...as well, the circumstances under which those thoughts/images are being evoked.  Mr. Romney read from a written text, one that must have gone through careful preparation, rewrite and editing to be sure he had accurately expressed his ideas.  I'm guessing he read it aloud several times; to himself and others.   We don't have that information, but surely he didn't intend to find himself overcome with emotion, unable to continue, when he said, "I am profoundly religious.  My faith is at the heart of who I am."  I think that a heightened awareness of whom one needs to reach with one's thoughts is what produces an emotion that under other circumstances might not appear.  Therefore, we're back to the action, the need -- what do I need to do to my partner?

For Mr. Romney, in this particular circumstance, it was his colleagues -- his fellow citizens - the world.


 

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

BEING SIMON CALLOW: "Acting is thinking the thoughts of another person."

Hey, everybody!  I've been talking about this interview to so many of you, that I decided to look for it, and here it is:


Sunday, February 2, 2020

BARBRA STREISAND, SARAH VAUGHAN - PERFORMER / AUDIENCE CONNECTIONS






Whomever it was Streisand had in mind is not someone we'd know of with certainty, but what's obvious is that she had someone in mind. Note that when the camera moved to the audience and focused on one of its members, that that woman connected to her own life experience, not Streisand's life experience.  Did that woman say to herself, when she bought her ticket, "Oh, my, I'm going to Streisand's concert soon; I must go over all my romantic experiences in order to be able to find my substitutions and connect with my emotions!"?  Regardless of the story, what makes a member of the audience spontaneously laugh, cry, get angry, remember an event, etc.?  Isn't it a connection to the ideas/images they hear?  That's why I suggest diving head first into the character's actions because how and if they will resonate for you will be discovered by trusting that it's somewhere there in your body.  Both Hagen and Adler suggested, in writing, to seek a substitution only if all else failed.

Here's Sarah Vaughan with the same song and a different life experience.  She moves me with every song I've heard her sing because she seems to combine her words with the musical notes in a particular way that vibrates, illuminates, the idea/images she needs to convey.



And another one -- ah, the angst we'd need to go through dredging up memories days, hours, before taking a comfortable seat, seeing who's in the audience, pleased we dressed appropriately for the occasion, and then again, preparing our painful memories in order to participate in the audience's experience listening to:



Saturday, February 1, 2020

IN MY MIND'S EYE


I first saw this photograph of Stella Adler in the role of Bessie Berger in Clifford Odets' play, Awake and Sing hanging on a wall with other photo memorabilia of the Group Theatre at the Stella Adler Academy in Hollywood.  I'd usually stop to look at it whenever I was there because each time I did, I noticed something I hadn't noted before, and just the other day, while discussing thought, I mentioned it to an actor who's prepping for a production that goes before the cameras this month.

Note and get from it what you will -- but just to remind you, the play was performed on a stage in a theatre, and what Stella was actually looking at was whatever objects stagehands had assembled to be used in other scenes and those walls were actually flats, the odor of which I can still remember, and in my experience didn't diminish from opening to closing night performances.

HEADING FOR A PRODUCTION AT THE GROUP THEATRE OR DINNER WITH STELLA AND HAROLD

 

AH, IMAGINING...opening night of The House of Connelly and being invited to meet them at Sardi's after the show?  Imagine....


Tuesday, January 21, 2020

CHARACTER OR CARICATURE? LAURA DERN - MARRIAGE STORY

I discussed creating the character previously in a blog post titled Artistic Interpretation or Mimicry (7/2/16), and it seems to me that it's related to  creating a character about whom, because of their idiosyncrasies, we recognize as humorous, and understanding that in order to avoid the trap of indicated acting (showing the character) which leads to caricature, the actor must seriously "participate in the actions of the character," (Uta Hagen).  It's possible that Laura Dern was directed by Noah Baumbach to portray the divorce attorney in a caricatured style; if so, a serious error, in my opinion.  Consider the performances of the three actors who portrayed divorce attorneys in Marriage Story.  Caricature prevents us from finding the character funny, whereas, when the actor steps into the shoes of the character, thinks the thoughts of the character, and is deadly serious about the character's actions, that's when we find them funny.

 

 Were they thinking of Lisa Bloom?  Lisa Bloom takes herself very seriously.
  
Ray Liotta and Alan Alda performed correctly. Caricature distances us from the actions of the character, whereas idiosyncrasy of character draws us into the actions of the character.

In the scene above, if Laura Dern had portrayed her character as sincerely as Alan Alda portrayed his, the irony, the heartbreak, would have been much more profound.  I think that Noah Baumbach is an excellent screenwriter who creates the syntax of film beautifully; what he is unfamiliar with is the task of the actor, and it shows up in his films.  There are excellent performances alongside drastic errors -- I don't think it's a roll of the dice -- I think it's ignorance of technique.

Thursday, January 16, 2020

SIR LAURENCE OLIVIER ON MARLON BRANDO




I've written in various posts about talent and technique; what a pleasure to find this brief discussion about it from Olivier regarding Brando (6/25/13 post).

Sadly, this is also an example of how little exchange there was, and still is, between teachers and practitioners regarding the definition of technique. Per my 6/16/17 post on diversity, I quoted Uta Hagen's definition of technique.  Note her definition of realistic performance, and although Olivier surmised, without asking him, that Brando wouldn't have agreed that he was a technician, I'll take the liberty, from Brando's quotes, to surmise that he would definitely have agreed that he was a technician who practiced the realistic technique defined by Hagen.

Interestingly, in an anecdote regarding her experience with Olivier, Hagen said that no matter how differently she might have delivered a line to him in rehearsal, he always responded in the same way.  See the film, The Boys From Brazil.  Nevertheless, Olivier seemed definitely to play an action and identify with the images in his above recitation of the lines from Milton's Paradise Lost.

Monday, January 13, 2020

SCARLETT JOHANSSON - INNATE TALENT WITHOUT TECHNIQUE PITFALLS - MARRIAGE STORY


There are many talented actors who have studied minimally or a lot, but don't rely on technique when they perform; and there are a few who have never studied formally, but are talented enough to not make the error of indicated depiction of a character with the result of either showing us their idea of the character or reading the script's dialogue narratively rather than acting dramatically.

I've written elsewhere on my blog that talent is a variable, but that technique is not.  I don't think there's any substitute for technique regardless of the actor's innate talent, and I think Ms. Johansson has demonstrated my POV very well in several scenes in Marriage Story.  Two scenes from the film demonstrate this:  In the above scene, when her partner commented on her hair in a very intimate, personal manner, the thought that preceded her verbal response conveyed physically the irony that although they were no longer in such a relationship, he didn't seem aware of it, was dramatically conveyed and appropriately performed.  Note that her body language and words conveyed that idea.

However, in the following scene, Ms. Johansson performed her monologue narratively.  Note that every sentence of her description of her marriage seemed to be known to her in advance, and she rattled off, without hesitation, disparate events consecutively that had taken place over a period of years.  Many actors who do this will frequently shake their heads back and forth while they're speaking, which I interpret as an attempt to connect to the idea.  Note how much Ms. Johansson did that as well as physically shake herself during her monologue.  I think she was trying to connect to the images of her narrative description.  Each sentence of that well-written monologue needed a thought to precede it, a reliving of each incident - a reaching for the words to describe the images of those disparate events.  In addition, compare the relaxed voice placement in the first scene as opposed to the tension in her voice in the next scene.


In addition, in the following scene, she performed the scene correctly until her last sentence.  Both men were trying to convince her to participate in a way she no longer wanted to.  They were critical and ignored or weren't sensitive to her resentment and pain.  She needed to hurt them, insult them in return and escape. The actor needs to prepare the action/verb for each individual sentence.  To insult or even something stronger for, "I'm gonna go if you're just gonna sit around and suck each other's dicks," needed to be laser beamed at each of them.  Instead, "...suck each other's dicks" went into the air, instead of being the piercing dagger it needed to be.



An actor who understands and uses technique in rehearsal and performance knows how to avoid the pitfalls of uneven performance.