Discussion and critique of acting technique, theory and practice of the members of the Group Theatre as derived from the work of Constantin Stanislavski. All critique and point of view is written by June Barfield. All videos and print material on this blog are intended only for educational purposes and therefore fall within the purview of Fair Use under copyright laws. Contact: junebarfield@gmail.com
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.
.
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.
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 mylead 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 Meisnerand 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.
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.
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 bea 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.
...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.
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?
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?
