"There Are No Wrong Notes"

I think it's worth listening to this entire lecture just to hear Herbie Hancock tell, at the end of it, the anecdote that I've often told my students about the time he was in concert with Miles Davis.  It's one of the best acting lessons I can think of, especially when actors so frequently make judgements about the performance of their partners in a scene.  I heard Mr. Hancock tell this anecdote several years ago in a television interview.  Clearly, it meant a lot to him; he repeated it here.  

The Life of Reilly | Part 16 Miss Hagan's Class

Talent and Technique

Please note Channing Tatum's first scene in this trailer for White House Down.  It's an excellent example of narrative, rather than dramatic acting.  Note that the first line is almost incomprehensible, and that the following lines are "indicated" inasmuch as Mr. Tatum had made a decision in advance on how to say them.  They thereby become descriptive rather than dramatic.

Channing Tatum is a very talented actor.  However, he lacks technique.  His performances have ranged from excellent to poor depending upon who directs him, whether he has an identification with the given circumstances, or a given moment, or a given character.  

There's an anecdote about Marlon Brando:  He said, "Stella Adler taught me everything I know," and Stella Adler said, "He knew it before he came to me."  I think they're both right.  Brando was what I call a natural actor.  He understood the craft by instinct.  Sometimes it's called genius.  Nevertheless, he learned a technique from Adler that he was able to use in every performance, in every genre, from Julius Caesar to Guys and Dolls.  There's no substitute for technique -- not even genius.

The Objective and the How of that Objective

        http://nyti.ms/Swi2cU

The Roundabout Theatre in New York has revived Picnic by William Inge.  On January 14, 2013, The New York Times printed a review by Ben Brantley.  The Times also presented a video clip from a scene in the play.  The actor Sebastian Stan plays Hal Carter in this production, and in the clip, Mr. Stan's error regarding playing the objective is illustrative of a common error regarding that aspect of the technique.

It seems, from watching his work here, that Mr. Stan has provided his character with an objective (to get a job in an office). However, instead of also preparing how he intends to achieve that objective from beat to beat, Mr. Stan falls back on a troublesome habit of many actors:  He has decided in advance how he wants to say his lines, and "shows" us his character's objective.  He thereby listens to himself, and strains to show us what his character wants.

The actor who falls back on this habit gets further and further away from his character, not closer. He also presents what I call "actor-think," instead of "character-think."  It's my shorthand for reminding my students that there is no "actor-think" in performance; the character thinks, but not the actor.  What do I mean?  The actor has not prepared properly, and during a scene he'll stop the action in order to connect with how he wants to say the next line.  Notice that Mr. Stan does this just before he says, "Something in a nice office," in the clip from the Times.

As Uta Hagen wrote: "Never confuse the enormous difference between the kind of involvement we have when we are participating in the character's actions and that of the involvement entailed in the kind of muscular, emotional acting springing from an observer's sympathy for the character."

Is There an American Acting Tradition?

I know that's a leading question; I teach a class that claims it's so.

One of the best examples I've found that starkly demonstrates it, is the Kenneth Branagh production of Hamlet.  The Americans whom I remember from that cast were Billy Crystal as The First Gravedigger, Robin Williams as Osric, Jack Lemmon as Marcellus, and Charlton Heston as the Player King.  There was a stark contrast between them and the British actors.  The British actors "recited" their lines; the Americans spoke their lines.  The only time that Mr. Branagh spoke his lines was when he had a scene with an American actor.  Charlton Heston seemed the least skilled among the Americans, but otherwise, it seemed as if there were two separate casts in the film.  The other exceptions that I recall in that cast were Gerard Depardieu as Reynaldo, and Julie Christie as Gertrude.  Julie Christie said that she had never before performed Shakespeare.  Apparently, she approached the material as she would any prose, and Mr. Depardieu, for the several lines he had, well, I'm sure you can imagine how he played it even if you haven't seen the film.

I recently read Kirk Douglas's autobiography, The Ragman's Son.  He mentioned the American actor, Edmund O'Brien in the film of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in which Marlon Brando played Mark Antony.  Mr. Douglas mistakenly said that Mr. O'Brien played Cassius (played by John Gielgud; O'Brien played Casca).  Nevertheless, he further said, "Although underrated, Edmund O'Brien was one of the best Shakespearean actors.  In simple-sounding American speech, Edmund made the words of Shakespeare sound as if they had just occurred to him, really came out of him." 

...the words as if they had just occurred to him - yes.  I'm willing to claim that it was the contribution of the members of the Group Theatre who greatly influenced the American acting tradition; Laurette Taylor notwithstanding.

"Heaven help the master who's judged by his disciples,"

says Henry Higgins in the screenplay that GBS wrote for Pygmalion.  We teach what we remember and what we were able to comprehend and no voices come to us "from the grave" in the rooms in which Hagen, Adler, Meisner or Strasberg taught, admonishing us for outright misrepresentation or for skewing concepts that we claim they taught as well.

Don't be lazy.  Read.  Read everything all of them wrote.  I hope you'll come to the conclusion that those four masters may have disagreed with each other on how one achieved certain results, but they did not disagree on what those results should be.  It's startling to discover that some colleges, universities, and certain acting schools insist that their instructors teach only Meisner.  What kind of an education is that?

There Are No Throwaway Lines

When an actor has not established the character's overall objective, which is based on the theme of the work, and then establish that character's objective in each scene as well as "moment to moment" objectives, he will deal in an expository way with scenes that don't turn him on emotionally, hoping he can get past them as soon as possible, and on to the "meaty" scenes that are emotionally clear to him.  The actor's task is to not only understand the theme of the work, but also how each scene is related to the progression of the story that the writer has chosen to state that theme.  Therefore, each sentence in each scene is related to that progression and no sentence should be uttered unless it drives that progression forward.  "There are no throwaway lines," said Stella Adler on page 19 of The Art of Acting, and the only reason I didn't put it in quotes in the title of this post is because I said it to actors before I read her book.  I'll continue, in future posts, to point out that there were no differences in technique between Adler and Hagen, only in the way they expressed that technique.

Actors frequently make the error of throwing away lines, and an obvious example that I point out to my students is the scene in the film Notting Hill in which Hugh Grant helps Julia Roberts learn her lines for an upcoming film in which her character will star.  Because Ms. Roberts had not paid attention to the progression of the screenplay, she addressed that scene as if the only objective her character had was to learn her lines; lines that were boring and "not exactly Henry James," as Grant's character states.  But that scene occurs well into the progression of the story, after a connection of mutual attraction has been made between the characters.  The actors must be mindful that this is a romance and that the scene is definitely not merely about learning lines.  However, Ms. Roberts played it as if that's all it was about, so the scene was as boring as the lines her character had to learn.  Ms. Roberts seemed to think so too; she tried to get through it as fast as she could.