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Here are the beginning pages of The Actors' Notebook. The three of us are in different stages of production, as I write this. Sara Morsey is performing Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet and is three weeks away from opening as Cornelia in The Carpetbagger's Children at the Hippodrome. Bobby McAfee is just a week away from opening as the King in Once upon a Mattress at the Gainesville Community Playhouse. I open as Jaques in As You Like It at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre in two weeks.
(Sara Morsey has spent nearly a decade at the Hippodrome etching sublime portraits of the most fascinating women in dramatic literature from Amanda Wingfield to Lady Macbeth and seemingly everyone in–between.)
Hey Shamrock, what you want to write about is just about the only thing I feel really at home talking about. I think that is OK, since everything I know about anything is subsumed within my acting.
As far as the beginning of a process&ehllip; I am starting The Carpetbagger's Children while just getting a good hold on Romeo and Juliet. That is a blessing, of course, not a curse, as my real love is for true rotating repertory.
I have actually been reading the play over several times as I always do. I am not a very good play reader. I miss a lot in the reading until I actually get down to dissecting my character. I've also started a bit of the memorization process because my character, Cornelia, has a lot to say.
At the production meeting to which I was invited, my eyes were opened to the amount of work and input from designers that precedes us. I know this, but I was nonetheless impressed with the insights of the various artists involved.
Having dabbled in directing, I realize I am a much better actor than director because I long to delve into one mind and find it hard to inhabit them all. The actual process that I have is particular to me and the closest I've come to writing it down was in my MFA documentation.
More and more I seem to be involved in plays that have my character directly addressing the audience. This is harder for me than playing with a "fourth wall." I've gotten used to the fact that you can expect nothing from your audience and may have to almost manufacture response to keep yourself going. At the same time, you can't judge the audience because they made no pact to react in any certain way or even buy into your story for that matter. They may also be involved and not "show it." We are the actors. So much for that.
As you rehearse without anyone except the stage manager and director "out there" you know that one day soon you will look into the actual faces of people you don't know and who don't know the story. I don't believe in looking above the heads of the audience or pretending to look at them, but not really focusing. That is something they teach you when you are learning public speaking, or something I think I did as a very young actor. Now it seems false and less than I want to deliver as an actor.
(Bobby McAfee's acting talents have stretched like glad wrap around Stoppard's Rosencrantz, Shakespeare's Polonius, King Lear, and a witch in Macbeth who could morph into anybody.)
I'm playing a Mute King in GCP's production of Once Upon A Mattress. Instead of memorizing lines, I have to memorize lots of pantomime. It's a different challenge. I'm stealing as much from Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd as is humanly possible. Seriously, the challenge is how to play an old man and have it be different. Cooking up the new stuff…that's the fun.
My brief time onstage is a gift I don't fully understand. And I don't want to blur it or dull it with tired analysis. All I know is the pleasure of it, and I'm fine with that.
Every rehearsal is a performance. I get the same butterflies, and damn if my knees don't shake the same.
I act for myself, but desire the approval of my fellow actors, (yet I have the hardest time accepting any compliment for something so personal).
"You saw it, I'm glad you saw it, I wanted you to see it, but do we really have to talk about it?"
The problem I've found with good theatre is that it makes everything else you've accepted as entertainment look so horribly bad. Movies start to look like bad commercials, television becomes a depressant, and local theater — the place where greatness happens in scenes and moments, and not so much in plays, is the only place where for me hope still exists in the talent of the player.
So the challenge becomes not being in a well written play, or on a good stage, but instead in a show where you believe those scenes and moments have the best possibility for survival.
I'm a student actor with no affiliation to any theatre, university, or workshop. Everything I need to know I learn from the audience.
I love this city. I love that I'm not alone in my addiction. I love that I see my friends in the paper. I cheer their publicity.
In one of those inane classrooms on the University of Florida campus that seems like it's being preserved in the Museum of Bad Acoustics, Professor Homan had gathered the cast of Shakespeare's As You Like It so that each of us could, quite studiously, analyze his or her character.
One by one the students rose dutifully and held forth on the behavior patterns, past history, and offstage habits of their characters. Katherine Cotter as Rosalind, with wit and assurance, cockily chewing gum. The veteran Malcolm Sanford (Adam), avuncular and jocose. Max Miller (Oliver), his earnest thesis shaded with a stand–up comic's panache.
As the melancholy Jaques, who is out of sorts in a Forest of Arden where It's All Good, I spoke from the audience and declined to take the podium.
"I don't know how to tell you this, guys. But there are no characters. I'm a playwright, and I know. It's just words on a page. They can't go out and have a drink with you after the show or anything."
Of course that's just what Jaques does in the play — he throws a wet blanket over all the fun, because, like me, it's his idea of a good time. "Why do you always have to be such a critic?" Well, duh.
The theory is David Mamet's, and I only espouse, as I suspect he does, to be a provocateur. David calls it Practical Aesthetics, the notion that It's All in the Words. You learn the lines; you don't memorize them. And that's all there is to it. You learn the lines so well that they become part of your own speech pattern and, voila: You the man.
Sid Homan, the Shakespeare scholar who blazes new ground with his belief that any scholar worth his salt needs to stage the plays to find out how they really work, had a reply ready.
I know and respect the Mamet theory. For me, it is another approach — but hardly the truth.That is, I myself like the idea of the actor's collaborating with the playwright by using the actual lines on the page as a base, as the heart and soul of the role (I will avoid using "character," and you are right: "character" in Shakespeare's day referred only to handwriting). But I do think another valid approach finds "additional" dialogue in the subtext (which also includes an imagined "history" for the character). To be sure, all would agree that one should learn the lines rather than memorize them. But "learn" is a very inclusive word. The characters the kids gave tonight were just for this moment in the rehearsal process, just in transition. And, of course, character is never fixed, neither in performance nor in life — the sweet neighborhood boy suddenly becomes a mass killer and the new image seemingly contradicts what everyone thought of him.
Cicely Berry says in The Actor and the Text, "We have to find ways to make words part of our physical self in order to release them from the tyranny of the mind. Breath is the physical life of the thought. The breath and the thought are one. How the character breathes is how the character thinks."