Arthur Penn was a great director. He was an important member of The Actors Studio who was equally at home in the theatre and on film sets. Best remembered for the Broadway productions of “Two For The Seesaw” and “The Miracle Worker”, and the films “The Miracle Worker”, Bonnie and Clyde”, “Night Moves”, and “Little Big Man”, I remember him best as a vibrant moderator at Actors Studio sessions, and as a co-founder of The Actors Studio Drama School when it was at New School University.
It was in this last capacity the he and I had some very spirited conversations as to the place of sense memory in performance. He maintained that it was purely a training device that actually got in the way of an actor’s performance, while I repeated that it was an important part of each actor’s everyday work. As much as I enjoyed his work and his ideas, I found it somewhat frustrating to go to sessions at the Studio on Tuesdays and see and hear him support Lee Strasberg’s guidance to include sensory work in the scenes, and go again on Fridays, when Arthur was the moderator, counseling actors to “forget about sensory work and just get up and do it”.
Arthur’s position, repeated many times, was that actors enjoyed sense memory training because it was all about them. He felt that it reinforced an actor’s self-involvement and egocentric orientation. When it came to actually acting, he felt that the focus needed to be placed on the playwright’s structures. Why then the difference in his positions in Lee’s presence? I never asked him, but I’m fairly sure it had to do with the internal politics of The Actors Studio.
To this day, I don’t believe Arthur ever truly understood what Lee was after in emphasizing sense memory in training actors. Of course we can use different sensory exercises to elicit specific responses when they are demanded of us. (This personal object will make me sad; another will make me happy; that overall sensation frightens me, etc.). But the true purpose was to train our senses to open the portals to our imaginations. As sense memory exercises became easier and more vibrant over time, an actor’s responses became stronger clearer and more consistent.
There are certain moments in acting that cannot be left to chance. If my character has to have an extreme reaction to an event, it is my responsibility as an actor to make that moment come to life. That can only be guaranteed by going to a specific sensory task that I know will deliver the required response. In most other types of scenes I can rely on my imagination because my imagination has been trained. What that means, precisely, is that by repeating sensory exercises many countless numbers of times they are forever connected to my thought process and my imagination. Even sensory tasks that haven’t been previously explored come to life as I think of them. The danger, of course, is to confuse my thinking of something and actually experiencing it through my sense memories. The only reason my sensory memories come to life so quickly is because I took the time to train them to always be there. There are a lucky few who seem to have been born with this ability. For most of us there is a need to train it to be in place.
Baseball lover that he was, Lee had a colorful way of describing this. He said, “you wouldn’t throw a ball to an unsuspecting child and tell them to ‘think fast’. It would be too dangerous and the child could get hurt. Instead, you gently roll the ball back and forth with a child countless numbers of times. Only then can you begin to gently toss the ball back and forth countless numbers of times. At some point you can begin to play ever more challenging games of catch countless numbers of times. And after a very long time, perhaps years, you might be able to toss a ball at the now grown child and say ,’think fast’. At that moment the child’s hand will go up and catch the ball without the conscious mind telling it what to do. So it is with sensory work. After countless repetitions and exercises we make the connection to our sense memories without our conscious mind guiding us every step of the way. But even professional baseball players occasionally fumble a ball”.
In that way, Arthur Penn was correct. We don’t do sense memory exercises during our scenes and performances. But I was right also. I can count on my work being there for me because I continuously practice it. That way I don’t exercise, but use my sensory skills within my acting. But what if I “fumble”? What if that fails me during a performance? What then? Wait for inspiration? Fake it? Give up until the next night’s performance or the next take? Absolutely not! That’s when I actually go to my sensory explorations right in front of the audience or camera until my imagination comes to life. That’s the missing link in Arthur Penn’s thinking. It’s understandable though. He was, after all, a wonderful director who was never trained as an actor.
Lee had a wonderful expression to cover this part of our process, too. He said, “I don’t take an aspirin if I don’t have a headache. But I keep them in the medicine cabinet just in case”.