“Am I going to have to relive and re-experience the horrors of my past in order to learn this work”? This common question started off the new academic year of 2015-2016 for my college sophomores. It was met by stares and groans of affirmation and concern from a large part of the rest of the class.
A good friend and colleague referred a student to me who was looking for quality acting classes. She was reluctant to get in touch with me because she didn’t want to have to go through the turmoil of psychological and emotional exploration that she had heard was part of Method Acting training.
“I have spent a great deal of time and effort getting over and away from the difficult moments of my past to want to re-activate them again”. Or, “Oh good! I can get to relive that dreadful experience and resolve it and get over it once and for all.” These last two comments are also ones that I hear repeated almost every time the conversation goes to the demands of Lee Strasberg’s work.
A few years ago, as I was walking out of a theatre after having seen a show, I introduced myself to a recognizable director who had also been in the audience that night. He was kind enough to recognize my name, but very quickly said that he thought that Lee Strasberg’s work was dangerous and that he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to put themselves through that. When I asked him if he had studied with Lee or had first hand knowledge of Lee’s work he said, “No, and I wouldn’t want to. It’s wrapped up in too much emotion”.
All these concerns about emotion, emotional work, and emotional trauma in training the actor, from people who had not yet experienced or been exposed to Lee’s work from a person properly trained to teach it. And yet, every time an actor in class or at The Studio became emotional and focused on it, I heard Lee repeat, “It’s not about the emotion! It’s about everything that surrounds the emotion!”
If it’s not about the emotion, but we actors are required to express our characters’ emotions and experiences, what are we supposed to do? A fair amount of time is spent describing the differences between “external” and “organic, internal” acting. One of the main points is that external actors represent the character’s emotions, while Method Actors actually experience them. Again, there seems to be a conflict in the rhetoric. Let me assure you that there is no contradiction. Let me explain.
When any of us walk outside and are confronted by the day’s weather, we have a reaction to it. The beautiful day, with fresh air and breeze; with clear skies and abundant sunshine, can put us into a good mood. However, if we aren’t feeling well; if we are suffering from a head cold and headache, the bright day and refreshing breeze could just as easily aggravate our symptoms and put us into a cranky mood. When I walk downstairs in the morning and greet my wife and children and pets it puts me in a wonderful mood. Unless one of them is ill or worried, or if the pets have destroyed something or “messed up” during the night. Then my mood quickly changes from “good” to “concern” or even something stronger. In all of these circumstances it is not about how I am feeling, it is about the event. This array of emotional responses comes from whatever I’m experiencing without me ever having to concern myself as to how I am supposed to feel. It’s not about the emotion, but the emotion certainly exists.
It’s always fun to explain to people that when I see them walking toward me in an unexpected location, I don’t have to figure out how to respond. The very sight of them will bring a smile (or something else) to my face. I don’t have to decide to shout out a happy “hello”. That will come automatically. It’s not about the emotion. It’s about what causes it. The difficulty in training comes from learning to differentiate between conditioned response and true response. We are supposed to like a friend even if s/he continually gets under our skin. For some actors shedding the conditioned response can be uncomfortable, and can lead to avoidance.
Of course, as we train in the different types of Method exercises: pains, strong tastes, strong smells, overall sensations, personal objects, people, places, music, etc., we monitor their affects on us. We constantly ask ourselves how we are “feeling” so that when that mood or emotion is needed for a scene, we know how to achieve it. But there’s that apparent contradiction again. If it truly is not about the emotion but I am choosing to work on something for a particular emotional response, how do I reconcile that?
For the answer, I have to go beyond what I am creating for a scene and allow the circumstances of the scene to affect me. I have to go beyond conventional thinking of acting and embrace Method Acting’s more “dangerous” demand: I have to be willing to go where the scene takes me rather than where I take the scene. This was wonderfully illustrated this past week in my college classes. In one scene, from August Wilson’s “Fences”, the actress used a personal object to get the hurt/angry response she wanted when she was told about her husband’s infidelity. It gave her the emotion she wanted and she didn’t have to “act” hurt/angry. She certainly could do this if working for a director who demanded that. But Lee Strasberg had another idea. He said, “why predetermine how you are going to respond? Why not create someone you love for your husband, listen to them tell you about their cheating, and let yourself respond however you wind up responding ‘in the moment'”.
The lesson must have taken hold. A few days later, two actors brought in a scene from Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel”. This time, one of the actresses created a person to help herself believe in the romantic (or at least sexual) attraction to the other actress. When her advances were rejected her responses were to the rejection and not to a preset creation that would give her the desired emotion. That part of the scene was totally believable. Brava!
Finally, I was present when an actor asked Lee, “What do you have to do when you have to cry on cue?” Lee responded, “Why would you have to do that? Firstly, trust that your imagination and belief are engaged and allow yourself to respond. Only if that fails you, resort to something that will make you cry if your director is demanding that. If that fails you, find something else that brings tears to your eyes. I pull a hair from my nose. And if that fails you, fake it. There’s an audience out there watching!”