There are so many examples in literature of the long suffering artist that many forms of creative disfunction have become romanticized. We read of forever drunken writers, coked up dancers (after all dancers have to keep the weight off), stoned actors, painters, and sculptors. And if we believe both literature and the popular press, musicians do it all. Indeed, it is easy to see why so many people believe that to be successfully creative is to function through a haze that would ordinarily stop creativity in its tracks. We are led to believe that this is necessary in order to dull the pain in our souls from which our art flows. Sure, there are those that say that the creative spark is released through these chemicals (more on that in a later blog), but for the most part it is relief from the “pain within” that this is meant to address.
Within a small part of the acting community there is even a strong desire to have the world believe that we need to be in endless pain in order to give a good performance. Or at least we have to go to our pain while training. Look no further than the yellow press’ reporting about Heath Ledger playing the Joker in Batman. According to the articles, he had to go so deep, to the dark bottom of his soul, that there was no coming back. It was even reported that Jack Nicholson warned him about the potential for this happening. Philip Seymour Hoffman was reported to be in so much distress generated by his profound work that it led to his drug abuse, eventual drug overdose, and death. Mixed in with our sadness about these reports is a curious attraction to the romantic image of driven artists. Young people just starting out on their journeys toward creative fulfillment are led to believe that they need to explore feelings, behaviors, and emotions that they are unprepared to look at. To people who perpetuate this kind of thinking, acting is all about themselves and their emotional lives rather than their characters and the insights that the playwright reveals. Unfortunately, some of the ill-informed attribute this to Lee Strasberg’s teaching.
People also believe that Lee’s teaching was all about emotions and how to achieve them.
As with all of us, Lee recognized the need to hit certain emotional marks from time to time. His work with Affective Memory leading to emotional recall addresses this, but is actually the smallest part of his teaching and training. Once, when asked, “how do you cry on cue”?, Lee responded, “why would you have to do that? But if you do, first do nothing at all because your imagination might actually take you there without any technical devices”. He also emphasized, again and again, that his work was not about emotions. He would teach us that “we can’t create emotions; only the things that stimulate emotions”. Even then, most of Lee’s teaching involved creating our character’s given circumstances and affecting ourselves to be and react more as our characters might.
Yet the myth of the ever suffering actor continues. Not long ago I read how actors “tear the bandaids off our soul (sic) and then walk the streets exposed, almost naked”. This came from a person who claims to have studied with Lee, but only adds to the distorted perceptions about The Method. Lee never allowed or encouraged anyone to work on anything emotional that remained unhealed and unresolved. What he actually said was, “if you work on something before you are ready to, it is like pulling a bandaid off a healing wound. It needs time to heal before you uncover it”. When we did train that part of our technique we applied “the rule of seven years” to it. I will explain this in greater detail in a later blog, but for now let it suffice to recognize that seven years gives us plenty of time to get over and heal from our feelings. Even then, it was absolutely the last element of acting that Lee wanted anyone to explore. Let me repeat and be absolutely clear about this. 1. the Method is not about emotions. 2. Lee Strasberg never encouraged anyone to be emotional. 3. When actors became emotional in class exercises or scenes, Lee would emphasize that “it is not about the emotion” and ask us to focus on something else. 4. He coached his teachers to guide students away from using his training and work as a substitute for therapy.
Rather than walking around like a raw nerve after a performance that was highly charged, and feeling the need to turn to drugs or alcohol or other destructive behavior to dull the pain of the experience, most well trained and healthy actors feel a sense of accomplishment and joy for having used themselves personally and fully in telling the writer’s story.
Why, then, this preoccupation with emotions and the myth of dredging the depths of our very being in order to be fully creative? We might as well ask why there is evil as well as good in the world. However, in his tutoring of me as a teacher, Lee revealed his observations about this. He felt that we live in an age that discourages expressing our feelings and emotions. As a result, many people bury and hold on to their responses and never give themselves the chance to reconcile with them. When given permission in acting classes, these same people indulge themselves and wrap themselves in overly emphasized expression. He also felt that for some people who didn’t achieve a level of success with their work, there was a need to make it sound more dramatic in the telling of it. We have all met actors who had a greater sense of drama in the dressing room than on the stage.
Finally, one of my favorite quotes from Lee about the place of emotion in acting comes from when he told us, “if you are an actor who can always get the emotion but never the simple reality of a scene, you won’t find work. If you are an actor who can always get the simple reality but never the emotions, you will always work. And if you are an actor who can get both, you might even work significantly”.