“Just imagine it”, or “just imagine that circumstance”, or ” just imagine that you’re in love with that person”, or “just imagine it’s bitter cold outside, or that you’re the happiest person alive, or you’ve just gotten a dire diagnosis”.
Over and over again people who claim to teach, make demands such as these. In my classes actors very often start off by telling me similar things. Very often this advice from teachers, “to imagine it”, accompanies a comment about how unnecessary it is to go to the effort of using Lee Strasberg’s work, or how unnecessary it is to recreate an event out of one’s own past. (This last one is evidence that the teacher never bothered to study with Lee or anyone else who knows his work). “Why bother with a sense memory when you can just imagine it”, is a too often repeated statement. However, when asked, “how did you do that? How did you imagine that? What was your process of imagining”? the actors are stymied.
Perhaps due to the fact that Lee Strasberg’s training begins with Sense Memory exercises based on what each actor has already experienced in his/her own life, the ill-informed think that that is all there is. We have to begin with what we know, but we must never limit our characters to our own life experiences. We create and explore Overall Sensations that come from our own lives. (Things like being in the rain or snow, or having a flu, or being drunk or stoned). We create people and places from our own lives and pay attention to how we respond to them personally, behaviorally, and emotionally. We explore Personal Objects and discover their inner meanings and the moods that ensue. Certainly we use all of these in our acting, but we are in no way limited to them.
Once we become accomplished at creating these Sense Memories, we can begin to create character elements with which we have no experience. Certainly, we have no need to go out and have the life events of our characters in order to play them. I have already discussed how self destructive that can be. Instead, I can “imagine it” – but only if I couple the mental pictures with sensory detail.
How does this work? Easily. My home doesn’t have to burn down for me to imagine it if I bring the smell of fire, the sight of flames, or smoke, or smoldering ashes to my imaginary circumstance. I can blend the sensory elements of separate experiences in order to bring my imagination to life.
It is not necessary for an actor to have destructive experiences in order to “make them real in my acting”. No actor needs to go out and get drunk because s/he’s playing drunk in a scene. It is enough to have had a drink or two and to have felt those affects. The actor takes the same sensations and amplifies them (turns the volume up) to get the desired response. If an actor has no knowledge of alcohol at all, not even a single drink, then of course there’s no basis for creating this. But each of us has had parallel experiences that can be mistaken for the character’s circumstance. If we seem drunk to others when we are overtired, or ill, then that is what we use.
As for creating events from my past, sure I can do that, I’ve been trained to be able to do that, but that is not my first option. Very often the circumstances of the play take me where I need to go. I need to imagine them and support that imagination with the kernel of truth that is within my own world. I don’t want to relive my life onstage. I want to use what I know to bring my character’s life alive, and bring that on stage.
Thank you Lee Strasberg for always reminding us that, “If it’s literal, where is the art in acting”?