It is not unusual for actors to try to create the physical, sensory experience of a situation’s response. This is as true for well-trained and experienced actors as it is for neophytes to The Method. Just last week one of my students told me that he was trying to create the feelings of renewed hope and accomplishment by sensorially exploring how he felt physically when this has happened to him. By the way, this actor is talented, imaginative, trained, and joyful in his work. He trained with me many years ago and is back in class now. He also trained with Lee Strasberg himself, and although Lee was long gone, he actually taught at The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in Los Angeles. So you see, the trap of trying to “create a result” befalls even the best and most sincere of actors.

In a recent class, one of my students responded to the question, “what do you want to tell me?” with “I created an event in order to bring the scene to life”. She went on to tell me that she knew how her character felt in the scene because she had gone through something similar in her own life and wanted to bring that to her work. Of course, when I asked her how she had accomplished that, she was stuck for an answer. Hoping that she related her effort to what she had been practicing in the training part of the class, I asked her leading questions about the sensory life of the event to which she referred. Questions such as, “what were you wearing, were you indoors or out, was it day or night, etc.?” She had not given these types of questions any thought until I asked them, and even then she was hard pressed to remember. Not that it truly mattered. She is not sufficiently advanced in her training to be able to sustain so many sensory elements simultaneously in order to bring the event to life. What she had done, like so many others was to concentrate on remembering the event rather than re-experiencing it.

For as long as I can recall, actors have been praised for being “natural”. Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that this comes from critics who are writing for a general audience more than for actors and theatre professionals. Even among many friends, mine and probably yours, this label of “natural” is seen as an accolade and something to strive to achieve.

It’s okay to think anything at all, it’s just not okay to say it. That’s a pretty good rule to live by if you want your phone to keep ringing. It’s an old cliché, but if you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything. Then we run into both Method Acting and the training of Method Actors. In both circumstances, being courteous and polite is restrictive and leads to a closed actor’s instrument. It’s not that we are asking ourselves to be purposefully rude, but we are asking ourselves to be completely open and honest, even if we limit this to our “spoken out” subtext.

A new film is being promoted. In the advance publicity there is much talk about how committed one of the lead actors is in creating his/her role. This actor already has a proven performance history (and 1 Academy Award), and I have liked much of his/her work. But now the publicity is how s/he has taken “Method Acting to a whole new level”. S/he is playing an evil person; a true “bad guy”, and has been terrorizing the rest of the cast by staying in character even when not filming or even being on the set.

In the eleven years that I spent studying, working for and with, and socializing with Lee Strasberg (and his family), I never heard him say anything disparaging or in any way denigrating about another actor, director, or teacher. He would sometimes recognize and discuss the ways that he thought acting and directing might be improved in a particular project, but he always left teachers out of his comments. I once heard him ask a student where he had studied previously. When the student answered, “with Sandy Meisner”, Lee said, “Good. That’s a strong foundation for us to continue our work”.

There is a misconception that doesn’t want to go away. I’ve touched on this subject a couple of times before in this blog, but now is a good time to address it head on. All of our work lives in the here and now, not in the there and then. Yet many actors think in the past in order to get in touch with something necessary for a scene.

This is all about process – and semantics. It is not about application. That topic is for another day.

There are two labels that many (perhaps most) actors use interchangeably: “Affective Memory” and “Emotional Memory”. In both Lee Strasberg’s classes and at The Actors Studio it was common to hear actors say about their work, “I was working on an Affective Memory”, or “I was working on an Emotional Memory”, with equal frequency. Of course, if “Affective Memory” was the term used, everything proceeded in a normal fashion as Lee addressed how successful and appropriate the effort was. If the actor said, “I was working on an Emotional Memory” everything would come to a temporary stop as Lee would address the fact that “you can’t work on an emotion. You can’t work on an emotional memory”. Often this would be accompanied by the legendary clicking sound as he spoke that signaled his displeasure or downright anger.