Suppose you are portraying a character that has a lot of self-doubt. Like, for instance, Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” or Martin in Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love”. You know from your study of psychology that anxiety presents itself as a high and heady power center. Blanche is already on the verge of a nervous breakdown when she makes her entrance in the first act. Anxiety expresses itself as tension, and tension makes you feel light, not heavy. Confidence, by contrast, manifests itself as a feeling of relaxation, which you experience as weight. Stanley is confident and therefore has a lot of weight. Blanche is bird-like.
The question one of my students put to me recently is how it is possible to play – with confidence and weight – a character that is inherently anxious, tense and light. “Isn’t that,” the actor wanted to know, “a contradiction?” “How can you be light as the character while feeling the weight of confidence as an actor at the same time?”
This is actually a very good question that must be answered in two parts. Part One has to do with an actor’s role vis-à-vis the audience; Part Two has to do with characterization.
If I asked you to walk across the stage like a regular person, someone like your own self in real life, could you do it? Good. Now, suppose I ask you to walk across the stage like a professional actor. Would there be a discernable difference? Probably not. Now suppose I ask you to walk across the stage like Blanche Dubois. Blanche is not comfortable in her skin, but you the actor are. In other words, you have weight, but the character you are playing does not. Indeed, Blanche seems frequently on the verge of taking flight. But here is the key: It takes the confidence (weight) of a good actor in order to portray this characteristic of Blanche’s personality. If you are yourself unsure of your footing on stage, your interpretation of Blanche will make the audience nervous. It will make it more difficult for them to willingly suspend their disbelief (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817).
Regardless of the role you are playing, you are first and foremost an actor. The audience expects you to lead them. They did their part by showing up tonight. If you are not confident in your ability to lead, the audience will feel cheated, uneasy, worried for you as a person. They will not be able to get past you and into Blanche. Have you ever seen a nervous actor on stage with a teacup and saucer, with her hands trembling so that the liquid almost spills out?
The actor who asked me the question in the first place is relatively new to her craft. And she is worried a lot about being truthful and honest. Blanche is a nervous wreck and so, for this actor, the correct portrayal was to be a nervous wreck. The problem, of course, was that she appeared to have no weight – i.e. no confidence – on stage as an actress when all we saw was Blanche’s tension. All that honesty and truthfulness, although appropriate for Blanche, was only succeeding in making me nervous for her as an actress as I watched. Before anything, it is the actor’s job to let the audience know it is in good and confident hands, that the actor knows his job. Recently, I read a review of the all-black “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, now playing on Broadway. Anika Noni Rose is playing Maggie “the Cat”. I imagine she is quite good, but all the reviewer had to say was that she was “pushing too hard” at the role. In other words, the actress herself was coming off as lightweight, while playing a character that oozes sexual confidence.
There is a wonderful book by British writer/director Patrick Tucker, Secrets of Screen Acting, in which he speculates why it is that such a large number of Best Actor and Best Actress Academy Awards are won by British actors. This very year, for example, Daniel Day Lewis won Best Actor and Marion Cotillard won Best Actress. Both are British. Tucker muses about the difference in training between British actors and Americans and, somewhat with tongue somewhat in cheek, he observes that American actors are really too obsessed with being honest in their acting. He pointed out that British actors don’t worry about that; they only want to APPEAR that they are being honest. In other words, the British may be more aware of what the camera (i.e. the audience) is seeing. Acting is, after all, pretending. The British-trained actor perhaps – according to Mister Tucker – has a somewhat stronger grasp of that distinction than American actors with all of their Strasberg Method and Meisner Technique. Whether he is correct or not is almost beside the point. It is necessary for an actor to know he is acting. Theatrical reality is not the same thing as regular reality. I have myself sat in classes and heard reputable acting teachers advise that, when acting is “right”, the actor becomes unaware of the audience. That, forgive my French, is hooey. An actor never is unaware of the audience. Stanislavsky never advocated oblivion! The audience is the reason the actor showed up at the theatre in the first place!
“If I am totally in the moment”, goes the argument, “I will not be aware of the audience.” That’s fine except that being totally “in the moment” is an ideal that is not achievable. If you were actually to get “in the moment”, you might just wander off stage. Acting is a discipline, and the actor is in control. The audience does not show up to see you be “in the moment.” They care about the story and the characters, not “the moment.”
Put in a more practical way, I often advise new actors to avoid physically leaning forward from the waist in order to emphasize their lines. If you go to any high school production, you’ll see the actors on stage bending from the waist all night. If you go to a Broadway show, you will rarely see it. Professional actors learn the power of weight; they learn not to chase the audience, but to bring the audience to them.
Regardless of the kind of character you are playing, the audience expects you to be confident of yourself as a leader. Actors are shamans. Truthfulness is nice, but it is only part of the successful theatrical transaction.