“As actors, we spend most of our time nauseated, confused, guilty. We are lost and ashamed of it; confused because we don’t know what to do and we have too much information, none of which can be acted upon; and guilty because we feel we are not doing our job. We feel we have not learned our job well enough; we feel others know their job but we have failed. The good we do seems to be through chance: if only that agent would notice me; if only that producer had come on Tuesday night when I was good rather than on Wednesday night when I was off; if only the script allowed me to do more this and less that; if only the audience had been better; if only we had not gone up five minutes late-as a consequence of which I lost me concentration. So we become envious of those who have “luck,” of those who, seemingly, have “technique,” as, having no technique ourselves, we think that their accomplishments must be based on “luck.” So we invest more heavily in a “technique based on luck,” and it becomes, in effect, a superstition, an investment in self-conciousness, in introversion. We turn our attention inward because introversion spares us from the horrible necessity of living in a theatre world for which we are totally unprepared. So our “technique” becomes more and more devoted to the development of a kind of catatonia: Sense memory. Substitution. Emotional memory. The “Fourth Wall.” The creation of auxilliary “stories” which are just as difficult to “perform” as the script but lack the merit of being about anything other than ourselves. ...Acting is not a genteel profession. Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people’s performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. An awesome compliment. Those players moved the audience not such that they were admitted to a graduate school, or recieved a complementary review, but such that the audience feared for their soul. Now that seems to me something to aim for.” -David Mamet
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:49:36 +0000
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