I ♥ difficult actors

"There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." —Leonard Cohen

The skipped line. The misplaced prop. The broken door. Why are these mishaps so often the only life in live theater? Because they cut through our pretense of control, remind us of our fallibility, and (amid the contrivance) touch something real. Perfection onstage is not just impossible but inhuman. Our evolution as a species is a conspiracy of accidents; its survival driven by randomness and mutation. Why then do we often attempt in rehearsal to iron out the possibility of surprise, the inherent variability that makes theater more than just a beautifully ossified museum exhibit? As a director, I always try to allow space in both the rehearsal hall and performance for life to sneak in. A play’s performance should be more than just the realization of my clear vision; it should be a living organism that evolves when I’m gone. In this paradoxical struggle for planned spontaneity, our secret weapon—the mutant gene that catapults our organism beyond mundane repetition toward the mysterious potential of its better self—is the Difficult Actor.

When I hear someone labeled a “Difficult Actor,” my ears perk up with interest. Dustin Hoffman, Marlon Brando, and Orson Welles after all are the Difficult Actor Patron Saints. But no matter how much trouble they caused, I can’t see myself throwing any of them out of a show. There is, of course, a fine line between Difficult and Diva, a line these men crossed with abandon, and daily. During the run of one show, for example, Welles was so intent on gaining higher onstage status than a fellow actor that, after running out of ever larger set pieces on which to stand, they competed nightly to find the tallest shoes. Yet even preserved on film, well past their primes, and on their most self-indulgent days, these actors still vibrate with the kind of unpredictability and vitality that infect those around them, spreading into the audience on a molecular, viral level: mutation, adaptation, evolution, life.

The very act of theater—convincing a roomful of people to suspend their rational faculties and share an invented, present-tense reality they know to be false, for the first time, nightly—should be impossible. Without Difficult Actors, it would be; the best allies in an impossible battle are impossible people, and they provide the creative tension of struggle, the sparks that flare when strong visions collide. In The Director Prepares, Anne Bogart describes every theatrical choice as an act of murder, the survival of the fittest, most compelling moment among the discarded corpses. Without this necessary violence, we would be stuck with an onstage collection of weak moments left unchosen, unfit, unwrestled by collaborative selection. Fortunately, the Difficult Actor loves to wrestle.

Unfortunately, many directors don’t—falling instead, at their worst, into two opposite but equally harmful types: The Creationist, whom we’ll call Adolf Gepetto, and his opposite, The Chaos Theorist, Sprolly N. Abler. Adolf insists on godlike predetermination of every moment and sees a Difficult Actor’s questions—or worse, ideas—only as challenges to his authority. Preferring “his” actors to be empty vessels into which brilliance can pour unimpeded, Adolf spoon-feeds them every intention, movement, and gesture until they become so afraid of their own impulses—or too Minnesotan to argue—that they stand like marionettes, waiting for their strings to be pulled. Meanwhile, Sprolly N. Abler passively sits back, vainly hoping a full-grown show will sprout organically around him, completely without his guidance. But, like nature, if left untended, creative impulses can sprawl and deform, mashing together a sleekly beautiful seal and a perfectly good duck into a platypus. By accepting all, he creates nothing. Sloppiness is his aesthetic, and the Difficult Actor his excuse. Though Fascism is more efficient than Democracy and Anarchy is more fun, these directorial extremes—while they may feel safer than true collaboration—are both likely to kill any potential life that stumbles into their primordial tide pool before it has a chance to grow.

Ironically, both Adolf and Sprolly, who fear “difficult” behavior equally but for opposite reasons, have created rehearsal ecosystems that actually cause Difficult Actors to devolve into “Bad” ones, or even worse, to multiply, and no sane director wants a cast full of them. In these toxic environments, once-manageable—even useful—mutations strengthen, out of simple self defense, into their own infectious personalities:

Cool Hand McMurphy has all the best ideas from the worst possible view. Gives notes to fellow actors, is easily bored with repetition, and generally challenges or undercuts authority whenever possible.

Mustansa Hollaback defensively responds to every note: “Really? Okay, I’ll TRY it, if you’re SURE that’s what you want.” Or, “But that’s what I was DOING.” Or, “You may not have seen it, but I FELT it.”

Anita Coddle: “Was that okay, that thing I just did with my finger? Should I take two steps or three here? How can I sit down; the chair is facing the wrong way?” Shares a close, near incestuous relationship with Flagellatia Spankme—“I’m sorry, I suck, I’m sorry, god you must hate me, are you sure you don’t want to hire someone else…?”

Method Man plays the back story instead of the front one. Probably in a tempestuous relationship with his flamboyant girlfriend from London or Chicago, Roe Coco—who plays the spirit animal, the nervous tic, the ornate prop-work, everything except the moment as written in the script.

Otto Pilott is generally considered the safest and most reliable, for better or worse. Finds a pattern and sticks with it, no matter what. (Me: “Remember when we talked about that moment, and I suggested six or seven times that you sit down at a different point, and we tried it once, and it worked? Let’s maybe try to remember that and do it.”)

And perhaps the trickiest Difficult Actor, because both her weakness and potential strength are the same, Ivanna Feelit, whose character “would never do that.” At some point in rehearsal, from a vantage point deep inside the character, the actor will know the person she plays better than I do, and I encourage strong advocacy on her behalf. But this does not mean the actor should be allowed to confuse what she wouldn’t do with what the character wouldn’t. Loving the character doesn’t mean she has to like her, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the audience should. Softening strong choices out of a fear of looking silly or wrong flattens recognizable human contradiction, shrinking the role to the actor's comfort zone. Similarly, if she views the larger story from too deeply inside her preconceived so-called "character arc," Ivanna replaces empathy with literary theory and cookie-cutter-pop-psychology. In either case, she separates herself and the audience from the potential life of the play.

While every actor will exhibit flashes of these potentially Difficult behaviors over the course of a rehearsal process, most will do so unintentionally. (Actors who consciously steal focus or trip up their scene partners aren’t Difficult; they’re just jerks.) For the simple reason that an actor can never see himself onstage, he must, in an incredible act of trust, place his performance, even his sense of self, in a director’s hands. Because this trust is so often betrayed, many Difficult Actors have been trained to execute a compelling, thoughtful performance no matter what impediment is thrown their way. Though useful, this “director-proofing” can set up an adversarial tone, a sometimes thorny protective wall that can be intimidating to the insecure. If, however, the director keeps in mind that the vast majority long to join a healthy larger organism and crave intelligent feedback, then this wall is easily breached. Behind it, no matter how tall and imposing, lies not only a treasure trove of imaginative ideas and restless energy waiting to be channeled, but also the strongest and fiercest kind of respect: not simply surrendered, but battle-forged and won.

The best directors, then, must combine the Creationist’s clarity and strength with the flexibility of the Chaos Theorist. They recognize that the act of creating life onstage is a borderline-impossible, crazy-making battle for which everyone, themselves included, must suit up in their strongest armor. They learn that, when they adapt their own approach to the individual, rather than expecting the reverse, the Difficult Actor becomes a uniquely necessary part of the creative ecosystem, rather than a sickness from which to protect it.

After all, Thespis, the first actor, wasn’t the one who silently obeyed orders or blended in; he stepped forward out of the Chorus as a character, an individual voice with something new to say. So it was a Difficult Actor, from the very beginning, who lifted us highest, creating our best chance, through shared imperfection, to touch the light. ❦