Playwright thinking about actors

Editor's Note: I thought I'd catch up on my published opinions this month. Consider this the second in a series on various topics. Part 2 of the essay on economics coming soon. For now, acting. I love actors so much that I write scripts for them. This is a confession: I don't write scripts for audiences. Audiences never read scripts. And I don't write them for directors either—who sometimes pride themselves on how much more creative they are than any stage directions I might write. I make scripts for actors so that they will appear to be incredibly talented, beautiful, attractive, and complicated when they speak the words I wrote. I try simply to put dialogue on paper that when coming out of an actor's mouth makes it relatively easy for them to appear exceptional in a role, in a plot, in the world of the play. I'm not saying my plays are easy to do necessarily, only that if done correctly, it should be easy for an actor to be incredible in them. I figure that if this happens, then the production that comes from that script will be worth an audiences' time. Most audiences, including critics, think that a playwright's job and actor's job are two separate but equal parts of a production. As you leave a theater, you might hear someone say, "I liked the actors but the script wasn't my kind of thing." Playwrights are given credit for crafting what a play is about: the war in Afghanistan, poverty, love, anger management—and ultimately judged on whether whatever the audience thinks the playwright was saying about the subject is a worthwhile thing to say. Actors are generally judged on whether the audience enjoyed watching them say and do stuff and generally believed that the people they portrayed would say and do that kind of stuff. As a playwright, this drives me up a wall. Though I have philosophical thoughts, I don't consider myself a philosopher. Though I have opinions about war, I think there are perfectly acceptable media where those opinions are more appropriate to share. My job is to craft an entire experience, including the characters, that is transporting, energizing, and open-ended. Directors help but actors are the essential ingredient—but not because they convince the audience that they're playing real people. If I have written the play correctly and an actor is reasonably competent the characters will be "believable" to the audience. If I'm reasonably competent, the story will be interesting, thought-provoking, clear, worthwhile, and engaging. The audience and I already have an unstated agreement that, given reasonable competence, these things are inherent in the play. It is what they want to see when they buy their ticket, and what I promised to give them in exchange. We meet each other halfway. At that halfway point—where a theater experience explodes into something more worthwhile than a political essay, philosophical treatise, or personification of the playwright, director, actor, or audience's ego—stands the actor.

What does an actor do

Did you know that smiles cannot be faked because half the muscles involved in a smile cannot be controlled by the conscious mind? You can move your face into a position that looks like a smile but everyone knows when you're faking it. And fake smiles, while clearly communicating some kind of attempt at pleasure, do not infect other people with delight the way real smiles do. Great live actors have to not only make fake smiles that are real but also align every other muscle in the body, from toes to the top of the head, to create an illusion of spontaneity where none exists. The actor's singular, impossible, paradoxical job—the thing that elevates theater from the merely acceptable to truly magical—is to make the rehearsed be spontaneous night after night.

How do they do this?

An actor once called me after an audition and asked what he could have done better. At first, I was shocked and scared. What could I say that wasn't cruel? Someone else was better than you. But then I remembered that I had really wanted to cast him—every actor you see at an audition, you hope for the best. What had held me back? "You didn't appear to trust yourself or the script," I said, "and I didn't think I had the time to convince you to trust those things during rehearsal." What can he do about that? he asked. "Figure out what assets are already in the environment and use them. Trust that you don't have to work at what comes naturally. What, for example, is conveyed in the dialogue of the script? What part of that do you personally convey naturally? If the script calls for you to be seductive, and you are a naturally sexy person, then don't play seductive. Just say the lines in a spontaneous way. If the script has a character saying that they're unhappy, don't play sad. It's already communicated. Just say the lines in a way that is a spontaneous reaction to the lines that come before. In fact, you don't want to play anything. You want to be the character. And you only do that if you believe that what you naturally have inside, in combination with the script, will be an appropriate vehicle for the character and serve the audience." Some talented actors I know work far too hard at the wrong things. They create characters on stage that are really impressive stretches, like they pieced a new person together in their body, inch by inch, physical tic by physical tic, until, like a Frankenstein monster, they have built something miraculously animate but unlike anything we recognize from nature. Then, in an effort to make sure their smiles are real (so to speak), they spend the rest of their energy attempting to genuinely feel what the characters should be feeling. Watching actors feel things on stage makes me sweat—which is generally how I know that something is wrong since this type of acting, being correct in all its particulars yet somehow off-putting, is very hard to criticize. In fact, because it requires visible effort and obvious choices, it is often praised for its clarity and emotional intensity—even if it throws off the effectiveness of the rest of the play. As far as the audience is concerned, the moment you present yourself on stage, you are the character. If the program gives you a specific name different than your own, if you speak the lines that are written, if the other characters treat you a certain way, then whatever you do—whether you invent a special character walk or wear glasses to show how smart your character is, whatever—the audience is inclined to believe that you are the character. They don't know you personally; they only know you as this person. If the play doesn't suck, if a character that is supposed to be smart and complex is written to say and do smart and complex things, and you simply trust in it, then you have just saved yourself an awful lot of time and energy that you can apply to making the rehearsed feel spontaneous.

Why is this so hard?

Young talented actors are identified early on by their ability to mimic how other people feel. In the abstract, this is a worthwhile skill for an actor since being one, an actor, seems to require so much mimicry. In reality, however, in the actual production of plays, the important emotions are not what the actor feels but what the audience feels. A local actor who I love told me this story: When he went to school for performance, his professors kept telling him to simplify, simplify, simplify. He knew he was a talented actor, they wouldn't have let him into the school if he wasn't, but every show he did all he ever heard from them was Stop doing all that stuff that you're doing! And he had no idea what they were talking about. As far as he was able, he was just trying to feel as though his performance on stage was truthful to the feelings of the character. Finally, during a production of Chekhov, he decided he just wasn't going to do anything. He'd show them how ridiculous their direction was. He was just going to walk onstage and deliver his lines and be boring. I forget which character he was playing but it was a comic role—and from the moment he started speaking, he said, the audience fell out of their seats with laughter. "You have to make your performance about the audience, not about yourself," he explained to me. "You have to give the audience the space to fill in their own experiences, emotions, ideas. You have to appear to put in less effort so that they want to lean toward you in their own ways." Though it should look easy, it isn't, he explained. You have to get used to a different kind of feeling inside yourself in order to know when you're good and when you're bad. It would be easier to judge your performance based simply on whether it felt "real" to you. You have to hold the line between playing to the audience (bad) and playing for the audience (good). You have to basically, he described, be centered in yourself first and pivot into the character from there, trusting your fellow artists more, and the story more, knowing what you don't have to do and always holding onto your own personal vulnerable sense of truth as a touchstone. You have to be more transparent. You have to be more available to a wider array of stimulus than simply what you artificially think a character might feel. You have to listen more and adjust more quickly and keep yourself open to the audience and your fellow actors as a conduit for the story rather than as a mimic. And you have to always be vulnerable enough to let us see through all the way to your own true heart in the midst of a story and plot that is full of contrived problems and drama.

Actors are like writers

As he spoke, I realized that great actors are very much like writers. Though characters and stories that come from a writer's imagination need to appear different from the writer in order to be relevant to others, they are all elements that come from inside a writer's heart. Every character, no matter who, has an element of the writer in them. Every subject comes from the writer's own obsessions and passions. I don't mean that actors should be like writers and actually rewrite a play as it suits their mood in the moment. The best actors I know memorize their lines perfectly as early in the rehearsal process as possible. I mean that the best actors I know, like the best writers, open themselves up to the audience in service. Hence, the actor becomes an extension of the writer, and vice versa. They both need to reveal themselves to the audience in an insane and beautiful attempt to communicate with the audience and make the rehearsed spontaneous, make fiction into truth—without ever making it about themselves. I write plays for actors because the ones who are willing to partner with me and trust what I have written for them are the ones most deserving of that trust in return—and, in turn, they are the most effective in the way they present our inextricably intertwined effort to an audience.