The actors art and craft

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"Utterly inspirational. . . . The best book on the craft of acting that I have ever read —Mary Steenburgen

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William Esper teaches

THE MEISNER TECHNIQUE \ vi

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11

WILLIAM ESPER DAMON DiMARCO FOREWORD BY DAVID MAMET

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THE ACTOR'S ART AND CRAFT

DAMON DIM A ICO

William Esper is a graduate of Western Reserve University

and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York City. At the Playhouse, Bill trained as both actor and teacher under the tutelage of Sanford Meisner, originator of the Meisner Technique. Thereafter, Bill worked closely with Sandy as a teacher and director for an additional fifteen years, and served as associate director of the Playhouse s Acting Department from 1973 to 1976. In 1965, he founded the William Esper Studio, where he contin¬ ues to teach, and in 1977 he founded the Professional Actor Train¬ ing Program at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, which he chaired for twenty-eight years. These two schools are renowned for routinely contributing actors of the highest qual¬ ity to the international stage and screen. Bill was voted Best Acting Teacher in New York City by Backstage magazine’s readership poll in 2006 and 2007. The long list of actors with whom Bill has worked includes (among many, many others): Kim Basinger, Kathy Bates, Jennifer Beals, Larry David, Kristin Davis, Kim Delaney, Aaron Eckhart, Calista Flockhart, Peter Gallagher, Jeff Goldblum, Glenne Headley, Patricia Heaton, Dule Hill, William Hurt, Chris¬ tine Lahti, Wendie Malick, John Malkovich, Gretchen Mol, David Morse, Timothy Olyphant, Tonya Pinkins, Molly Price, Sam Rockwell, Tracee Ellis Ross, Michele Shay, Richard Schiff, Paul Sorvino, Mary Steenburgen, Patricia Wettig, and Dean Winters. Damon DiMarco earned his MFA from the Rutgers Univer¬

sity Mason Gross School of the Arts under Bill Esper’s tutelage.

He has acted professionally on stage, screen, and television, and currently teaches acting and directing on the faculty of Drew University. Damons other books include Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/1 1, Out of Bounds, with Roy Simmons; and Heart of War: Soldiers ’ Voices from the Front Lines of Iraq, an oral history of U.S. veterans of the war in Iraq. He also writes for the stage and screen.

THE

ACTOR’S ART and CRAFT

THE

ACTOR'S ART

AND

CRAFT

WILLIAM ESPER TEACHES THE MEISNER TECHNIQUE

WILLIAM ESPER DAMON DiMARCO

© ANCHOR BOOKS A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC. NEW YORK

AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, APRIL 2008 Copyright © 2008 by William Esper and Damon DiMarco All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. for permission to reprint lyrics from "Summer Wind” by Johnny Mercer (original German lyrics by Hans Bradtke and music by Henry Mayer), copyright © 1965 (renewed) by The Johnny Mercer Foundation and Edition Primus Rolf Budde KG. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Esper, William. The actor’s art & craft: William Esper teaches the Meisner technique / by William Esper and Damon DiMarco.—1st Anchor Books ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-307-27926-2 (alk. paper) 1. Acting. 2. Meisner, Sanford. I. DiMarco, Damon. II. Title. III. Title: Actor’s art and craft. PN2061.E87 2007 792.02'8—dc22 2007029149 Book design by Jo Anne Metsch www.anchorbooks.com Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321

For Suzanne, Michael, and Shannon

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/actorsartcraftwiOOespe

CONTENTS

Foreword by David Mamet Prologue

xiii 3

Bill’s Class

13

one—Begin Again—Empty Your Cup

15

two—The First Exercise—Did You Hear What He Said?

33

three—Repetition Continues—Did You Really Hear What He Really Said?

49

four—Developing Concentration

64

five—How to Justify Absolutely Anything

83

six—Don’t Gird Yourself to Act; Open Yourself to Receive

107

seven—Objectives and Expectations: Be Careful What You Want eight—Action Problems: Awaken Your Inner Criminal

127 142

Contents

XU

nine—Scene

Work: Private Conversations—Approach

the Text and Pick Up Your Impulses ten—Farewell

159

to Repetition: Don’t Do Anything Unless

Something Happens to Make You Do It eleven—Daydreams,

Fantasies, and Your Inner Life:

Emotional Preparation twelve—Relationships:

197 I Know He’s Your Brother,

but Who Is He Really'? thirteen—The

219

Domestic Exercise: How Are Things

at Home?

234

fourteen—The

Second Round of Scene Work:

Go Deeper into the Text fifteen—Final

181

252

Questions: It’s a Wrap. Now Where

Do We Go from Here?

Ac knowledgments

274

285

FOREWORD

DAVID

MAMET

Forty years ago I got a lucky break. I got to study at the Neighbor¬ hood Playhouse, and I met a great teacher. Sanford Meisner was the head of the school, and we all took classes with him; but the great teacher was Bill Esper. Say his name to the decades of his students and their eyes smile. I read his wonderful book, and I am taken back to my student days—the same words, the same Socratic questions, gentle and light, inviting the student toward a deeper understanding. I’ve spent my life working with actors. To do so, one needs but a few essential tools, the mastery of which is the challeng¬ ing work of a lifetime: be patient, be precise, be terse, encourage, suggest, praise, listen. I was first exposed to these tools through the example of Bill Esper, and I am very grateful.

THE

ACTOR’S ART

and

CRAFT

PROLOGUE

“If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowl¬ edge of it is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an ‘artless art’ growing out of the Unconscious/’ —Zen master D. T. Suzuki

In my senior year of college a theater professor took me aside and said, “I know you want to become an actor, and you have a lot of talent. But talent is like water. Without a vessel to contain it, its useless/' “What is the vessel for talent?” I asked. My professor answered, “Technique.” “Fine,” I said. “Then I’ll learn technique. Where do I go to do that?” “If you’re going to bother at all, you’d better learn from the best and study with a Master Teacher.” “Show me where the Master Teachers are and I’ll study with them,” I said. And so it was that, days later, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove to Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jer¬ sey, home of the Mason Gross School of the Arts. I was going to meet Bill Esper. He wasn’t what I’d imagined. I suppose I had this vision that a Master Teacher of acting would be a rakish man in a beret with a

Prologue

4

Mephistophelian mustache. Imagine how surprised I was to meet a kindly, quiet man with salt-and-pepper hair who waved me into his cramped office at Mason Gross’s Levin Theater. This was the famous Bill Esper? Impossible. This man was a regular guy with a well-trimmed goatee and piercing eyes behind spectacles. We talked for about forty-five minutes, and I’m sure I was try¬ ing too hard to make a good impression, because I honestly can’t recall a single word that Bill said. Except this one part: Toward the end of our talk, Bill asked me, “Why are you interested in coming here? What interests you about studying with me?” I said, “I studied the Meisner Technique a little in college and I got a lot out of it. Now I want to learn it top to bottom.” Bill didn’t respond. He just sat there looking at me. Finally, very quietly, he said, “If you come here, you won’t be learning Meisner Technique. You’ll learn my technique, the Bill Esper technique. And—God willing—if you leave here, you’ll leave with your own technique. Do you understand this?” I didn’t. Not really. But I was young. I lied. I nodded my head and said, “Yes.”

I 1 11 Now, more than ten years later, Bill has asked me to visit him. The door to his studio swings open, and I walk through a short vestibule with red-painted walls, heading straight toward his office. It’s a cramped, busy little room, and the first thing I notice is the metal umbrella stand just inside the door. It holds three umbrellas, a battered vaudeville cane, a Louisville Slugger, and a fencing foil. Surely this is an actor’s office. I glance up. Bookshelves cover the wall behind Bill’s desk from floor to ceiling, the wooden slats bowed under the weight of his library. Spiral-bound notebooks are crammed onto the shelves

Prologue

5

at impossible angles. Manila files jut forward like stuck-out tongues, each bursting with what appears to be a lifetime s worth of scribbled musings. Tchotchkes from around the world sit on the shelves, too. Some of the items must have once served as props in a play: a leather armband beset with glass jewels, a feathered headdress, a white fluted vase with a single silk rose erupting from it in a brilliant red comet. A tiny metal box stands next to a bat¬ tered, blue-bound copy of Webster’s Unabridged English Dictio¬ nary. Carved wooden horses stand here and there—they appear to serve as tiny guardians for this eclectic library. My teacher sits behind his cluttered desk, reading the morning paper. He glances up. “I hope this is a good place for us to work,” he says. No other introduction, though we haven’t seen each other in years. “It works for me,” I say. This office is obviously a sanctuary for the imagination, and therefore a fitting place to begin the task at hand. "Will it work for you?” Bill grins. Tm not sure. IVe never written a book before.” “It’s easy,” I say, “if you know where you want to begin. Lets take a moment to introduce you/’ I reach into my bag for a micro¬ cassette recorder, which I click on and place on Bill’s desk. “First of all, why do you want to write this book? What do you want to say?v> Bill thinks for a long moment. Then he says, “I’ve been very for¬ tunate to devote the past forty years of my life to continuing Sandy Meisner’s legacy. In that time it’s been my great pleasure— and fascination—to refine his technique and, in some cases, to extend it. I apprenticed myself to Sandy for seventeen years when he was at the peak of his career. Then I worked nearly thirty years more to experiment with the technique, distill it, and apply it to areas Sandy wasn’t able to, like the classics, for instance. Plays with heightened language. Sandy loved style and theatricality, but

6

Prologue

he never had the time to work in these areas in any extensive way as a teacher.” “For a moment,” I say “let me play devil’s advocate. There are lots of acting teachers out there. What have you got to say that’s so special?” Bill nods. “These days most people who call themselves acting teachers do so because they offer helpful hints and anecdotes to performers who are desperate for real instruction. I don’t consider that teaching. The way I see it, vejy few teachers have done what Lee Strasberg and Sandy did; very few teachers have developed a concrete, step-by-step approach to training a truly creative actor—a system that takes an artist as raw material and builds the skills necessary for him to excel at his art from the ground up. “Craft—technique, if you will—is vitally important to art, but so many people don’t understand it. The biggest misconception I hear about acting technique is that it restricts the artist’s talent. Ridiculous! Ultimately technique does not constrain the artist’s instincts; it frees them.” “How does this apply to Meisner Technique?’ “Learning to act is very much like bqilding a house. First you have to pick a spot to build and clear the land. Then you must dig a good foundation and shore it up against the elements. These are the very first stages; perhaps they’re also the most important stages. If the foundation of a house isn’t properly laid, the entire structure will eventually collapse under its own weight during the first good wind. In Meisner Technique, we uphold this analogy by practicing a regimen of exercises which create foundation, a stable floor upon which we build our craft.” “You generally work with actors over a two-year period,” I say. “In terms of this training, how do you lay the foundation?” “Utilizing the Meisner approach,” Bill says, “my students spend the entire first year of their training developing themselves into

Prologue

7

truthful acting instruments. If you like, you could say that this first year is all about training the actor in the basic skills required for professional acting.” ‘Til play devil’s advocate again,” 1 say. “A lot of acting schools consider the basic skills for acting to be voice, speech, and move¬ ment. What do you believe?” Bill waves his hand. “Voice, speech, and movement are external skills. Very important to acting, yes. But not so important that you study them to the neglect of an actor’s inner life—his emotional core. An actor without an emotional core is like a cardboard cutout of a human being. “These days the most common piece of advice you hear people telling a young actor is ‘Be yourself.’ Of course, this leads the actor to ask the next, inevitable question: ‘Who am I?’ The way I see it, until an actor learns to work from the core of his own truth, all the voice, speech, and movement training in the world will only succeed in creating a highly skilled puppet. I don’t want to train automatons. I want to develop actors who are unique! Who are alive! “Painters make their art from brushes, canvas, and hues. Sculptors work in clay and bronze, stone, and plaster. Writers use pens and paper—lately they use computers. Musicians have their instruments. But what does an actor use to create his art? Some would say nothing, but this isn’t true. In fact, the actor has the most complicated instrument of all—himselfl His experiences, his imagination, his sensitivity. His physical body and his observa¬ tions. Everything that makes up the sum total of a person’s humanity is part of the actor’s instrument. As Eleonora Duse once said, ‘All that I have to offer as an artist is the revelation of my soul. ” “That sounds a lot like Stanislavsky,” I say “Why not simply use his work?”

Prologue

8

“For a variety of reasons/’ Bill says. “Teaching Stanislavsky doesn’t work for contemporary actors. The realities faced by twentyfirst-century actors are completely different than those faced by Russian actors of the nineteenth century. In Stanislavsky’s world, if actors wanted to rehearse a play for three years, they could. Mod¬ ern actors, however, must constantly adjust their work to meet the demands of various media, and they must do so while laboring under the restraints of incredibly condensed rehearsal times. This is particularly true in the film and television industries, where actors are lucky if they get three minutes to rehearse before the camera runs. As things stand now, feature films are often made in twenty-eight days or less. The pressures of television are even more acute. “One of the reasons I believe so strongly that Meisner’s tech¬ nique is the best approach to training actors is that the technique can be applied to any challenge an actor faces. It develops actors who can create performances of genuine quality in any medium . “The art of acting has been in a state of perpetual change since the day it began. A lot of it has to do with the way society devel¬ ops, but a large part of it has to do—interestingly enough—with technology. For instance, during the nineteenth century, actors trained to work in large theaters; they worked on projecting their voices and developing stock gestures that conveyed their emo¬ tional life to the back of a large, crowded hall. Then, in the early part of the twentieth century, silent films became a viable job mar¬ ket for actors, and suddenly they had to conquer the problem of acting without sound. Then, after talkies arrived, actors confronted the massive issues of subtlety and truthfulness in film acting. “When I studied with Sandy in the fifties, television was a bud¬ ding medium. Look at how many actors work in television today. Then, in 1963, the Guthrie Theater opened and inaugurated the regional-theater movement. Suddenly there was a tremendous

Prologue

9

need for American actors who could handle the language and period styles of the classics, which pose huge acting challenges.” “But doesn’t every form of actor training prepare you for these media?” Bill shakes his head. “No. Not in the least. These days, no mat¬ ter which road you choose to travel into the art of acting, there’s a school out there that will charge a toll and raise the gate. But are their graduates just as skilled at doing TV and film as they are in the classics? Rarely. Because the systems they train in aren’t as clearly organized as Sandy’s. My vision of a well-trained actor is someone who can apply his training to a contemporary film or a stage production of Shakespeare with equal ease. An actor who can perform Euripides, Shaw, Brecht, and O’Neill, then turn around and work a contract role on a soap opera.” “That’s a pretty tall order,” Bill looks at me. “It certainly is.” “But why write another book on Meisner Technique? Isn’t Sandy’s book enough?” Bill raises his eyebrows. “Sandy wrote a wonderful book. But because of constraints on his time and energy, it’s incomplete. There are many important aspects of his technique which he didn’t have the opportunity to address in Sanford Meisner on Act¬ ing. I’d like to explore these lost areas. Also, the proliferation of Meisner Technique has led to a dilution of it. Many teachers across the country claim to teach authentic versions of Sandy’s work, but they don’t. One pitfall of the Meisner Technique is that the beginning exercises are easy to learn and easy to teach. This attracts a lot of underqualified practitioners. They teach versions of Repetition and claim that they’re teaching Meisner’s work without progressing to the next steps, all of which are necessary to build genuinely accomplished actors capable of creating char¬ acters with deep and compelling inner lives.”

1 0

Prologue

I clear my throat and glance away at the walls. “Bill, I have a confession to make.” From the corner of my eye I can see hes sitting there, waiting. Patient. Bill Esper has the speaking habits of a poet. He speaks only words that are essential. He’s incredibly comfortable with silence. Had he chosen to pursue a career in writing rather than acting, I suspect he would have made a lousy author of pulp fic¬ tion. His haiku, however, would have been stunning. “IVe begun to teach.” Bills ears prick up. I can see this pleases him immensely. “Excellent!” he says. “I always thought you might.” “It’s not excellent,” I snap. Bill doesn’t blanch for an instant at my reaction. He doesn’t judge it. From the look in his eyes I can see he’s already intuited my problem: It frustrates the hell out of me. “The more 1 act and teach, the less sure I am about the rea¬ sons behind what I’m doing.” “It takes time to develop a feel for it,” Bill says. “I’ve been at it for eleven years.’’ He snorts. “Come back to me in thirty more. We’ll see what you’ve picked up then.” But then he nods. “This is good. I want to write a book about training actors. You want to learn more about teaching actors. Why don’t you show up here tomorrow? I have a new class that’s just beginning. We’ll start at the beginning and work our way through the process.” “That sounds fine,” I say. “Beally. That sounds wonderful.” Bill smiles. Over the next year and a half, I observed Bill teaching his firstyear students and worked together with him on this book. We decided that no single class would be likely to cover the full range of situations that regularly arise in the classroom or show the many ways that the method can help individual students with their specific problems. Instead we created a narrative that is

Prologue

1 1

meant to depict a representative first-year class, with the general types of students and issues Bill has encountered over the years. None of the students described in this book represent actual indi¬ viduals. We drew on my observations and on Bills decades of teaching to re-create the classroom experience and to give readers the most illuminating portrayal of the technique in practice.

I

BILL’S CLASS

1) TREVOR—A wiry young man with a contagious grin and a shock of coarse black hair. 2) AMBER—A pretty blond English woman with a sense for the ironic and the absurd. 3) VANESSA—A petite African-American woman with a spirit that defies her diminutive size. 4) JOYCE—An older woman who worked for years as an actor in regional theater before taking time off from the business to raise a family. She has a direct gaze and an ironic twist to her lips that makes her at once both endearing and formidable. 5) DOM—A slim, aesthetic-looking guy with thick black hair and an open expression that is at once both alarmingly direct and vulnerable. He has large, dark, liquid eyes. 6) KENNY-—A whipcord-thin man with curly blond hair, a sar¬ donic voice, and a perpetual grin. 7) QUID-—A lanky African-American young man with a perpet¬ ual pout. 8) REG—An African-American man built like Zero Mostel with a pencil-thin mustache and a soft Southern lilt to his vowels.

1 4

Bill’s Class

9) MIMI—A television star from an eighties sitcom. 10) TYRONE—A muscular Latino with a gravelly bass voice. Tyrone must sleep with dumbbells in each hand. His arms are as thick as peanut-fed hams. 11) JON—A short, balding man with a round build. From Den¬ mark. “My family/’ he says, “thinks that I’m dreaming. They tell me all the time, You’ll never be an actor. Grow up. Get a real job. Wake up and smell the coffee.”’ 12) CHERYL—A young woman from a rural part of Illinois. Very wide-eyed and sweet. 13) MELISSA—A tall, lithe woman with a dancer’s physique and bright eyes that sparkle in a face that holds many secrets. She has a tendency to withhold her emotions. 14) DONNA—A woman in her late twenties with very dark fea¬ tures. She left a high-paying job as a financial consultant to return to her first love: acting. 15) UMA—Think Kathy Bates, but younger. Perhaps she is of Eastern European descent. Uma comes across as shy, but fiercely intelligent. Her eyes are glistening flints beneath her black bangs, and she listens constantly, rarely speaking, but always taking in. 16) ADAM—Has the stocky build of a professional lumberjack. Due to his whitish blond hair and clear blue eyes, he appears to be of Scandinavian descent. But his last name is Italian, and he is in fact Sicilian.

BEGIN AGAIN— EMPTY YOUR CUP

“How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.” —Alexandre Dumas

Sixteen students wait for Bill to arrive, eight men and eight women. These actors have been carefully selected for their talent, potential, and seriousness of purpose. They come from across the United States and around the world. Some have long resumes stocked with impressive credits; some have acted only in small theaters. Many have studied with various teachers who have espoused different approaches to the craft of acting. Each actor seems to possess talent. In their admission interviews, however, each disclosed unique problems—issues and obstacles that have blocked them from fully realizing their talent. Everyone smiles in a nervous but genuine way. Introductions are made here and there. We wait. The rooms walls are painted neutral gray. There are no windows and only one door. The class is seated in chairs on low risers stacked against the room’s southern end, facing this door across an open space. The risers form the students’ gallery. Bill’s desk is situated to the side—also looking into the playing area. The floor is bare, save for two mattresses lying on low bed frames, one against the west wall, one against the east. A shelving

1 6

The Actor’s Art and Craft

unit set to one side contains an array of props: liquor bottles, vases, books, plates, kitchen utensils, strings of Christmas lights, coffee mugs, and a manual typewriter that easily dates back to the 1940s, all available for communal use. The door to studio C swings open and Bill enters. Everyone quiets instantly. Bill moves to his desk without pausing and grunts a hello, which the class returns enthusiastically. Taking a seat at his desk, he opens a brand-new class roster and reads it for a long moment. Then, apparently satisfied, he looks up and begins.

“Once there was a student who desperately wanted to learn about Zen. So he approached the house of a great Zen master. The mas¬ ter, in a moment of uncharacteristic graciousness, invited the stu¬ dent inside. “They sat down to tea and the master asked the student, 'Why have you come?’ The student opened his mouth and started to babble. A torrent of words poured forth: testaments to his immense curiosity, his passion, his understanding and confusion regarding Zen. On and on the student talked. The master blinked, then set to work making tea. He set out cups, ground the tea leaves, and boiled water while the student kept talking. “The young man only shut his mouth when the master started to pour the tea. The old man filled the student’s cup until the tea reached the brim and overflowed, running all over the table, scalding hot. ‘My God!’ cried the student. ‘What have you done?’ “The old man stopped pouring and said, ‘Your mind is like this cup of tea. How can I put anything in it when it’s already full? If you wish to learn Zen, you must bring me an empty cup.’” Bill sits there, watching, as the class takes this in.

Begin Again

1 7

“Now tell me,” he says. “Why are you here?” At first no one speaks. Then someone from the back row says: “To study acting.” Bill thinks about this. “Yes, but what is acting exactly? If you wish to study it, it’s good to be clear about what it is.” No one speaks. So Bill says, “All right, let me put it this way. Suppose that today you were walking down the streets of Man¬ hattan and you bumped into a Martian. A real, honest-to-God Martian—an alien from another planet. You know he’s a Martian because of his short build, green skin, and wiggling antennae.” I glance around. Everyone’s eyes are wide. “Well, naturally you’re a little curious, right? So let’s say you strike up a conversation with this guy. ‘How’s life on Mars?’ ‘Oh, not bad. How’s life on Earth?'—that sort of thing. And pretty soon the Martian gets around to asking you, ‘So, what is it that you do? By that I mean, what is your profession?’ And you say to him— proudly, I hope: ‘Well. I’m an actor.’ “The Martian says, Really? An actor? What’s that? We don’t have any actors on Mars.’ How would you explain to him what exactly an actor does?” A thin, wiry young man with a contagious grin and a shock of coarse black hair raises his hand. From the previous introductions I know that his name is Trevor. Bill points to him, and Trevor says, “Acting is living in make-believe.” Bill cocks an eyebrow. “Hmmm. You’re onto something. When you say make-believe, I take it you’re trying to bring up a point about imagination, am I right?” Trevor thinks. Nods. “Good. Because imagination is very important for actors, and we ll be using it a lot. But let’s leave that alone and come back to it. Who else has an idea?” A pretty blond woman with a soft British accent raises her

1 8

The Actor’s Art and Craft

hand. She introduces herself as Amber. Bill points at her. “So what do you think? What is acting?” “Acting is a form of entertainment,” she says. Bill winces. “Okay,” he says. “But so are carnival freak shows, croquet matches, and wrestling. When you get right down to it, tiddlywinks is a form of entertainment. I’d hoped we could aspire to something a little higher than that in here. I don’t mean to be sharp, but it’s got to be more than entertainment. Much more. Otherwise we’d all be stand-up comedians instead of artists.” Vanessa, a petite African-American woman, says, “You know what I’d tell that Alartian? I’d tell him that acting is portraying a character from a story.” Bill thinks. “Okay,” he says. “But let me get this straight. This story you’re talking about. It takes place onstage, right? So ... is it real?” Vanessa thinks for a moment. Then she shakes her head. “No, it’s not,” says Bill. “In other words, it’s a work of im¬ agination. So here we are again, bringing up this point about imagination.” He looks back at Trevor, who nods. “Maybe we’ve pinned down that acting must have something to do with the imagination.” Several students have begun to take notes. Bill continues: “Here in the studio we have a working definition of acting. This definition comes straight from my own teacher, Sanford Meisner, and—after forty years of teaching—I personally believe it’s still valid. Sandy said that ‘Acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.’ Have you got that?” Sixteen heads bob up and down as the class bends to its note¬ books. Bill scratches his chin through his beard and frowns. Then he continues: “All right, then. Let’s examine this a bit. Acting is living

Begin Again

1 9

truthfully under imaginary circumstances. Fine. But before we go any further, let’s break that definition down. It seems to me that there are two important factors in that definition that need to be defined. What are they?” “Living truthfully,” says someone in the front row. “That’s right,” says Bill. “That’s a big one. What else?” “Imagination. Imaginary,” says a female voice from behind me. “Okay,” says Bill. “Let’s try to define those things.” Bill looks at the door to the studio for a moment, as if waiting for someone to walk through it. Then he says, “Truth is so impor¬ tant to art, because isn’t that how we judge the things we see? Think about it. Have any of you ever come out of a play or a film and said, 'Oh, I really loved it! It was so 'phonyl I didn’t believe one moment of it! ” Everyone laughs. Bill chuckles, too. “Truth is the blood of art. Without truth a piece of art fails to touch the human spirit.” Someone in the back row grunts their approval, and Bill contin¬ ues. “Now let’s look at the other side of this definition, the imagi¬ nary part. Imagination is pivotal for actors because everything we do, every piece of our craft takes place in the world of imagi¬ nation. “When you go to see a play—Hamlet, for instance—you know the man dressed in black isn’t really a prince of Denmark. That woman who’s marrying her brother-in-law isn’t really the queen. As a matter of fact, you’re not even in Denmark. You’re sitting in upper-mezzanine seats in a Broadway house on Forty-fifth Street and the whole thing is a tissue of lies, a figment of William Shake¬ speare’s imagination. So, if it’s all lies, how can we talk about it being truthful?” Amber looks up. "Because if the actors are skilled, you forget that it’s a lie.” Bill nods. “That’s right. If the actors are skilled, we’ll begin to

20

The Actor’s Art and Craft

react to the events onstage as if they were real, as if we were bystanders at some actual event. Do you know why this happens?” Amber thinks, then shakes her head. “Because if in fact the actors are skilled, what were watching isn't pretend. It is an actual event. Do you see how that could be? Hemingway once said, ‘All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.’ Isn’t that exactly what we re talking about here?” More notes. Bill presses forward. “Are you familiar with the late great Harold Clurman? He was an esteemed critic, director, and teacher who was instrumental in founding the Group The¬ ater—maybe the most important theater we’ve ever had in this country. One of his books was a collection of his theater reviews which he titled Lies Like Truth. I love that title because it captures the essence of theater in three simple words. Lies Like Truth. That’s the nature of all good acting: illusion that is real. Imagi¬ nation made true.’’ An older woman named Joyce raises her hand. I remember Bill telling me about her.

She’d been a moderately successful

regional-theater actor for years before taking time off to raise a family. “So are you saying that actors are liars?” The class laughs. Bill turns to her and smiles. “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” Everyone stops laughing. “Yes, actors are wonderful liars. They can make you believe anything, can’t they? They’ll convince you they just won a million dollars or that their mother died this morning. They’ll talk with an accent and make you think they’re German when in fact they grew up in Australia. They’re wonderful liars—but the difference is this: Their lies are always grounded in truth, and always— always!—their lies serve the purpose of art.” The class is silent. After a sustained moment Bill continues.

Begin Again

2 1

"You know, I interview students before they come to study with me. I’ll often ask, ‘Have you ever acted before?’ Occasionally some¬ one will say, ‘Well, no! I’ve never acted—not in a play or on TV or in a film. But I act all the time! In life!’What 1 suppose they really mean is that they lie a lot. To which I say, ‘Nonsense! That’s not acting.’ Because acting doesn’t take place under life circum¬ stances; it takes place within the confines of imaginary circum¬ stances.’’ Bill pauses, thinking about something. “Do you see the differ¬ ence?” he asks. The class nods. “So we’ve got this wonderful working definition of acting—acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. But there’s a prob¬ lem with it, isn’t there? You see the problem, don’t you?” The class stares at Bill with blank expressions. “Well, it’s sort of a general definition, isn’t it?” No one answers. “Let me show you what I mean,” Bill says. He points to one of the young men in the front row. “You,’’ he says. “What’s your name?” The young man has thick black hair and an open expression that is at once both alarmingly direct and vulnerable. He says, “My name is Dorn.” “Okay, Dom,” says Bill. “This definition we have for acting. What is it again?” Dom repeats, “Living truthfully under imaginary circum¬ stances.” *

Bill grins. “Would you do me a favor, then?” Dom is cautious. “Sure.” “Would you mind coming up here and doing a little ‘truthful liv¬

ing’ for everyone? Just as an example, of course.” Dom doesn’t move.

The Actor’s Art and Craft

22

Bill leans forward. “Is there a problem?” “I don’t ... I mean . . . I . . .” “What’s up?” "I wouldn’t know where to begin.’’ “Why not?” Dorn’s face becomes a mask of puzzlement. “. . . ‘living’ ...?’’ Bill raises his eyebrows. “Don’t you know what ‘living’ means?” Dom struggles with this for a moment but eventually shakes his head. “Okay” says Bill. “This is the problem I was talking about. We need to pin this down before we go any further: What does ‘living’ mean?” A quick glance around at the class tells me that everyone sees the point Bill’s trying to make. Bill says, “Dom, let me ask you. Were you living today? You were alive, weren’t you? This morning, I mean.” Dom thinks, then nods very slowly. Bill smiles at Dom and continues. “Okay. Good to hear. So, Dom, while you were alive this morning, what did you do?” “This morning?” “Before you came here. Yes.” Dom thinks for a moment. “I got up. I made breakfast. I ate it.” Bill seems pleased. “Uh-huh,” he says-—as if to say, Continue. Dom glances at the ceiling, thinking. “I answered a few phone calls. Uh, got the paper. I looked for jobs in the classified section. Then I paid my phone bill. Went to the subway station. Bought a new MetroCard and came here." Bill nods, satisfied. “Okay. So. You did all those things, huh? And maybe tomorrow you’ll do some more things. Maybe a lot more. Right?” Dom shrugs. “Have to. I have to find a job.” The class laughs.

Begin Again

23

Bill smiles. “I sympathize. But listen. Maybe you’ve already answered the question about what ‘living’ is.” Dom stares at him, waiting. “You say you did all those things today and that you’ll do some more things tomorrow. So. Maybe ‘living’ can be defined by what you do." Dom thinks about it. Nods. This makes sense to him. Bill returns his look to the class. “Listen, this is very important. Let’s substitute the word ‘doing’ for ‘living.’ So now we have: act¬ ing is doing—really doing—truthfully under imaginary circum¬ stances. “This principle—the reality of doing—is the foundation of all good acting and the cornerstone on which all of Sanford Meisner’s work is built. The focus of our work will therefore be on learning to really do. This is our first step on the path to the art of acting.” A whipcord-thin man with curly blond hair and a sardonic voice calls out. This is Kenny. “But how do we know when we’re really doing something as opposed to just . . . you know.” Bill cocks his head. “As opposed to not doing it? As opposed to \pretending?” “Yeah.” “Tell me, how many letters are there in your first and last name combined?” “What?” “I asked you how many letters are in your name.” Kenny says, “I don’t know.” “Count for me.” Kenny blinks at Bill. Then he frowns and begins to concen¬ trate. He quietly mouths the letters that spell his name while ticking them off with his fingers. Finally he says, “Eleven.”

24

The Actor’s Art and Craft

Bill nods. “So did you really count the letters? Or did you pre¬ tend to count them?” Kenny thinks. “I— Oh. Okay. I get it. Thats the difference.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “That’s the difference. “Now I’d like you all to try something. Think back to exactly two weeks ago today. I want you to remember that day . . . and recall everything you had to eat.” At once the class falls silent. After a few moments Bill says, “How many of you could do it?” _ A few students raise their hands. Most, however, do not. “Let me ask you this: Even if you couldn’t remember—were you really trying to recall? Or were you just pretending?” Everyone mutters, “Trying. Really trying.” “Then that’s what we re after. That’s the reality of doing. Now let’s add something else. From where you’re sitting, I want you all to listen for a moment. But you’ll have to really listen, because the sound I want you to hear is very far away. I want you to listen for the choir of angels singing above our heads. Try and make out the song they’re singing.” Again the class falls into rapt silence. A few moments pass, and Bill asks, “Who heard them?” No hands go up, so Bill says, “That’s good. Because if you did I’d have to prescribe some very powerful medications.” The class laughs. “But here’s my point: Does it matter if you heard them or not?" A lanky African-American young man with a perpetual pout says, “No. It matters if you were really listening for them." Bill nods. “That’s right. What’s your name?” “Quid.” “Quid, that’s very good. Would you do me a favor?” Quid nods. “There was an accident here in the studio last night. Very

Begin Again

2 5

unfortunate. I think there must be some bloodstains on that bed¬ spread over there. See if you can find them.” Quid blinks at this odd request but gamely gets up from his seat and moves to the bed Bill indicated. He quickly scans the bedspread and finds nothing. Then he refines his search, going over the fabric inch by inch. Still nothing. While we watch, he pulls the bed frame away from the wall and examines the spread from a different angle. Nothing. Then he pulls the bedspread off the mattress and flips it over to check the other side; again he goes over the fabric inch by inch. He’s in the middle of his search when Bill finally asks, “Find anything?” Quid looks up, startled out of his concentration. “Huh? No.” Bill turns back to the class. “Of course he didn’t. Because the bloodstains are imaginary. But does that really matter?” Everyone shakes their head. Bill asks, “Why not?” Adam has the stocky build of a professional lumberjack. Indeed, I heard someone in Bill’s office mention that he’d played college football. He appears to be of Scandinavian descent but his last name is Italian. He is in fact Sicilian. “The fact that there are no bloodstains doesn’t matter,” says Adam. “The important thing is that he was really looking for them.” "That’s right,” says Bill. “I’ll say it again! The reality of doing is the single most important principle of truthful acting. It is the key that allows you to unlock the door to the imaginary world, enter it, and live there truthfully. “Let’s go back to that production of Hamlet we were talking about. Does everyone know that play?” A chorus of yeahs. “Good. Actors should know Hamlet. So tell me. What’s that play about}" An African-American man built like Zero Mostel with a pencilthin mustache and a soft Southern lilt to his vowels speaks up.

26

The Actor’s Art and Craft

His name is Reg. He says, “It’s about passion, agony, and the lust for revenge.” Bill shrugs. “You gave me a list of emotions, but I want you to be very careful here. A lot of people think that emotion—emoting—is the cornerstone of good acting. Bobby Lewis used to say, ‘If acting were crying, my aunt Tessie would be a great actor.’” The class laughs. “Let’s try again. You all know the story of Hamlet. So let’s look at that play like actors. There’s this prince in Denmark. Tell me: What does he do in that play?” Kenny calls out, “He sees his father’s ghost and listens to the secret the ghost tells him.” ' That’s right,” says Bill. “Then what?” Amber: “He pretends to be crazy.” Kenny: “He breaks up with Ophelia.” Reg: “He hires the players, writes a special script for them, and trains them to perform it precisely the way he wants them to.” “Very good,” says Bill. “Keep going.” Mimi, a television star from an eighties sitcom: “He contem¬ plates suicide. ‘To be or not to be!”’ Trevor: “He kills Polonius.” Kenny: “Oh! He also tricks those other two guys, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “And on and on and on. So Hamlet does all these things. Therefore, the actor portraying Hamlet must also do these things. He must really do them under the imaginary cir¬ cumstances of the play. And if the actor does all these things— really does them—what happens?” “He becomes Hamlet,” Dom says quietly. “Not yet,” says Bill. “But it’s a damn good start.”

Begin Again

27

The conversation progresses. Very shortly it becomes clear to the class that if acting begins with really doing, they’ve been acting all their lives. They’ve really tied their shoes each morning. They’ve really made a pot of coffee. Really paid bills by writing out checks. Really made love. Really watched movies. Really wondered where their lives are going. Really worked a survival job, made the bed, done the laundry, walked the dog. From the moment we leave the womb, we are all committing ourselves to actions. Acting. Actors. Yes, it’s a far cry from playing Hamlet, mostly because none of these actions were performed under imaginary circumstances. But they were actions nonetheless, and therefore—as Bill said— a damn good place to start.

Bill explains his views on acting as an art. “This work has a creed, an article of faith, if you will. I believe that, in the best of hands, acting becomes a creative art, and that true excellence in its prac¬ tice can only be attained by total mastery of technical craft. Unfortunately that takes time, and America is a hurry-up place. In America we think we re gaining something by how fast every¬ thing around us is moving. Every day, faster and faster. But what do we miss in the process? “In Japan they have a wonderful ancient form of puppet theat^~ called Bunraku. These puppets aren’t like European-style marionettes. Bunraku puppets are life-size replicas of human beings, and each puppet is controlled by three puppeteers who— unlike European puppeteers—appear onstage in full view of the audience. “Watching Bunraku is an eerie experience. The puppets are so

28

The Actor’s Art and Craft

lifelike! They move just like human beings do; they even have facial expressions. Huddled behind them, the puppeteers are clearly visible, dressed all in black. They cavort around the pup¬ pets like Greek Fates. One puppeteer moves the legs and feet. Another moves the puppet s torso and arms. The third puppeteer controls the head. With all these hands at work on the same instrument, its easy to imagine a lot of miscommunication, con¬ fusion, and disharmony taking place. Not so! The movements of Bunraku artists are so seamless, so synchronized that you imme¬ diately forget you’re watching a puppet. Bunraku re-creates the wooden doll as soft, living human flesh. It’s an incredible art to behold. “I tell you this because you should know—to become a Bunraku puppeteer, you must apprentice yourself for twenty years! “The first thing a young apprentice learns is how to move the puppet’s feet. Then—after eight or nine years—he graduates to controlling the torso, the arms and hands. Finally, after a very, very long time, he learns how to control the puppet’s head and face. By that time he is intimately aware of the puppet’s every ten¬ dency and movement.’’ Bill stops and fixes the class with his gaze. “Twenty years to learn an art. My God. In this country a person can expect to change jobs four or five times within twenty years. Where is our focus? Clearly we re a transient culture. But nothing worth learn¬ ing comes quickly. Sandy said this, and I’ve always upheld it: It takes twenty years to become a master of acting. “Before we begin your training, I must pose this question: Have you come here to learn to act? Or have you come here with pipe dreams about commercial success? I ask because I must warn you—what I teach here is craft that hopefully will enable you to create art. True, many of my students have done quite well for

Begin Again

29

themselves in the business of acting. And if you experience com¬ mercial success, fine. Count yourself lucky. But that’s not the rea¬ son we act! The only true reason to approach any art is because it is your passion. “It’s no secret that actors go into acting for the wrong reasons. They want to be admired; they want to be famous; they want to make a lot of money appearing in movies. It’s the perfect escape from reality, and acting, after all, is an escapist profession. People think it’s so much simpler to act than it is to become a doctor, for instance, a lawyer, or an engineer. What a colossal delusion. “A few months ago a young man in his mid-twenties came to interview for classes. He admitted that he knew almost nothing about acting—he said he’d done a play in high school. Since then he’d made his living as a model, but, to his credit, he didn’t find the work emotionally satisfying. “This young man was very handsome. He said he wanted to give acting a serious try and I believed him. So, even though he had no real experience or training, I put him on my wait list, and a few weeks later my assistant called him to say that we had an opening. When the young man called back, he apologized. He said he couldn’t commit. His agent and his manager both felt that he didn’t have time to take acting classes; he’d be too busy audi¬ tioning.” Bill raises an eyebrow. “You know what the saddest part is about this story? You already know the answer. Ask me where that actor will be in five years. Sure—maybe he’ll get lucky. I guess he’s got his one-in-a-million chance, just like anybody else. But he’s living a Willy Loman version of the American dream. In his dream it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. As far as what you know, this man doesn’t know anything. And all the who-youknows in the world won’t make him a good actor.”

30

The Actor’s Art and Craft

Bill thumps his desk. “What those people don’t understand is that good acting—real acting—is impossible to spot. Do you ever catch talents like Robert Duvall or Kathy Bates acting? No. I defy you to show me where. Which is why some people like this poor boy I mentioned suffer from the awful delusion that acting is easy. Great talents make the art look simple, so some people think that the hardest part about acting is ‘memorizing all those lines.’ To this I say: Beware. “When master actors act, their craft becomes invisible. Their art becomes artless. Not so in other disciplines. When we saw Baryshnikov leap or heard Joan Sutherland sing, we were forced to recognize the skill of the artist. You can’t listen to Yo-Yo Ma play the cello without recognizing brilliance. But real acting can never be pegged because it cannot be differentiated from real life. “For these reasons and more, the art of acting is mysterious. But this goal—the mastery of craft—is the only acceptable reason to act,” Bill says. “Anything else is unworthy.” A short, balding man with a round build sheepishly raises his hand. This is Jon. He comes from Denmark. “My family,” he says, “thinks I’m dreaming. They tell me, ‘You’ll never be an actor. Grow up. Get a real job.’” Bill sits quietly with this for a moment. “I have always won¬ dered,” he says finally, “at people who disdain passion for security. Who refuse to follow their dreams. Who stand in the way of the dreams of others. 1 question what drives them forward through life.” Bill stares off into the distance, and the fingers of his right hand begin to drum slowly on the lip of his desk. "Do you know?” he says. “It’s true what Thoreau said. ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Because most people measure their lives by so-called significant moments, the number of which can usually be counted on the fingers of two hands. A graduation.

Begin Again

3 1

A marriage. The loss of someone close. The birth of a child. A long-awaited promotion. Midlife crisis. Perhaps a divorce. Retire¬ ment. Their best round of golf. A sudden tragedy. A vacation won in a sweepstakes. These are the peak moments in a normal per¬ son’s life. “But an actor lives with a different truth. To an actor, every moment is a peak moment. He may live an entire lifetime in two hours or less. An actor knows that this thing we call 'life' is noth¬ ing more than a series of moments strung together in a mystical chain. Accordingly, there is no such thing as small moments or important moments

to the actor—these are

tricks of the

mind. The actor therefore trains himself to pay attention to all moments, and to live each one as if each moment were his last. He learns to live mindfully, beholden only to his sense of truth, without anticipation, without fear. The moments bind together, forming an endless wave which the actor rides like a tiger, never knowing where the tiger will turn next—never caring, if the truth be told. For the actor knows that there is never an outcome and never an ending. There is only the ride. “What I teach you here will be yours for your entire life—if you want it. No one will ever be able to take it from you. If you wish, it will become your driving force. Your art will become your doorway to the entire world. “But make no mistake—the actor’s life is a hard one. Even the most recognized names in our industry struggle. But should you choose to pursue this craft fully, if you pledge yourself to your woi4c, if you let it feed you, nourish you, create and re-create you—no matter what happens, no matter what the world throws at you—you will always be able to hold your head up high. When people ask you, ‘What do you dor’ You can respond with pride that you are an actor. You are an artist. And il they don’t under¬ stand, there’s no point to saying anything further.”

32

The Actor’s Art and Craft

Bill changes tack quite suddenly. “Enough/’ he says. “No more talking. Who wants to begin work?” Now, for the first time, a sea of hands rises into the air. “Okay, then. Here we go.”

THE FIRST EXERCISE— DID YOU HEAR WHAT HE SAID?

“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet/’ —Franz Kafka

Bill asks, “Did anyone here grow up on a farm?” Cheryl raises her hand. She’s a young woman from a rural part of Illinois, wideeyed and sweet. “Okay,” says Bill. “Then you’re the perfect person to answer this question. Suppose I have this crazy dream. I want to raise a beautiful, lush, enormous head of cabbage. Tell me: What do I need to get started?” Cheryl smiles. “Traditionally, you’d start with a cabbage seed.” “Of course! Brilliant! Now let me ask you this: Let’s say that, instead of a cabbage, I have an even more grandiose dream. I want to raise a mighty oak tree. What would I need to do that?' Clieryl looks at Bill as if he’s gone batty. “An acorn?” she says, as if she’s answering a trick question. “That’s right,” says Bill. “Because an acorn is the seed of an oak tree, isn’t it?” «n

.

bure is.

»

Bill turns to the class. “Seeds are very important things. Don’t

34

The Actor’s Art and Craft

be fooled by how small they are. From the tiniest, simplest seed, the biggest and most sophisticated things can spring forth. You don’t believe me? Look no further than yourselves. Each of us started out as a tiny microscopic egg. And now, many years later, look at how we’ve grown. “Seeds—beginnings—are important. And a proper beginning is very important. You’ve all heard the expression that ‘so-and-so’s a bad seed’? Well, you can’t raise a good head of cabbage or a mighty oak from a bad seed. You need good seed to raise good things, and acting is no exception. Has anyone here studied ballet?’’ Melissa raises her hand. She’s a tall, lithe young woman with a dancer’s physique and bright eyes that sparkle. “I did,” she says. “For fifteen years.” “Perfect,” says Bill. “Tell me: On your very first day of ballet class—the very first time you set foot in a ballet studio—did the teacher turn from the barre and say, 'Good morning, class. Today we will dance Swan Lake. Who would like to be the Swan?” Melissa laughs and shakes her head. “That’s not the way I did it.” “Oh, no? How did you do it?” “We did nothing but exercises. We drilled ourselves over and over again until the steps, the positions, the movements— everything became second nature. Then we were ready to dance.” Bill looks at Melissa with a wry little smile. “What kind of bal¬ let career would you have had if you’d started off dancing Swan Lake on that first day?” Melissa thinks it over. “No career at all. I wouldn’t have learned the skills necessary to support that piece or any other dance I wanted to learn.’’ “There it is in a nutshell,” Bill says. “Musicians, dancers, painters, and singers—all serious artists commit themselves to a series of training exercises which develop the skills necessary to

The First Exercise

35

meet the demands of their medium. But one area where this is not so well understood is in acting. “The world is full of acting classes where someone gets up and does a little Stanley or a little Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire. This is followed by a penetrating discussion of the dark, poetic vision of Tennessee Williams. At the end of the day, every¬ one leaves the studio feeling artistically elevated. Meanwhile the two people doing the scene still don’t know how to act. All they’ve done is talked about the theater. No one’s learned anything about acting! But guess what we’re going to do in this class?” Three or four students speak at the same time. “Exercises,” they say. “That’s right. And now it’s time to start. Let’s plant the cabbage seed of your training. It’s called Repetition.”

Bill gets up from his desk and moves to face the students. He searches the crowd for a moment. His gaze finally settles on Trevor. “You,” he says. “Help me out.” Trevor says, “Okay.” “We re going to do Repetition, okay? It’s very simple, like play¬ ing a game. All you have to do, whatever I say, just repeat it back to me. Can you do that?” “I think so.” “Good. Then here we go.” Bill continues to look at Trevor. When Bill takes a person in, he isn’t just looking at them. It’s more like he’s experiencing them. He is incredibly deft at putting his entire attention on others. A few moments pass. His concentration is completely on Trevor. Finally Bill says, “You’ve got a funny hat on.” Trevor repeats him mechanically. “You’ve got a funny hat on.”

The Actor’s Art and Craft

36

Bill:'You’ve got a funny hat on.” Trevor snickers. “You’ve got a funny hat on.” Bill, with a hint of impatience: “You’ve got a funny hat on.” Trevor, a bit offended: ‘You’ve got a funny hat on.” Bill: “Stop.” “Not bad,” Bill says. “Trevor did exactly what I asked him to do. But there’s already a problem with what just happened, isn’t there? Who’s wearing the funny hat?” Everyone looks at Trevor. He’s wearing a battered, oil-stained baseball cap with white cursive letters that read Von Dutch set in a lime green field. The brim is tilted at a comical angle that accen¬ tuates the long, strange lines of Trevor’s face. “I am,” says Trevor. “You’re not.” “Right,” says Bill. “But you kept saying, ‘You’ve got a funny hat on.’ Seems to me something isn’t ringing true here. You did what I told you and you repeated what I said. But it made you say some¬ thing that wasn’t true.” Trevor makes a face. “It’s funny you say that, ’cause what I really wanted to do was ...” He stops. “What?” says Bill. Trevor cocks his head. “I mean, my impulse was to say, I’ve got a funny hat on?”’ Bill smiles. “Your impulse was to change the Repetition so that it made your answer honest?” «T

1 guess.

>>

“That’s a very good impulse to have,” says Bill. “You just gradu¬ ated to the first change in the Repetition. From now on, follow the impulse you had. In this case it was correct. In other words, if you have to change a word in the Repetition in order to keep your answer honest, do it. Never sacrifice a truthful answer to the liter¬ alness of the Repetition.” Bill turns to Uma, a solidly built woman in her early thirties

The First Exercise

37

with jet-black hair falling in sharp bangs over eyes the color of flint. She hasn’t spoken a word in class so far. She seems painfully shy but hardly disassociated; those flinty eyes sparkle with intelli¬ gence. She listens constantly. Though she doesn’t speak, she’s always taking things in. Bill says, "Are you wearing a wig?” Uma takes this very personally. "Am I wearing a wig?” “Yes, are you wearing a wig?” "No!” Uma hisses. “I’m not wearing a wig.” “No,” Bill says, "you’re not wearing a wig?” He sounds as if he still doesn’t believe her. “Drop dead," Uma explodes. And the class erupts into laughter. Bill shifts his attention to Beg. “You look tired,’’ he says, which takes Reg aback. “I look tired?” Beg says. “You look tired,” Bill repeats. “I look tired,” Reg says. “You look tired,” Bill repeats. “I look tired,” Reg says. A hard edge comes into his voice. “Yeah, you look tired,” Bill says. “Yeah, I look tired,” Reg says huffily. “Yeah,” Bill says. Reg’s huffy attitude has him getting huffy now. “You look tired.” “Yeah,” Reg says, gritting his teeth. “I look tired.”

.

“Yeah,” Bill says, hammering home the point. “You. Look. Tired!” “I’m not tired, goddammit!’’ Reg shouts. Bill smiles. “Stop.” “What happened, Reg?” Reg blinks. “What do you mean?” “Well, you first moved away from rote Repetition by using the honest answer. I said, ‘You look tired,’ and you said ...?’’

The Actor’s Art and Craft

38

“I look tired/’ “That’s right. And after we hit that one back and forth a few times, I think I added a ‘yeah’ in there at some point. I said, Yeah, you look tired.’ ” “That’s right,” says Jon. “You did.” “That sort of popped in there because the Repetition was becoming frustrating. Reg did his job well, though; he picked up on the added word and repeated it. That’s good. That shows you were really listening. Whatever your partner says, you have to repeat. But finally Reg really changed the Repetition because he had an impulse to shout out . . . ?” Reg throws his hands up into the air, exasperated. “I’m not tired!” he says. “For crying out loud, I got a great night’s sleep!” Bill also throws up his hands and says, “Okay! I get it! You’re not tired!” The class breaks up into laughter. Bill laughs too, and says, “So you’re saying that the effect of the Repetition sort of piled up inside of you. The sheer repetitiousness of the Repeti¬ tion began to frustrate you because I kept making the same inac¬ curate observation over and over. This frustration created a real impulse in you, which you followed when you said, Tm not tired, goddammit!”’ Reg thinks for a second, then nods. “Great,” says Bill. “Because that’s the second way the Repeti¬ tion can change. For the sake of creating a working vocabulary, let’s call it the pileup. The pileup often happens as an organic reaction to the process of Repetition itself. In other words, if you were really listening and really answering, the sheer repetitious¬ ness of the Repetition will begin to play on you internally and cre¬ ate an impulse. “Here’s the point I’m trying to make. If you’re doing the Repeti¬ tion exercise, sooner or later one of the partners will have an organic impulse to change the course of the exchange. Reg got really fed

The First Exercise

39

up with the Repetition, so he said, Tm not tired, goddammit!’ Well, there’s the change. Had we kept working, the exercise would have continued from there.” Bill turns to Reg and says, “You’re not tired, goddammit?” Reg holds up his hands and moans. “Please,” he says. “I get it.” “You get it?” says Bill. “I get it,” Reg repeats. “You get it?” "I got it.” Good. Kenny raises his hand. “So you shift the Repetition when you think it’s time to move on to something else.” Bill shakes his head. “No. Thinking your way into a shift is wrong. It’s inorganic and calculated, like trying to manipulate a conversation. We don’t seek to develop our minds with Repetition; rather we seek to develop our instincts. Everything that happens in Repetition should be driven by impulses. Emotions. You must respond to what you hear from your partner without analysis. Any time you engage your mind during Repetition, you’ll mask your true impulses and throw yourself off the exercise.” Kenny shakes his head. “I guess I’m not clear on what an impulse is,” he says. “Sure you are,” says Bill. “You’ve had impulses all your life. It’s like this: When you sit down on a nail, what happens?" “Ouch!” says Amber. “That’s right,” says Bill. “Your impulse is to cry out and immediately stand up. Do you have to stop and think about it? Not at all. It’s an instinctive reaction. It’s natural. An impulse. You can’t think an impulse. If you follow the impulse to move, you’re all right. If you don’t, you’ll sit there in pain until you do." Bill pauses for a moment. Then he says, “A connection with his impulses is one of the most important things an actor can develop,

40

The Actor’s Art and Craft

because who you really are is revealed by your spontaneous impulses. Not the ‘you’ that you’d like to be or the you’ you think another person wants you to be. I’m talking about your true self. To be your true self, you have to act before you think. Right now that means: Repeat before you think. That may seem contrary to things you’ve been taught in the past: Look before you leap. Think before you speak. Censor yourself before you tell your aunt she’s really fat. But I say: Speak before you think! Leap before you look! This is the only way to be spontaneous, the only way you’ll ever come to life as a human being. “One thing you may have noticed about these Repetitions: They’re not very rich in intellectual content. And that’s good, because there’s something going on which is much more impor¬ tant than that. The exchanges are very lively. “One of the few things that Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg actually agreed on was the single greatest actor they ever saw. Paul Muni, a superb actor, by the way, shared this opinion. They all agreed that the greatest actor they ever saw was a Sicilian named Giovanni di Grasso. Di Grasso came to the U.S, in the 1920s and 1930s and played with his company down on Second Avenue. They say he was a genius. When he stepped onto a stage, you couldn’t take your eyes off him. If he wanted his audience to laugh, they laughed. If he wanted them to cry, they cried. If he wanted them to laugh and cry together, they did that, too. He was like a force of nature. “But Meisner, Strasberg, and Muni also agreed that—offstage— Di Grasso was a complete social boor. It was impossible to carry on an intelligent conversation with him. When he acted, he did so from his instinct and his feeling. He didn’t perform from his intel¬ lect. He actually didn’t seem to have one. “Someone once asked Harold Clurman, ‘What ingredients does a person need to become a wonderful actor?’ Clurman responded:

The First Exercise

4 1

‘First of all, you have to have a wonderfully trained voice so that when you open your mouth to speak, everyone sits bolt upright in their chairs to listen. Secondly, you have to have a very alive and expressive physical instrument that can convey every nuance of what you are feeling. Thirdly, you have to have a lot of tempera¬ ment. Which means you get upset easily, you laugh easily, you cry easily.’ “The person who asked Clurman this question nodded and said, ‘Okay. I understand. And what else?’ “‘What else?’ Clurman asked. ‘That’s it! If you have these three things, you can be a wonderful actor!”’ Bill holds up a finger. “Notice what Clurman left out of his por¬ trait of a great artist.” “Intelligence,” says Dom. “That’s right,” says Bill. “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not say¬ ing you have to be stupid to be an actor, nor should you be. I’m just saying that your intellect shouldn’t be brought to work with you. Leave it home where it belongs. For actors, intelligence is less important than having a large, understanding heart that’s able to identify with the things going on inside another human being. “Yes, actors think. Certainly they do. But it’s a very specific way of thinking, an actor’s way of thinking. As painters think visually and musicians think in terms of sound, actors think more with their hearts than with their heads.”

Bill does the Repetition with more students, stopping them here and there whenever he picks up any moments that are inaccurate or don’t ring true. This happens while working with Vanessa. “I like your blouse,” Bill says. “You like my blouse,” repeats Vanessa.

42

The Actor’s Art and Craft

Bill maintains, “I like your blouse/’ “You like my blouse.” “Yes, I like your blouse,” says Bill. “You like my blouse,” says Vanessa, evidently bored. Bill brings the exercise to a halt. “What did you miss?’ Bill asks. “Huh? I don’t know. What?” “What did I say to you?” “I don’t know, you said you liked my blouse.” “No,” Bill says. “What I said—exactly—was ‘Yes, I like your blouse.’Then what did you say?” Vanessa shrugs. “I said, ‘Yes, you like my blouse. ” “No, you didn’t. You left out the yes.’” “Oh. Sorry.” Bill looks away, a bit frustrated. “Be careful,” he says. Vanessa frowns. “Is it really that important?” Now Bill absolutely winces. "Oh,” he says. “You mean that one little word? Is that one little word so important in the greater scheme of things? Let me be clear: It’s important that you repeat accurately and that you miss nothing. You hear and repeat every¬ thing. Because if you start missing a word here and a word there, eventually it will undercut your ability to listen in the heightened way an actor must be able to listen. Ultimately, it will corrode your contact with your fellow actors, and then it becomes a ghastly affliction.” “It seems like such a little thing.” Vanessa pouts. “Ah,” says Bill. “Little things. What else is there?”

I I I I After a few more rounds of the Repetition, Kenny raises his hand again. Bill notices and says, "What?”

The First Exercise

43

“I was just wondering,” Kenny says. “When are we going to start working with text?’’ The look Bill shoots Kenny is situated almost exactly between amusement and blunt annoyance. “You mean,” Bill says, “when am I going to start assigning you lines from a play?” “Exactly,” says Kenny. “I mean, I get what you’re doing here with the Repetition, and I like it. But 1 can be a much better actor when Eve got lines that Eve learned.” “I doubt that very much,” Bill says. “Text is a very confusing ele¬ ment in acting. It can mask a great many problems. The fact that someone can memorize lines and speak them in more or less the right order might give people the impression that they’re acting, whereas they may merely be reciting lines. “But you bring up an interesting point. If we take text away from the actor, what can he use as a substitute for dialogue? Oftentimes when actors improvise, they’re forced into the posi¬ tion of making up their own dialogue. This ends up putting them right back in their head, the very place where you don’t want them to be. “For now, the Repetition serves as a perfect substitute for dia¬ logue. All you have to do is repeat what your partner says to you. You don’t have to think and you don’t have to make up anything, so you’re free to follow your impulses. Just repeat, repeat, and repeat some more. “Now let me ask you this,” Bill says. “I’ve said before that acting is doi^g. And the key to good acting is the reality of doing. Which means that everything we do in this studio will be centered on that one fundamental issue. If that’s true, what does this little seed of an exercise have to do with the reality of doing? “Repetition has everything to do with the reality of doing because it forces you to really listen and really answer whatever you hear. This is the seed from which all good acting springs. By

44

The Actor’s Art and Craft

really listening from a pure, uncensored point of view, actors come into truthful contact with themselves. Then, by really responding to a partner from a pure, uncensored point of view, an actor makes truthful contact with that person. Contact with another person is the source of life—life in a performance and life offstage.”

As Bill continues to work with the rest of the class, it becomes apparent that no two exercises are alike. The Repetition elicits all that is unique, lively, and unpredictable in the actors who do it. By watching each exercise, I begin to gather detailed impressions of the actors in this class. Melissa, for instance, tends toward the taciturn and has a ten¬ dency to withhold her emotions. Amber, on the other hand, has a finely tuned sense of the ironic and the absurd. Donna is different. Shes a serious-looking woman in her late twenties with very dark eyes and black hair. She wears a pale blue designer pantsuit and stylish black-framed glasses. Donna started out as an actor, then took a high-paying job in the world of finan¬ cial consulting. Now she's returned to acting, her real love. Like Kenny, she responds intellectually. Her mind constantly tries to think her way through even the tiniest, most innocuous moments, as if everything that comes up in the exercise—or life—is a university-level trigonometry problem. When Donna does the Repetition exercise, she tends to say nothing for long periods of time. Bill tosses her an observation, and, rather than repeat it from her gut, Donna keeps it to her¬ self, mulling it over, strategizing, coming up with the wittiest or the cleverest spin to put on her delivery when at last she speaks. Bill has no tolerance for this. Whenever Donna pauses for too

The First Exercise

45

long in the exercise, he snaps his fingers and demands of her, “Repeat!” To this, Donna usually reacts as if struck in the face. She stammers out the line that was given to her, and Bill, unde¬ terred, hands it back to her. In this fashion Bill largely succeeds at interrupting Donna s mental process and inspires her to respond from her impulses. Donnas shock at being awakened from her mental stupor frequently results in accidentally hilarious line deliveries. Every time the class laughs out loud, she is pleased and blushes, as if a long-hidden part of her spirit has finally been revealed. "There are two points I want to make about what’s going on here,” says Bill. “First, where must the actor place his concentra¬ tion? This is a tremendously important element in acting. As an actor, where is the one place you never want your attention to be?” Amber says, “On yourself.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “An actor who makes himself the focus of his attention becomes self-conscious and paralyzed. Fortu¬ nately, the placement of your concentration can be controlled by your will. You can place your concentration where you want it to be. In this exercise, where should your concentration be?” Dom: “On listening?” “That’s right. Meaning, on the Repetition itself. Which means you have to be alert so that you don’t miss anything, not even a single word.” Bill shoots Vanessa a look and the class laughs. Vanessa blushes. “M)t second point actually has to do with the great Yankee base¬ ball player Yogi Berra. He was a great athlete, but not notable for his intellect. At a certain point in his career Yogi went into a terrible batting slump. He went through game after game without getting a hit. It got so bad that eventually everyone in the ball club began to offer him advice. One person told him, ‘You’re stepping out too soon. Another said, ‘You’re holding the bat too high.’Another said,

The Actor’s Art and Craft

46

‘You re not keeping your elbows in.’And Yogi desperately tried to process every single one of these helpful hints. “Finally he went up to the plate and—one, two, three—he struck out in three fast swings. In an outburst of frustration he threw down his bat and shouted, ‘Dammit, you know I can’t think and hit at the same time!’ “Nor can actors think and feel at the same time. In fact, if you have someone in life who’s hysterical, very upset, the best thing to do is start asking them questions. Miraculously, as they start thinking of how to answer you, their emotions will subside. So what I say to you now is: Act before you think. Repeat before you think. And live! “Repetition isn’t like football, where you toss the ball to some¬ one else so they can hold on to it and run all over the field. It’s more like Ping-Pong; the ball moves fast and never stops. It bounces to me and I don’t wait—I hit it back to you. Then you hit it back and here it is with me again. From me to you, from you to me—ba dip, ba doop, ba dap, ba ding. If you pause to think, you’re done for. “Once the ball stops, the round’s over, and who cares what the score is? The beauty of this game comes entirely from keeping the ball in the air. Let go of any judgments you want to place on the outcome.’’

Bill makes sure that each student gets a chance to try the Repeti¬ tion exercise, and the class ends twenty minutes past our quitting time. “Okay, this is a good place to stop. Do you think you have enough information to begin practicing?’’ Everyone in the class nods. “Good. Just to remind you: Today we’ve explored two ways in

The First Exercise

47

which the Repetition can change: the honest answer and the pileup. Next time well introduce two more ways. I’m going to assign each of you a partner. For the next few times we meet, well continue to work on the Repetition, and Ill assume that you’ve been rehearsing with your partner outside of class.” At this point, Bill impales the students with his gaze. “I’m going to say something now that’s very important,” he says, “and I’m only going to say it once. Rehearsals outside this studio are as much a part of your training, if not more, than the time we spend within. You will not absorb the principles I teach here unless you practice constantly. Do not dishonor me by coming to this class without rehearsing. I have no patience for the unprepared. “By the way, some food for thought. The word for ‘rehearsal’ in French is repetition. In Italian it’s ripetizione. I mention this because I believe it indicates something about how important the rehearsal process is to building good actors. To practice’ or ‘to rehearse’ means to repeat something until mastery is achieved. Mark my words: it’s only through practice that the principles I’m teaching you will become habits, second nature. Unless you train yourself to default to these habits instinctually, they will not serve you onstage or in life. Are there any questions?” For the moment there are none, so Bill nods. “Good. Then we’ve made a good beginning. I’m satisfied. Get to work and plant your cabbage seeds. We ll see where you stand next time.”

I hang out for a moment, listening. Some students linger to ply Bill with questions, but he deflects the queries. “Let’s see what happens next time” becomes the answer I hear him repeat again and again. Clearly it’s not the answer most of the new students hoped to hear. But it’s the healthiest answer for budding artists in

The Actor’s Art and Craft

48

search of direction. If there’s one thing Bill taught me well, it’s that the search for direction must be managed within. Providing answers that are too complete or delivered too fast can damage artists, robbing them of the gift of having to explore strange new territory on their own. I’ve known Bill long enough to know how much he sympathizes with his students’ insatiable curiosity. Nonetheless, he believes that mastery of the actor’s craft can be won only through a frus¬ trating process of trial and error. Fall on your face, get up, and try again. For now, I decide, my own questions can wait. I leave Bill to his work and walk out the door of studio C.

REPETITION CONTINUESDID YOU REALLY HEAR WHAT HE REALLY SAID? “You may say anything you really and truly feel. Anything at all, no matter what it is. I am not afraid, so long as it is your real self that speaks and not a mere attitude—a gallant atti¬ tude, or a wicked attitude, or even a poetic attitude. I put you on your honor and your truth. Now say whatever you want to.” —George Bernard Shaw, from Candida

(This quote hangs in a frame on the wall by Bill’s desk in his Neu? York studio. It was given to Bill’s wife, Suzanne, by one of her students.)

On the next day of class, Bill asks, “How did your rehearsals go?” Immediately a small forest of hands shoots into the air. Everyone has a question. “Okay,” Bill says. “Whos first?” Uma consults her notes. “Bill, I’m not clear on how the Repeti¬ tion starts.” “Good question. Repetition always starts by one actor opening his coifiplete attention to the other actor and finding something concrete about them that holds some interest for him, no matter how small. He then expresses this interest in a comment or an observation.” “Like what?” Uma asks. Bill laughs. “I have no idea. And neither will you until your partner is standing in front of you. Maybe when you take her in,

50

The Actor’s Art and Craft

you’ll say ‘Wow, I love that necklace.’ Honestly? It doesn t matter what your first response is so long as it comes from something that really exists about the other person. After that, the Repeti¬ tion’s off and rolling.’’ “So I couldn’t say something like ‘Hi. How are you today?”’ Bill shakes his head. “Stay away from making conversation. Likewise stay away from general remarks like, ‘What’s up?’ or ‘Warm enough for you?”’ “Why?” “Because the ability to make conversation is not something actors need. You don’t want your comment to come from your head; you want it to be evoked by something that concretely exists about the other actor. Who’s your partner?” “Adam.” “Okay, let’s try it.” Adam and Uma enter the playing area. Bill moves toward his desk to give them room and says, “Uma, when you look at Adam, what strikes you?” Uma says, “He’s wearing a white shirt.” “Good,” says Bill. “Adam does indeed have a white shirt on. That exists. What else?” Again, Uma takes Adam in. “I really like his belt.” “Good. I’m glad you said that, because it brings up something else we really need to look at.” He turns to the class. “What’s the difference between the two comments Uma just made? ‘He’s wearing a white shirt’ and ‘I really like his belt’?” A Latino man with a muscleman’s physique, a shaved head, and the general demeanor of a furious pit bull raises his hand. This is Tyrone. “One is just an objective report. The other, she’s sharing an opinion.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “The white shirt exists. You noticed and you’re reporting it. But the belt observation goes a step further.

Repetition Continues

5 1

You turned that into a personal comment. Its subjective. You liked the belt, but somebody else might look at it and think it’s boring.’’ Bill pauses for a moment before continuing. “Now listen care¬ fully. I’m about to tell you something that is absolutely crucial to your development. In art, the prized response is always the sub¬ jective response. This is what separates art from science. Scien¬ tists only prize objective responses because objective responses correlate with concrete facts. Artists are less concerned with facts than they are with what those facts mean to them. “Ultimately, a painter doesn’t paint the bowl of apples on the table in front of him. He paints what the apples mean to him, how the apples impress him, how he feels about them. Maybe the apples’ deep, rich red color excites him. Maybe the fruits gorgeous natural curves provide inspiration. Therefore, that’s what he paints. Similarly, an actor must create every moment of his performance out of what it means to him, how he really feels about it. “Which leads us to another, very important aspect of an actor’s development. How can young actors cultivate everything about themselves which is unique and special and different from every¬ one else? To unlock your own unique personality is an incredibly important achievement in the business of acting. “When I was teaching at Rutgers University, I would take every graduating class to New York to present a showcase of scenes to an audfence of agents, managers, and casting directors. A few years ago an agent approached me after one of these showcases and said, 'I want to thank you, Bill Esper. You are amazing!’ Natu¬ rally, that got my attention.” The class laughs. “I said, ‘Really? Why do you say that?’ The agent said, ‘I go to a lot of these presentations looking for talent, and I find that a lot of

52

The Actor’s Art and Craft

schools turn out actors who all look, walk, talk, and act the same. It’s as if they’ve been stamped out on an assembly line by the same cookie cutter. It gets to where I can’t tell one actor from the next. But whenever I see your actors, I’m amazed because no two of them remotely resemble one another. I confess, I'm intensely curious about how you accomplish that.’ “To me, this is maybe the best compliment I’ve ever received. Because I believe that, if you don’t reconnect an actor with every¬ thing within him that’s unique and special, then you really haven’t done anything for him. The only thing you have to offer as an actor is your unique personality, that which is yours and yours alone. If you want to be a composer, there’s no point trying to compose music that sounds like Mozart. If someone wanted to listen to Mozart, they already have him. Why listen to a secondrate imitation?” Reg raises a hand. “Bill, how can we find these things within ourselves? How will we know what’s unique about ourselves?” Bill nods. “I’ll tell you a story. One time a young writer approached the famous French novelist Flaubert and asked him, ‘Please. How can I cultivate my originality?’ Not a bad question for a young writer to ask. Flaubert thought about it a moment and replied, ‘Go out to your garden and find a rock. Take the rock inside your house and set it on your desk. Every day, before you begin to write, pick up that rock and look at it for a minute or two. Do you know what will happen? One day you will see something in that rock which no other human being on this earth has ever seen before. And that will be your originality.’ “An actor must know how he feels about everything. And I do mean everything. The development of this connection with your own true person, your point of view, is a major area of work in an actor’s development. Right now it comes down to one simple thing: Saying to somebody, ‘I really like your belt, is much more

Repetition Continues

53

helpful to your development than telling him, ‘You've got a white shirt on.'"

With Uma and Adam, Bill says: “Adam, I want you to begin the Repetition. Take your time. Don’t start until Uma has provoked some opinion in you, however small.” Adam nods, and the Repetition begins. For long moments, Adam takes Uma in. Then he says, “I like your earrings!" Uma is pleased. “You like my earrings?" “Yes, I really like your earrings!" “Yes, you really like my earrings?" “Yes, I really like your earrings!" “Yes, you really like my earrings?” “Yes, that’s what I said. I really like your earrings!" Uma is obviously a little overwhelmed with Adam’s candor and enthusiasm. “Well," she blurts out, “thank you for the compli¬ ment." The class bursts out laughing—Uma’s remark is so awk¬ ward. But Adam stays with the Repetition. “Well,” he says, “thank me for the compliment." “Yeah." Uma laughs. “Thank you for the compliment." “Yeah, thank me for the compliment." “This is really getting saccharine." Adam: “This is really getting saccharine?’’ “Yeah, this is really getting saccharine." “That’s a lousy thing to say.’’ The class bursts out laughing again. “Okay," says Bill, smiling. “You’ve got it. Notice that when Uma said, This is really getting saccharine,’ that came right from her point of view about what was going on between them. So the third way the Repetition can change is when you express an

54

The Actor’s Art and Craft \

opinion, a point of view. And this can happen any time during the Repetition, so long as it comes to the surface from something that really exists, something that’s really going on between you and your partner.”

More pairs of students get up to do Repetition in front of every¬ one. Rill watchdogs the work and stops the exercises from time to time to point out a missed moment here, a dropped impulse there. The students nod their heads more and more as he works with them. By sticking faithfully to the Repetition, they become more spontaneous, and the more spontaneous they become, the more exciting their work is to watch: touching, funny, wild, and utterly unpredictable. After a few more rounds, Bill makes this point: "You know what I’m hearing? The actors starting the Repetition usually begin by noticing something positive and supportive. ‘I like your shoes.’ ‘Your hair looks great.’ But this is important: The moment you begin to work with yourself as an acting instrument, only one thing in the world can matter to you: the truth. “Harold Clurman once said, The domain of the theater is uni¬ versal, nothing human is alien to it.' This is why theater artists accept all lifestyles, all humanist values. We embrace the notion that nothing—not the highest pinnacles of nobility, not the deep¬ est depths of depravity—nothing is beyond our sphere as players in the great passion of life. We must not judge. We must partici¬ pate fully. We must always honor the truth. “If we’re being honest with ourselves, we’d have to admit that, in real life, we often behave in a manner that’s less than honest. When was the last time you approached your hostess at a party and said, ‘Good night. I really have to leave now; I’ve had an awful

Repetition Continues

5 5

time. Your friends are the most obnoxious group of people I’ve ever encountered in my life and the food was horrible!”’ Everyone laughs. Bill laughs, too. “Of course you don’t say that. If you did, people would stop inviting you to parties. So in life we say a lot of things just to keep the wheels oiled. And in life there are real consequences to speaking the truth. If you tell your boss to drop dead, you’ll lose your real job, you won’t have any real money, and you won’t be able to pay your real rent. But when you’re acting, the situation is completely different. Because life when you’re acting, is never the same as real life. “For example, how many people here would love to die of cancer?” No one in the class raises a hand. Bill notes this and continues. “Okay. But what if someone handed you a script and said, ‘Here’s the part I want you to play. In this script, your char¬ acter dies in agony throughout the entire second act.’Who would like to play that?” Many hands go up. Bill grins. “Of course you would. You feel this way because you’re actors. When you read that script and realize that you’re going to die from a horrible disease, your faces light up and you think, ‘Ah! Great! Look at this fantastic scene in the hospital right before I expire! They bring in the kids. My whole family’s there. They even bring in the dog to say good-bye. This is perfect! There won’t be a dry eye in the house! ”’ The class laughs. “Or think about this,” says Bill. “Desdemona and Othello come offstage after the play. The actor playing Des¬ demona says to the actor playing Othello, ‘God, you were so won¬ derful tonight! I really thought you were going to kill me! For real! I almost wet the bed! I loved it! Let’s go get a beer!’ “The imaginary world and the real world have different values, and you, as actors, have to understand that. Every time you with¬ hold a truthful response, you actively hurt your development as an actor. Now, that being said, I don’t encourage you to turn

The Actor’s Art and Craft

56

Repetition into an excuse for being rude to one another. But let’s start working from your honest responses. Don’t edit them in order to be perceived as nice. “You’ve come here to be trained as actors,’’ Bill says. “And you bring a lifetime’s accumulation of defenses in order to prevent yourself from displaying your true selves. Many of your past expe¬ riences have, to a greater or lesser degree, sealed your true selves away from the world to a point where you may have lost all aware¬ ness of who your true self is. “Repetition can cure this, because Repetition demands spon¬ taneity, and spontaneity can unlock the thick door of reservations that keeps your true personality imprisoned. Remember: It’s only when your response to something truly surprises you that it will also surprise other people—your audience. This is one of the goals of Repetition. You could say that a big part of my job over the next few weeks will be to trick you into being yourselves. Why? Because it’s the only way to reconnect you with the thrill of your own spontaneous responses. “Okay. Enough talk. Let’s get back to work.”

Jon and Cheryl are working together now, and Jon begins. “That’s a very sexy blouse,’’ he says. “That’s a very sexy blouse?” says Cheryl. “Yes,” says Jon. “That’s a very sexy blouse.” “Yes, that’s a very sexy blouse?” “Yes,” Jon says. “That’s a very sexy blouse.” Cheryl sighs. “Okay,” she says. “It’s a very sexy blouse.” “Okay,” says Jon. “It’s a very sexy blouse.” “Okay,” says Cheryl. She’s obviously getting a little steamed. “It’s a very sexy blouse.”

Repetition Continues

57

Jon squints at Cheryl. “What’s wrong with you?’’ he asks. “What’s wrong with me?” Cheryl demands. “Yeah, what’s wrong with you?” This seems to aggravate Cheryl even more. “Yeah, what’s wrong with me?” “Yeah,” says Jon. “You seem a little offended.” Cheryl’s practically sputtering. “Yeah,” she says, “I seem a little offended?” Bill interjects quickly. “Okay, let’s stop for a moment.” He turns to the class. “Did everyone see what made Jon say, 'You seem a little offended’? What made him say that? What caused that shift in the Repetition?” Amber: “Cheryl did. She was clearly offended.” “That’s right,” says Bilk “But Jon didn’t get that from anything Cheryl said; he got it from her behavior. It’s good that we’re bring¬ ing this up now. We’ve stumbled on it by accident, but we couldn’t have done so at a better time. The fourth way that the Repetition can change is by responding to your partner’s behavior. “Up until now, I’ve told you to put your concentration exclusively on the Repetition. To listen carefully and to miss nothing that the other person says to you. Now I’m asking you to extend your con¬ centration to include your partner’s behavior. Because a person’s behavior communicates more truthfully what they really mean than the words they’re speaking. Tet me show you. Cheryl, do some Repetition with me.” Bill turns to the class, but gestures to Cheryl. “Watch her,” he says. “But listen to me.” “You look really outdoorsy,” says Bill. “I look really outdoorsy?” Cheryl repeats. She clearly doesn’t know how to take this. “Yeah,” says Bilk “You look really outdoorsy.”

58

The Actor’s Art and Craft

“Yeah, I look really outdoorsy?” “Yes,” says Bill. “What’s so funny about that?” “Yes, what’s so funny about that?” “Yes, what’s so funny about that?” “Yes, what’s so funny about that?” “Yes, don’t you know?” “Yes, don’t I know?” “Yes, don’t you know?” “Yes, don’t I know?” “Yes, what’s the matter? Don’t you understand that?” “Don’t I understand that?” “Yes,” says Bill. “What’s so confusing?” “Yes, what’s so confusing?” “Yes,” demands Bill. “That’s what I said. What’s so confusing?!” Bill’s response is so fiery as to be comic. Cheryl blubbers, “I don’t know!” The class laughs, and Bill turns to address them. “There. Can you see that everything I said was provoked by her behavior?” Everyone nods. “So there you have it,” says Bill. “That’s the fourth change in the Repetition. And now you know all the ways that the Repetition can change. Let’s review them quickly.'’ Jon: “Well, one of them is off the honest answer.” “That’s right. You always change the Repetition in order to respond honestly.” Uma: “Then there’s the pileup.” “Right. The sheer repetitiousness of the Repetition can begin to play on you internally and create an impulse, which makes a change. What’s the third way?” “Point of view,” says Adam. 'That’s right,” says Bill. “If you have an opinion at any time in the Repetition, you can express it, and that will change the Rep¬ etition. And now—finally—you know to respond off the other

Repetition Continues

59

person’s behavior. When their behavior changes, the words of the Repetition must change in order to reflect it. “Have you noticed how, with each change we introduced, the Repetition became more and more lively?’’ The class nods. Bill nods back. “That’s because the Repetition forces you into real contact with your partner. Not intellectual contact—that’s useless to an actor. I mean real contact—emotional contact. “I’ll put it to you this way: How many of you were in the Boy Scouts?’’ Kenny, Trevor, Adam, and Dom raise their hands. Bill points to Trevor. “How did the Scouts teach you to start a fire when you had no matches?” Trevor grins. “We rubbed two sticks together until they made a spark, and the spark started a fire.” “Good,” says Bill. “That’s how I want you to think of the Repeti¬ tion exercise. Repetition takes two actors and rubs them together so that sparks of life begin to happen. Now that you’ve got the four changes down, let’s ruin everything and introduce some¬ thing new. “For next time, I want you to find some activity that involves concrete objects—meaning actual physical items. I want you to choose a task that will demand real concentration in order for you to complete it. The key factor here is that—whatever you choose to do—this task must be something that you can’t perform with¬ out putting one hundred percent of your attention on it. Think of this task as an exercise for your concentration.” Kenny raises his hand. “Bill, can you give an example?” Bill gets up from his chair and walks to the property shelves along the opposite wall. He rummages through them and pulls out a book. “See this? The title is Taste of Honey by a woman named Eileen Goudge. It’s written in English. I ask you: How much concentration would it take to translate the first chapter of this book into another language?”

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Kenny raises his hand again. “A lot. But I could translate it into Italian.” “You know enough Italian to do that?” Bill asks. Kenny nods. “Okay. What would you need to do the job right?’ “I’d need the book, a pen, a lot of paper, and an English-Italian dictionary.” “Okay,” says Bill. “Then that’s what you should bring to class next time. That’ll be good for you.” Bill goes back to the shelves and pulls out a bouquet of artifi¬ cial flowers. He holds them up. “What could somebody do with these?” he asks. Melissa raises her hand. “I could try to draw them,” she says. “That’s good,” says Bill. “To draw these flowers would take a lot of your concentration, wouldn’t it?” “It would for me,” says Melissa. “I’m not much of an artist.” “Excellent,” says Bill. “I think you’ve got the idea. Bring these tasks to class next time and I’ll show you how to put them together with the Repetition. But between now and then, get together with your partners again and repeat! Practice, prac¬ tice, practice!”

I sidestep the crowd of students that gathers by Bill’s desk once the class breaks up. Shouldering my bag, I head straight for his office. The door is open and I push inside. Bill’s assistant, Laith, stands by the combination fax machine/ copier balancing a sheaf of paperwork in one hand while punch¬ ing a tattoo of numbers into the keypad with the other. Every time I see Laith he’s juggling a hundred things at once. Like the stage manager for a theatrical company, he is invaluable in keeping the gears of Bill’s school running smoothly.

Repetition Continues

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Moments after Laith exits the office, Bill enters and nods to me. “They seem to be catching on,” he says, and moves to sit behind his desk. “They’re a good group. You’re very lucky.” “I’ve been lucky a lot. I tend to get very committed students.’’ Bill makes himself comfortable in his chair and taps the keyboard of his Apple desktop. The screen blinks to life and he opens his e-mail program. “Do you think you’ve got everything you need to write about Repetition?” “Almost. I’d like to pin a few things down before moving on.” “Go ahead.” Taking the seat next to Bill’s, I pull out my notepad and pen. “Mostly I’m worried that writing about Repetition won’t do it jus¬ tice. The exercise is so spontaneous that, when it’s going full-tilt, every moment is completely new and unexpected. Reading about it won’t be the same as seeing it in action.” “That’s true,” Bill says. “But on that point, we should note that reading a book about acting can never take the place of studying and practicing with a qualified teacher.” “I can write a sentence or two about that.” “Do that. I’d hate to have a bunch of people running around thinking they know everything about Meisner Technique after reading our book. Repetition is an extraordinary exercise. Even after forty years of working with it, I’m amazed at how quickly it gets an actor out of his head and moves all of his responses south by about a foot.” Bill taps his head with his hand, then taps his chest. “Now he’s operating from where he should: from his heart. Repetition is such a simple exercise, but consider what it demands from someone. It forces the actor to really listen. It forces the actor to really respond. It forces the actor to work moment-to-moment, and it forces him into real spontaneity.” “A good place to begin studying the craft,” I say.

DEVELOPING CONCENTRATION

“I don’t know what is better than the work that is given to the actor—to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.” —Sir Laurence Olivier

Mimi is a flamboyant, bawdy woman who made her mark in the industry as a sitcom star back in the early eighties. When the series ended, however, her career began to atrophy. Television wasn’t hiring her anymore, so she took jobs in regional theater. It was a big shift which required an almost total redirection of her talent. She found she wasn’t prepared for it. During her admission interview to the studio, Mimi confided in Bill. “I just didn’t feel qualified for the work I was doing onstage. Here I was suddenly being asked to play these major characters from the classics. Medea. Hedda Gabler. Lady Mac¬ beth. Lysistrata. I had no idea where to begin crafting them! Theaters hired me quite often because people knew me from my TV show. But pretty soon that just wasn’t enough for me. I decided to come back to school.” Compared with some of her fellow students, Mimi certainly has more life experience from which to draw her work. On the other hand, she’s had more time to accumulate bad habits. Despite the fact that he’s had only a few classes to work with Mimi, Bill has already begun to effect a change in those habits.

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I’ve noticed the particular way he works with her—gently, very gently. On the outside it might appear that Bills paying deference to Mimi’s experience, age, and talent. Not so. He knows that the process of retraining an actor can be as tedious and painstaking as the process of teaching someone from scratch. Best to work easy. Best to go slow. Mimi and Dom are the first up to work the next time the class meets. Mimi takes a seat at the small table in the playing area. Pulling a copy of the Village Voice from her bag, she lays it out on the table and begins to flip through the pages. Dom pulls up a chair and makes himself comfortable. Mimi, already engrossed in her paper, takes a small pad and a pencil from her handbag and begins to make occasional notes on what she reads. For a few moments they are silent. Mimi works at the paper while Dom takes her in. Then, once Dom has the impulse to speak, he does so and the Repetition begins. “You look grim,” says Dom. Beat. Mimi looks up from her paper and frowns at him. “I look v>

grim ?

“Yeah,” says Dom, shrugging. “You look grim.” Mimi shoots him an acid look and returns her attention to the paper. She flips a page and sighs. “Yeah,” she says. “I look grim.” “Yeah,” says Dom. “Is it something I did?” Mimi thumps the end of her pencil on the table and glances at Dom again. “Yeah,” she says. Her voice is elevated, rich with tones. She speaks with the rolling, perfect diction of a trained actress. I glance over and catch a small wince cross Bill s face. “Is it something you did?” “Yeah,” says Dom, rolling his eyes. “Is it something I did?” “Is it something you did?” Mimi flips a page. “Yeah, Mimi,” Dom says. “You seem annoyed." Dom seems upset over the way she’s treating him.

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Mimi flips another page and scans it with her eyes. Finding an ad that interests hep she circles it, nods, and shrugs. “Yeah/’ she says, noncommittal. “I seem annoyed. So what?” “So what?” Dom gapes. “So what,” says Mimi. She yawns and flips a page. “Okay,” says Bill. “Let’s stop. Mimi, what are you doing?” Mimi looks up at him and grins. “You mean, what’s my activity?” Bill looks at her, his expression blank. “That’s what I meant.” Mimi’s grin grows positively huge. “Well. See, I’m looking for an apartment in the real estate section of the Voice.'' Bill’s tone is unimpressed. “And what exactly does that entail?” Mimi cocks her head. “I’m not sure what you mean.” Bill doesn’t move a muscle. “What I mean is, what exactly are you doing? I understand that you’re flipping through a newspaper; I can see that. But so what? How is that difficult?” For the first time Mimi blanches. Her grin begins to falter. “Well,” she says. “See . . . when I see an apartment I like? I circle it and make a note on this pad.” Bill shakes his head. “That’s not difficult enough.” “I thought it was.” “Not at all. Not by a long shot.” Bill turns in his seat to address the class. “The last time we met, what did I tell you about the activity? What makes up a good activity?” Amber checks her notebook and reads from what she’s written. “You said it should involve concrete objects. Physical items.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “I did say that. Mimi has a pen and a pad and a newspaper. So far so good. What else?” Amber continues. “You said, most important, an activity must demand real concentration in order for you to complete it. It should be a task you can’t possibly perform without using one hundred percent of your concentration.”

Developing Concentration

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Bill nods. “Very good. Thank you.” He turns back to Mimi. “Do you understand that? What you’re doing isn’t hard enough.” Mimi frowns. “Then . . . I’m sorry. I guess I just don’t under¬ stand the activity at all. To me, looking for an apartment in New York City is a very hard thing to do.” Bill raises his eyebrows. “I agree with you. Looking for an apart¬ ment in New York can be a very hard thing to do. To find an apartment in New York City, you have to do a lot of running around, dealing with brokers, setting up appointments, filling out forms, going through credit checks, maybe getting a cosigner . . . and that’s just the beginning of the nightmare. But that’s not what you’re doing here! Here you’re just flipping through the paper. As an activity, it’s not engrossing enough. It demands practically nothing from your attention span, and it won’t help you for this exercise.” “Oh,” says Mimi. She closes the paper on her desk and sits there, thinking. "You knit,” Bill says suddenly. Mimi looks up and blinks at him. “Excuse me?” “Didn’t I see you knitting in your chair as I walked in at the beginning of class?” Mimi blushes. “I’m just learning. I’m not very good.” “Is that right?” Bill says. His grin has become positively huge. “Tell me about it.” *

“I’m all thumbs with it,” Mimi complains. “My sister makes it look so damn easy. 1 don’t know how she does it.” “Would you get your knitting bag and start knitting for us, please?” Mimi stares at him. “I don’t understand.” “Please,” says Bill.

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Mimi flips another page and scans it with her eyes. Finding an ad that interests her, she circles it, nods, and shrugs. “Yeah,” she says, noncommittal. “I seem annoyed. So what?” “So what?” Dom gapes. “So what,” says Mimi. She yawns and flips a page. “Okay,” says Bill. “Lets stop. Mimi, what are you doing?” Mimi looks up at him and grins. “You mean, what’s my activity?” Bill looks at her, his expression blank. “That’s what I meant.” Mimi’s grin grows positively huge. “Well. See, I’m looking for an apartment in the real estate section of the Voice." Bill’s tone is unimpressed. “And what exactly does that entail?’’ Mimi cocks her head. “I’m not sure what you mean.” Bill doesn’t move a muscle. “What I mean is, what exactly are you doing? I understand that you’re flipping through a newspaper; I can see that. But so what? How is that difficult?” For the first time Mimi blanches. Her grin begins to falter. “Well,” she says. “See . . . when I see an apartment I like? I circle it and make a note on this pad." Bill shakes his head. “That’s not difficult enough. “I thought it was.” “Not at all. Not by a long shot.’’ Bill turns in his seat to address the class. “The last time we met, what did I tell you about the activity? What makes up a good activity?” Amber checks her notebook and reads from what she’s written. “You said it should involve concrete objects. Physical items.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “I did say that. Mimi has a pen and a pad and a newspaper. So far so good. What else?” Amber continues. “You said, most important, an activity must demand real concentration in order for you to complete it. It should be a task you can’t possibly perform without using one hundred percent of your concentration.”

Developing Concentration

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Bill nods. ‘Very good. Thank you.’’ He turns back to Mimi. “Do you understand that? What you’re doing isn’t hard enough.” Mimi frowns. “Then . . . I’m sorry. I guess I just don’t under¬ stand the activity at all. To me, looking for an apartment in New York City is a very hard thing to do.” Bill raises his eyebrows. “I agree with you. Looking for an apart¬ ment in New York can be a very hard thing to do. To find an apartment in New York City, you have to do a lot of running around, dealing with brokers, setting up appointments, filling out forms, going through credit checks, maybe getting a cosigner . . . and that’s just the beginning of the nightmare. But that’s not what you’re doing here! Here you’re just flipping through the paper. As an activity, it’s not engrossing enough. It demands practically nothing from your attention span, and it won’t help you for this exercise.” “Oh,” says Mimi. She closes the paper on her desk and sits there, thinking. “You knit,” Bill says suddenly. Mimi looks up and blinks at him. “Excuse me?” “Didn’t I see you knitting in your chair as I walked in at the beginning of class?” Mimi blushes. “I’m just learning. I’m not very good.” “Is that right?” Bill says. His grin has become positively huge. “Tell m^ about it.” “I’m all thumbs with it,” Mimi complains. “My sister makes it look so damn easy. I don’t know how she does it.” “Would you get your knitting bag and start knitting for us, please?” Mimi stares at him. “I don’t understand.” “Please,” says Bill.

1 1 1

The Actor’s Art and Craft

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Moments later Mimi is seated back at the table. Her copy of the Village Voice has been put away and her knitting bag now lies open on the floor with a gnarled birds nest of ocher-colored wool yarn spilling out from it. Mimi holds a long pair of needles in her hands. Her grasp of the instruments is awkward. It’s clear that Mimi’s no pro at knitting. “Can you make a sweater?” Bill asks. Mimi snorts. “Are you kidding? I can barely make a decent stitch.” “Wonderful,” says Bill. “Now we re onto something. I’d like you to make a sweater. Do you have a pattern you can use?” Mimi winces. Reaching into her bag she hauls out a small pat¬ tern book, which she handles with obvious distaste. She flips it open to a page. “I don’t even know how to read this.” “Try,” says Bill. “Make a sweater.” “The whole thing?” Mimi snaps. “Of course. It’s cold outside.” Dom, seated nearby, opens his mouth to speak, but Bill waves him to silence. “Please,” he says to Mimi. “Begin.” Mimi sighs explosively and sets her needles down. With every move she makes, every breath she draws, she presents the very picture of a woman in actual torment. Picking up the pattern book, she squints at the sweater template within. Her eyes wrin¬ kle and her nose scrunches up with concentration. For long moments we watch her struggle. This is a different Mimi from the flamboyant woman we’ve come to know. Gone are the grandiose gestures and Arkadina-esque flourishes of the trained actress. The woman before us is very still, very focused, and incredibly interesting to watch. Her world has collapsed into the vortex of her intense concentration; her breathing comes shallow and tight. Watching her, I’m struck by the thought that if the roof of the studio were to cave in just

D eveloping Concentration

69

now, Mimi wouldn’t notice. She’s that far gone into what she’s doing. When he feels all is ready, Bill catches Dorn’s eye and nods at him to begin. Dom takes Mimi in and says, “You’re really intent.” Mimi is so into her pattern book that she doesn’t reply at first. It almost seems as if she might not have heard Dom. When she finally responds, her voice is disembodied, completely distracted. “I’m really intent.” “Yeah,” says Dom. “You’re really intent.” Beat. Mimi shakes her head at something she reads in the pat¬ tern book. She turns a page, reading, and then—as if remember¬ ing where she is—replies: “I’m . . . intent?” Her delivery of the line would be funny if everyone weren’t so riveted on what she was doing. Something about Mimi’s complete concentration seems to intensify Dorn’s focus as well. He speaks slowly. “You’re not really listening to me.” Mimi scratches absently at her chin and nods her head, appar¬ ently satisfied with something. Frowning, she sets down the pat¬ tern book and picks up her needles with shaking fingers. She grips the yarn and makes a tentative stitch. “I’m not listening to you,” she whispers. “You’renot listening to me,” Dom presses. “That’s right. I’m— Shit! I’m not listening to you.” Dom smirks. “That’s right, you’re—shit—you’re not listening to me. Mimi tries to make the stitch again and fails. “Shit!” she says. “Okay! I’m not listening to you, all right?!” “Hey, don’t shout at me!” says Dom. “Don’t shout at you?!’’ Another missed stitch. “Shit!” “No!” says Dom. “How do you think that makes me/eeZ?!”

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Mimi’s hands are shaking violently now.

Her teeth are

clenched together like a set of channel locks. She’s muttering from behind sealed lips. This time the stitch nearly falls into place. “How ... do I think . . . that makes you . . . Shit!” “Yeah,” screams Dom. “How do you think that makes me/ee/?!” Mimi’s temper suddenly explodes. She pounds her fist onto the table so hard that the pattern book jumps a full inch and a half into the air. “Shut up!” she screams “Shut up!” She stares at the impossible tangle of yarn in her hands. Dom throws up his hands. “Shut up?!” he demands.

“You

shut up!” Mimi’s fingers begin to work manically at untangling the bad stitch. She doesn’t have a chance. The more she works at it, the tighter the knot becomes. “Stop it!” she retorts. “Just— Dammit! Stop!” “Stop?” Dom demands. “Stop what? Stop what?” Mimi’s finally gives up and slams her hands onto the tabletop. “Dammit! This is stupid!” “Dammit, that’s stwpid?” Dom asks. Suddenly he can’t contain himself. He snickers. Mimi snaps her head toward him and growls, “What the hell is so funny?!” This sets Dom off even more. He starts to laugh, choking for breath, which makes Mimi positively furious. She pounds her fist against the table so hard that she knocks her needles onto the floor. “What the hell is so funny?!” she screams. She waves the tangled knot of yarn in the air in front of Dom like a dead rabbit. By this point the entire class is asphyxiating from trying to con¬ tain their laughter. Bill waves his hands in the air. He’s smiling ear to ear. “Okay,” he says. “Okay! That’s good!” “Dear God!” Mimi explodes. All at once she sinks back into her chair, her chest heaving as if she’s just run a marathon. She stares

Developing Concentration

7 1

at the needles on the ground and then at her own shaking fingers. “Dear God\” Bill turns to the class. “Can somebody tell me what we just saw?” Uma responds. “The first activity Mimi chose was too easy,” she says. “It didn’t . . . How did you put it? It didn’t demand one hundred percent of her concentration.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “And then what happened? On the sec¬ ond go-round, what did you see?” Jon raises his hand. “She was so into trying to knit—really try¬ ing to do it—that she ... I don’t know. She stopped acting and started really responding.” “Yes,” says Bill. “That’s absolutely correct. Remember: Once an actor places the totality of his concentration on the accomplish¬ ment of some concrete, specific, and truthful goal, he cannot help but react truthfully, from the core of his self and experience. In this manner the activity becomes a real workout in the reality of doing, and the actor becomes emotional in spite of himself. “Notice something else. Mimi wasn’t trying to act. She was really and genuinely trying to knit that sweater, and so, when she came to life, her emotion was of very good quality. By which I mean that nothing about it was manufactured. She was not trying to be emotional; she was trying to get her work done. That’s what makes all the difference. Remember: You must never, ever, ever try to be emotional. Instead, choose an activity with real difficulty in the object. In the doing!” “Bill,” says Reg. “I’m confused. I thought that both the activi¬ ties Mimi chose were difficult in their own way. But you’re saying that’s not the case, right?” “That’s right,” says Bill. “Her two activities were light-years apart in terms of crafting. I want to make sure this is clear to you, so let’s look at it another way. Would you answer a question for me? What’s two plus two?”

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Reg shoots Bill a smug look. ‘‘Last time I checked?” he says. tour. “Good.” Bill nods. “Now try this one: What’s seven thousand four hundred eighteen divided by three?” The look on Reg’s face changes immediately. He frowns with concentration, glances to one side, and begins to make soft tick¬ ing motions with his chin, nodding as he checks off the numbers in his head. “Stop,” Bill says. Reg lets out a huge sigh of relief and the class laughs. Bill turns to them. “Did you see the shift in Reg’s behav¬ ior? That’s a true, concrete obstacle; it forces the concentration to the point where the actor loses all awareness of himself and what he’s doing or how he’s responding to the other person. Obstacles lie at the core of dramatic action.” Kenny pipes up from the back row, “Could you explain that a bit more, Bill?” Bill nods. “The word ‘drama’ comes to us from the Greek, mean¬ ing ‘to do’ or ‘to perform.’ In a drama, characters struggle to over¬ come some obstacle. The higher their obstacle, the better it is for the audience, since struggle is inherently interesting to watch. Every human being can identify with it because we all experience struggle as a part of life. In fact where there’s no struggle, there is no life. “Crafting a difficult activity is the best gift you can give yourself as an actor. A truly difficult activity will demand that you place the entirety of your concentration on it, but you must still respond to your partner—you can’t just let the Repetition go by the wayside. You’re responsible for responding to what you hear, just as before.” Adam: “Bill, should you try to listen to the other person when you have the activity?” Bill shakes his head. “Emphatically no. You know what Lincoln said? ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ Neither, for

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that matter, can an actor. If you have the activity, your obligation is to get that activity done and respond to what you hear. Do your work, trusting that you’ll hear whatever your partner says. If you’re so into what you’re doing that you don’t hear something? Well then, that becomes the truth of your response.” Donna: “Bill, I noticed that the Repetition tended to slow down a bit when Mimi had a real activity. Is that okay?” Bill nods. “Yes. The exchange will change pace necessarily now that one partner is completely focused on something else. In fact, actors sometimes develop a tendency to respond by rote when they’re doing an activity, rather than responding to the impulses their partner inspires within them. Part of my job as we enter this next phase of the exercise will be to make sure that you’re still answering responsively to every moment, no matter what you’re involved in.” Donna makes a face. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.” Bill waves his hand. "It’s one thing to just repeat what you hear, quite another thing to use the Repetition to respond to your partner in every moment. Each moment from your partner will come as an interjection or interruption to the concentration you put on your activity. However, you must answer each of those interruptions for what they mean to you, no matter how involved you are in your task. “We’re'getting ahead of ourselves,” he says. “You’ll see what I mean as we go along. Let’s have two more actors come up and give the activity a whirl.”

For the remainder of the class period, the students present what they thought were fully engrossing, difficult activities. Bill rejects nearly each one as being too easy.

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For instance, when it’s her turn to work, Cheryl lays the broken pieces of a dinner plate out on the table. Before she even gets started, Bill asks her what she’s doing. She replies that her activity is to glue the plate back together again. “Great idea,” says Bill. “How many pieces have you got there?” Cheryl counts the pieces: She has seven. “Really?” says Bill. “Would you bring them here to me?” Cheryl bundles the shards into a kitchen towel and brings the packet to Bill, who accepts the package as if it were the crown jewels of England. “Thank you,” he says. Then he drops the bundle on the floor and stomps on it a few times, causing Cheryl to moan and the rest of the class to gasp. Stooping to retrieve the packet, Bill hands it back to Cheryl and says, utterly straight-faced, “Try it now.” Quid fares no better. He brings in a microcassette whose mag¬ netic tape has unwound itself from the sprockets. Glossy brown loops of cellophane dangle from the cassette like thin tongues, twisting and crinkling and threatening to tear should they catch on the slightest obstruction. Quid produces a small screwdriver and inserts its blade into the take-up sprocket. Twisting his wrist, he begins to wind the tape back into the cassette case. Bill is not satisfied, though. “Here,” he says. “Let me help you.” Moving to Quid’s side, Bill takes the fragile loops of tape into his fingers and begins knotting them together in savage tangles— once, twice, three times. Quid collapses into himself as if shot through the guts. “Oh, no,” he moans. Bill makes a fourth knot, a fifth, then a sixth. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no . . .” Thanks to Bill’s intervention, both Cheryl and Quid begin their exercises in heightened states of focus and—not to put too fine a point on it—agitation. Turning back to the class, Bill simply repeats: “The bigger the obstacle, the greater the struggle. The greater the struggle, the more life we see.”

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Little by little the students come to respect the level of diffi¬ culty required to craft an activity that will truly serve them as actors. But Bill says, “The activity is no excuse for poor Repetition. One dropped moment can derail your entire sense of reality.” Kenny stumbles headlong into this trap. His partner is Amber, who has crafted an activity around teaching herself to juggle three neon orange tennis balls. Standing center stage, she consults a book whose cover reads How to Juggle. Satisfied, she tosses the book aside and begins lobbing the tennis balls into the air. She’s not a gifted juggler. She can barely keep one ball in the air, let alone three. Most of the balls hit the ground, forcing Amber to chase them. Kenny sits on one of the beds with his back to the wall, taking Amber in. Her exploits clearly amuse him. When he finally speaks, Kenny stifles a grin and says, “What are you doing?” “What am I doingT Amber demands. She consults her book again and tosses the balls into the air. No soap. Again, she can’t control them. “Yeah,” says Kenny, laughing. “What are you doingT Amber’s reply is laced with acid. She doesn’t even look at him. “What am I doing, Kenny?!” “That’s right,” says Kenny. “I said, ‘What are you doing?”’ Amber gets down on her hands and knees to retrieve a ball that rolled uncfer a chair. “What does it look like I’m doing?” She snorts. Kenny laughs. “What does it look like you’re doing?” “Yeah,” Amber growls, reaching for another ball. Her tone is incredulous. She clearly feels that Kenny’s a blind idiot or worse. “What does it look like I’m doing?!” she demands. Her subtext: you schmuck. “I don’t know.” Kenny grins. “You tell me.” “Stop,” Bill says. “Please stop. Kenny! Kenny!”

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Kenny gets defensive. “What? What’d I do?” Bill looks at him, exasperated. “You’re not using the moments. Can’t you hear what she’s really saying to you? When she said, 'What does it look like I’m doing?’ she was very clearly telling you that she thought your question was stupid. But you didn’t pick up on it. Instead you just made conversation.” Kenny blinks. “Okay. So?” Bill throws up his hands. “You’re not in here to make conversa¬ tion; you’re here to act!” Kenny attempts to process this for a beat. Finally he says, “I don’t get the difference.” Bill groans. “Listen. If the ability to make small talk was neces¬ sary for good acting, Charlie Chaplin would never have had a career. Your job isn’t to make cocktail chat. Your job is to put your entire attention on Amber and respond off what she’s giving you in her behavior. You’re not doing that. You’re just sitting there, impregnable to her overtures. You’re just being a smart aleck.” “What? No! Bill, I really wasn’t trying to do that; I was just—” “You were what?” Bill demands. “I . . .” Kenny falters. “I was just . . . you know.” “No,” says Bill. “I don’t. So please. Tell me.” “I guess I was just . .

Kenny’s shoulders collapse. “Making

conversation.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “You were. Not good." Bill turns to the class. “There’s a big difference between listen¬ ing to someone and really hearing them. Kenny was listening to Amber, but he didn’t really hear the sarcasm in her answer. And because he didn’t hear that, Amber couldn’t really have any effect on him. As a result, he was completely out of adjustment with what she was giving him. “Even though you’re doing an exercise, remember: It’s an exer¬ cise for acting. This means that you must take every moment

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you’re given in the exercise as an absolute reality. If, in the exer¬ cise, someone says something to you that would hurt your feel¬ ings in real life, you must allow your feelings to be hurt in the exercise. If someone says something to you in the exercise that would amuse you in real life, you must allow yourself to be amused. It’s not okay to miss a moment. You must take everything you get from your partner personally and respond truthfully— from your heart.” The class begins to scratch down notes, and Bill continues. “Speaking from your heart is an essential skill for actors. But most of you don’t do that. Most of you have been trained to fill time with meaningless jabber. Listen to me when I say this: Every word you utter which does not come from a truthful place within you will corrode your ability to act well. You must, as actors and artists, take exceptional care to be truthful unto yourselves at all times.” Bill motions for Kenny to leave the playing area and takes Kenny’s place on the bed. He tells Amber, “Start your activity again,” and she does. As before, her attempts at juggling meet with no success whatsoever. Bill takes her in for long moments, during which Amber whips herself into a lather trying to get the balls to fall just so. She’s quite a sight to behold. Finally Bill speaks: “You really need the practice.” The remark stops Amber dead. Tennis balls thump to the floor and rebound, spilling everywhere. One ball rolls against the wall, hits the molding, and stops there. Another skitters into the cor¬ ner. “I really need the practice?!” she demands. She impales Bill with a sharp gaze. If looks could kill, he’d be dead. “Hey,” Bill says. “Don’t look at me like that.” “Hey, don’t look at you like that?” “That’s right,” says Bill. “Don’t look at me like that.”

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“That’s right, don’t look at you like that?” “That’s right,” Bill says. “Don’t look at me like that.” Amber snorts. “Screw you!” Bill lays a hand on his chest. “Screw we?!” “Yeah, Bill. Screw you.” Bill’s really hurt by this. “Yeah, Bill, screw me?” “What, did I hurt your feelings?” Amber says. “Yes,” says Bill. “You hurt my feelings.” “Yes,” says Amber, “I hurt your feelings?” “Yes,” says Bill. “You hurt my feelings.’’ “Then don’t make fun of me,” Amber says. And the class laughs. Bill looks for Kenny in the student bleachers and finds him back in his seat. “You see what I mean?” he asks. “Don’t make conversation. Respond off the behavior.” “I get it,” says Kenny. “I think I got it.” “Good,” says Bill, “Every time I introduce the activity, people start to let go of the basics we’ve already learned. They start to respond too sensibly and intelligently. It’s best to nip these things in the bud; otherwise we ll end up having deadly conversa¬ tions.”

« ■ I 1 Melissa sits at the table in the playing area and lays out a bouquet of artificial flowers. Then she takes out a large sketch pad and a kit of charcoals and pastels. Frowning, she sets to work drawing a likeness of the bouquet. The exercise goes well. Reg and Melissa really listen and really respond to each other. Over the course of several minutes they laugh, scream at each other, trade jibes, shock each other, giggle, and grow bored, excited, then finally furious with each other. Bill nods his head and brings the exercise to a close.

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Turning to the class, he asks, “Do you see why that was good? Repetition has no agenda. There’s nothing that’s supposed to hap¬ pen; there’s nowhere the exchange is supposed to go. The point is to really listen, really hear, and truthfully respond—that’s it. If you do this, you create real contact between the partners. Not intellectual contact but emotional contact. The exercise becomes a workout for living spontaneously from moment to moment; that’s an essential skill for actors.” Rising, Bill approaches Melissa’s table. “Tell me what you’re doing for your activity,” he says. Melissa holds up her work. She’s gotten a good head start on creating an excellent likeness of the flower bouquet. “I’m having trouble getting the stem line of that tulip right,” she says. “See?” Bill examines her work. “Yes, I do. You’re trying to make your picture look exactly like the bouquet, aren’t you?” “That’s right,” says Melissa. “That’s why it’s so difficult. I have trouble drawing angles like that. See how it flares right where the first leaves sprout off the stem? Then it tapers again toward the bulb. That’s complicated.” “I agree,” says Bill. “But if it wasn’t complicated—if you weren’t trying to make your picture look exactly like this bouquet of flow¬ ers—-it wouldn’t be a worthwhile activity, would it?” Melissa thinks about this. “No,” she says. ‘‘The difficulty comes from having a standard to shoot for.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “And you’ve just introduced something that’s very important to our understanding of activities. We call it the standard of perfection. Without a standard of perfection, no activity is difficult. What happens if an activity isn’t difficult?” “It won’t bring you to life,” says Amber. Bill nods and turns back to Melissa. “What was the standard of perfection for Mimi’s activity? Remember when she tried to knit the sweater?”

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Melissa nods. “She had to make a sweater that looked exactly like the one in the pattern.” “Thats right,” says Bill. “Every stitch had to match the tem¬ plate. And what was Cheryl’s standard of perfection when she tried to glue the plate back together again?” Cheryl raises her hand. “I had to put every piece into its correct place and make it look as if the plate had never been broken.” “Very good,” says Bill. “Quid, what was the standard of perfec¬ tion for your activity with the cassette tape?” “I had to get the tape rewound onto its sprockets. I guess if I really wanted to test it out, though, I could’ve brought in a recorder to make sure that the tape could play properly once I was finished.” “Yes,” says Bill. “That would have been a very good idea. And how about Amber’s juggling activity?” Amber smiles. “My standard of perfection was to keep all three balls in the air at once. But I suppose it goes deeper than that. I really wanted to keep all three balls in the air any time 1 wanted, for as long as I wanted. That’s the only way to prove that I’d learned to juggle." “Excellent,” says Bill. “Now you see what I’m getting at. From now on, every activity will need a standard of perfection. When we apply ourselves to an activity, we must begin with the end in mind and keep working with all of our concentration until that end is met. How are we doing on time?” I glance at my watch and tell Bill that we re just about ready to quit. “All right,” Bill says. “I want to introduce something new for next time. Write this down. “For next class bring in an activity, same as you did this time. You’ll use the Repetition, same as you’ve been doing. This time, however, the person doing the activity must have a simple and specific reason for performing their task. Let’s go back to Mimi

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knitting a sweater. Mimi, what could be a simple and specific reason for doing that?" Mimi thinks a moment, then shrugs. "I could be making the sweater for my husband as a birthday present." “Wonderful,” Bill says. “That would do nicely. Quid, how about you? Why would you go to great lengths to repair that damaged *

cassette tape?” Quid’s face breaks into a huge grin. “My landlord promised to fix the broken tiles in my bathroom. I caught him saying it on tape because I had the recorder in my pocket. Now he’s saying he’s not going to do it, and I want to bring this tape to my lawyer, make sure I get my bathroom fixed.” Bill smiles. “You’re onto something good there. Did you all see how that reason activated him? That’s what we’re looking for. We call these reasons justifications, and again, they must have certain crite¬ ria. They must be simple and they must be specific. Finally, the jus¬ tification should be imaginary, but something that your imagination can accept as possible. Do you understand what I mean by this?” Tyrone chuckles. “Like you wouldn’t want us to say, ‘I’m fixing this broken plate because space aliens are coming down from the sky and they want to have dinner with me tonight. ” Bill smiles. “Right,” he says. “None of that. We ll talk more about this i^ext time. For now, keep rehearsing with your partners outside of class. Remember the words of the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein. He said, ‘If I miss one day of practice, I will know it. If I miss two days, my manager will know it. If I miss three days, my audience will know it. ”

Back in his office, Bill says, “They’re a pretty good class.” I look up from my notes. “They’re diverse,” I say. “They’re all individuals.”

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He nods. ‘Their individuality will become even more accentu¬ ated as the work deepens. It always happens like that. Its like watching their spirits being born. The work just serves to reveal them little by little. Like rubbing the tarnish off an old pewter cup.” “What’s the deal with Kenny?” Bill makes a face. “He’s spent years doing musical theater, a style that’s often presentational; it’s about selling a song or selling a performance to the audience. That can devastate an actor’s sense of truth. He’s got this tendency to make a scene rather than to let one happen. In a way he and Mimi have the same problem. There’s a tendency to push, to refuse to leave themselves alone and experience something genuine. I have a feeling that Kenny considers genuine things boring. I disagree entirely.” “They’ve all got their blocks,” I say. "He might move past it.” “He might,” Bill says, and leaves it at that. “This is always an exciting part of the training to enter, though. The justification. Do you know what I love about it most?” I click my pen. “Tell me." “Up until now the exercise was based on reality. You really come to class and really fix a plate while you really repeat with your partner. Introducing the justification to the activity is vital because it’s the first step the actor takes into the imaginary world. Once we cross that line, we’re into a new and exciting universe.”

FIVE

HOW TO JUSTIFY ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING

“I never paint what is. I only paint what I imagine could be.” — Degas

Donna and Quid are the first ones up when the class meets again. Donna takes a seat at the table in the playing area and lays out a small mirror, a curling iron, some hair products, and makeup. She drapes a cocktail dress wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic over one of the beds and begins to change out of her customary pantsuit. Quid moves to a position on the bed opposite her, makes him¬ self comfortable, and begins to observe her, taking her in. Long moments pass before Quid says, “That looks good on you.” The tone of his voice is appreciative. Donna has just struggled into the cocktail dress and she tosses her hair. “Th^s looks good on me?” “Yeah, girl. That looks good on you.” Donna laughs. “Yeah, girl? This looks good on me?” She moves to the makeup table and sits, examining herself in the mirror. Quid frowns. “What? You think I’m lying to you?” Out of the corner of my eye I catch Bill’s subtle nod. This is good. Quid picked up on Donna’s subtext and reacted off that, which changed the course of the Repetition. Donna begins applying makeup. “Do I think you’re lying to me?” “Yeah, girl, that’s what I said. You think I’m lying to you?”

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“Stop calling me girl.”’ Quid smiles. “Stop calling you girl?” Donna snaps closed a compact and picks up mascara. “Stop calling me girl.’” “Stop calling you girl?” “Yeah, stop it. I hate that.” Quid holds for a beat, then shrugs. “What do you want to be called?” “No,” says Bill, cutting in. “That’s too logical. Too intelligent.” Quid looks at him. “Sorry?”' “You answered her intelligently, but you didn’t answer what her behavior said. If you’re really working off the other person, the Repetition will never follow a sensible conversational path. It has a logic, but it’s a logic of cause and effect. I do something that does something to you, which makes you do something, which does some¬ thing to me. And on and on. Don’t make conversation. Just answer her real responses, which are expressed in her behavior rather than her words.” Quid returns his attention to Donna. He allows himself a few moments to let Donna affect him before saying, “You’re tense.” Donna’s in the middle of powdering her nose and she snorts. “I’m tense?” “Yes,” Quid insists. “You’re really tense.” Donna shakes her head and continues powdering. “Yes, I’m really tense?” “That’s what I said; I said you’re really tense.” Donna shakes her head again and roots for a lipstick in the pile of cosmetics. “That’s what you said,” she repeats. “You said I’m really tense?” Her tone is uninterested, even dismissive. “That’s what I said,” Quid starts. “I said you’re really—” Bill cuts in. “Quid. Does she even care that you’re here right now?”

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Quid glances at Donna and makes a face. “No.” “And did you notice that? “Yeah,” says Quid. “1 did. She’s sort of being bitchy to me.” “Then that’s what exists in her behavior. Let it affect you and work off that. She’s being a bitch to you, so what happens?” Quid looks back at Donna and shoots this at her: “I don’t like you.” Donna glowers at him. “You don’t like me?” “No, I don’t like you. You’re cold.” Donna stops what she’s doing and looks at him full-on. “No, you don’t like me, I’m cold?” “That’s right. You’re an ice queen.” “I’m an ice queen}\” Quid beams. “Oh, you don’t like to hear that, huh?’Again, I see Bill nod. Quid has once again successfully worked off Donna’s behavior rather than her words. “No, Quid, 1 don’t like to hear that!” “No, Quid, you don’t like to hear that?” Donna: “No, Quid! Dammit! I don’t like to hear that!” “Well then, don’t be so cold!” Now the two of them have come to life. The sticks, as Bill put it, are rubbing together, making real contact. Sparks have begun to fly. After a few more minutes Bill brings the exercise to a close. “That was pretty good, but I had to help you out a few times, you see? Every once in a while you miss something in her behav¬ ior and it hurts your contact, because whatever you don’t notice or don’t hear can’t affect you.” “Yeah,” says Quid. His tone is desultory. “I know.” Bill watches him. “Each moment you miss undermines your con¬ tact and hurts your work. Why do you think you do that? he asks. Quid frowns. “Sometimes I’m afraid that what’ll come out of my mouth will get me in trouble. ” At this, the entire class laughs.

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Bill nods. “Remember what Leo Durocher said.” Quid blinks. “Who?” Bill throws up his hands. “How can I relate to you people if you don’t know who Leo Durocher was? The famous manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers? You don’t know him?” an

Sorry.

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“You should be. He was the one who said, ‘Nice guys finish last.’ Ever heard that one?” Quid nods. “Well, it’s an important les¬ son for actors. It’s important for you especially because you’re try¬ ing to be nice rather than operating from your true feelings. Which means you’re manipulating yourself, and that hurts you. Do you understand?” Quid nods, his face crestfallen. “Yeah. I guess I do.” Bill persists. “Do you like it when people try to manipulate you in the outside world?” Quid shakes his head. “Then don’t do it to yourself in here. Give yourself a break, Quid. Every time you try to conform to someone else’s opinion of what’s nice and what’s not, you corrupt your acting instrument. Out in the real world, granted, we have to be cautious about what we say and when we say it. In here, however, the rules are different. We follow our impulses wherever they take us.” Bill turns to the class. “Impulses are the most important things we have as artists. Stop judging them. Get out of their way and follow wherever they lead. “When people are spontaneous, they’re always charming. They’re interesting to watch because they’re really and truly alive; we never know what they’ll do next because they never know what they’re going to do next. That’s what’s so captivating about them. “Sandy used to say that acting without spontaneity is like soup without salt. ‘It’s stale, flat, and unprofitablel’Your problem, Quid, is that you’ve trained yourself to behave in ways that you think will be attractive to the people around you. Like many others, you

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want people to see you as noble, generous, compassionate, and understanding. You prefer to believe that these images reflect your true nature.” Bill turns to the class. “How many of us portray ourselves as vulnerable? Malicious? Petty? Vain? Arrogant? How many of us will even admit that we carry these less-than-flattering qualities within us? Precious few. But these qualities, too, are facets of every human being. They are aspects of our humanity, and we must embrace them.” “Did you know that the great actress Eleonora Duse never wore makeup onstage? She wanted nothing to come between her and the audience. She wanted her face to reveal everything that was going on inside of her. Everything! She realized that a true actor must reveal the entire spectrum of human emotions.” Finished with Quid, Bill turns to Donna. “What’s your activity?” Donna smoothes out a wrinkle in her dress and says, “I’m put¬ ting on makeup.” “How is that difficult?” Donna looks at him. “Excuse me?” “Well, don’t you do that a lot? Isn’t putting on makeup some¬ thing you do all the time?” “Yes . . .” “Then what’s so complicated about it? How is that demanding of your full attention? Where’s your standard of perfection?” To all these questions, Donna winces and looks away. Bill continues. “See, this isn’t an activity that’s going to really bring you to life because it isn’t crafted very well. You’re not helping your develop¬ ment by giving yourself such an easy activity.” “But I thought . . .” “Yes?” “I guess I thought that it was a good activity because it was sort of a slice of life.” Bill holds up a hand. “Be careful,” he says. “This exercise must

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be truthful, but it’s not meant to be a slice of life. A Shakespeare play is not a slice of life. The Elizabethans didn’t run around speaking iambic pentameter at one another. So why are Shake¬ speare’s plays valued? Because they possess something more important than a literal depiction of everyday reality; they capture the truth of human experience. We still perform Shakespeare’s plays hundreds of years after they were written because they cap¬ ture human behavior in ways that will resonate forever. ‘If you constantly stick to what is real in your acting, you’ll never transport yourself into the world of the imagination. But it’s there and only there that the really great parts in the theatrical canon lie. Have you ever killed your own children?’’ Donna shakes her head. “I guess you’ll never play Medea, then. Too bad. Have you ever taught a blind, deaf girl to speak, read Braille, attend college, and participate in normal society?’’ Donna clears her throat. “No,” she says. “Oops,” says Bilk “There goes The Miracle Worker. How about this: Have you ever rebelled against an oppressive husband? An oppressive society? Have you ever left your own children behind to walk away from a life of bondage and escape into a world of poverty and suffering in which you will ultimately find your selfrespect?” “Ibsen. I get the point.” Bill gives Donna a good, long look. “All right, then,” he says finally. “You must understand that—in this studio—we’ve got no place for slices of life. Use this space for something different. To explore. To grow. To experience things you’ve never experienced before. “It’s never a question of ‘what is’ that’s exciting to the actor; it’s always a question of ‘what might be’ that activates him. All cre¬ ative work comes out of supposition. ‘What if this were true?’ or

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‘What if this happened to me?’ These are the questions that lead actors to life—to all the gold. Get it?” Donna nods. “Got it.” This line of thought has sparked something in Bill and he con¬ tinues. “Stanislavsky once said, ‘Life is to art as grapes are to wine.’ Meaning that life is the raw material of art, but they’re not the same thing. Not by a long shot. One is a much-rehned version of the other. “One time I was a guest artist at the Banff Festival in Alberta, Canada. At that time Banff was a major gathering of artists from all disciplines from all over the world. Everywhere you turned, you saw musicians, actors, painters, singers, dancers, sculptors, and photographers practicing their crafts. The Canadian Brass was in residence—so was William Primrose, the famous Scottish viola player. I got to meet Josef Svoboda, the brilliant European scenic designer. It was extraordinary: all these skilled craftsmen practic¬ ing against the breathtaking backdrop of the Canadian Rockies. “Anyway, there was one man who I saw walking around the grounds many times. He taught painting, and he wore a bright red shirt with big white block letters on it that said, ‘LIFE AIN’T ART!’And he was right. It ain’t. And don’t ever forget it.” Bill turns back to Donna. “Now let’s talk about your justification. What reason did you give yourself for putting on your makeup?” Donna shifts in her seat. “I’m going to a party.” Bill waits a few beats. “And . . . ?” Donna looks confused. “And that’s it,” she says. “I thought it was supposed to be something simple.” “It is supposed to be simple," Bill agrees. Then he turns to the class. “It’s also supposed to be something else, however. What else is your justification supposed to be?” Mimi checks her notes. “Specific,” she says. “You asked us to be specific.”

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Bill nods. “I agree. Going to a party is a simple reason, but its not specific enough. Why specifically do you want to go to this party? Do you hope to meet a specific person? Will Steven Spiel¬ berg be there? Are you receiving some kind of award?” Donna shakes her head. “If I answer those kinds of questions, my justification isn’t simple anymore. But if I don’t, you say I’m being too general. I’m confused.” “Let’s clarify this. First, what does the word ‘specific’ mean?” Uma speaks: “Concrete.” “That’s right,” says Bill. “You might also say ‘singular.’ So, what does ‘general’ mean?” Vanessa: “Vague. Broad-ranging. Ambiguous.” “Yes,” says Bill. “As an example, the term ‘mankind would be general. On the other hand, ‘Trevor’ is a specific person. Let’s apply this principle to something you can understand.” Bill turns to Tyrone. “I know somebody who’s hiring for a job. Do you want it?” Tyrone looks at Bill, waiting. Finally: “I guess ...?’’ “Aren’t you excited?” Bill asks. “It’s a really great job.” “I guess I need to know more about it first. What would I be doing? Where do I have to go? How much am I getting paid?” “Oh,” says Bill. “You mean you need me to be a little more . . .” “Specific,” says Tyrone. And he suddenly grins. Bill turns to Jon. “I know this person who really wants to go out with you.” Jon squints at him. “You know what I’m going to ask next.” Bill laughs. “I think I do. You’re going to ask, what does this per¬ son look like? What’s their personality like? What does he or she do for a living?” “Actually,” says Jon, “I was going to ask how much money she made.” The class laughs. “Right,” says Bill. “A very specific piece of information that per¬ haps will inspire you.” He turns to Dom. “Could you do me a favor?

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My cousin Yolanda is waiting for me downstairs on the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue. Could you go down and bring her back up here, please?” “Thirty-fourth and Seventh is a busy intersection,” Dom says. “So what?” “So I’m going to need a little more information if I’m supposed to pick out your cousin from everybody else,” says Dom. “Oh,” says Bill. “Right. Well, what if I told you she’s four-foottwo, three hundred pounds, with red hair, spiked heels, and she’s wearing a magenta jumpsuit?” “I’m on my way.” Bill grins and turns back to Jon. “Yolanda’s the one who wants to go out with you.” Jon makes a face. “No, thanks,” he says. “I’m taken.”

“I want you to consider that there are no generalities in nature. Therefore, there can be no generalities in art, because the artist—as Hamlet put it so eloquently—seeks to hold the mirror up to nature. “To be an a