The Story Behind the Theatre; The Actor As An Artist

But New York City the theater capital of the world Riverside radio brings you the story behind the theater. In weeks past we have heard how producers directors designers managers and the many behind the scenes members of a theater production are hard at work long before a play reaches the boards. The actor he who is on stage when the curtain rises must also undergo arduous preparation and lengthy rehearsal before he faces the footlights today. Two well-known members of the same profession traced the steps and missteps of an acting career. But a field star of all theatrical media whose play credits include the four poster and a touch of the poet and the equally versatile stocks cuts worth. It was a Broadway roster lists and here with the wind and advise and consent discussed

the actor as an artist with our host for these backstage visits Lyle Di Jr.. There have been a thousand. At least I'm sure books and articles which of attempted to explain what might be called the creative process as it applies to acting or as it applies to actors. So that with that kind of background I doubt very much if in the next few minutes we're going to settle much here actually on this discussion of the actor as an artist. But nevertheless there are I think some excepted categories which could more or less describe what you might call the mechanics of the acting process. And Betty with both you and Staats I think if we can look into now the validity or there actually the practical operation of some of the mechanics of acting that out of your long experience and background you can bring to the program itself. Actually we may as well start with the the first thing first which of course is the script. What's the first thing as far as you're concerned do you try to personally identify yourself with a

character. Do you try to first absorb the story itself as a whole and see where you fit in. In other words are you concerned with yourself first or with the play as a whole. I've usually found that one should sit with the script. And read it straight through naturally knowing in the back of your mind what part you want to play or what part you've been asked to consider. But to get the impact of a play. Imagining yourself sitting in the theater watching it just as you would if you were there first get the impact of the whole play and in that way you do find your place in it and you can then begin the process of becoming or imagining. In such a way that you go back to the very primal instinct of childhood to pretend acting is pretending under control.

But I think that that's the first part of the process. Then you begin to model because the words aren't your words or the author's words but if you can carry your your initial concept. But just until it's right it agrees with the director and carry that concept through that terribly nerve wracking period where you're trying to learn the author's words instead of your own. Then you go through a metamorphosis that winds up with a performance of some kind. Well you used the term moment ago agree with the director. It's always fascinated me also as to how pliable obviously an actor must have now let's say given a circumstance where you haven't necessarily talked over a characterization with a director but you've been handed a part. You have one specific conception of it. You come into rehearsal and you think this is stocks for instance you think this is the sweetest guy in the world. What you got out of reading the script. You walk in and the

director all of a sudden is coaching you that he's he's pretty much of a say a bigot or a monster. Perhaps the circumstances wouldn't be that extreme but wouldn't it be difficult to have your own preconceived ideas of a character to watch. Well set I should thank you for your very simple I'm very wrong on the I just bought two two set two. Definite limits to a true performance before you even got into rehearsal I'd be ridiculous because the ideas develop between you and the director are devoutly to be wished. And it's always easier when you know the actor or the director See I'd lie about a character than when they're at battle though or when you feel you must trust the director. Another great you have to tell you is his show. Well I guess I am giver. I can give an example if you would like of the personal experience I had of the process of getting a character which was really the only experience

I've ever had that was this difficult in Eugene O'Neill's a touch of the poet Harold Clurman was the director and I was assigned a part in the play. And as it was written by Eugene O'Neill It wasn't very clear what she was she was New England and she was aristocratic and she came in and had this long long monologue all about her family heritage. But whether the. And then she disappeared and her relationship in the play to the other characters was by way of contrast the other were poor Irish and she was she was to represent to Eric Portman who played the leading part. Who was this humble Irishman who was ashamed of his humble background he she represented to him this aristocracy which he could never achieve. So he was supposed to be charmed by her and also a little afraid of her. Well when I first came to rehearsal I really didn't have it as I usually do an instinctive.

Feeling of exactly how this part should be played and not the did anybody else because it wasn't really really very clear was it was a very off beat kind of part. I don't think Harold Clurman had any actual thing in his mind but he did have more than I had because of the first few days of rehearsal. I had evolved a characterization which was really an imitation of an old New England I had because I am from New England. It was complete with the New England accent and all the ways I had remembered this old aristocratic sound. And how will watch this for a couple of days then he said Betty you don't like what you're doing you seem to be doing an imitation of somebody. He said the reason we gave you the part is that we want the quality that you have naturally we want that sort of vague charm that you had that you that you have naturally. Well of course this just destroyed me because for a few days of rehearsal I attempted to be nothing but charming and very I was so vague that I wasn't doing anything but weaving

around the stage being terribly charming terribly vegan and he didn't like this either and he made suggestions or I should use a fan. He made suggestions that I should listen to Mozart at home to get the elegant feeling of the lady. Well I had to finally go through a whole process of evolution and come back to not a specific imitation of an old New England but a combination of something that I had in myself and I had to reach for another character who would combine this elegance. I was to credit manner with a sort of gentleness but I think only also proves to me what I know what I meant about the model period. Yeah it's the difficult time when you think you've got something in there. Suddenly it's smashed and you have to go through an evolution of making a character your own in the

sense that. What the character does is real as you do it. It is it wouldn't be real if you did it on the street in real life because that part of you belongs to daily living and not the stage. But doesn't every day society help you a good example really starts in advise and consent when you play the man they wanted to be secretary of state. Wouldn't it have been easier for you to read the newspapers to look around at actual people in Washington. Your daily life study the kind of character study you can get or involve yourself yeah the contemporary actually what it does it helps you to absorb the mental picture the script gradually being finished in detail on the canvas of your mind. But when it's a contemporary character like honey it's an advisor could say it was a you're chiefly concerned I think with what the author

has written in terms of that character's relationship to other people. In other words it's not important how Huntington smokes a cigarette is not important how he parts his hair. It's not important whether he fiddles with his necktie in that kind of characterization the kind of body it's all in the mind and he's got to he's an alert man and. There are ways that you find in rehearsal you find yourself if you're thinking the man you'll do the right thing almost every time. You know then it becomes that then the evolutionary process of eliminating taking out all the fancy detail that it occurred to you two weeks before in the middle of the night and say oh it would've been nice if I scratched my nose there. Well it isn't all that important unless the scratching of the nose has some very definite pictorial facets of our of the characters concerned and some place.

It's better to leave it out entirely. And these are things we take a little while to learn as actors you could probably or would want to spend as much time on characterization as we could here just talking about creating a character but there comes a time very shortly I'm sure when the practical aspects of the play begin to crowd in on you the staging the blocking let's say just the actual physical movement if you have furniture on it you've got doorways you've got to. Again trust your director I'm sure that he's giving you a move for a specific reason. But Betty for instance in the first days of staging it your experience has been the directors usually say go where you want to go do what you want to do or do they actually say go above the sofa turn on the lamp come down and sit in the chair on the second line. Well I've never worked with a director that is cut and dried is that about it. There are certain limitations that both the director and the actor have to be held in by such as What is the set where is the door where does one make an entrance and therefore

the other characters would not be right in front of that door if you were making your entrance I don't know where is the sofa and where the other chairs are what is in the set and how they the characters relate to what is on the set is there a mirror that the man is admiring himself and therefore he would be downstage looking in this mirror and so forth which remember its dark Betty that women I know a wonderful director who stuck me in priestly Morrison and we never got the sack until Monday night or Monday it was all we were rehearsing on a bit of stage you know. I want to make the mistake of saying precisely where is the door and he said you'll recognize it on Monday. So in stark You know there again. Well you have a very short preparatory period in stark. The cut and dried business is necessary in other words your first blocking running through has already been done already been prepared in New

York long ago when the play played in New York. The director has a road map of where you're going to be on a certain line and if you know that remember it the first time that you do it. And make sure that you remember the next time you do it. That part is over with. There's no more experimentation. There's no time for it. Tell me this I've heard actors so often say during our rehearsal period I feel hung up. Now precisely what does this mean or why do they just sort of there as if they're standing in the middle of Erebus going to phrase X with nothing to do. You want to take it relating to furniture. Well this is something that would have to be worked out between the director and the actor it would it would be possibly because you were standing in one position and not allowed to move at all and therefore it was rather static. Or that you were making a cross across the stage to sit down without any particular motivation. I remember Burgess Meredith told me that

he once told an actress to cross and sit down on the sofa from stage left to stage right and she said Well how do I get there. He felt like saying well on your two feet is there what she meant was what motivates me to to make this move. Well he expected her to think of a motivation of her own under the duress of emotion she wanted to sit down and cry or whatever the scene was but there would be some reason that they were just as in real life you move from one piece of furniture to another or you go to the door of the window or under stress of emotion are all because you want to see something there's usually a lot usually a logical reason. Why moves are to be made and if an actor can't find a logical reason then he's apt to feel hung up hung up. Better you used a word that is going to get us into something that I'm sure we just can't avoid. As we talk here and that is a fair use of a better term the method which I think is a much harangued word of

badly understood or misunderstood by most everyone but nevertheless I think there are two clear cut schools of acting one. The subjective actor who has to discover within himself partly what we're talking about before a meaning for this character a motivation the other actor who perhaps is absolutely a technique actor knows how to indicate an emotion except instead of really feeling at Naturally the the happy medium is the best but I think there's been so much on method that most people don't understand it and I think most actors misuse it. The method itself of course is something that your subjective acting that the best actors have been using from the word go to start with. I may be wrong because of by nobody knows much more about the present use of the quote at the method unquote. But I think we should remember that when Stanislavski was writing

about the method used in rehearsal with the Moscow Art Theater the system by which he aided actors and actors aided themselves in creating over a long period of time because they rehearsed many many many weeks creating a character from the inside. This was a rehearsal method. I always have to remind myself that whenever speaking of the method you're speaking of a rehearsal system a personalized rehearsal system and as such I certainly heartily applaud it I think any anything that helps the actor to create a character that comes alive on the stage is to be lauded is to be used. But and I think the what you speak about it being a controversial word and being two schools of thought is based chiefly on two things One is a misconception of the word itself. The other is

the fact that some people lemon to play I think carry their personalized. Growth process into actual performance. Sometimes to their own detriment and sometimes the detriment of the play and the other actors who have to play with them. I don't agree because I think if they are truly doing well the for want of a better word I guess we have to call it the method but in other words if they are truly acting a part with with true feelings and not just indicating which is what my idea of what the method is supposed to be that they are giving good performance. Now that many actors do that anyway even though they don't. That would be horrified if somebody called a method actor most good actors really are doing that. But. I just here's an example. I was supposed to make an entrance in a play called ladies of the

corridor. The woman I was playing was an alcoholic but in the first scene there was nothing to show the audience that she was an alcoholic she was not drunk at the moment but and all her lines were just consisting of a conversation about how her bill had not been paid yet at the hotel. But you have to to show in that small scene where she just discusses with the hotel clerk about how she hasn't paid her bill yet. You have to show a woman who was a potential suicide when she was at the end of the play. You have to show a woman full of hostility and fear and struggling with the morbidity in her nature. And yet none of the lines could help you here. So what I did in rehearsal which I always try to do the fast thing in rehearsal I indicated I made my voice a little higher to show how nervous I was I. I lowered my head I did all the external things. Well I wasn't quite good enough it just sounded like I was a nervous young girl. It didn't really give the effect of this

terrible fear that this woman had to be under so the director gave me something which would be considered a Stanislavsky method of doing he said to me one day at rehearsal. Try reading every line you have through clenched teeth. Well of course at first it made me laugh because I remember hearing a remark like this you can hear our show. But actually the sensation of clenching the teeth if you do that if anybody tries that and tries talking with their teeth absolutely clenched it makes you feel afraid. You suddenly are full of the most awful fear it's like it's the same theory of a man running if you run fast enough you're going to become frightened your heart will beat faster you and you will be afraid even though there's nothing to be afraid of. And this worked and I never lost this this feeling that was the best scene in the play that I played because I came on and from having rehearsed for about three or four days with the teeth clenched when I finally did speak again I never was

indicating I never was doing anything false. I had this this sensory memory so far really ingrained in me that I automatically would just lower my head and be frightened and full of fear and terrified and and not look at the man when I spoke to him and all the sensations that I previously had tried to do externally by directing myself to do them so that they came out rather false not because I would really have known what it was to feel like this. I could play this scene with much more reality because I think that's a very honest clear cut example that the kind of thing that bothers me is the it seems to be the growing lack of communication that concerns an actor I think especially on the part of young people who are with. Again we're labeling it the method but with a subjective kind of thing. In so many of the wrong kind of classes and so many of the dirty little offs around town they're using this thing for almost a psychological crutch so that

I feel you're getting so many hangers on in the theater of young people perhaps without much talent for because they're going so deep psychologically they're working so subjectively it's difficult to judge any artistic merit anyway but that these people then are being encouraged are being told they're actors but they are virtually eliminate ng communication with an audience that's so meaningful to them. It is so inside them. They feel it's the most magnificent scene that's ever been acted and you sitting in an audience feel like you're looking at a blank wall. I think Barry's example was a beautiful one. The legitimate and proper use of anything the tradition no Stanislavski the great wealth of that man's mind. Carrying this on if that's meant that I'm for it. But what I think you mean is the lack of discipline. And I also mean a lack of discipline in performance and I wouldn't mind I never doat do mind when in rehearsal.

When you get to playing a scene with somebody and the lines are all there and everything that the person is a little different each time you go through it or that I am a little different I move a little further over. I was far home but once this thing becomes part of you it is said it should remain there and not. People should not be encouraged to vary their performances night after night. But Betty Aren't you always aware. Getting back to this word communication and aware of the audience aware that you are communicating with an audience. The word empathy which is the feeling that I think an actor must have that there is something flowing between him and the audience not just between him and another actor but actually communicating across to them don't. Aren't there some nights when you feel you've got a bunch of coughers in the house or a theatre party it's a bad audience other nights there's a good audience.

Oh yes the actor can't help but be affected by the audience and is no more marvelous a thing that's why I get so much more fulfillment playing. Do in the theater then us how ever would from TV or pictures because the power the sense of power you feel by it by with your own concentration and that of the other actor you're playing with being able to and lists the concentration of the audience so that the whole thing is a unit. It's a marvelous experience which I don't think you ever can get from film anywhere on TV. But are you starts as an actor affected by the kind of audience it comes in on Monday night into Tuesday night and Wednesday night do you actually feel a difference. Can you feel a difference in an audience where you can feel a difference lie a lot. I I think we have to fight being affected adversely by an audience such as one finds very often at

benefits and in New York where people have paid up to $35 a seat for their lives you know going out to dinner and they're a little bored and piqued by the whole thing and they refused to react at all. I think one is affected by that one feels that you've got to fight the tendency to overact you've got to fight the tendency to to plug to hard to pitch points. Whereas with an audience that is receptive it Betty said you feel a part of them. You feel that literally they are hanging on every word. And it's very exhilarating. It's very exciting I think many years ago I was in a play written by Omar rise called Dream Girl. We tried out in Boston. Well Boston didn't think it was a funny play. And the reviews were bad therefore there was nobody in the audience. On top of this one there was a terrible blizzard the worst the last time I ever had. So there were about six or seven people in

the audience every night and the actors all had colds and they were morose because they thought they were in another flop and none of them thought they were very funny people made suggestions to take the scene out and put in this one and rewrite this one because the scenes weren't funny enough. But Elmer Ries who was directing hell. We held his strength and insisted that it stay the way it was we opened in New York. And all this nervous company who thought they weren't. It wasn't a very funny play and thought when they were domed and were calling up their agents and trying to get another job in the next week suddenly the only night audience was electrified. They thought it was the funniest play that ever seen. Every line that nobody thought was funny suddenly got roars of laughter. Well it was like a shot only on every actor in that company they suddenly were just lit up like a neon sign and they just automatically gave a marvelous performance and there was this response to an audience. Well what can either of you do let's say to assure me as a member of an audience

that I see as good a performance eight months after you've opened as someone else was fortunate enough to see on your opening night how do you keep it fresh the integrity of it belongs in the theater because the actor belongs to the director he should come back but he doesn't show us a lot of very old Most good directors do I think. Coming as they are you know it's you know a lovely line of I've forgotten what was it said. We'll call a rehearsal tomorrow and I have to raise the plate run for six months we're called a rehearsal tomorrow take out all the improve the movement. Well it's very necessary that you cannot go through in a perfunctory way this has to be just as real and recreated each night as it was when you first got on your feet because you're fooling people your convincing people who have never seen it before for the first time and who paid their money and they just deserve the best you can do. The old illusion of the first time that's right. I don't magine you'd really be in trouble if you walked in the

stage door some evening and the first thought that came in your mind was I've got to go through it again. Well this often happens is this is but the minute you step on the stage the magic happens. It does that's when it is you know I was going to go into the the area of whether acting was really an art form or whether it was just showmanship but I think the two of you here today have proved so conclusively that the actor is an artist that there's no need to go into that so thank you both very much for being with us. Thank you for calling us that. Thank you. The story behind the theater today the actor as an artist. Lyle died junior managing director of the Equity Library theater has been talking with but he fields and starts cuts worth about the actor and his art. The actor is an artist and is also an artisan. He must train himself through a routine of study making the rounds acting classes auditions and rehearsals. All these are constant in the actor's daily life. Our next programme reveals the

Otherworld of the actor as actors Jay Barney and Annie Weston discuss the actor as an artisan. Listen next week when from New York City the theater capital of the world Riverside radio again brings you the story behind the theater. Produced and recorded by Riverside radio WRVO in cooperation with the Equity Library theater under a grant in aid from the National Association of educational broadcasters WRVA R is a metropolitan FM station of the Riverside Church in the city of New York. This is the end AB Radio Network.