Some Thoughts on Acting

Photo credit: David Kinder Photography

Picture a person standing with perfect poise in the middle of a room, an expensive rug under their feet. Then imagine the rug is violently pulled away. If there was any time on the way down, such a person might take a little moment to give a side-eye at the absurdity of life, wondering: how can things change so quickly? The more I live in this play as Laertes, the more I’m starting to feel that my job is to simply honor the kinetic energy of that fall. Grief takes away the ground under our feet, and until we get it back again we don’t know who we are. The characters in Hamlet never get there: that healing, that meaning-making after disaster, is left up to the audience (although Horatio is there to serve up a ready-made moral of the story, if they need it). I suppose most plays are like that. A play offers an hour or two of human beings going taking all the varied pratfalls of life, and then the lights go out. If it’s good and the audience brings receptive hearts, it’s a gift that the actors offer: we will take the falls, so that you can reap the harvest of meaning that comes from fierce living, without going through the hard exercise of it yourself.

I’ve been finding such freedom in that as an actor. I don’t need to know what it all means, or decide if I succeeded or failed; I just need to live, moment to moment, and be moved by it, and then when it’s all done, leave it in the audience’s hands to do with what they will.

It’s taken me a long time to learn this lesson. My artistic partiality has always been towards writing. Writing is different. Sometimes the words and people flow through your fingers and you are, in fact, living moment to moment, but the desire to control and shape is always there. You have something to say, even if you don’t quite know what it is. As lost as you might get in the immediacy of a moment, a sentence, there’s always the outside assessor’s eye seeing the forest, not the trees. This comes with a certain responsibility. Artists play at being gods with the little worlds they create, and, well, if you’re going to ask people to live in it, it better be a pretty good one. Or at least all the plumbing should work. In this way your ego is always somewhat on the line. What do people do when things aren’t working out, when the world doesn’t make sense? They grumble to god, demanding to know what the fuck he’s up to.

So, what a joy to release all that recently when I go on stage!  My ego suddenly doesn’t have much at all to do with the job at hand—it’s simply not relevant. Of course that doesn’t mean that actors are free from carrying any responsibility. They need to learn their craft, and every performance of mine has at least as many failures and successes. It’s just that when you get on stage, I’m thinking now that their responsibility is to shed precisely what I’ve been talking about: the ego’s controlling had. An actor’s center needs to move out of their head and into their heart. And, as an actor mentor of mine always says, let it fly.  

And it’s too early to say, but I’m starting to feel a little curiosity, a little glimmer of a yearning, about what it would mean to find this freedom in the way I live my life…