Richard Foreman posted an interesting discussion in his blog about how he directs his actors. I’ve added some emphasis.
I like actors that are not saying at every moment to the audience, on one level or another, love me, love me. Even when I was a young man I always disliked what I perceived as being the real content of performances which was ‘I may be suffering, I may be playing an evil person, but I want you to love me’. Obviously an actor wants to be liked. I want people who don’t, or I want to teach people how not to use that, how to have an inner laser-like intensity, that’s all inner directed, not going out so much towards the audience. One thing I’ve always told actors is that they have to think that everything they say is the most intelligent thing in the world (though they’re not saying anything in this play). They have to do it, it’s a secret that they have to assume that only one person in the audience is going to understand and they are not offering it on a silver platter for everybody. It’s a secret, so that when you’re sitting in the audience you can think Ahh I’m the one person that gets that, the other people aren’t smart enough to get it. That’s a delight, to think that it is not stated in a vulgar, general way, but you are sitting there with your partner in the theater and you poke him in the ribs and say ‘Hey did you realize what he’s saying?!’ You’ve got to have that feeling. I want a secretive kind of performance- performers that have secrets, and actually I think that gets me in trouble sometimes because I know certain people have said ‘Oh, I didn’t like the show because everybody seemed to be acting as if they had some secret and I didn’t get it.’ To me, that’s the only thing that turns me on because I do these shows to turn myself on, which would be a form of seduction, which I just said I don’t want to use. However, these are the contradictions that make up everything.
What I like about his shows is exactly that feeling he describes above: I feel like there’s all these secrets in them, and I’m the only one in the audience who gets some of them. The rest of the time I’m just wrapped up in what’s being presented viscerally while I’m thinking: “Well, I don’t get this secret, I wonder who here is?”
Fascinating, isn’t it, that two people for whom one harbors great respect can deal with exactly the same problem is paradoxically opposite ways. Foreman says “have an inner laser-like intensity, that’s all inner directed, not going out so much towards the audience”; Terry Schreiber says “Take it up, take it out; the minute it becomes instrospective, the audience goes to sleep — if it isn’t addressed to us, we just don’t care.” But of course although it is the opposite of Rashomon, all lines apparently pointing away from the central truth, it is only a seeming paradox. Foreman is clearly right: If what the actor is directing at the audience is “Look at that! Look at that amazing thing I just did! Love me!” it is worse than introspection: it’s exhibitionism. That clearly isn’t what Terry is urging. And if the intelligence that underlies the “secret” is disembodied and impersonal no one in the audience will be affected by it, whether they get it or not; that clearly can’t be what Foreman is advocating. At the heart of the teachings of the non-Strasbergian sons and daughters of Stanislavsky is a belief that the words on the page, the “character”, is you, way beyond sharing traits or experiences with you, and if you can free yourself defending your ego by selling yourself to the audience in the most positive light or by hiding from them inside your own navel you can bring that character to life for the audience. It is astounding and humbling how many drastically different and apparently diametrically opposing ways there are to say it, but it is so rich, so seemingly simply yet so treacherously complex, a truth that as many ways as there are, they probably aren’t enough.
What I really latched onto was the first two bits I bolded above.
I’ve always disagreed with this notion that we need to care about or even love every character on stage. I think what Foreman is describing is something that’s been ingrained in student-actors: that we have to be lovable. I distinctly remember teachers asking “Where is the love?”
My problem with this is simply that there are despicable people in real life, and stories should be told about them.
Ultimately, what RF advocates as an ‘acting method’ (quotes neccesary?) is perhaps not so much in opposition to Terry’s fear of ‘introspection’ – as I understand it from your brief comment – as much as that it speaks to a different sort of theatre. RF isn’t concerned as much with ‘character’ – the bonds between impulses, fears, neuroses, intelligences, etc that make a complete person – as he is with breaking that apart to reveal seemingly disparate impulses in the personas he sculpts on stage. Less the behaviors that are created from all these influences inside a person (in a simplistic sense, it is honestly understanding and relating these behaviors that defines traditional characterization) than just the impulses themselves. What fascinates me about his ‘acting method’ detailed above is that if realized, suddenly the ‘laser like intensity’ of introspection is not hidden because there is nothing for it to hide behind – Richard’s theatre has stripped the character of his mask to some degree and so now this ultimately personal experience, impulse, drive is laid out at the mercy of the audience, unabased but there only for the moment before another impulse replaces it. What fascinates me most is the promise of applying this method outside of his deeply personal theatre, to adapt the method to other forms of storytelling, traditional or not. I’m not rereading this comment, so let’s hope you can follow it.