True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor Read Online Free PDF

so-attractive actions listed above are the work of the
writer
. It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the
actor’s
job to make the performance truthful.
    When the performance is made truthful, the work of the writer is made something more than words on the page, not by the inventiveness, but by the
courage
of the actor. Yes, it might seem like a good, and might seem an attractive idea to embellish—it’s your job to
resist
that attractive idea; for you cannot both “guide” the performance, and keep your attention and will on accomplishing your objective onstage. The impulse to “help it along,” to add a bit of “emotion” or “behavior” is a good signpost—it means you are being offered—in resisting it—the possibility of greatness.
Invent nothing. Deny nothing
. Develop
that
hard habit.
    It takes great strength of character—which is formed only over time and in frightening times—tomake difficult, and many times upsetting, decisions. Act first to desire your own good opinion of yourself.
    ——
    Today’s vast amusement parks, “theme parks,” offer not amusement but the possibility of amusement. Like the lottery, which offers not money but the possibility of money Similar is the academic/serfdom/great-chain-of-being paradigm from which our current western system derives. We are trying to please the teacher, to get into the good undergraduate school, to get into the good graduate school, to get into the good postgraduate program, to get into the good job.
    The actor strives to please the panel, to get into the good professional studio, to please the casting director, please the agent, please the critic, and so progress. “But progress to
what
?” I ask you.
    These schematic, arithmetical models, while reassuring, are false. To serve in the real theatre, one needs to be able to please the audience and the audience only. This has nothing to do with the great chain of being, or the academic model. The opinion of teachers and peers is skewed, and too much time spent earning their good opinion unfits one for a life upon the stage. By the time one is twenty-eight years old and has spent twenty-three of those years in a school of some sort, one is basically unfit to work onstage as an actor. For one has spent most of one’s life learning to be obedient and polite.Let me be impolite: most teachers of acting are frauds, and their schools offer nothing other than the right to consider oneself part of the theatre.
    Students, of course, do need a place to develop. That place is upon the stage. Such a model can and probably will be more painful than a life spent in the studios. But it will instruct.
    And it is probably finally kinder to the audience to subject them to untutored exuberance than to lifeless and baseless confidence.

AUDITIONS
    T he audition process selects for the most blatant (and not even the most attractive) of the supplicants. As a hiring tool, it is geared to reject all but the hackneyed, the stock, the predictable—in short, the counterfeit.
    The casting agent, and, to the largest extent, the talent agent are unacknowledged adjuncts of the production companies and studios. They reason, and in their place you or I might reason similarly, that the actors come and go but the producers go on forever.
    The producers are not interested in discovering the new. Who in their right mind would bet twenty million dollars on an untried actor? They want the old—and if they cannot have it, they want its facsimile.
    These gatekeepers understand their job to be this: to supply the appropriate, predictable actor for the part. They base their choice on the actor’s appearance, credits, and quote—as if they were hiring a plumber.
    If this sounds tedious, reflect that the actor himself is habituated into the process and endorses it from his first experience of it. And his first experience is the school.
    The acting school and its lessons are many times harsh, but their rigor and