A prospective student for my Los Angeles acting class presented me with a question recently that I thought was worth discussing.  She said that when she first starts to work on a scene or monologue, she is able to be fresh and spontaneous, but the more she rehearses, the more she starts to feel stilted and stuck in certain ways of delivering the lines.  She wanted to know what I suggested with regard to this.

I have a few thoughts.  First of all, it’s important to recognize that we all have an inner critic, a part of ourselves that judges what we do and usually finds it wanting.  There’s nothing to be done about this directly, except to accept it.  By accepting that the critic is there, we have a chance of muting it a bit.  If we stop trying to get rid of it or fretting about its input, it loses some of our power over us.

Beyond this, it’s important to focus on working off of the partner.  Stanislavsky posited that all actors face the challenge of self-consciousness, the inhibiting awareness of being watched and scrutinized and evaluated and judged.  He further suggested that the way out of this self-consciousness was for the actor to put their attention outside of themselves, usually on their scene partner, and to engage in the solving of some problem, or in the achieving of some objective.  If the actor succeeds in doing this, then she is getting input from the partner, and she responds to that input as she speaks her text.  Because she is working off of what comes from the partner, which is going to be a little different on each take, her responses in turn are going to be a little different as well.

In the approach that I teach in my acting class, we try to identify a “hot” need that the actor can embody and pursue from the partner.  If the actor truly needs something from his partner, something “hot” or visceral like love, respect, acceptance, worth, control, freedom, or security, this will naturally incline the actor to direct her attention to her partner and keep it there.  And again, the more the attention is on the partner, the more the actor is being fed impulses by the partner, and the more likely her work will be fresh and spontaneous.

There are some other technique, such as points of concentration, which I teach in my advanced acting class, which can help maintain the freshness of a scene as it is rehearsed, but the main thing is to work off of the partner.  That’s what keeps things alive.

What do you go to acting class to learn?  Camera angles?  Eye lines?  Cold reading?  Audition technique?  How to get an agent?

These are all good things to know about, but to my mind, acting class should be about acting, first and foremost, as this casting director notes. And what is acting about?  Well, there are many definitions of it, but the most straightforward one I know is the following:  acting is entering into a character’s circumstances, coming to care about the people, places, and things that they care about, pursuing what they pursue, and being impacted by what impacts them.  Those four things: circumstances, care, pursuit, and impact.  That’s the heart of acting, whether you’re acting in a film, a sitcom, doing voiceover, or shooting a video game.

First, circumstances:  what are the facts of the character’s situation?  What has happened to them in the past?  What choices have they made?  Where are they?  When are they there?  What do they hope will happen next?  What do they most fear will happen next?  In the first sessions of my ten-week Los Angeles acting class known as the Essentials workshop, I teach a framework for collecting and organizing the circumstances known as the Five Questions. This framework will guide you through a thorough and penetrating examination of the character’s circumstances, which is the essential foundation for your creative work on the role.

Next. care.  The character’s world is full of people, places, and things that are significant to them.  Lovers, friends, siblings, children, bosses, mentors, rivals.  A wedding ring,  a beloved car,a favorite T-shirt, a trove of love letters.  The house where they grew up, the church where they were married, their workplace.  All of these people, places and things have significance for the character, but at the outset of the process, they are devoid of significance for the actor.  So the actor must personalize; them, using the process Uta Hagen calls transference, which is the finding of equivalencies between the elements of significance in the character’s world and elements in the actor’s.  Through this process, the actor comes to care about the elements of the actor’s world.

T​hird, pursuit.  Characters have intentions, goals, and needs.  These needs spur them on to pursue the​ fulfillment of those needs, by taking risks, confronting, insisting, and contriving, among other gambits.  It’s your job as actor to connect with the character’s need in yourself and undertake the pursuit of its fulfillment, relentlessly.  “Play to win!”  is the mantra that students in acting class hear from me time and again.

Fourth, impact.  In the course of your pursuit of fulfillment, you will bump up against the world and get feedback from it, specifically from your scene partner.  It’s your very important job to listen for this feedback (in a sense, listening is the whole ballgame), and to allow yourself to be impacted by the feedback you receive, to be open and vulnerable to it.  An actor who is not impacted by what comes from the partner, who is immune to what comes from the partner, will not be a very interesting actor.

These four elements comprise the essence of acting, no matter the technique, no matter the context, no matter the medium.  And it’s these four things that you should go to acting class to learn and practice.

There has been a lot of discussion in the media of late about “Method acting” and its legitimacy. In a new article in the LA Times, actor Andrew Garfield defends Method acting, and talks about his experiences preparing to play a Portuguese Catholic missionary in Japan for Martin Scorsese’s film Silence.

The “Under the Banner of Heaven” star recalled employing Method acting in Martin Scorsese‘s 2016 religious drama “Silence,” in which Garfield played a 17th century Portuguese Jesuit missionary who ventures to Japan. For the role, Garfield studied Catholicism with renowned Jesuit priest Father James Martin and took special note of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.

“It’s basically a 31-day retreat that you do where you actively meditate on the life of Jesus Christ and you place yourself, using your imagination, into every single stage and scene and moment of the life of Christ, from his inception to his resurrection,” Garfield said. “It’s a transformational process. I had a relationship with an imagined Christ in my head by the time I had finished this retreat.

That is not the only thing he did to embody the life of a priest.

“I had some pretty wild, trippy experiences,” Garfield added, “from starving myself of sex and food for that period of time.”

What Garfield is describing here is his effort to “live the part”, to live as the character he would portray had lived, or some approximation of that. It seems that this idea of “living the part” has become synonymous with Method acting in our public discourse, as has the practice of staying in character while not performing. These practices may or may not have merit, but they don’t have anything to do with Method acting, at least as it was originally conceived.

Stanislavsky, whose System is the antecedent for the Method, once tried “living the part”. as described in Isaac Butler’s book The Method How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act.

Whenever Stanislavski felt lost, he researched his way forward. Perhaps, he thought, he could understand the Miserly Knight’s solitude by experiencing it himself. So he tried a kind of research that, a century later, would become standard practice in the long line of actors who claimed to follow in his footsteps: He tried to live as his character lived. He traveled to a castle and had the staff lock him in its basement, but all he picked up was “a bad cold and despair … Apparently, to become a tragedian it was not enough to lock myself in a cellar with rats. Something else was necessary. But what?”–

That was the only time that Stanislavsky ever experimented with anything like “living the part”, and he rejected it as a failure.

Nor was it a part of the teaching of Lee Strasberg, who was the American heir to Stanislavsky and is the teacher most associated with the inception of “the Method”. The hallmark of Strasberg’s work was the pride of place that it gave to a technique pioneered by Stanislavsky called emotional memory. With emotional memory, the actor attempts to relive some episode in their past life as a way of supplying the needed emotional content of a scene. Giving this priority to emotional memory became a significant point of contention with Strasberg’s contemporaries such as Stella Adler and Bobby Lewis, who felt that it encouraged self-indulgence in the actor and detracted from the presentation of the writer’s vision.

While I don’t usually teach emotional memory, I can see that it may have its uses. Actors may be called on to start a scene in an extreme emotional state, with no “runway” or stretch of scene that will help them to reach those peaks by going through the character’s experience as suppled by the writer. Emotional memory could be very useful under those circumstances. Also, I think emotional memory may work in another way: not as a rehearsal technique, but as a practice that helps actors get in touch with their emotional life and bring their emotions closer to the surface. The writer Franz Kafka once remarked that a book should be an axe to break up the frozen sea within, and I think emotional memory can function in that way as well: it can help to resurface emotions that have been repressed or buried and make them more available to the actor. I think emotional memory has to be practiced responsibly; it’s not a way to deal with traumatic experiences. That is the proper purvey of the psychologist or psychiatrist.

Regarding living the part, I am not sure. I can see how Garfield’s study of Catholicism and exploration of ascetic existence might have helped him prepare for the role, and he certainly seems to feel that it did. I’m a believer in doing whatever works, and I think every actor’s process is an individual, personal thing. I suppose I am less convinced by the idea of staying in character on a movie set while you’re not acting. It seems to me that it would be well-nigh impossible to sustain the pretense that you are a 17th century priest while hanging around on a movie set between takes. But again, whatever works.