The illustrations for this piece are all of playwrights, but what I really want to talk about here is actors and acting. I want to ask, what is the purpose of acting? How does an actor know when he's doing it right? I've been spot reading in acting books lately and the consensus of opinion in these books seems to be that dramatic acting is all about creating believable and appealing characters...but is it? I'm no expert on the subject, but somehow that seems inadequate.
Believable and appealing are important building blocks, but surely that's all they are...building blocks. We need to ask, what's an actor supposed to build with them?
In my humble opinion, what the actor needs to build is... a work of art. It's not enough to hold a mirror up to reality. The actor's job is to create something entertaining and profound that's better than reality. When he does his job right he stylizes his voice and movement to create a thing of awe-inspiring beauty and force. Through sound and motion, through his personal philosophy and a sense of vocal and visual music...he creates a force of nature. He blows the mind of his audience.
To make my second point I'll have to lapse into mysticism. I'm sticking my neck out here, and I may regard this as utter nonsense when I wake up tomorrow, but it seems to me that some of the best live action dramatic actors deliberately take a story and use it as a springboard to explore the mysterious universe that underpins our own. Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani did that in "The Fugitive Kind." What they were expressing in that film seems true, but it's very difficult to put into words.
It seems to me that the world is full of strange rules, patterns, tensions and assumptions that none of us can articulate, but which we all know exist. Some actors thrive in that world. They deliberately go for nuanced motivations that defy description. My mystical way of saying it is that they step sideways into the true architecture of reality.
That's pretty vague, isn't it? Aaaargh! Maybe I'll return to this subject when I've had a chance to think about it a little more.
BTW: The caricatures shown here are all by David Levine. They are in descending order: Chekhov, Odets, Ibsen, and Tennessee Williams.
