6: Catching Up

Got to do some catch-ups in this post. Thanks for the reminder.

To be brutally, painfully, and dangerously honest, I'm no longer the biggest fans of acting books. In my opinions, there are too many of them lying around. Although most of them are valid and the authors do try to contribute what they have find to be so crucial and golden that they want to share with their readers, I believe every actor has their own "kicks" or triggers. Eventually (in a perfect world), each actor develops his own process and hold on to the same list of questions or reminders that can spring them to live onstage or in front of camera. I find it a bit difficult to read more acting books because of all these teachings and previous information that I have yet to process thoroughly, but I'll try my best and say a few things in Mr. Cliff Osmond's book that ring to me.

Conflict: my undergrad acting teacher love to say: 99% of the scenes - especially between 2 characters - are boxing matches. You are in the ring alone with your opponent, and you have to fight like hell to win. I later came up with my own version: when I play a character, the common underlying thought across each and every moment of the scene should be: you (or any other people) will be better off if you listen to what I have to say. Cliff also said the important thing about love scenes (I guess it can be either between "lovers" or friends): there's always competition. Always. You always want to be better. You always want to win.

Reality: I embrace the moment when Cliff reminds the readers that acting should be as close to reality as possible (and yes, it's never equals to BORING or MUNDANE). I'd like to think though that if there's any difference between true reality and staged reality, is should be that staged reality is a "heightened" reality: that is, people in this world have more emotional freedom. They're more vulnerable and sensitive to their emotions, and they concentrate their every living second on feeling and living. We sometimes skip through our own daily lives in order to protect ourselves so that we don't ending up in an asylum, but audiences are hungry and bloodthirsty in that sense: usually, if not always, they want to see the actors feel and react and get overwhelmed by emotions. I have to remind myself of that. It's tough, but I'm learning.

On those NPR thingy, I read about the crazy and mesmerizing Daniel Day-Lewis and the underrated william H. Macy, and boy did they have something to contribute. My most memorable moments of reading/listening to Day-Lewis talking about Lincoln was when he talked about how thrilled he was when he discovered Lincoln's sense of humor. To be a smart-ass for a moment, Kurt Vonnegut said at one point that "humor is an almost physiological response to fear." What makes us human is our sense of humor. We use humor as a weapon to deal with our frustrations and fears we encountered in our everyday lives. I believe, therefore, by understand the character's humor, I can get a clearer glimpse of the character's fears and views of life. It can be very valuable. It's huge and hard to grasp, but I think this is the right track.

William H. Macy, on the other hand, said something that was very important and is especially true to us "student actors". I'll be lazy there and post the transcript:

"In our theater company, with Felicity, with my wife, we talk about actors sometimes - some actors, they're good actors, quote-unquote, "good actors." And then you get these other actors who are completely not, quote-unquote, "good," meaning they're not team players. They're just all over the place.
They're hard to get to the set. They're unpredictable. They never do the same thing twice. You don't know what they're going to do. They, a lot of times, turn out to be - give the best performance. They're great. And I fall into the category of the good actor. And I'm trying to do less of that and be outrageous."

Isn't that a great wake-up call? Sometimes we need to, yes, stop acting and stop being careful and start reacting. Feel. Be free. Don't worry if you're off-beat. Don't worry if you lose yourself. That's great. People savor it when you can make the unscripted errors part of the characters. Keep living.

Wow-wee. A lot of words today. Good. Productive. Onwards and upwards.