playwriting & acting

The chapter that we had to read for this last Wednesday made me wonder. It described many things an actor could do to be "good." The first half of being an actor is having the tools that project a character to the audience can "see" it. These tools are your body, your voice, centering- which orchestrates the previous two tools so utilizing them become natural and don't "look" as if they actor is only trying to perform a part of themselves. The second half of acting is being a character, pretending to be someone else. Stanislavski formalized the processes used in his time to achieve being another person. He wanted an actor to have to outward features & movements of their character, as well as having the wants, motivations, feelings, objectives, and relationships of their character. Tangentally he wanted all this to be performed continuously whether or not something important was happening or the character was in the middle of the drama on stage, or off in the corner watching the other characters- the character had to be watching- not the actor. Stanislavski does give techniques by which to achieve the goals he set for actors, which overall result in the actor creating every single detail about their character from personal history to color preferences in order to make their character become alive to themselves & give the actors answers to specifically HOW they should act and WHY. Later acting theorists wrote in further detail how to be able to act like someone who is not yourself, like Uta Hagen in Respect for Acting.

HOWEVER, the book does not really tell what is that quality that separates some actors from the rest- some actors get parts and some don't- but the book only skims the topic by saying that if an actor is unconvincing- they aren't being truthful- but what if they ARE being truthful- what if their "terrified, yet excited by the letter" doesn't translate to the audience? Is it the actor's fault for not being truthful to the audience's idea of "terrified yet excited" or has the audience just not understood what the actor is trying to emote.

Another interesting thought that comes from instructions on how to act is how these instructions could be used to write a play. If a playwright could first think of characters, then their super objectives, their objectives, and even split the objectives into beats, especially when characters conflict their different objectives, wouldn't that greatly facilitate the dialogue because then the playwright would only have to voice the emotions that he/she knows their characters are feeling and they don't have to make up a plot/conflict by themselves- clashing objectives of different characters will do that by themselves.