Filed under: Acting, education, theatre | Tags: #VerySeriousTheater, Acting, acting training, actors, audience, learning, performance, theatre
When I was in high school and dreaming of being an actor, I read a lot of the major acting texts. I read Stanislavksi. I read Stella Adler. I read Uta Hagen. I read Sanford Meisner. I was particularly enchanted with the Meisner book and tried to square it with the Meisner exercises we’d done at the Governor’s School for the Arts. They didn’t QUITE connect and I could never really apply what I learned to actual shows but I was captivated and all these texts seemed to strive for a more authentic, emotionally honest style of acting. A lot of acting training is concerned with this authenticity. A lot of acting training takes itself very seriously. I took it all pretty seriously. I took myself pretty seriously, truth be told.
And then I started working as an actor. The concerns of working actors have very little in common with acting training. For the most part, the jobbing actor becomes less concerned with whether or not you can tell someone their shirt is brown with authenticity (Yes, this was an exercise I did when I was 15.) but whether or not you can be heard and understood by the audience.
I wouldn’t trade the moments I spent in Meisner’s (or Hagen’s or Adler’s or Stanislavski’s) company but when it comes time to actually put on a show, the experience of surviving a thousand students who definitely didn’t choose to watch us or getting to the end of a show in a gymnasium or a cafetorium are all a lot more useful to me than anything I learned in a book or at school.
There is no better education than having to do a show in hundreds of different venues with very different kinds of audiences. It’s not something you can learn in a book. I don’t think you can learn it in a classroom either. It would be such a terrible class. It would probably just consist of someone saying, “Nope. Still can’t hear you.” over and over again. And then, like, trying to say a monologue over a room full of people pretending to misbehave. (I’ve had teacher training like this. It’s a nightmare.) Acting in difficult circumstances is a learn it on your feet kind of skill. You learn how to connect with an audience, how to work with them, how to win them over and how to adapt to their interest.
I recently did a show outdoors in a community garden and as soon as we started our show, two children in the audience started screaming at one another. It was loud and distracting. High decibel motorcycles and trucks went by. At one point, a line of small children ran through our playing area right where an actor had been blocked to cross. In situations like this, it is very useful to have some experience to rely on. Because no acting training program will tell you what to do when a trio of children suddenly troop through your stage uninvited. That’s because there is no one thing to do when this sort of thing happens. There never is “this sort of thing” again, really. The main thing you learn from experience is how to roll with the unexpected.
The other skill that came in quite handy for this performance was teaching. I wouldn’t have thought that my years of teaching many different ages would have informed my acting but in a chaotic environment like a public garden, getting the audience in order a little bit before starting is definitely useful. Classroom management skills come in very handy. We had quite a few hyped up children gathered and despite the fact that there were no scripted breaks of the fourth wall, I made eye contact with every kid I could see before we began. It’s not a decision I made, really. I just, in those first few minutes, made sure they knew I could see them. Afterwards, I was able to debrief about the show and realized what I’d been doing and why. It was entirely instinct at the time but I recognized then that that was both a teaching muscle and an acting one kicking into action. I suspect that if I hadn’t “set the scene” that way, we would have been in a lot more trouble than we were.
I’m intensely grateful for all that my teachers and my books taught me about acting. I’m also grateful for all that audiences and experience taught me. There are so many kinds of training – but audiences are the teachers I didn’t know I needed until I got much further down the road.
Do I enjoy shouting over a truck backing up? No. Do I feel like I’m really IN IT? No. It doesn’t feel like what we like acting to feel like. But I don’t do this for my feelings. I do it to make sure the audience can see and hear the story we set out to give them. If I felt great about my feelings but no one could hear or see me, I would not be doing the job. That’s one of the things you really begin to learn from experience. The audience tells you that.
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Songs for the Struggling Artist 
Hello darling! Greetings from Burgos, Spain. I loved the blog today; wh
Comment by vlowery2f3e459693 October 25, 2023 @ 1:07 am