John's Book

OK, I like to post every week. I like to observe and write clever things and try to make sense of it all and apply it somehow to being an artist. But a crazy person just spit in my hair.

Spit. In. My. Hair.

You can read all about that event at www.sandraoday.blogspot.com

In the meantime, I'm going to flat-out steal from my brilliant friend John Clancy. This is from his blog, which I really think you should read -- and he posts every week day. EVERY WEEK DAY. Now that's something. His is the "Scrappy Jack ..." link on the right.

Folks, meet John Clancy:

I've been working on an Acting Textbook for awhile now. Thanks to the Riders of Rowan, I had some time in the trenches with young American actors last year.

Most of the training they were getting was the same confused, dishonest horse-shit I got 25 years ago.

Not the fault of their teachers, either. Just the lack of clarity and definition in the field.

Here's a section from the beginning of the book, any and all comment is welcome.


A Simple Test

You need a performance space for this test. So if you’re not in one right now, go find one before you read the rest of this. Ideally it’s an old proscenium space, raised stage, wings, etc. but any space will do.

Stand offstage left. Breathe a little bit with your eyes on the stage. Get a good base and walk to stage center. Stand there. Then walk stage right until you get into the wings.

What happened to you, physically, when you were out there? Did your spine lengthen, did your breath slow down, did you feel a tingle in your palms and on your thighs? Did your vision get sharper? Anything?

If you didn’t have a physical reaction, not a mental or emotional one, (this test isn’t about thoughts or feelings, it’s about what happened to your body when you were in the charged space of the stage), if you didn’t feel the charge, then you’re not an actor. Maybe you’re a director or a writer or a producer or a designer or an agent. We need everyone on this ship. Maybe you’re an architect who will go out and make money and come back and give it to the theater. But if you didn’t feel the clarity and the potential and the current that exists on the stage, then you’re not home. Actors need to be home when they’re standing there in front of folks. It’s the only way they’ll have the courage and humor and strength to do the work out there.

Serious People Doing Serious Jobs

Watch how a scientist moves in the laboratory. Watch the way a soldier patrols a street in Falluja. No wasted movements. No wavering focus. No sighing and flopping about. Now watch most actors on our stages.

You see the problem?

The three cancers of American stage acting are subtlety, informality and lack of courage. The last one is different from fear. Courage is not the opposite of fear, courage is what you wish for when you have fear. Courage isn’t possible without fear. I’m not saying that American stage actors need to get rid of their fear, on the contrary, they need to seek it out and dance with it every night. What they need is more courage.

Again, watch a professional doing a physical job. Watch a paramedic checking someone’s pulse. Watch a cop patting someone down. You’ll see focus, you’ll see efficiency, you’ll see no wasted energy. The important thing is, you’ll see no tension. They are relaxed and engaged. If you’re out there under the lights pretending to be Romeo in front of a bunch of silent strangers and you’re tense or worried or stiff, you need to stop right there and breathe. And then say the lines and listen to them while they come out of your mouth. And then eyeball whoever’s pretending to be Juliet and look at her or him, not at “Juliet”. Human to human, simple, two people doing a job.

Base and Pace

The Audience Already Speaks English (Your Job is Not to Express the Meaning of the Words, Your Job is to Say the Words)

Have you ever heard anyone say something like “this wine is delightful” and their voice gets all weird and high on “delightful”? Or “He was a horrid man.” And again, their voice gets all shuddery and low and weird on “horrid”? What do you think of these people? What’s your first, base reaction?

It’s probably something close to:

What a fucking phony. What a fake.

That’s what the audience feels when you get all emotive on a good play, or a bad play for that matter. Mamet calls it the school of Funny Voices. Stop emoting. You’re already “emoting” whatever that means, as soon as you speak. You’re an emotional being. We all are.

When You're The Piñata, Give 'em Candy

I had a chance to work with a really great guy last week. His name is Todd. We booked a radio spot together, and it was a fairly straightforward script. But there were more than a few people directing us and Todd was taking the brunt of the contradictions. One person would tell him to do it one way, then the second person would tell Todd he missed this or that and would totally redirect him. Then the first person would redirect him again, and it went on and on like that. And it wasn’t as if the “directors” were battling between themselves in the control room, they just didn’t understand that they didn’t want the same thing, and couldn’t figure out why they weren’t getting what they wanted from the actor.

Meanwhile, the actor was trying very hard to please two contradicting directors. Todd was basically being a piñata. They just kept hitting him with more and more contradicting ideas, and he kept giving them candy.

Now, frequently, the actor in the “piñata” position would be rolling his or her eyes, getting snarky and making faces at the other actor, silently screaming, “Can you believe these idiots.” Personally I don’t like working with people like that. They make me feel uncomfortable and I think it makes them look like an ass. True, it’s hard to keep your cool when it’s so obvious that the clients either don’t know what they want, or don’t know how to communicate what they want. But it’s your job to do what you’re told, and if asked, help the client figure out how to define their direction. Usually, the people who do the impatient eye-rolling thing are people who don’t work that much. They have an idea in their head of how it should be, versus how things really tend to work. I often want to say, “Folks, you’re being paid to read. Buck up. It’s not like you’re digging holes during a heat wave.”

But Todd is a pro. He knows how good he has it. He makes fantastic money by talking. He’s been doing it for years, and quite frankly, this kind of thing happens all the time. During our session he was patient, he always did what they wanted, and he never got ruffled. Instead, when we were between takes while they were figuring things out in the control room, we talked about life stuff -- his son who’s in high school, our houses, our spouses -- and we had a great time. And when it was time to do another take, we did it. No attitude, just did our job.

Two days later they called us back to do a rerecord because of a mistake that had nothing to do with us, and we did it all again.

Class act, that Todd.

Inner Circle

Last week, on Wednesday, a member of my inner circle made it to Broadway.

Now, I’ve had friends on the Great White Way before, and certainly some of my colleagues are up there on a regular basis. But this, my friends, is inner circle. Rob is my best friend since I was 12 years old. We survived Texas together. He busted his ass to graduate from Julliard. We lived together in the summers up in Syracuse where I was going to school and we painted houses to try and pay our rent. We were really poor. We ate Army rations a friend had sent me as a joke when we ran out of money and food. We graduated from our glorious institutions and dove right into student loans and the hustle of making things work. Rob applied for and received a Fullbright scholarship (!) and then he went to work and teach in Colombia, South America for almost 10 years. (And when he went there he didn’t speak Spanish, he had to learn when he got there.)

He came home from South America, and many of his friends from school were already working at a very visible level. And he had to work, really, really hard to get back up to speed here in the USA. Very hard. Blood sweat and tears soul-busting hard.

And now he’s going to be on Broadway. He’ll be covering the lead in The 39 Steps, and I hope like hell he gets to go on sometime in July or August. (He’ll have at least 6 months to go on, but I want to see him up there NOW!) I can’t wait. He’s amazing, he’s brilliant and he’s where he’s supposed to be.

My best bud is stepping into the light -- and it feels so good.

Boomerang

I don’t know what’s in the air, but recently I’ve reacquainted with some folks I had worked with in my past. Back then, I found these people to be unbelievable successful. They made a lot of money, they had big, important jobs and fancy apartments and they basically made me wish I were more like them. They seemed somehow more together. More professional. Better than I was.

I was always running around to auditions and scrambling to make money and fighting tooth and nail to make my art. Where they were savvy, I was scrappy. They were smooth, I was rough and always wearing the wrong clothes. They were “there” in the land of “made it” -- and I was always looking in the window wondering what they were eating and if I would ever be that successful.

You might know the feeling I’m talking about.

Fast-forward to today, me meeting these folks again, having a cup of coffee and talking about what’s gone down in the past 15 to 20 years or so. And while I sit there and listen to them I realize how wrong I was to compare myself to them. How being envious of them was a complete and total waste of time.

They had all the stuff that I thought I wanted, sure, but they didn’t know what they were doing any more than I did. And because they were so busy trying to keep what they had, they never stuck their necks out. They just stuck.

A couple of the people I’ve reacquainted with are a friggin’ MESS. Not all of them, certainly, but some of them -- sheesh! They better send up a flair and hope for a life boat.

And here’s my overextended, blown-out metaphor for the entire experience:

When I was in my twenties, those friends of mine seemed like fancy, exotic, ascot-wearing heirs to the universe with perfect bodies who went to all the best parties and crapped money and pissed good luck. And they never understood why I stressed out about paying my bills.

I, on the other hand, was like a feral hillbilly who had to figure out how the hell to get around the jungle of Gotham with just my knife made out of goat bone and a weensie bottle of moonshine. (And a big stupid-looking straw hat.)

I learned the lay of the land from the inside out, a very messy hands-on process, because I had to. They stayed on the glossy outside of things because they could.

And some of them don’t know their way around anymore. And know what? I feel as bad for them now as I did for me then, which is arrogant I know, but it’s true.

I hope they remember what it is they really want to do. All that maintaining the picture seems to have taken away the want and the dream.

Have faith, kids. Those people who make you green with envy only look good on the outside. Do your thing. Follow your heart.

It’s the only thing that really matters.