The Existential Actor

In the theater we want what happens onstage to be a matter of life and death.  As directors we implore our actors to “raise the stakes.” As actors we search for the deep connections to our characters that will allow us to raise the stakes by making their concerns our concerns.

What happens onstage should always be a matter of life and death because everything we do in life, every action that we take, is always in support of something called the causa sui project.  This is the heroic narrative, the story of ourselves we construct that imbues our actions with a sense of meaning, purpose, and – yes – immortality.  The notion that fictional characters and real people share this fundamental mechanism of motivation and self creation is at the center of everything I will be talking about in these pages.

The Existential Actor is a broad theory about how “character” is created and how we create characters.  Why a “broad theory?” Broad theories attempt to ”fully explain and link together“  everything within the subject under consideration.  The theory of evolution (despite objections from creationists) allows any plant or animal to be located in the evolutionary scheme.  A broad theory for the theater should be able to “fully explain and link together” plays as diverse as Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman, Woyzeck, Hamlet, Oklahoma, and August Osage County.

The Existential Actor is an attempt to reconcile a host of competing and conflicting ideas that actors and directors and writers have been struggling with and fighting about for decades – even centuries – and to explain how all of it makes sense in the context of crucial discoveries and insights from the world of philosophy, psychology, and even religion.

Some of the ideas come from Aristotle, Freud, Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Sartre, Eric Erickson, David Mamet, Woody Allen, and especially Ernest Becker.  I’ll be leaning on those ideas and connecting the dots to four big ideas, four elements, that we use all the time in the theater.

Those four elements are:

1. Action.  The word action is shorthand for several different concepts that, in the theater, are often used interchangeably.  Motivation; intention; objective.   Action is what we do after we figure out what we want – our objective or intention – and why we want it – our motivation.  We’re going to shorthand all of that into one word: action.   In various techniques and theories about acting, action is everywhere – we find it in the writings of Aristotle, Brecht, Grotowski and Stanislavski.  You can’t do anything without action.
2. Transaction.  Transaction is what happens when we start interacting with other people on stage, or with the audience if we’re alone onstage.  Even during a soliloquy, when we’re alone on stage and not acknowledging the audience, our characters are surrounded by other people.   In the chapter Culture And The 3 Questions we’ll talk about the fact that we only know who we are because of those people: parents, siblings, peers, teachers and the larger world.  Once we know what our action is, we need some way of knowing when we’ve accomplished that action.  It happens in the transaction.  This is the essence of a technique we got from Sandy Meisner.   David Mamet refined it with the phrase, “the test is in the other person.”
   
3. 

   Sir Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice in "The Entertainer"

   Shape.  Shape is what we look like from the outside, but it’s also what we believe on the inside because that drives what we look like on the outside.  Shape is costume and language and period and gesture.  It’s how we dance and move, what we drive and what we wear and what we believe.  It’s who we love and who we hate.  Shape is the essence of “outside in.”  It’s Laurence Olivier who told us that he wears his character like a cloak or a nose.  It’s shape shifters like Meryl Streep and Marlon Brando.

4. Surrender.  Surrender is what we feel and how we allow ourselves to feel.  It’s the essence of the Actors Studio, so it comes with sense memory and emotional memory.  It comes when the shape gets shattered and we peel away the psychological armor that shape provides.

Is it possible to look at human behavior the way we look at evolutionary development?  Can we examine a particular action that someone takes and say that we know for sure what motivates that action?  It seems unlikely.  There are thousands of reasons people do what they do.  In any given moment people are variously motivated by fear, hunger, love, desire, hate, self-interest, pity, and so on.

But maybe…

Maybe there is some kind of bedrock motivation, something underneath those day-to-day, moment-to-moment­ motivations.  Stanislavski talked about little objectives – beats – and super objectives.  The character wants to do something this minute in order to fulfill some greater need.  Lady Macbeth must persuade her husband to kill Duncan (objective) because she wants absolute power for herself (super objective.)  Willy Loman wants to ingratiate himself with his boss (objective) so that he can keep his job and support his family (super objective.)

What do Lady Macbeth and Willy Loman have in common? Are they fundamentally motivated by the same thing in almost exactly the same way?  Do they share the same action?  I think they do.

This theory that I call “The Existential Actor” has a lot of moving parts, so there are a number of ways you can work through the material.  If you’re a linear, step by step, kind of person, you can follow along in the order as presented.  But as we introduce various ideas and concepts, you can also click on the links and sidebars surrounding the video to jump directly to a topic, or set-piece, that interests you and learn more about it in-depth.   I’m going to be talking a lot about action, transaction, shape and surrender.  Each one of those has its own set-piece.   There’s one about Aristotle’s four causes.  There’s a longish set-piece that really goes into detail about the different ways that actors have approached their craft going all the way back to the Greeks and up through people like Susan Batson, Anne Bogart and Robert Wilson.  Feel free to explore and then come back to the main thread.

I also want this to be a kind of open source project, so of course there are plenty of opportunities to comment on what you see and hear and read.   If an idea strikes you as particularly compelling, please let me know.  If something strikes you as bone headed and ridiculous or if you feel I’ve stated something that is unsupported, I want to hear that too.

Next: Mortality Salience

[Great thanks to Stef Stendardo for her invaluable editing assistance throughout this project.]