Acting Power

The 21st Century Edition

Robert Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135123161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

'Robert Cohen's book, Acting Power, follows the tradition of his other book, Acting One, and has been the veritable bible for acting teachers for the last quarter century.' – David Krasner, Emerson College

'This book, above all else, is an attempt to explore the qualities of acting power.... to suggest to you, the actor, an approach toward not merely good acting but powerful acting. Great actors display the power to frighten – and the power to seduce – and can shift between the one and the other like a violinist can her notes.' – From the Preface

The first edition of Acting Power was a groundbreaking work of acting theory which applied sociological and psychological principles to actor training. The book went on to influence a generation of theatre and performance studies students and academics, and was translated into five languages.

This carefully revised 21st Century Editio n (re)considers, in the context of today's field:

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• questions such as 'should actors act from the inside or the outside?' and 'should the actor live the role or present the role?';

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• contemporary research into communication theory, cybernetics, and cognitive science;

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• brilliantly illuminating and witty exercises for solo study and classroom use, and a through-line of useful references to classic plays;

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• penetrating observations about the actor's art by more than 75 distinguished professional actors and directors.

Cohen's elegant and rigorous updates emphasise the continuing relevance of his uniquely integrated and life-affirming approach to this field. The new edition draws on his extraordinarily rich career as teacher, scholar, director, translator and dramaturg. It is a recipe for thrilling theatre in any genre.

1
Out of the Self

“People have said to me, from time to time, that they admire my ‘technique.’ These comments aren’t always compli mentary because so often what people mean by ‘technique’ is some sort of artificial or mechanical approach to a role. The best definition of technique I know is this: that means by which the actor can get the best out of himself. It’s as simple and as broad as that – and as personal and private.”

American actor Hume Cronyn ¹

It is utterly obvious that the actor is at the center of his or her character. The playwright may provide the words, the director the staging and the costume designer the apparel, but it is the actor who implements the role with her voice, body, phrasings, timings, inflections, modulations, movements, expressions, emotions, authority, appeal and charisma – among the hundred or more qualities that might show up in a favorable review of the production. And these all begin as characteristics of the actor, who will shape and filter them into the characteristics of the character she plays. Getting the “best of oneself” onto the stage, as Hume Cronyn wrote, is therefore the actor’s fundamental job.

But what is the self? Is it how we are seen? Or how (and what) we see? Is it us as an independent, self-contained body, or as a living cog in the great machine of life? What most controls our behavior: our personalities or the situations that surround us?

In real life, these are not easy questions to answer. Philosophers have debated for centuries whether character shapes situation or situation determines character. It is sort of a chicken-or-egg debate, but one with important real-world implications, certainly in the arenas of criminal justice and international diplomacy. Did the thief commit the crime because he is a bad person or because he grew up in impoverished surroundings? Did the country invade its neighbor because it had evil intentions, or because it was defending its borders against enemies? Are the gang members in West Side Story “depraved on account of they’re deprived” or is it the other way around? Often the answers simply depend on what side you’re on. Other people, we often think, do certain things because of the nature of their characters. We ourselves, however, do what we do because our situations require it!

For the actor, fortunately, there need be no debate. From the actor’s viewpoint, it is situation, not character, which is dominant. This is true for a simple reason: all people, and therefore all characters in plays, think about their situations, and what they want from them, more than about their own personalities or characters.

An experiment in social psychology makes this particularly clear.² Professors Edward Jones and Richard Nisbett, in 1971, invited a number of subjects to “rate” various individuals according to a standard scale of character traits: strong-willed to lenient, aggressive to mild-mannered, stingy to generous, and so forth. The individuals they were asked to rate included their fathers, their friends, Walter Cronkite (a famous television anchorman of that era), and, last of all, themselves. The subjects were also permitted, if they wished, to make the response “depends on situation” for any particular pairing of person and trait. The results showed something very interesting: the subjects, to an extraordinary degree, used the “depends on situation” option only for themselves, while for their friends, their fathers, and Mr. Cronkite, they were able to find fixed character attributes. The professors concluded that the human being is peculiarly egocentric in this regard: that human beings believe that “personality traits are things other people have.” Conversely, from our own perspectives, we find ourselves to be innately flexible, natural spirits whose behavior springs not from any rigid personality attribute, but which “depends on our situation.” Other people are the “characters” in our lives. We, on the other hand, behave according to the situations in which we find ourselves. The name for this is egocentricity. We are at the center of our lives; everybody else, therefore, is somewhere on our periphery.^*

And so we do not walk around in daily life simply concentrating on our “characters,” or who we are. Rather, we concentrate on our situations, and who other people are, and how we can successfully work them into our goals?

Thus, for an actor to bring a character to life, she must act like the living person her character is to represent. And to do that, she must concentrate primarily on her character’s situation, not her character’s character. Like the person she plays, the actor must look outward and forward, not inward and back.

In playing a character, one plays from the vantage of the character’s egocentricity. You play the character from the character’s point of view, not from your own, or what you might think is the audience’s. If you play Iago, for example, you don’t play that you are the villain that the audience sees, but that you are the aide to Othello who should have been promoted to lieutenant, but was instead passed over by some stupid pretty boy named Cassio. If you play Molière’s Alceste, you don’t play the misanthrope that the play’s title calls him, you play an intensely honest man who is surrounded by vilely pretentious and obsequiously flattering liars! Indeed, you will think of yourself as the one person in the play who does not think of himself as a “character,” but rather as a normal and very proper human being who is responding to this terrible situation around you. And by focusing fully on this situation you, you will let the audience and the other characters see who you truly are (a misanthrope), even if your own character never will.

So playing “characters,” therefore, really means responding to the situations one’s character confronts. Everything that follows in this book – including the chapter on “playing character,” is based on this fundamental understanding of human egocentricity.

“You can’t … say to yourself, ‘I am playing a villain.’ [The characters] don’t think they are, anymore than heroes think that they’re heroes. They’re just who they are and this is what they want. It’s other people that put that label. So you can’t judge the character you’re playing, ever.”

British actor Alan Rickman ³

Situation and context

The situation of the play is generally considered the situation that exists among the play’s characters. That situation, however, exists within a higher-level framework: the theatrical context. This context may be a theatre, with perhaps a proscenium, scenery, lights, text, and audience or some other sort of configuration; or it may be any other medium of performing or performance art. But how does an actor concentrate fully on her character’s situation without coming into mental conflict with the unavoidable awareness that she must also be heard in the back row? This is perhaps the most basic concern of the actor, a problem that baffled Stanislavsky, who could only resolve it by contradicting his own precepts.^*

It is utterly solvable, however. Consider the professional athlete – a baseball player, for example. His two worlds are quite distinct. His context is the world of baseball; where three strikes make an out, a ball over the fence constitutes a home run, a successful season means a renewed contract for next year, and a good rapport with the local fans means negotiating points towards a raise in pay. This information is all true, but the player cannot directly think about any of it while he is up at bat. He can only think of hitting the ball, wherever it crosses the plate within the strike zone. If he’s thinking about his salary, or his wife in the stands, he will almost certainly strike out.

The ballplayer does this by the conscious effort of concentration. He is entirely focused on the immediate situational factors: the score, the inning, the signals from his coaches, the number of outs, the men on base, the pitcher (and how refreshed or tired he might be), the exact positions and subtle movements of the infielders and outfielders, and a dozen other factors. Plus there are a number of intangible factors that describe his situation: the feel of the air, the sense of morale (both in his teammates and the opposition), the dampness of the ground, and the apparent fatigue, drive, and strategies of the other players. The player’s concentration on these situational aspects of the game is total, at least as total as is humanly possible. It is this complete absorption into an artificial situation which creates the immense excitement that draws tens of thousands into the stands for every game, and millions more to their television sets.

But the ballplayer will win his contextual goals as a by-product of his concentration on his situational ones. If his concentration is absolute, and his power and talents come to his aid, he will gain the avid following of the crowds that watch him and the owners that pay him – even when his team loses. If, however, he goes straight for the contextual rewards – if he continually “plays to the audience” – he will not only lower his batting average, he will be accused of grandstanding, publicity-seeking, and show-boating. Such players rarely last as professionals.

Situational involvement is the only way to suppress contextual awareness. This is one of the great ironies of consciousness: that it is impossible, on strict command, to not think of something. If we are told, “Do not think of a purple giraffe,” we cannot not think of it, because we first have to think about what we are not to think about. Psychologist Gregory Bateson called this a “double-bind,” because it is a command that is impossible to follow.^* A simple and clear example would be a sign that said, simply, “Don’t read this sign!” “Relax!” is a common double-bind, because relaxing means not trying to do anything at all, but being commanded to relax requires a conscious effort – which is the opposite of relaxation. “Act your age,” as a little contemplation makes clear, is a clever variation of it; to give in to this command, you must become a child again.

The only way to suppress contextual awareness is to fill the mind with something else. In concentrating on the past few sentences, the reader has forgotten the purple giraffe, although that could not have been done by forgetting alone. The mind can only deal with one thing at a time; the mind’s eye must have a single focus.

This is not at all to say that the actor is unaware of contextual matters – that would be as undesirable as it is impossible – but only that the actor cannot concentrate on them in performance. In Chapter 5 we will see how contextual considerations of performativity, driven into deeper areas of the mind, come forth at the proper time to inspire performance to its highest potential. But this can happen only when the situation is fully realized and can be fully played. Even then, the actor’s concentration, her conscious in-performance thinking, is strictly devoted to the successful outcome of her character’s situation – that is, to winning.

Winning

Situations are not static, they are dynamic. All life is fluid and relative; even in the world of science, since Einstein and Heisenberg, we are given to understand that the concept of “a moment in time” is a useless one.

The situation of the ballplayer, as he comes to bat, is a mobile and dynamic integration of moods, feelings, perceptions, contingencies, and ideas. These are events – hypothesized, feared, expected, or intended – which come together in the player’s mind. They would be absolutely chaotic if they were not organized into some sort of useful structure – and they are. That structure is winning. Winning – the lust for victory – is the mindset which determines the way the player sees his situation, and how he acts upon it. For the professional player there is no need to dwell on the focus on victory, which has been immortalized by the late football coach Vince Lombardi into the professional athlete’s credo: “Winning isn’t the most important thing. It’s the only thing.” It is the athlete’s concentration on winning that structures both the athlete’s absorption and the spectator’s fascination; if the fans feel the game is fixed, or the boxer they are rooting for is not trying to win with all he’s got, they boo ferociously.

Of course, with the professional athlete, the “win” is a quantitative victory, with the rules of the game awarding so many points for such and such behavior. Also in sports, one person’s victory is usually another person’s defeat; in these ways sports remain an imperfect metaphor for life, and for the actor in theatre or films. But the primary parallel remains: in acting as in sports, situations become dynamic only when a victory is sought, when the actor pursues winning, and pursues it with vigor, with all of his or her acting power.

Life is not a game, however, and the field of life has an infinite number of goals, not just one on each end – and an almost infinite number of players. Winning in life is not necessarily a competition against individual rivals or rival teams. It more normally means fulfilling one or more self-designated goals. These stem from the basic human instincts: survival, love, happiness, health, validation, respect. All human beings direct their actions, sometimes effectively and sometimes not, toward goals they draw from those general human instincts. The universal foundation of a credible and inspiring performance – and this holds true in any character, in any production, in any theatrical style – is the accurate and compelling rendition of a character who, like all human beings, is trying to achieve fulfillment, satisfaction, love, happiness. The character may not know exactly what these may be; she may be inarticulate, psychotic, perverse, misguided, or bizarre, but she is after something that represents, to her at least, a victory.

The character may not ever get her victory, of course. Lady Macbeth doesn’t get night to cover herself in a p...