by Alan Arkin
Uta paused and looked at me sweetly (to which she was not given—she was not sentimental), before saying, “Oh my dear boy. Who ever told you that you were supposed to be comfortable?”
My suspicion is that Ms. Hagen was referring to the discomfort of the character, and not that Matt was supposed to be in a state of discomfort onstage for the rest of his life. At any rate, that was Matt’s breakthrough as an actor, and it involved his dramatically changing the place he worked from. He understood the power of story; that truths want to be told, have a will to be told, and that if we can simply exist in the scene the story and its truth will pass through us, willing itself into existence. It is our job only to be in the scene, to have the experience. That is what audiences come to see. Of course it’s not a bad idea to be playing the character while all this is going on.
One of the things that happens after an actor has had an experience such as Matthew’s is that technique can come into play. It then becomes possible to remember the initial experience, and how you got there, and to create a close semblance of the event, so that in a long run you don’t become an emotional wreck by actually living the experience night after night. Because like it or not, the character and his feelings become your feelings. I guess a lot of actors from other traditions might feel otherwise, but I think the emotions and the essence of the character dig into us, whether we like it or not.
I remember Carol Burnett telling me that she’d been invited by Dr. Thelma Moss, a professor at UCLA, to try an experiment in the Kirlian aura lab. Carol was asked to place her hand on a photographic plate. A picture was taken by some technique that showed an aura around the hand, and apparently each person’s aura is unique. Carol was then asked to do a series of photographs where she was to think, just think of herself as each of about a half-dozen of the characters she was known for. On every occasion the resulting photograph was significantly different from either Carol’s personal imprint or those of her other characters. When Dr. Moss looked at the photographs she described, in detail, the emotional life of the characters that Carol was thinking of at the time. Carol said that in each case her description of the character was spot-on. This was a pretty graphic demonstration of how thought, and the way we think of ourselves, becomes a dynamic that influences our many systems, and in many different ways, onstage and in life as well.
For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle, confronting some stern and faceless judge who would condemn me to a pit of hell if I didn’t achieve the “zone,” if even for a moment. Not a particularly happy place to work from. But as my interior work started taking me over, as the sensibility within me started to shift and change, I could no longer hang on to that stance.
Through my early years in front of a camera there had been no life whatsoever outside of my tightly focused eyeline. There was no crew, no director; there were only the specific actors I was working with. I was intensely focused on my subjects, and this came out of a ferocious attachment to my acting technique, which protected me from my own fears and a terrible sense of being judged, of being disliked, of needing approval. Now, as things started to crack open inside of me, as these centers began to open, I lost that tight focus. I would play a scene, working to the best of my ability, and no matter how hard I tried I could not shut out what was taking place in my peripheral vision—the knowledge that a crew was present, with a director behind the camera, and a lot of lights and trucks just off the set. When that began to happen I felt as if I were losing my ability to act altogether. I would sheepishly check with the director to see if he’d noticed anything wrong with my performance. No one ever said a word. Then I would realize that for better or worse I had to incorporate my expanded sense of awareness into my technique. I wasn’t particularly happy about it, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, so I lived with it, feeling that my abilities as an actor had diminished to some extent. I had to accept it. There was no other choice.
Then, one day, I was reading a book by a Native American shaman and I came across a chapter on vision. The shaman maintained that as one’s consciousness expanded one’s vision got broader. Literally. One’s field of vision actually grew wider. He went on to say that tight vision belongs to a world of confrontation, to the hunter, and broad vision to a world of wider and more subtle perceptions. He also maintained that as one became used to this breadth of vision, the details of the tight vision could be sustained while everything else in the periphery continues to be seen and acknowledged. I had never encountered this idea before, and it gave me a sense, for the first time, that what was happening to me was constructive and developmental, and not just a sign that my acting ability was going down the drain. Nevertheless, I had to relearn how to act. I had to redefine who I was when I was playing a character. My work had to become more public, more accepting of the real world around me that was going on at the same time I was playing a scene. But there is a strange and interesting phenomenon that takes place within our psyches. As was the case with Matt’s experience with Uta, and my own experience with expanding vision and many other such experiences, all of which were very positive indications of growth, initially and almost invariably they feel like aberrations. Like failings! In almost every case I’ve felt that there was something wrong with me, and it’s taken some time to adjust to the idea that: “Hey, this is good! I’m in a better place!” An odd state of affairs.
Another one of these shifts took place while I was doing The In-Laws. During the shooting, for the first time in my life I found myself having a good time while working. There was nothing I could do about it. There was no struggle involved, no mountain to climb. Out of nowhere, acting had become play, and for weeks I worried that I might get fired. Before The In-Laws I had felt that I had to work my ass off to get into some kind of state, into the zone, shot by shot, in order to do acceptable work. Now, in spite of myself, I was having fun.
For the first weeks of shooting I tried to jam myself into my old familiar work place. I tried to suffer, to constrict myself; I couldn’t make it happen. I kept looking at the director, Arthur Hiller, to see if he was disapproving, to see if he knew the terrible fact that I was having fun and not working. I looked at Peter Falk, my co-star, to see if he was hating me for enjoying myself; no one said anything. In fact, people seemed to like it. I even think my having fun allowed Peter to do the same. I’m not sure that it’s a place he’s frequented too often in his career. He’s a terrific actor, but I don’t think fun is a word that he would apply to his work process.
Interestingly, over the years when people talk to me about The In-Laws, the first thing they say to me—and this has happened not once but literally hundreds of times—the first thing they say is, “God, it looks like you guys are having a good time in that film.” And more perplexing yet, it seems to mean something to them. When I answer, “Yes, we had a ball making The In-Laws,” I see people breathe a sigh of relief. It has happened over and over again, and after the fiftieth or hundredth time that someone said those words to me I began to wonder why they cared. What difference could it possibly make to anyone whether or not I had a good time making The In-Laws, or any other film for that matter? There are a few other movies I’ve made over the years that received similar responses from audiences, and amazingly it’s invariably the films in which I was having a good time that prompted people to ask me this question. These audiences of one always knew, and they always cared, and they always breathed a sigh of relief when I said “yes.”
And then I began noticing that I do the same thing with my favorite films or favorite musical groups. When I find out that the musicians of a string quartet that I’ve admired for years fight endlessly with each other, it fills me with inexplicable sadness. When I meet other actors and ask them about their experience in a film, wondering if it had been fun to make, if I get a positive response it fills me with joy. This strange phenomenon puzzled me. Either people enjoyed the movie or they didn’t. Is everyone that much of a Samaritan
that they need me to have a good time while I’m acting? I don’t think so, but I couldn’t find an explanation for it. It puzzled me for years until one day I tried an experiment in order to solve another problem of mine, and it took care of both of them at the same time.
I’ve always loved classical music, and I’ve always loved Carnegie Hall. Yet for years, getting myself to a concert there filled me with dread. It happened over and over again, and try as I might I couldn’t make any sense of it. Over the years it began to really annoy me. I only went to Carnegie Hall to hear music I loved, no one forced me to attend, it was always of my own volition, and yet each time I got near the place I’d struggle with terrible anxiety. I berated myself endlessly about it but never came to an understanding of what the cause could possibly be.
One night, thoroughly fed up with myself, I determined to get to the bottom of it. There was a performance of Beethoven’s 9th taking place at Carnegie Hall, which I’d been looking forward to for several weeks. I asked a couple of friends to come with me. It was a performance by an orchestra I’d been a fan of for many years through recordings, but had never seen. I told my friends about my problem and said I wanted to go with them as if I were blind. I thought limiting my senses and allowing myself to be cared for might relax me enough to get a handle on what was bothering me. My friends agreed. I put on a pair of dark glasses and off we went to Carnegie Hall. I was fine until we neared the auditorium. As we got within earshot of the place, I began to pick up the excitement of the people waiting in the lobby for the auditorium to open. I began to hear snatches of conversation and also began to pick up the jarring collisions of emotional states of those waiting to get in. I could hear it and I could feel it. A lot of people were waiting with great enthusiasm. Others didn’t really want to be there; they were there to appease a date, a husband or a wife. Others were there because it was a corporate gift and felt they had to attend. Others went to keep a scorecard. They’d heard different orchestras perform the 9th and they were there to evaluate nuances of this orchestra, pitting it against the others, showing off their knowledge and hoping to add another notch to their expertise. Some attending the concert were musicians; they had friends who were playing that night. Others were present because it was their outing for the evening—tomorrow it would be the opera, the next day the ballet, in a continuous fix of culture.
I felt barraged with the endlessly varied agendas of the people who were attending, and I quickly realized this is what had been driving me nuts over the years—the cacophony of egos and personal needs. I was desperate for some silence. Some sense of awe, of humble anticipation of what might be coming. The doors of the auditorium eventually opened and we were let in, and the lot of us scrambled for our seats, talking, complaining, rummaging through programs, trying to figure out where to stash our stuff, oddly girding ourselves against the onslaught of the Beethoven, most of us doing everything possible to avoid the chance of open connection, or confrontation with what was before us.
The music started. I stayed blind, trying for once to feel the entire experience rather than attempting to block out the audience, or anything else that I might have considered extraneous. I wanted to feel everything going on, not just the music onstage but everything happening in the hall. As the music continued the audience slowly began to settle down, and it soon became clear that we were hearing an extraordinary performance of the 9th. The orchestra was on fire. About five minutes into the first movement, the varied personal agendas in the audience began to melt down and then slowly disappear, all agendas, those of audience and musicians alike, until finally the only purpose or meaning in the hall was Beethoven’s. And then by the end of the third movement even Beethoven’s agenda was gone, and we were swept up in what he had been swept up by, what lived through him, and all of Carnegie Hall became one living organism, one thing with a couple thousand moving parts. We had let go, and we lived inside that majestic vision of brotherhood and unity and heroism written over two hundred years ago.
We had become the music.
When the piece finished, when the applause died down, there was a split second of recognition of what had taken place. I could sense a subterranean desire sweep through the audience to hang on to this connection that had been forced on us by the music, this unearthly unity and love that Beethoven’s music insists on. For a split second you could feel in the audience a need to join hands and link together and look each other in the face, or grab each other and embrace, a need to apologize for a lifetime of neglect, to cry, to tell each person in the hall that we would always love them, that we always had loved them.
And then the moment was over. And slowly the discussions began, the intellectualizations, the looking for overcoats, the program searches, the rush to the restaurants and garages. And I took off my dark glasses and finally knew what my anxiety had been about. For me, going to Carnegie Hall had always been going to church. I knew that what I would find there, in those rare, exalted moments, would be a holy experience. I went there to abandon myself to the power not only of the music but, even more importantly, to the occasional unity that presents itself when a group of artists catch fire and become one thing. When what rules the evening is the essence of the music, not the people playing, or those listening to it. And I began to realize that the underlying message that runs through all of the group art forms, whether it be dance, music, theater, or film, is: “Look at us! We can get along! We can do this beautiful thing and we are doing it together and actually enjoying each other! There is hope for us after all!”
This is the message that runs underneath and through all the group art forms. I don’t know what else would explain an audience’s desperate need to know that they’d been part of something grand and joyous and unifying, or even to know that an actor had fun making a movie. And I find myself thinking, my God, if we can’t get along playing music, dancing, singing, pretending we’re other people, what possible hope is there for the people who work at the U.N.? For doctors? For research scientists? For teachers? For all those places and professions where lives are at stake? What we do as performers has to be joyous and it has to be generous. The audience needs to know.
CHAPTER TEN
Somewhere along the way I became a director. It was not part of my life plan, nor was it a profession I thought I had any particular talent for. I never thought of myself as a leader and I didn’t want to be one.
But one day I got a call from a couple of friends who were in rehearsal for an off-Broadway play. They said the cast was foundering under bad leadership, and they asked if I would consider coming in and taking over the direction. I wasn’t working at the time so I said I’d take a look at a rehearsal and see what I thought.
I went to the theater and watched a run-through, completely confused about what I was seeing. The play made no sense to me, and without a handle on what it was supposed to be about I felt I couldn’t be of much help. They thanked me for coming in, and I went home. Two weeks later they called again. They’d hired a second director, and after a few days he turned out to be as bad as the first. Would I come in again and take another look?
I went back and watched another run-through. This time, although I still felt the play wasn’t working and the acting stiff, I could at least follow the plot, even though I didn’t understand it. I had nothing else on my plate at the time and I liked the idea of helping my friends in the show, so I said I’d take over. With my heart in my mouth I started rehearsals. I had no craft as a director and no idea of where to begin, so I sat there and watched. All I knew was that I could determine when something felt false or incomprehensible to me.
To my surprise, when I made suggestions, the actors would actually try them. When they’d ask me why I was telling them to do certain things, I found to my further surprise that I could come up with reasons that satisfied them. As the days went on I began to enjoy my new hat, and I found that as the newly clarified moments in the play piled up on each other it all started making sense. To my delight,
I discovered that it was quite funny. The play opened, ran for a year, and I started getting some off-Broadway directorial work.
At every opportunity, I would hire the actors I’d worked with at Second City. My second play was Little Murders, by Jules Feiffer. Two of the cast members were from Second City, Andrew Duncan and Fred Willard. Then came The White House Murder Case, also by Jules Feiffer, and once more most of the cast was from Second City: Andrew Duncan, again, who as far as I was concerned was the unsung hero of Second City, Anthony Holland, J. J. Barry, Paul Dooley, and Peter Bonerz, who was from another successful improv group called The Committee.
Whenever I work with actors with improvisational training, my rehearsal time is cut in half. It’s been my experience that a lot of actors don’t really read scripts. They read their parts and pay only cursory attention to the other elements of the play. As a result they don’t know their function within the totality of the event, and it becomes a director’s job to fit the actor into the piece as a whole. Actors with improvisational training almost always understand the shape of the event they’re working within. I think it’s at least in part because improvisational actors are simultaneously their own writers and directors. When you’ve improvised long enough you develop instincts—about the style of the piece you’re working in, but also about when to take over, when to step back, where to position yourself physically onstage while leaving room for the other actors, when to come on and when to get off. Since no one is in charge, generosity becomes a survival technique. These skills transfer easily into working on written material. Most actors bury their heads in the role, forgetting that in a wellconstructed piece each role has a function. Being aware of that function makes finding the character that much easier, and good improvisational actors tend to excel at knowing their function within the whole.