What Kevin did when he took it off the page and explored the script was basically what he did in the movie. He was all instinct—like Nathan. He explored the scene in front of Pakula without caring where he went with it—without Acting. The lines took him to disconnected places that were all true to Kevin in the moment. Pakula could see that he could just film Kevin, and with Kevin’s many different brilliant explorations, he could piece together an extraordinary character—brilliant, schizophrenic, scary, funny, charming, tender, delicate, masculine, and always unpredictable. He understood that the audience had to love him the way Sophie loved him in order for the film to make sense.
Of course, no matter how good you are in an audition, you still may not get the role. Remember, a good director won’t cast you if he doesn’t need you, even if he thinks you’re a terrific actor. The director has a vision of the work, and his needs must be fulfilled with the right choice for him. It has nothing to do with us as actors. Sometimes we can surprise a director, by revealing sides of ourselves he didn’t know we had, or by exciting him with a vision of the character he didn’t think was possible. But all we can do is our best, and we must leave it to those casting to do their best.
And if we are consistently doing our best, we will be ready when the right part comes along.
Andie MacDowell came to me when no one would hire her. For a year and a half she came in week after week, working on her acting and preparing auditions. After a few months, she was really cooking. Her auditions started to show how talented she was, and the people she was auditioning for were impressed. But still no one cast her, and she was afraid she would never act again.
I told her, “Be patient. The right part is going to come along. And they’ll have to have you.” Then sex, lies, and videotape came along, with a hot new director, Steven Soderbergh. She auditioned, and Soderbergh absolutely had to have her in his film. He got his way. And she got the part. She was ready.
Be ready!
Suggestions for Practice
In addition to the scenes listed in chapter I, here are some for audition practice.
Man / Woman Noel Coward, Private Lives
Sibyl and Elyot in Act I
Man / Woman Neil Simon, Barefoot in the Park
Paul and Corie in Act I
Start “Corie? … Where are you?”
Man / Man David Mamet, Speed the Plow
Gould and Fox in Act I
Start “ … How much money could we
stand to make?”
End “but it ain’t crowded”.
Woman / Woman Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge
Beatrice and Catherine in Act 1
Start “Listen Catherine. What are you
going to do with yourself?”
End “Okay.”
Man / Woman Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind
Frankie and Beth in scene I
Man / Woman Clifford Odets, Golden Boy
Lorna and Joe in Act I, scene 4
Man / Woman Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke
Alma and John in scene 4
Start “ … I want to see your father.”
Continue through the end of scene.
Cut Dr. Buchanan and Rosa from the scene.
Man / Man David Mamet, American Buffalo
Don and Bob in Act II
Start at the top of the scene.
End “Teach and me and Fletcher.”
The following are scenes from films.
Man / Woman Some Like It Hot
Joe and Sugar in scene 3
Man / Woman East of Eden
Abra and Cal in scene I
Man / Woman Funny Lady
Billy and Fanny in scene I
Start “I’m glad to see you Fanny.”
End “Gotta use your John, Kid …”
4
ON STAGE IN REHEARSAL AND IN PERFORMANCE
“Harold taught me that during rehearsal you must allow yourself to make an absolute fool of yourself if necessary. You cannot judge yourself. You must leave your taste behind.”
—Kevin Kline
IN REHEARSAL
Theater has a built-in process that allows the actor to uncover the character: rehearsal. There are usually four to five weeks of rehearsal before the actor has to face an audience. In that time, the whole play will be staged with sets, lighting, costumes, music, sound, and any special effects needed. But most of all, rehearsal allows the actor to explore the possibilities of the character on his feet with the other actors and a director.
“The luxury of rehearsal to me is finding every way in which not to do it,” Kevin Kline told me in our discussion about rehearsing. He continued, “To leave no door unopened. Not to deny yourself what may seem like inappropriate impulses.”
In theater, rehearsal is the place to take chances, to make all of our mistakes. This is often a dilemma for the actor, who may be afraid of seeming inadequate to the director, the producer, and the other actors. He may even be afraid of being fired. But the more careful we are in rehearsal, the less range our characters will have in performance. If the actor hasn’t explored the character enough in rehearsal to trust himself fully in performance, he will be dull when it’s time to perform in front of an audience. And that’s a real problem.
An actor must explore the character piece by piece, moment by moment, in rehearsal. He discovers what doesn’t work or doesn’t belong, not to fix the part in stone, but to leave himself free to continue the exploration in performance. By then, if the actor has gotten his big mistakes behind him in rehearsal, it will be a more informed exploration.
Here’s a framework for thinking about the rehearsal period. First, when we are working at home, we are exploring on our own from our instinct, imagination, and also from our research. In rehearsal, we have other actors offering stimulation that affects us. In our homework we must be totally available to ourselves, and in rehearsal totally available to the other actors. But the real trick is to be available to ourselves while in rehearsal. We can’t be pushed around by our response to the other actors or to the director, because we may lose ourselves. And only we are responsible, in the end, for our work.
The director’s job is to put the play together during rehearsal in a cohesive way that moves the story along with the greatest clarity and speed. The actor’s job is to make each moment of the character in the play believable, interesting, and thrilling. I think of our work, the actor’s, as exploding the moment. The director’s work is to move it along. You can see the potential for conflict here. But it is a necessary conflict if the play is to be fulfilled for the playwright and the audience.
Be Bold
When Kevin Kline was offered a part in the Broadway musical On the Twentieth Century in 1978, he called me to ask whether he should accept it. The role was the leading lady’s handsome lover—a bit player in Hollywood movies of the 1930s. The script barely spelled out his character, so Kevin didn’t have much to go on. But Harold Prince was directing, the book and lyrics were by Comden and Green, the music was by Cy Coleman, and Madeleine Kahn was starring.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. “You have another job?”
“No,” he said. “But the part is boring.”
“Does it have to be?”
There was a pause on the other end.
“Right!” Kevin said finally. He decided to do it.
But while Kevin was waiting for rehearsals to begin, all he kept thinking about was how one-dimensional the part seemed to him. He feared he’d been hired only because he looked right for the part, nothing more. He thought the character had been written not as a comic part, but as the straight man. Every choice that occurred to him seemed as boring as the part did. At a loss and desperate to find the character, he impulsively filled his pockets with anything that came to mind as something a desperate, self-absorbed actor might use to draw attention to himself. He took every actor’s fear—that he will make obvious, idiotic choices—to a lunatic extreme, selecting actu
al objects that were stupid, obvious, and idiotic. He was still worried, but at least he had acted on impulse.
Kevin’s entrance was onto a train platform, in tow of the leading lady, whose appearance photographers were eagerly awaiting. At the very first rehearsal, Kevin grabbed a camera from one of the photographers, turned it on himself, reached into his pocket, and threw confetti into the air while he snapped a picture of himself. When he came into what was supposed to be a stateroom on the train in another scene, he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out an eight-by-ten head shot of himself, and taped it to the rehearsal room wall. He thought Hal Prince would either like it or fire him. In fact, pictures of Kevin mysteriously popped up everywhere in rehearsals. He worried that all this would be perceived as desperate overacting and a ridiculous attempt at scene-stealing. But Hal Prince thought it was perfect for the character. He told Kevin to go as far as possible, and to trust him as director to rein Kevin in if necessary. Kevin’s willingness to make a fool out of himself was the genesis of a vain, embarrassingly desperate and ambitious character—the quintessential “bit player.” As a result, the part was built up over the rehearsal period, and a big song was added for Kevin’s character. Eventually this “boring” role won Kevin his first Tony.
When I went backstage after an early preview to congratulate Kevin, he said, “But is it acting?”
“If it’s not, who gives a damn?” I said. Then I explained why it was not just acting but good acting—unpredictable, startling, and refreshing.
When Kevin came to study with me he was a musician, a wonderful pianist, very sensitive, deep, cultivated—and tasteful. Unfortunately, I think good taste is antithetical to good acting because it stifles parts of the actor. Once he attacks his sense of good taste so that all the “cheap stuff” is out in the open—once he is in an uncensored exploration of the character—his taste becomes usable; it tells him what belongs and what doesn’t. Having learned in his work with me to trust himself completely, Kevin had been freed from the shackles of good taste. As a result, he’d been able to tap into a part of himself that all actors have inside—the desperate need to be recognized.
In rehearsal, the actor has to shatter any preconceived notion he may have about the character—defy it, until he knows what the character is not by trying out precisely those possibilities that seem ridiculous. The actor must not play it safe in rehearsal. If he is to be ready by performance, he must make his mistakes as early as possible, because it can take a while to arrive at what the part is. Kevin remembers that it wasn’t until he’d been clowning around for a while at a tech rehearsal of Sandra Jenning’s Beware the JubJub Bird that I directed off Broadway in 1976 that I insisted, “You must put that on stage, that’s where you live as an actor.”
This willingness to let go in rehearsal is not only essential to exploring comic characters. It is necessary to work this way with a serious or tragic part as well. The actor must be able to get beyond his shyness, good taste, and embarrassment from the very beginning of his work in rehearsal, like Aidan Quinn in Streetcar pulling the “meat” out of his pants. That doesn’t mean the actor can’t be simple or quiet or even delicate if that’s where the lines and character take him. In rehearsal, the actor must give up Acting right from the beginning. He must have the courage to be simple, just to say the lines as he feels them, with no extras added—no beautiful projected speech, no graceful movement, no dramatics to fill out the character.
Take It Slow
In the best of all possible worlds, the rehearsal process starts out slow. In the first week, the actors and director sit around a big table, reading through the play. Performance issues are set aside so the actors and director can explore the play together. When a question comes up about a line, a scene, or the play as a whole, a discussion erupts. So everyone is working on the same play. Everyone takes their time and allows themselves to listen to the other actors explore their lines, creating a free communication back and forth.
Gradually, needing a physical expansion of their explorations with the other actors, actors start to get up from the table and move around in the scenes as they say their lines. The director sketches out the setting—the sink, the couch, the table, the doors through which the character’s enter or exit on stage and where they lead.
The actors’ free wandering converts to a need for direction. The director may have a specific blocking plan, but ideally he keeps it hidden at first, allowing the actors to find things—movement, props, etc.—on their own organically. Then, if their natural relationship to the character and scene works for the director, much of his work is done. If not, he can offer his pre-planned blocking and the actors will explore the new blocking.
The surprising thing is that if we start slowly at the beginning, everything becomes more natural and easy for both actor and director. Scenes start to play quicker and quicker. Because everyone is in it together, in no time actors are “off book,” exploring more and more deeply with each other so that four or five weeks of rehearsal genuinely prepares them to explore in front of an audience.
But unfortunately, it doesn’t always happen this way. Too often, within the first few days a director is already looking for results. And an actor becomes too intimidated to take his time. The director uses the rehearsal to stage and re-stage the scenes because it’s never right the first, second, or third time when staging quickly without the actors’ input—because it’s not organic. And everything goes too fast. The director wants to see the performance and he wants it at performance tempo.
If everything is going too fast in rehearsal, the actor has to work on his own, slowing everything down. At night, take your lines slowly off the page. Don’t worry about memorization—as we have discussed, it will happen naturally. Breathe, think, feel—let your instinct and imagination surface. Even if you are pressured to go faster than you want in rehearsal, you will not feel as rushed if you have been able to find space for yourself with the play on your own.
Do Your Homework
As I have said, I am not opposed to research as a tool for exploring character. In fact, used judiciously, it can be crucial to the rehearsal period, not only for the individual actor but for the production as a whole, as an early experience of mine illustrates.
I was cast in a play called Second Avenue Rag by Allan Knee at the Phoenix Theater in New York. It was about the garment trade in New York City in the early part of the twentieth century. I was to play a women’s tailor in a dress shop that catered to stars of the Yiddish theater.
The first thing I did after being cast was to try to find out more about the period, the trade, and the Yiddish theater. I read books describing the history, art, theater, and politics of the era, and I found an old tailor in upstate New York, Willie Greenfield, who had emigrated many years ago from Germany. He was in retirement, but he took in odd jobs to keep busy. I became one of them.
Willie was a perfectionist. Each stroke—pierce, push, pull—was done perfectly and powerfully. He was never tentative in sewing. He was sweet but no pushover. There was a quiet strength about him. He was quite religious, in a very natural way. He had a deformity in his back that made walking difficult and painful, yet he never complained. He had great pride. He dressed simply but with style. He was thoughtful, but every now and then anger would burst from him. He seemed to love showing me how to work—he thought of me as an artist, so he showed me great respect even though I was much younger than him. He took his work seriously. He knew he was good. He didn’t have to show off. Willie showed me that such men as the one I was to play not only existed but were interesting and full of life.
Willie had trained in Europe, and he showed me the difference between women’s tailoring and men’s tailoring—and the difference between the way men and women work at tailoring. First of all, they use different thimbles. The men use an open thimble, pushing the needle with the side of their middle finger. Women use a thimble that is closed on top and push the needle with the tip of the middle finge
r. I watched Willie closely—he had real force in his sewing. It was powerful and fast.
Willie gave me one of his old thimbles. I practiced all the time. When I went to rehearsal, I brought my sewing with me. Before long, I looked right and felt right. The sewing itself was a mess, but no one in the audience was going to see that. It made me laugh when I looked at it and became a part of the character—someone amused by his own work rather than bored.
I continued to sew as I read with the other actors, and as I was watching and listening to rehearsals from the side of the rehearsal room. When I was in a scene, Cynthia Harris, the actress playing the great Yiddish actress Bertha Kalish, would come over to check my sewing to see if it had gotten better, and we’d share a laugh. When I showed Willie’s technique to the other two actors playing tailors, it changed the whole look of our work. Pretty soon, they started bringing their sewing to rehearsal too, and we sat together, watching and stitching and gossiping about our research, like a strange little kaffeeklatsch. Sewing quickly and powerfully, and listening to the bickering and bantering around me, I became a sort of spiritual leader to the tailors, with my skullcap, quiet manner, and amused disposition, which is how the character struck me.
When an actor’s preparation is good, it impacts everyone in the production. It makes the actor fall in love with the character and everyone picks up on it. It makes them want to do more and it gives the work a dignity like that of Willie Greenfield.
Give Up Your Ego
How to Stop Acting Page 11