How to Stop Acting

by Harold Guskin

  These parts are rounded human beings who emerge from rich texts. We must know as much about them as possible. But we must also let them come alive in the playwright’s hands; we must let them move from line to line and moment to moment without shackling them to a narrow interpretation. After all, real human beings react with more choices, thoughts, emotions, and changes than any actor, no matter how brilliant, can think of. So we must allow these great characters every opportunity to be real. Critics and audiences may analyze the performance afterwards and praise or fault our “interpretation.” But we, as actors, must not interpret. We must give ourselves—including our intellect—over to the role, and let the text take us where it will.

  Actors may believe that an interpretation puts their personal stamp on the role, but it actually does the reverse. It not only diminishes the character, it makes the character less personal because the interpretation comes from the intellect, and intellect is only a part of us. And although really good actors are intelligent, it’s a different kind of intelligence—not so much analytical as instinctive. To make the character a full human being, the actor needs all of himself—his mind, his instinct, his imagination, his personal experiences, and the whole range of his responses to the text, not only in preparation but alive in performance.

  I believe the real reason actors try to play an “idea”—an interpretation—is because they want to control the character. That is why they are willing to limit the possibilities and choices. But the actor can’t really control anything when he acts, except maybe the possibility that he be truly present every moment he is on stage. And there is no better way to learn this than by playing these roles.

  Using the Negative

  What makes the great roles daunting, in addition to their inherent depth and complexity, is the fact that they have been played by important actors again and again and again. Every actor who comes to the major classical and modern repertoire has in his head Olivier’s Hamlet, Henry V, and Richard III, Richard Burton’s Becket, Katharine Hepburn’s Mary in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Marlon Brando’s Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, among other memorable performances. It is necessary for the actor to approach such roles from the negative, saying to himself, “Anything but what I remember from that particular performance.”

  When Kevin Kline was cast as Henry V for the 1984 New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, he and I were both more than familiar with Lawrence Olivier’s monumental portrayal of Henry V in the film version of the play. Olivier’s Henry V, with his crisp, heroic speech, had seemed the perfect king for World War II, when the film was made, and the portrayal was still resonant in the 1960s and 1970s when Kevin and I first saw it. But Kevin had the sound of Olivier’s Henry still whizzing through his head at maximum speed.

  The first thing he did was to slow down his own speech. He pulled each line apart simply to make sense of it, allowing the language to become clear and resonant for him. Kevin wanted his Henry to be personal and very human, as opposed to Olivier’s confident King. Olivier’s Henry didn’t seem to have any doubts about himself or his position. Kevin saw him as full of uncertainty.

  After all, we had been through the Vietnam War and were instinctively suspicious of what looked like jingoistic clichés in the play. So we talked about John E Kennedy as a possible model for the character—the scion of a powerful, wealthy family, groomed from boyhood to be president. Henry V’s father, Henry IV, was powerful but distant; there were suspicions about his right to the throne. John F. Kennedy’s father, Joe Kennedy, had served as Ambassador to England but never overcame a certain political dubiousness. Although Henry spends most of his youth with common men—Falstaff and his group of drunks, lechers, and thieves—he asserts his nobility when he goes to war for his father and defeats Hotspur, a true nobleman in the earlier history plays. He had the “common touch,” but also the “touch of a prince.” Many felt the same of JFK.

  But Kevin was not using Kennedy as an interpretation. Rather, he was invoking Kennedy as an inspiration, to get him in touch with his own thoughts and feelings about the kind of king he himself would like to be—a king in touch with real people and their feelings, dreams, passions, and fears.

  In Act IV, scene 3, Henry addresses his weary troops before the battle of Agincourt. They are outnumbered ten to one by a fresh and confident French army. As Henry approaches, he hears Westmoreland:

  O! that we now had here

  But one ten thousand of those men in England,

  That do no work to-day!

  King Henry begins:

  What’s he that wishes so?

  My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:

  If we are mark’d to die, we are enow [enough]

  To do our country loss; and if to live,

  The fewer men, the greater share of honor.

  Olivier had delivered this speech as a classic piece of bravura acting, starting simply and building piece by piece to a rousing call to war. Kevin did the opposite. He started by raging the first line, “What’s he that wishes so?” Having startled everyone, he paused a bit, then he broke the silence:

  My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:

  If we are mark’d to die, we are enow

  To do our country loss; and if to live,

  The fewer men, the greater share of honor.

  Kevin’s voice got louder and louder, line by line—a crescendo of outrage, increasing with each thought until, almost shouting, he bellowed:

  O! do not wish one more:

  Rather proclaim it, Westmorland, through my host,

  That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

  Let him depart …

  We would not die in that man’s company

  That fears his fellowship to die with us.

  Then he stopped. He took a long pause as he looked around at his men. When their surprise and his anger subsided, he said simply, quietly, as if he were only just realizing what day it was, “This day is called the Feast of Crispian.” Then he continued, more personally:

  He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

  Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,

  And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

  Then he got more and more personal, describing what it would be like in years to come for those men who survive this battle and celebrate the feast of Saint Crispian in England. Then with deep emotion, face to face with each man in turn, he said very slowly and quietly:

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers:

  For he today that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother.

  I am still touched, remembering this moment. Kevin’s Henry seemed truly to offer his men his brotherhood—the brotherhood of a king. Man to man, shedding blood together. He and they were one; he asked them to fight on personal terms, as partners. And he got quieter and more personal as the speech progressed, rather than more and more heroic.

  There are examples of great actors in the past using this negative approach to the Great Roles. Olivier rejected Gielgud’s beautifully spoken, sensitive, classical Hamlet which was so popular in his day for a swift, modern, psychologically complex Hamlet. He said he just wanted to make it contemporary. Olivier’s Othello was a mixture of sensuality and primal animal fierceness as opposed to the earlier renowned Othello of Paul Robeson that was all nobility. We see this again and again with great actors rejecting former portrayals of these roles in order to be free to re-create them. These roles are so capacious they allow for infinite variations. They contain multitudes.

  DEALING WITH SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE

  To act Shakespeare, an actor must be verbal. From the tinkers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Hamlet, all of Shakespeare’s characters express themselves in words textured with description and allusion. So the actor must be able to express himself using their words.

  When the actor is able to speak such rich language with ease and authenticity, the
effect can be unforgettable. I remember, for example, a production of Twelfth Night that Joseph Papp asked me to direct for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. I’d immediately thought of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio for the role of Viola. She was a beautiful, intelligent young actress, deeply emotional yet fiery and tough minded—all qualities needed for the role. And having coached her for many years, I knew she wouldn’t be intimidated by Viola’s poetic dialogue.

  It was a startling performance. Because of her freedom with the dialogue, Mary Elizabeth was able to create a brilliant, poetic, sassy character who never lost her femininity, and yet was totally believable and charming as a young man in male clothing. The depth of her emotion popped up in surprising and illuminating ways. One moment in particular stands out in my memory. Viola, impersonating the Duke’s page, delivers a message of love to the veiled Countess Olivia, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Since she herself is in love with the Duke, she is irritated by Olivia’s rejection of him; she cannot understand why any woman would spurn this wonderful man. Viola says, “Good madam, let me see your face.” Mary Elizabeth said this as a challenge, as if she were saying, “Remove your veil, so I can see what the hell the Duke is so hot about.”

  After protesting, Olivia says, “We will draw the curtain and show you the picture.” When she let the veil drop, Mary Elizabeth looked at Olivia’s face, and everything stopped. Her own face said it all: the Duke is in love with this image of beauty and femininity. I am a boy in the Duke’s eyes. I can’t compete with that. How can I ever have his love as a woman? Tears came to her eyes and she looked away. It was a stunning moment.

  There was a pause. Olivia, unsure of why Viola turned away, became vulnerable, confused, hurt. She asked simply, “Is’t not well done?”

  Mary Elizabeth answered truthfully, even humbly, “Excellently done.” She took a moment to gather herself and then said, wickedly, “If God did all.” The audience roared with laughter. Her sudden shift from a deep sense of loss to this feisty, sharp wit created a marvelous surprise.

  If Shakespeare’s language offers some of the greatest possibilities to the actor, however, it can also pose one of the greatest obstacles, particularly when the lines are in verse. On top of our reflexive tendency to artificially heighten our inflection when we see lines as verse, there are the endless debates about what a “proper” Shakespearian delivery should be.

  We don’t really know how the lines were spoken in Shakespeare’s time, but even if we did, how useful is some generalized “Shakespearian” style of speaking and acting? Each play is set in a different time and place, and each character comes from a specific class, period, and location. The specifics of time and place and their attendant styles are enormously important, as are each character’s specific lines. So how can we have a general style for speaking Shakespeare’s lines?

  Of course we should study the history of Shakespeare’s time—the political, social, and literary history as well as the language and poetry. As actors, we should know as much as possible. And we should study speech and voice. It broadens our range and offers us possibilities. But in the end, it is the specific play and character that matters to us, not any general notion of how the lines may have been spoken or the plays performed in Shakespeare’s time.

  I know that the model for acting Shakespeare is British acting. And there are great British actors whose work I admire. But I don’t believe they should be a model for American actors. The manner of speaking English in England today is no closer to the way Shakespeare spoke four hundred years ago than our manner of speaking in the United States.

  I believe we have to forget about “style” in speaking and acting and go back to the text. The text is the source. It gives us the character. Make the character alive, a breathing human being, and the play will come alive. If the audience is to believe the character, the actor must treat the lines as realistic dialogue, speaking them with as little fuss about the poetry as possible. If the phrase or line is poetic, so be it. It doesn’t need the actor to make it beautiful. If it is written as poetry, and the actor says the lines simply, the lines will be both real and poetic. But if the actor becomes too conscious of his beautiful speech, he will likely forget what he is saying—the sound of his voice will smother the simple truth of the line and its personal meaning for the actor.

  The actor can begin by pulling the lines apart, stopping to find out exactly what each word means. Use a Shakespeare glossary or dictionary—I use Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, or for quick reference, C. T. Onions’s A Shakespeare Glossary, which is more compact. Then try to take the line or phrase off the page. If a word or phrase feels foreign to you, so that you feel as if you’re translating as you say it, stop. Replace the word or phrase with a modern equivalent and try it again.

  JULIET. Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, Towards

  Phoebus lodging!

  In Act III, scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is waiting for Romeo. They were secretly married in the morning, and now in the afternoon she is waiting for night to come so that she and Romeo can be together.

  Take the first line off the page, looking up any words you don’t know.

  Gallop apace: gallop quickly.

  You fiery-footed steeds: horses that draw the chariot of the sun god or the sun itself.

  Towards Phoebus lodging: Phoebus Apollo is the sun god; his lodging, where he sleeps, is where the sun sets in the west.

  Juliet is looking up at the sun and ordering it to move more quickly to where it sets.

  After saying the line, repeat it in your own words: “Gallop quickly to where the sun sets, you fiery-footed horses.” Then go back to the original lines. Go back and forth between your words and Shakespeare’s until the words, thoughts, and image are really coming from your mouth.

  This can take time, but until an actor truly means what he says, he can’t be in the moment.

  Sometimes Shakespeare’s phrasing trips up actors. Verbs aren’t always where we expect them to be, either for poetic reasons or because of historical differences in speech. If the phrasing is giving you a problem, rearrange the phrase or sentence so that it reverberates as modern speech. Then go back and forth between your phrasing and Shakespeare’s until you truly mean the line the way he wrote it.

  In Act II, scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet has been surprised by Romeo on the balcony while voicing her love for him to the night air. She says to him:

  Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,

  Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek

  For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight.

  Take the lines off the page, looking up words you do not know and rearranging phrases to make them accessible to you.

  Thou knowest: you know

  The mask of night: the cover of darkness

  Is on my face: is hiding my face

  So, in contemporary English we say: “You know the cover of darkness is hiding my face.”

  Else: otherwise

  would a maiden blush: a virgin blush, an embarrassed blush

  bepaint my cheek: be painted on my cheek

  In contemporary English this becomes: “Otherwise my cheeks would be painted with a virgin blush of embarrassment.”

  Keep going back and forth between the contemporary phrasing and Shakespeare’s until you can say them with equal freedom and meaning. Stop yourself when you are not meaning what you say. Use the modern word or phrase and then go back to pure Shakespeare.

  Be patient. The process is worth the time it takes, because you will never get more exciting or deeper material to work on. Once you get past the first stage, you won’t feel the need to Act.

  Suggestions for Working on Your Own with Shakespeare

  Men should start with Sonnet 130:

  My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,

  Coral is far more red than her lips’ red.

  If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

&nb
sp; If hairs be wires, black hairs grow on her head.

  I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

  But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

  And in some perfumes is there more delight

  Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

  I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

  That music hath a far more pleasing sound.

  I grant I never saw a goddess go:

  My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

  And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

  As any she belied with false compare.

  Women should start with Sonnet 57:

  Being your slave, what should I do but tend

  Upon the hours and times of your desire?

  I have no precious time at all to spend,

  Nor services to do, till you require.

  Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour

  Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,

  Nor think the bitterness of absence sour

  When you have bid your servant once adieu.

  Nor dare I question with my jealous thought

  Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,

  But like a sad slave stay and think of naught

  Save, where you are, how happy you make those.