HONESTY

When at the age of 15 or 16 I developed an interest in acting, my parents allowed me to study with the actors of the Washington Theatre Club in Washington, D.C. This was magnanimous of my father, since he believed (or claimed to believe) to his dying day that all actors are prostitutes. I think my father's mind and mine must be similar, since one reason I admire actors so much is their willingness to get naked in front of us -- only unlike my dad I mean emotionally naked (though certainly many are called upon to remove their clothing as well, and often, too, to simulate sex -- whether or not to do this is also a matter of choosing how far to go; also unlike my dad I do not believe that every actor's avocation is hopping in and out of bed with other actors.) On the other hand, perhaps what shocked my father about actors was after all their emotional nakedness; he was an extremely generous man whose generosity seems the more marvelous when contrasted with his suspicion of anything which was designed, or which conspired as he most likely saw it, to move us. He did not want to be fooled and I think he saw acting as trickery. He even saw rock 'n' roll that way, and the more attracted to it he was (and I believe he was tremendously attracted to it, as he liked both folk music and true blues) the more furious he became.

It is possible that my father confused fiction with falsehood and mistook it for the opposite of truth. Jessamyn West said, "Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures." Edward Albee added, "A play is fiction -- and fiction is fact distorted into truth." Pablo Picasso was more brutal in his assessment: "We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." Alan Bennett, in his play "An Englishman Abroad," put these words into the mouth of real-life spy and traitor to the crown, Guy Burgess: "If I wore a mask it was to be exactly what I seemed."

Perhaps my father believed, as many do, that that actors can't be honest, that they have to act all the time. First of all, as I have said, acting isn't pretending (and it mustn't be dishonest), and secondly, it's hard work, so no one could or would even be tempted to do it all the time on purpose, much less be able to get away with it. Of course there is an aspect of acting that is playing too, a lot of fun and very gratifying, and I like that part a lot; it has a place in my life, but its purpose is not to fool people. I have some facility with accents. I am imitative and enjoy assuming personalities I have observed or using aspects of my own self to create characters. I do this with my friends, who know who I really am and who know I am playing; I don't do it to get good press coverage, win friends or influence people! (Yes, we each put on a charming smile during a job interview, even if we don't feel so great that day, but it's our own smile, isn't it? -- I don't think we need to feel deceitful about that.)

Joan Crawford's act wouldn't fool many today, but Michael Jackson's hype still draws crowds. Perhaps the difference is that Michael's fans know it's hype and like him anyway, or even because of it. Joan's followers believed her publicity absolutely. Still, Joan had quite a machine working for her (as does Michael) and those closest to her certainly knew the score. If my father, an intelligent man, was afraid of being taken in not only by an actor's hype (which does not have to be the concern of someone who enjoys the actor's work -- do we ask whether our plumber is cheating on his wife or whether the clerk who checks out our groceries has paid her taxes?) but by his or her work, whose purpose is momentarily to take us in, then was my father not in fact more afraid of his own susceptibility than of the actor's prowess? Indeed, an actor's ability to move the audience depends neither on its susceptibility (the advertisers, not the actors, hope we are gullible dupes!) nor on his or her dishonesty; it is an actor's honesty that moves us.

If acting isn't an inclination to be dishonest, or to pretend, or to fool people, what the hell is it? What makes people act, and how can they stop when it's time to stop? Beats me; I can only speak for myself. At first it was, as I said, a relief to be someone else for a while to overcome shyness, and a way to free myself to say and do things I otherwise wouldn't. It was also a way to interact with others in a safe environment, and to learn about people and experiences not normally within my environment. Later, pride in my craft became a factor. Interestingly, people with Multiple Personality Disorder use their multiple personae much as actors use acting, but with an important difference. The person with MPD most often uses other personalities to protect him- or herself from emotions (generally reactions to events of the past, appropriately or inappropriately perceived as being a part of the present) while the actor uses his or her inner population (and if you don't believe we have an inner population, read "Steppenwolf" by Hermann Hesse) to reach out safely for new experience. MPD is an incredibly sophisticated, intelligent, frightening and inconvenient way for a psyche to survive the unsurvivable; acting is safer in that it has defined boundaries. I don't think Sam Beckett will leap into Scott at the dinner table to protect him from a sudden unwanted memory; I would be surprised to learn that Jack Killian (or more frighteningly, Lucas Buck) emerged to protect Gary Cole from freeway traffic; most likely Martin Shaw has not lately seen much of Raymond Doyle.

  COMMITMENT

At the WTC I studied improvisation, scene preparation and performance, fencing (which I soon quit because I was afraid of being poked, since my eyes were so weak -- I had not yet read J. D. Salinger's "Seymour: An Introduction," or I might have realized that I did not need to look so hard), dance (oh, if I had only had then what I have since gained by taking so many aptitude tests: a sense of spatial relationships!) and something else which is hard to name and even harder, it seems, for most people to accept is true. We called it "sending"; if we had another name for it, I don't remember it, but it is related to sense memory.

The WTC was not an acting school but a small repertory theatre which, in order to support itself, regularly took on a limited number of students, most of us in our mid-teens. We were instructed, or trained, if you will, not by professional acting teachers, but by professional working actors. (One of them, Arlen Dean Snyder, with whom I did not study, played the sheriff in the "Quantum Leap" episode "Promised Land"; another WTC performer of that time was John Hillerman, a regular on "Magnum, P.I.") I don't remember hearing the word "method," though I think what we studied was the technique, or collection of techniques or attitudes toward acting which is commonly called "method." What every one of our instructors emphasized again and again was honesty.

Our improvisation instructor, Bob Darnell, who until his death showed up in series television now and again, was relentless in his insistence on our commitment to the honesty of the moment. We had to be in the reality, totally, or else.

In our improvisational exercises generally two students were given common information about a scene -- who they were, the location, the general situation -- and then each was given other details privately. Perhaps both neophytes would be told that the setting (in truth a grubby room with a few ratty-looking pieces of furniture in it) was a park, that today was Monday and that they were strangers to one another. Then one would be drawn aside and told that she was hungry and that her goal was the get some money from the other; the other would be told that he was a lonely man looking for a lover. (This is not a real example, but, off the top of my head, the type of thing that would set up enough of a conflict to force both actors to think on their feet and to avoid making facile assumptions and cliched decisions; it would also leave enough latitude for a story to happen.) Once my friends Amy and Jane were in an improvisational scene in which they had been told in common that they were coming home from somewhere, walking into their own apartment. I don't know what they were told privately to create the conflict but they certainly were not told that Big Bob (as we called him to distinguish him from the WTC's other resident Robert, the less strapping and therefore "Little" Bob Spencer) would be sitting there on the sofa when they walked in. When they did walk in, together, they saw him sitting there and began to giggle. Big Bob was furious. If they came home to find a total stranger sitting on their sofa, he demanded to know, would they giggle? Could that possibly be an honest reaction? He sent them out to make their entrance again. This time he stood up on the sofa and draped himself over the doorway; as Amy (I think) happened to walk in first, he immediately grabbed her, threw her against the wall and screamed, "Now do you believe me? Now do you believe me?" She believed him, she believed him!

A few years later, in college, my best friend, Erik, and I prepared for our final acting exam. We had selected a scene from "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett (no relation to the fictional time-traveling physicist). Being young and confident (I hesitate to add foolish), we chose not to block the scene but rather to memorize the lines together and work on our characters without regard for our physical movements on the stage, which we felt sure we could work out a mere half-hour before performance. I don't know whether our idea was mainly to keep it fresh or to keep ourselves from working any harder than we had to, but the scene involved no props, no scenery and no fancy footwork so we weren't worried; we trusted that our movements would come from within our characters and our motivations, and in fact we had no trouble blocking out the scene in the time we had. That was no problem. What was a problem was that from the moment we started, the whole thing felt terrible. We didn't miss our lines, we didn't wander about the stage, but we were as lost as if we never had found the stage. Then came the moment when Erik had to remove his boots and I had to comment upon the smell of his feet. Erik had a little difficulty getting the boot off and I didn't have a line to say.... Suddenly I was hit by what should have been my driving force all along: I had no idea, after all, that Erik was going to remove his boot or have stinky feet. I was just waiting for Godot! So I waited for Godot. Godot never showed, but eventually Erik got the boot off and I smelled his feet and commented, and we proceeded. Everything was just fine.

Our teacher looked at us afterwards and shook his head. He said it was our finest work ever, except he couldn't understand what the hell we'd been up to at first. From the time of the boot, though, it'd been superb.