Play the Ink

What do you do as an actor when you begin to think about your character's past, their origins, their family, their morning, their evening -- basically everything that happens before and after we see them on stage or on screen? If you have an imagination, if you have an inquisitive and active mind and if you are playing the part, isn't it ultimately up to you as the actor to devise a complete picture of whatever content you choose?

What do you do as a director when you think about a character's past, origins, family, everything that happens before and after we see them on screen or on stage? As the director, every last detail is in your control. Shouldn't you map every single thing out for the actor and tell them how to play it? Shouldn't you make them do the role the way you see it? Shouldn't you direct and guide them into the performance that you see as best fitting the role, the play, the production?

If the answer to the majority of these questions is "Yes!" -- as many actors or directors would tell you -- then we are at an immediate impasse: the answer cannot be yes to the actor's questions if the answer to the director's questions is also yes, because the director, in theory, ultimately decides. But if there is a disagreement and the director forces the actor to bend to directorial will, the actor may always have a shard of splintry grudge in her heart over being forced to play the role one way, when she feels deeply that it ought to go down a different path.

Similarly, a director knows when an actor is ignoring their direction. Well, a good director knows; a director who deals in direct (pun!) communication, clear choices and intelligent staging knows when an actor is pretending to forget because there has definitely been clear, calm discussion at some point during rehearsal about what, precisely, is going on in this play. So when the actor "forgets" repeatedly to use the double-take or to cross down left before the witty riposte, the director knows that the actor doesn't like what they were told to do. Hopefully, it is a situation in which the director can talk to the actor and they can work it out. If it is not, the director is better off giving the actor the benefit of the doubt and moving on to the next project with cloudless hindsight: actors' egos are strange, fragile things more slippery and potentially destructive than the Hayward fault.

Rehearsal is the place to work these details out. And the actor and director must approach the work with an equally open mind. Truly wonderful things can happen as a result of open collaboration, and it is exciting to see what magnificent works arise from bright minds applied to potent work in fertile artistic ground.

But.

How do we know which approach to take, and when? What is to stop me, as Oliver Warbucks in Annie, from choosing to play my role as an ardent Nazi sympathizer and soulless war profiteer? My name, after all, is Warbucks. It is clear that I made my money in World War I, I am bound to have multiple contacts in Germany, it's in my best interest that the United States be at war with someone, the President of Germany appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on January 30 of the year in which the play takes place (1933), so this is all quite possible.

The specific math: I am 37, so I play Warbucks as 37. If it's 1933, then 37 years ago was 1896. So at age 23, it was 1919, the perfect timing for my having made my first million by age 23, as stated in the script. [Pure inference: Being such a business- and work-oriented fellow, I am probably a Capricorn. Many Capricorns -- or people with Capricorn Ascendants -- tend to feel unwanted, so getting into a business that everyone in the world wants (weaponry) is going to be very satisfying to me.] None of this prevents me from choosing to make Warbucks a Nazi sympathizer. There is the fact that I invite Judge Brandeis to my house on Christmas Eve to officially adopt Annie, but I could justify that by saying I'm rubbing a Christian holiday in the face of a prominent Jew. There's nothing disproving this in the script, and imagination can justify anything.

What if a director disagrees with this? How do they go about dissuading me from this viewpoint? What if the director thinks that I am instead the inheritor of a vast fortune from a dead uncle whose attorney had to search Hell's Kitchen for me in order to execute the Last Will and Testament? Again, there's nothing in the script to say that this is not the case, and imagination can justify anything.

Aren't both points of view equally valid?

Possibly.

Is there some kind of yardstick, either universal or specific, that one can use as actor or director to figure out the true path of any character?

Yes.

It's called the script.

Specifically, the ink. The script can spark all sorts of ideas, and any number of approaches can arise therefrom. However, in Playing Shakespeare, Janet Suzman advises us to, "Play the ink." This means play what's there, play what's written and what can be directly supported by other ink in the script.

In other words, what Oliver Warbucks had for breakfast this morning does not matter unless the scene is about what he had for breakfast this morning. And the scene should only be about this morning's breakfast if that somehow advances the plot. If there's no breakfast mentioned, it's not playable.

An actor who spends time playing unwritten deep upset at past events is wasting everyone's time and her own most of all: why spend a play focused on one tiny detail of a character's past when the character's current focus is the now and the immediate or long-term future? Yes, the past is part of the tapestry. But it's only playable if it's written. And while Warbucks never says he is NOT a Nazi sympathizer, he also never says that he is. And if the character never says it, and if there is nothing in the ink of the script that clearly, directly states it, then it is not true and cannot be played.

We play wants.

We use tactics to get what we want.

We play these tactics with life-or-death stakes.

Whether or not we get what we want defines the degree of our emotional reaction to the situation; in other words, Emotion Is The Sweat Of Action. Play like your life depends on it -- literally, you will die if you do not get what you want -- and when you win or lose you will feel what you should in that moment. It's natural, it's organic, it's economical.

An important caveat: where you were just before you walked in and where you were going when you entered the room are, of course incredibly important. They are part of your arc, part of your path. In a well-written play, this is clear. But these are things to know, not to play. Only action is playable. Just like in hide-and-go-seek, we run for base as though we will die if we are tagged. To run for base as though thinking about the scary clowns of youth or the rhododendron behind which we were just hiding is precisely the path to losing the game.