Master actors are experts at creating theatricality. If you want to be a successful actor, you must learn to assemble the specific ingredients of theatricality into a performance. This takes a great deal of training. If you are willing to work hard, you can learn to activate the ingredients of theatricality and distinguish yourself from average aspiring actors.
The essential elements of theatricality are: creating intense relationships with the other characters and demanding a response from them, in spite of huge obstacles; struggle; urgency; life-and-death importance; discovery; universality; vulnerability; and heightened energy. These elements are part of what add up to a compelling performance. Serious actor training will teach you how to create these things in a performance. Most actors are not born knowing how to do this. You must work on the ingredients one at a time.
War is not volume
Being in an intense relationship with someone and demanding a response from them is, by definition, extremely confrontational. It is war… but not always loud and screaming war. In acting, wars can be quite still and vulnerable. Two people at a kitchen table, speaking softly about a marriage that is ending, can be waging a war more titanic than any battlefield scene. The volume is low. The stakes are absolute. Watch great actors closely and you will find that their quietest scenes are often their most violent… every word placed like a move on a board, everything risked on the outcome.
First, you must learn to create an intense relationship between yourself and the other characters. Then, you must learn to demand a response from them. Wars can also be internal, between different parts of you… your many selves, or archetypes. A character who cannot decide whether to stay or flee is a war. A character who wants to confess and wants to hide is a war. Great actors create both internal and external wars, often in the same moment, and the audience feels the collision even when they cannot name it.
Demanding a response can take the following forms: you can be doing something to the other person; you can be trying to change something about them; you can be trying to convince them of something; you can be trying to get something from them; and you can be trying to get them to do something. You can think of demanding a response as going after your objectives, your goals, whatever you want to call it. The vocabulary matters less than the experience. The point is… you must work until you care so much about the other characters that you go after them, demanding the response you must have.
Ask yourself right now, about the last scene you worked on: what did you demand from the other character? Not what did you want… what did you demand? If you cannot answer in one breath, the war was never declared, and the audience watched two people politely exchanging lines.
The energy bill
Many young actors understand these concepts intellectually but do not realize the huge energy expenditure required to really experience these things. Your energetic commitment must be extreme. Your acting must be “life with the boring parts cut out,” virtually every moment. It isn’t fair to waste the audience’s time with casual, slow acting.
This is worth sitting with, because it is where most training fails. You can hold every concept in this article in your mind, perfectly understood, and still produce work with no war in it… because understanding costs nothing and war costs everything. The concepts must move from your head into your body, your breath, your voice, your nervous system. That migration only happens through repeated experience, in a room built for it. Acting should make you sweat.
In general, your attention should be on the other character while you act, not on yourself. You should know exactly what the other character will look like… or what you will get… if you win the war you are in with them. See it. Make the picture of victory so specific you could paint it. Through physical and vocal actions, improvised in rehearsals, you must try everything you can possibly imagine to win, no matter what happens in the story. Try to change the play while you are acting. The audience does not know what is going to happen in the end, and neither does your character. Play to win the war.
Struggle and obstacles
It must be extremely difficult for you to achieve your goals. It must be a struggle filled with obstacles. The obstacles, inside yourself or in your environment, increase your struggle… and the more you are struggling while performing, the more interesting your acting. The situations the writer gives you are not supposed to be easy for your character. If they seem easy, the writing may be thin, and you must learn to add the struggle yourself. Because if you are not in a titanic struggle, you are wasting the audience’s time. Audiences want to see you in a life-and-death struggle while you act, virtually every moment.
Great actors “agitate” the given circumstances by adding internal and external obstacles: those things, ideas or people standing between your character and what you want. Obstacles can be a war of conflicting desires inside you, troubling memories that enter your mind, or the desires of the other characters colliding with yours. Stella Adler called it agitating the circumstances, and she meant it as daily craft, not as a rare trick. The tension between your pursuit of the goal and the obstacles in the way is part of what adds up to an amazing performance.
Here is a practical rehearsal discipline. For every scene, write down three obstacles the script gives you and invent two more it does not. One external… the room is too small, the train leaves in ten minutes, the neighbors can hear. One internal… a self in you that wants the opposite of what you are fighting for. Then rehearse the scene fighting through all five. The scene will roughen, thicken, and come alive. Smooth scenes are dead scenes.
If this all sounds confusing, don’t worry. It is confusing. It’s hard to write about all this in a short article. These kinds of things are what separate the serious actors from the average ones. You cannot learn how to really do this on the job or in audition workshops. It’s what real acting classes are for.
Urgency and life-and-death importance
Theatrical acting is urgent and has a feeling of life-and-death importance. People pay to see actors engaged in life-and-death, extremely efficient conflicts. People go to the theater to see actors grappling with issues relevant to their lives. All great acting is therapy for an audience. Audiences demand efficient storytelling. Ask yourself: is each moment of your acting truly a life-and-death struggle? Do you know how to create that experience for real, on cue, at ten in the morning on a cold set?
Urgency means you feel you must achieve your goals and work out your problem NOW. Not after coffee. Not in the next scene. Now. Urgency is not naturalism… in real life, of course, everything is not urgent. But great actors find ways to make their acting urgent and of life-and-death importance even when the writer fails to provide it. And a lot of writing, especially for the screen, does not supply the built-in conflict that characterizes great drama. You just see lines on a page and the scenes don’t seem too meaningful. You must add the depth yourself if you want to be remembered.
Discovery
Virtually everything the character does as the play moves forward is a discovery. No matter how many times you perform a role, it must be as if you are experiencing all the thoughts, realizations, feelings, actions and words of the character for the first time. The eight-show week is the great test of this. So is take fourteen. The craft of discovery… genuinely not-knowing what you know… is trainable, and it lives in the imagination, not in willpower. You cannot force yourself to be surprised. You can build an imaginary world so specific and alive that it keeps surprising you.
Universality and vulnerability
Sanford Meisner said, “Find in yourself those human things which are universal.”
Your struggles and life-and-death conflicts, the goals you pursue, and the relationships you create must resonate with audiences. In part, this is achieved by making your character’s desires and struggles universal. To achieve universality, you need an education in some humanistic psychology. Start with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You should be able to trace everything your character cares about back to those basic human needs… safety, belonging, love, esteem, meaning. The more of these basic needs your acting includes, the more it will resonate with all kinds of audiences.
And you need vulnerability. Vulnerability is a key to great acting, and most actors lack it in their work. It isn’t possible to be theatrical or successful without a true connection to your vulnerability, because vulnerability underlies every human conflict… nobody fights a war over something that cannot hurt them. Many old-fashioned comments given in acting classes are really the teacher complaining that the actor lacks vulnerability: “you have to raise the stakes,” “you have to let it affect you,” “you have to invest more fully.” These are not comments I hear myself saying to actors. Anyone can diagnose the problem. Actors need the solution. Archetype Work, and learning the Psychology of Selves, is the surest way I know to connect an actor to vulnerability. The last generation of teachers had a harder time helping actors do this. Now we can.
Heightened energy
Finally, heightened energy must permeate your work. Your acting should buzz at a higher, faster vibration than daily living. Michael Chekhov described theatricality in terms of “radiating” energies and living in specific “atmospheres” with specific “qualities.” He was reaching for something absolutely real… access to many kinds of archetypal energy… he simply didn’t have our modern understanding of psychophysiology. Acting takes an incredible amount of energy. If you aren’t expending a great amount of energy, combined with a feeling of ease while you work, something is wrong. The energy without the ease is strain. The ease without the energy is television-waiting-room acting. You need both at once, and that combination is a trained state, not a mood.
Actors at our studio engage in intense energy training… Archetype Work, sound and movement improvisations, and full ensemble warm-ups. This trains you, experientially, to access and communicate tremendous amounts of heightened energy while you act. You cannot achieve this through script analysis alone. It is an experience you must have many times, until your body trusts it.
The professional paradox
One more thing, because it confuses young actors. You must be a polite professional off-stage while simultaneously creating WAR that is titanic while you are acting. Most of us really want to get along with our fellow actors… we want supportive classes, we support one another at auditions, and we want to send auditors the clear message that we would be fun to work with eight hours a day for weeks. Keep all of that. But many young actors are so busy pleasing one another that this wonderful trait spills into their acting, and dramatic material is almost never about characters who get along. The war belongs inside the story. The kindness belongs everywhere else. Great actors hold the line between them absolutely.
When you succeed at combining all these elements into a performance, you are on your way to something profoundly memorable. Look for these elements when you watch professional actors. They are often missing. But you will find them all in the work of the truly great ones.
Robert Cohen said, “Great acting is not easy; anyone who says it is is either shallow or a charlatan. And one of the hardest things about acting is admitting that it is hard.” Many of the ingredients of great acting can be learned with hard work.
And Meisner again: “Your acting will not be good until it is only yours. That’s true of music, acting, anything creative. You work until finally nobody is acting like you.” The performing arts need your unique contribution now more than ever. Work, work, work.
Jason Bennett Actors Studio. Based in NYC and Jersey City, NJ. Online worldwide. Expanding to Florida.
Explore the wider craft in The Ingredients of Great Acting and the actor’s range in Great Actors Are Energy Masters.
