The 12 Days of BirthMas: Day 3, Acting is Hard

I wanted to spend some time leading up to the 2009 iteration of The Birth reflecting. Reflecting on staging a production, reflecting on staging this production, reflecting on the season, reflecting on literature, reflecting on acting.

This is a crazy time of year for me and I thought this would be a helpful way to pull back the curtain a bit and let you see what goes into this sort of process.

Thus I present to you, the 12 Days of BirthMas! (Technically the first performance is the 13th, but you get the idea).

Day Three: Acting is Hard.

When I was in college I was in a play called J.B. by Archibald MacLeish.  It’s a modern adaptation/retelling of the book of Job.  It has as it’s framework the motif of a circus and there are two characters, Nickles and Zuss, who are our God and Satan proxies but who in the play are literally two actors who observe the goings-on of J.B.’s misfortune and comment on it.  Sort of an existential Statler and Waldorf.  At a certain point in the play my character, Zuss, during a heated exchange with Nickles, shouts the line, “You’re NO actor!”

It’s a line that cuts deep.  It’s a line I want to yell at many a self-styled ‘actor’ that currently populate your local movieplex.  Don’t get me wrong, I do think there are a number of Hollywood stars earning a very good living doing their trade who I would, in fact, consider bonafide actors.  However, there’s also a staggering number of folks who, due to good looks, due to being in the right place at the right time, due to any number of factors have achieved a high measure of success that I would never on any day accuse of actually being actors.  Do they get paid for showing up in a movie every now and then where their name in front of the camera is different than their given name?  Yes.  But do they display any measure of skill and talent at creating the illusion that they are other than who they are?  Not really.

Here’s the thing.  In film, we have created every element possible to afford one the ability to not actually have to Live Real in Imaginary Circumstances (or, the definition of acting).  Most film sets are rife with every possible detail one would need to not actually have to ‘work’ at the art of pretend.

Now, it is not my interest to blast the film industry (especially as one who’d like to be a part of said industry) or to ridicule certain celebrities (too easy); it is my desire, however, to express that the art of acting is a difficult one.

This will be the fourth iteration of The Birth being performed this year and while I’ve always felt I delivered a serviceable performance I always, without fail, felt I could do better.  But making sure all the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted in the service of staging a beast like The Birth as well as self-marketing the whole thing, I always felt I let my performance sag a little bit in the final analysis.

This year I’m aiming to change that.  Hopefully all the work being done behind the scenes in rehearsals will pay off in a more nuanced, layered delivery, but even if to the average viewer there’s no discernable change, I’ll know that the work still stands.  In effort to better Live Real in Imaginary Circumstances, I entreated my friend and MFA-in-acting-holder Joe Rux to direct me.  We have met several times already and will meet another couple before we first perform on the 13th and the work being done is thrilling and challenging.  I come in with my patterned, I’ve-performed-these-pieces-for-3-years muscle memory working against the real need to throw it all out and start these characters from scratch.  Who is the Innkeeper?  What does he want?  Why is he so down?  What happened immediately before he starts talking to the audience?  These are all acting 101 questions, but we – myself included – often aren’t willing to do the work necessary to deliver competent, resonant performances.

When the Innkeeper ‘sees’ the man and the woman enter his inn, the audience needs to ‘see’ him ‘see’ them.  I remember performing a touring production of Romeo and Juliet several years ago and, as Romeo rehearsing the catacomb-seeing-Juliet-dead scene, the director kept stopping us, drilling into me that Romeo had to see her and we had to see him see her.  It’s a huge undertaking for an actor onstage to have to construct an entire world in his head that may or may not be visible to the eyes of the audience but has to be visible to their minds.  That, my friends, is acting.  Creating something from nothing.  Lighting a proverbial candle onstage for the briefest of moments for an audience to ‘go there’ with you.

I had a 20-something guy in my life a couple of years ago who, based on knowing I’d done a couple of commercials, decided he wanted to be an actor too and he started asking me how to get into it.  Now, far be it for me to quash someone’s dream, but that’s not what this was and it took every ounce of my being to not chastise him for reducing my 10 years of acting experience and training down to a mere desire to be on camera.

Who doesn’t want to be on camera?  Who doesn’t, at least, think that they want 15 minutes of fame?  Who doesn’t want to be recognized by their peers and strangers for some fun work they did?

But if there’s anything I’ve learned by having to inhabit these characters these last few years and even more concentratedly these last few weeks, it’s that the art of acting, of taking words on a page and speaking them as though for the first time every time, of not letting the poetic nature of the words being said get in the way of the gritty, heartbroken thoughts being expressed … well, to the person who can do that, that’s real acting.

It is my hope to do just that.

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The Birth runs December 13, 14, 20 and 21 at 6:30 and 8:30 pm at Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte. Visit thebirth.net for more information and to buy tickets.

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