I recently spent a week on one of the Gulf Islands off the coast of
Vancouver, a place now largely populated by lawyers who were once
hippies—people who somehow had the good sense, back in the sixties, to buy
land. For decades, they have been coming together for dinners after spending
their days chopping firewood, and I was invited to one of these dinners. Twelve
people sat around the table, including a woman in her late forties. She was
blonde with wide-set eyes. She had the tense, dry look of an actress who no
longer worked, which is what she turned out to be. She had done some CBC movies
and B-movies in her day, and now taught drama to kids. “I am old,” she said,
“and I am ugly.” She referred at least four times to her “European” cheekbones,
and reminisced about her early, energetic days as an actress in Edmonton
What do we do once we can no longer do what we did? It’s a problem for
anyone, but it seems to affect the actor most acutely. Even when an actor is working, it’s not unusual for her to
go entire weeks and months without a part. The customary thing is to take
acting classes, work undemanding jobs, exercise, meditate, see friends, read
plays. The actor’s life is about finding ways to fill in the time between gigs.
Even when one has an acting job,
there is still a lot of waiting around: while the lights are being moved, while
make-up is being done. Once the actor’s career is over, I imagine there is
still a sense of waiting, as though the spotlight might eventually return.
Sitting across from the actress at that dinner, I wondered how an actor
might root herself, artistically, in these downtimes, or after her career is
over; that is, how an actor can always be acting, and learn better how to act,
and make the world better by acting.
1. CHARITY
I don’t want to say that the actor—any more than any other person—should
spend her life in a charitable manner. But if the actor wants to imitate an
action, what could be better for the world—and her own self—than to imitate
selfless giving? Why shouldn’t the actor, in her off-hours, put herself at the
disposal of old people, sick people, people who need help, and act the part of
someone who cares? Acting caring leads to caring, and in this way actors might
turn themselves into the most fulfilled and happy of all the artists. As it is,
most actors can hardly take their eyes off themselves. The actor in this
scenario must use narcissitic qualities to imitate the action that will bring
her the most praise. Eventually, she will become worthy of genuine admiration.
This discipline would be called “Acting Your Opposite.”
2. SUBMISSION TO A NOVELIST
Actors should put themselves at the disposal of writers, once in a
while. What writer wouldn’t benefit from sitting in her easy chair and
listening to an actor read out her day’s work? Playwrights know that it’s
impossible to tell whether what they’ve written is good or bad until an actor
speaks it out loud. Novelists rarely think this way, but they could. After all,
readers speak the book silently to themselves in their heads. An actor reading
a novel out loud is a simulation of the reader’s experience—the closest a
novelist can get.
The hidden problem for the novelist is that she only ever reads her own work
one way, forgetting that there are so many meanings in any one sentence, so
many different intonations and interpretations. In this way, the
novelist can hear her words in the cadence of someone other than herself.
An actor could make herself very useful this way, and she would gain from
performing for an audience of one—one who cares deeply about the words being
said.
One of the sad and strange—and perhaps most beautiful—things about
humans is that there is only one of each of us. The problem for any individual in
our culture is how to be oneself most authentically. The problem for any actor
is how to best play a given part. The ordinary person strives to live in tune
with her own wisdom and intelligence, her sense of what is right, her instincts
and inclinations. The actor attempts to uncover these things in each role she
plays.
Could there be a service that hooks up—for a lifetime, or some shorter
length—an actor with an ordinary person, with the actor acting as that person’s
clone? The actor would try to dress, speak and move like the person she is
cloning (let’s call her Abigail), and poetically interpret her. She would try
to understand Abigail’s cognitive pathways and emotional responses. There would
never be a performance, just a perpetual following-around of Abigail. She would
read Abigail’s emails. She would meet with Abigail’s friends, when Abigail was
too tired. Trying, on a long-term basis, to get outside of herself and into
just one other role would teach the actor so much more than any single theatre
class. So many of the secrets of human nature are in the distance between who I
am and who you are.
The actor would then become like a painter or writer, whose whole life
is given over to the perfection of a master work. The in-between jobs would
turn into gigs taken for money, like journalism often is for the novelist, or
wedding portraits for the painter. The acting in those “in-between jobs” (that
is, roles in plays, films and television) would become much more lifelike. This
actor would know what a person truly was
like, from her ongoing imitation of life. And how endless this task of
imitation would be, since Abigail would be changing week in and week out, as
humans supposedly do.
As for Abigail, she would get what many humans secretly loathe and
crave: a witness and a mirror. To see oneself portrayed through the gestures of
another person, to see oneself interpreted, is to know what we otherwise never
know: how we appear to the world from the outside. I would hate to be the
person having an actress following me around, but why should everything be so
comfortable? Maybe having this real-life imitation would allow us to live in
greater proximity to our insides—closer to our motivations and our fears.
~
I do not want to be an actress, yet I grew up wanting to be one. I acted
and wrote from the time I was a child, but it gradually became clear to me that
I was not good at acting. Though I had enthusiasm, I knew there were people
who, while acting, had feelings I did not. As I acted, I looked at myself with
scepticism and embarrassment.
Yet the person who is an actor in her bones—who needs to act but has to wait for an opportunity that doesn’t always
come—probably dies a little inside from misuse. An actor who cannot act is like
a cat that cannot lick its own fur. Every creature has its own nature, and
happiness and fulfilment is being able to express that nature.
Of all the options I suggest for the actor, I think the last one—while
the most unpleasant and dangerous—is best. Only when we throw ourselves into
danger is anything of worth accomplished. We live in our cities, in our little
homes. But we are animals, and we are primed to respond to threat. When we live
lives with no real danger, our instincts find things that are not dangerous and
make these things dangerous. So why not invite into one’s life something
genuinely horrifying, and come face-to-face with oneself?
We should all have actors trailing us around. This would mean that all
the other genuinely non-dangerous areas of your life would lose the sense of
terror they currently carry. You would begin to feel real fear. As Mark
Edmunson wrote in the New York Times:
Shakespeare's
fools are subtle teachers, reality instructors one might say… Hamlet gets Yorick; Lear gets his Fool; Olivia, Feste; Rosalind,
Touchstone… In Shakespeare, to have a fool
attending on you is generally a mark of distinction. It means that you've
retained some flexibility, can learn things, might change; it means that you're
not quite past hope, even if the path of instruction will be singularly
arduous. To be assigned a fool in Shakespeare is often a sign that one is,
potentially, wise.
What actor doesn’t want to be useful—to be a real fool? Now go and find an actor to follow you around—you who want
to change, to become wise.
