I'm teaching my graduate class on theater and theory again, and in it we do some acting theory. I teach it because, as I tell them, all acting theories are really theories about embodiment. In the process of trying to figure out the best and most convincing way for someone to become another person, Diderot and Stanislavski and Strasberg and Adler and Mamet come up with some interesting ideas about how human subjectivity works. After we had our class on Diderot's The Paradox of the Actor (and Joseph Roach's chapter on it from The Player's Passion), during which (inevitably) we discussed its relationship to Stanislavski's System and the Method, one of my students asked me afterward, "Which acting theory do you believe in?"
You would think that someone who spends as much time directing (and thinking about directing) as I do would have an answer to that question. But in fact, I don't. At least, not at the moment. This is the first time I've had a chance to really sit down and think about it; and by the time I get to the end of this post, I'm sure I'll have some kind of an answer. Because that is actually one thing about directing that I'm really good at: making things up.
