Inside Out

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.


I do not direct professionally or academically. I teach a lot of drama but I don't have a performing arts background and I'm part of an English department. All the theater practice that I do, I do through my community theater. I have no formal training whatsoever and have basically just learned on the job from watching other people who knew how to do it.

I was never trained as an actor and have almost no acting experience. I'm a good performer and I've done skits and whatnot my whole life but as far as having a part in a play goes, no. Where is my expertise in this area, you ask? Spectating. I have a LOT of experience as a spectator.

I read a lot of theater and I see a lot of theater. That started in college, really. In addition to taking a lot of courses with drama in them, I was going to London on vacations, where my family was living, and going to the theater with my family. And, you know, only some of it was Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals. When my family was first living there and I didn't like going around the city by myself, I once enticed my younger sister to come to a production of Richard III with me by telling her that Richard III was very much like J. R. Ewing. She enjoyed it. I saw my first modern-setting Romeo and Juliet there, along with stuff like Noises Off and Henceforward and Lettice and Lovage and various American plays featuring highly unconvincing American accents. My parents basically would get tickets to whatever was getting good reviews in the major papers, and that was kind of an eclectic mix.

Everywhere I've lived since then, I have tried to go see theater as much as my schedule allows. My partner has been very supportive of me in this, and come to take an interest in it on her own. We now mainly go see small theater companies--what would count as 'off-off Broadway' if we were in New York--that have, let's say, a distinctive approach to the material. Many of these companies are semi-Equity and underfunded and they are a good source of ideas about how to direct a show in a small space with almost no money. Except that now, every time we sit down in one of these theaters, my poor partner has to listen to me go on for five or ten minutes about how much I envy the set and the lights, because even these theaters are doing things we just will never have the money to do.

But I digress. We were talking about acting theory.

All right, well, there are many theories but the two I spend the most time with are Diderot and Stanislavski, because they take (apparently; Roche believes that they actually overlap conceptually to a considerable degree, and so do I) opposite approaches to the Great Question of Acting, which can be phrased as: inside out, or outside in? Do you create a role by inventing a series of physical actions which, to the spectator, add up to a character; or do you find a character within your own soul and bring him/her out into your body to act the role? Is it the material world of movement, action, and objects that produces what we vainly conceive of as our souls, or do our innate souls animate and transform our bodies?

The paradox of the actor, according to Diderot, is this: How can an actor become as emotional as s/he has to be on stage and still remember the lines and the blocking? How can an actor have the same feelings, go through the same passions, say the same lines and make the same gestures, every time s/he does the part and yet make them fresh for the spectator? How could she really have these feelings and yet still do the technical part of the job?

Diderot answered this question for himself by formulating a theory of "double consciousness," according to which the actor produces all the sensational symptoms of emotion but yet remains, somewhere inside his/her mind, intellectually in control and fundamentally unmoved. Roach goes through a beautiful explanation of how this solution arises from eighteenth-century conceptions of the human body which are trying to account for the persistence of what appears to be a soul in an apparatus which they are determined to understand as entirely material, and argues that Diderot's concept of the "modele ideal" and his idea of how the performance gets into the "nerves" of the performer anticipate a number of Stanislavski's concepts. Roach in general is fascinated, in that book at any rate, with the phenomenon of virtuousity--the way in which the elite performer's body is trained to produce incredibly complex physical routines almost automatically. This is what leads to his final argument about the real paradox of acting being the idea of spontaneity: that what appears to the spectator like spontaneous and 'real' feeling is in fact the result of the actor executing a process that is so fully automated that it could actually in a sense be called "spontaneous" in that it pretty much unfolds automatically and involuntarily once it's initiated.

Diderot and Stanislavski are both technicians. In other words, both of them believe that great acting is produced through a system of physical exercises designed to teach the actor how to control his instrument, i.e., himself. I find Roach's argument that Diderot actually anticipates many of Stanislavski's methods enormously persusasive; it seems to me that they just have different ways of understanding what's happening when the performer learns technique. Both are also very focused on the problem of the performer's consciousness of the audience, and believe that the ideal to strive for is for the performer to be completely unaware of everyone who's sitting out there in the "black hole beyond the footlights," as Stanislavski puts it.

The major difference between them is that Stanislavski still believes in the soul, though in An Actor Prepares  he pretends he's just talking about the subconscious. The point of technique, from Stanislavski's point of view, is to allow the performer to tap into his/her subconsious and release the memories and feelings necessary to animate the performance. For Stanislavski there is none of this dual-consciousness BS: to perform well, you must be fully present and fully engaged on stage at all times. The subconscious will only emerge occasionally to sustain you through the very heights of your performance; but the rest of the time, as long as you have a good intellectual grasp on your character's motivations and objectives, feelings and emotion memory will get you through. Stanislavski believes that spectators can tell the difference between a "cold" technical performance and one in which the performer's feelings are truly engaged. In order to make that happen, the performer has to believe in the character s/he is playing and the reality of the situation. "Truth on stage," says Stanislavski, "is whatever we can believe in with sincerity."

Because of the influence of Stanislavski's theory on the Method as practiced and taught in the Actors' Studio, American acting is very influenced by Stanislavski's answer to this question, which is that the actor must build the role out of his own memories, feelings, and emotions, a process which requires that you create objectives and motivations which justify everything that you do on stage. British actors are more likely to have been taught to go from the outside in. This cultural difference has been productive of many amusing anecdotes in which British actors get fed the hell up with their American co-stars; but let's not get dragged into another digression.

So which do I believe in? Well, sort of both and neither.

First of all, Diderot's real problem from a theoretical point of view is that he believes in an opposition between intellect and sensibility that just does not exist, in my opinion. He seems to be assuming throughout that feeling REAL emotion carries you away to the point where you don't know where you are or what you're doing. I can understand how that might be true in, say, truly traumatic situations; but I also don't see why feeling should have to prevent thinking. Indeed, it's important to be able to think while you feel, if you don't want to, occasionally, do things you will intensely regret. Similarly, it is important to be able to feel while you think, otherwise, if you happen to be for instance an academic for a living, you spend a LOT of time not feeling anything. But in fact I believe that both activities always go on, involuntarily, and all that changes is how much we are aware of either or both of them. His conception of "dual consciousness" terrifies me, because it implies that the mind could become so divorced from what the body is doing that it essentially becomes imprisoned in a hermetic chamber from which it cannot escape through expression. This is a kind of nightmare version of the "brain in a vat" model of subjectivity which all academics are encouraged to embrace, and which I have spent 20 years of my life fighting.

On the other hand, Stanislavski's system strikes me as a freaking Foucauldian nightmare, and in fact I teach part of Discipline and Punish along with An Actor Prepares. Foucault believes in the soul, but only as something which is inscribed through a Kafkaesque process of physical conditioning created by continual surveillance and constant direction. Torstov lies to his students; he spies on them; he constantly corrects their movements and micromanages them; he teaches them the importance of relaxation and then yells "Relax more!" at them while they're on stage. And this is in a book that he wrote about himself. When Strasberg gets a hold of this, it gets even more intrusive, and at least according to Wendy Smith's history of the Group Theater. What Stanislavski asks of his students, physically and emotionally, seems to me to be way too much to ask for people who are participating in community theater maybe twice a week for a couple months for fun.

So how do I actually approach the acting part of the directing job? I must have a system of some kind, right?

Having thought about it, I believe that my system is, "Let the actors do their thing, and help them when you can."

To be more precise about it, I would say that I don't direct like an actor, I direct like a spectator. I think of the show as a whole system and I spend more time on stuff like the set and the music and whatnot than probably makes sense. I enjoy the spatial relations part of it and I enjoy figuring out how to move people around the stage in patterns. I really love directing the actors, also, but most of the time that means watching people act and making suggestions, which are really two of my favorite activities. I have an idea of what people should be seeing, and when what is happening is not right, I can usually figure out what to do to make it right. But mostly this involves me saying, "I think this should be more that," and then the actor figures out how to make that happen, I know not how.

The one part of Stanislavski's system that I would say I have adopted is the part that has to do with objectives, motivation, and justification. I always have my own objectives for the show as a whole, and this makes it easy to spin out endless backstories, motivations, etc. for the characters. And this really does help, and it's fun, and one of the really magical parts of the process is how you can tell an actor something about her/his character's emotional state or childhood or whatever, and then you see it become part of the performance. How do they do it? I don't know! It's MAGIC!

Really, when I think about it, the acting theory is more useful in thinking about teaching than it is in thinking about acting. Unlike acting or directing, teaching is something I've done pretty much most days for pretty much 20 years, and I do sometimes notice some of the things Diderot and Stanislavski talk about. In order to deal with my own anxiety, I did have to create a kind of dual consciousness. The experience of teaching at a place where I was going to regularly run into offensive politics inside and outside the classroom taught me to suppress my own emotional responses in order to appear neutral. I have noticed, however, that there are times when I am handling something particularly difficult that I have some of the physical symptoms of anxiety even though I may not actually 'feel' it. There is this strange sensation, when you're really focused on running a discussion, of being not so much out of your body as in the discussion. I believe that my discussion-running skills may have become automated, 'spontaneous' in the sense that Roach means. And this doesn't mean I'm not "there," or that I'm not me when I do this. But I do think that at these moments I might kind of be experiencing Diderotian double consciousness. Which is not necessarily a good thing for me, but it does seem to be what's good for the job.