| In respect of the New Year, I would like
to offer an excerpt from my book Acting with Adler. The excerpt treats imagination,
which Stella Adler called the "source of acting," and explores the principle:
EVERYTHING ON STAGE IS A LIE UNTIL YOU MAKE IT TRUTHFUL, as follows.
The actor’s imagination functions in various ways. Overall, it
serves as a filter through which the fiction of the stage is passed in order to make it
real. The imagination is the actor’s solution to his stickiest problem: how to avoid
speaking words or saying lines that he neither believes nor feels? The actor uses his
imagination to give life to each element about which he must speak — any idea, event,
person, or thing found in the text. The actor can build a world behind and under the words
of the script, thus sharing, as Adler said, "in the miracle of life." She
emphasized that not facts are presented to an audience but a creation.
Adler exhorted us to divorce ourselves from the sight of our own
habitual circumstances, including our own culture, home, neighborhood, and family. With
the eyes of imagination, we were to envision fresh territory, seeing ourselves active in
uncustomary situations. Whereas actual life tends toward redundancy, imagined life
transports us to other times, other places, with other people. Adler suggested how much
more interesting it would be to imagine preparing coffee in her kitchen using her coffee
pot, than routinely making coffee in our own situation. She advised us to train our
imagination to see things clearly and in detail. The idea was that the more specifically
the actor sees, the more he is propelled into exploring his unconscious life.
Adler argued against speculating whether what we imagined actually
existed or not. Whatever the imagination engenders has a right to exist and does. When
Adler asked us to imagine a lemon tree, she believed us capable of growing some kind of
lemon tree, whether or not we had actually ever seen one. As long as a lemon tree remained
alive in our imagination, it existed and could be brought to the stage.
To train our mind’s eye, Adler narrated the outlines of a scene.
She asked us to wend our way along a country road. As soon as we heard "country
road," we were expected to recognize immediately that we had been placed — put
into circumstances — and that we would have to visualize the circumstances in detail.
When the actor sees specifically, he knows the place where he is. From knowing where he
is, he can figure out what needs to be done there. Also, by seeing specifically, the actor
is protected from speaking of unknown places or circumstances. Adler explained:
The playwright is never going to give you a country road that belongs
to you. He will only give you to say, "I was walking along a country road." You
will supply the body, saying, "It’s dusty, the color of rust streaming through
corn fields, high on both sides." Though the playwright indicates the circumstances,
he does not give them to the actor.
In other words, the imagination lets the actor know what he or she is
talking about.
For the actor to know what he is talking about, Adler explained, means
to understand the logic of the place and the nature of everything in it. She called this
"managing the circumstances," the importance of which she illustrated.
Suppose on stage I say to you, "Would you like to have a
drink?" and your answer is, "No thanks, I have one." If we were in the
Peruvian mountains, you wouldn’t know what the hell kind of drink you were talking
about. It could be fermented llama milk. Or if you pick up your tumbler in a Shakespeare
play, and say, "Health to the King," and you don't know what you are drinking,
you are drinking the words.
The actor manages the circumstances by assimilating the logic of where
he is. He figures out what kind of drink that place has to offer, as well as the nature of
everything else coming his way.
So, the actor’s goal via the imagination is to bring to life and
to personalize every element given by the playwright. The actor must make the play his
own. The actor must not let the play remain the printed words of a playwright’s text.
"If it is Shakespeare's," Adler said, "throw it out. It has to be
yours." To dispel any mystery as to how the actor personalizes the facts of a script,
Adler explained that it is simply a natural process of slowly opening up in order to give
birth. The actor begins to appropriate a section of the text by asking questions.
- What am I saying?
- Can I say this in my own words?
- Can I put them into a place?
- What place is it?
- What is necessary for this place?
- What must be done in this place?
Such questions impel the actor to think, see and select, and finally to
imagine himself doing something somewhere. The more the actor personalizes his images, the
more he can knowledgeably and honestly speak on stage — from personal imagined
experience. Personalization lets the actor access his unconscious life, getting his
feelings to flow.
Adler also recommended the imagination for arousing sympathy for a
character. The technique was to devise a story, in which we would see the character doing
something in a place — so as to care about the character. For example, Adler asked us
to imagine what happens to a man holding a large package while waiting for the bus. To be
able to care about the man, it was essential to imagine something like the following:
"When the bus stopped, the man tried to board it, but the package was so big and
there were so many people on the bus, that he just decided to get down, turn around, and
walk home." On the contrary, it would not have been helpful merely to say, "The
man didn't take the bus." The former, which is seeing the life behind a fact, lets
the actor feel the inside of another's shoes. The latter, which is stating the fact,
leaves the actor with cold feet.
Using the imagination to give life to facts is "a big secret of acting,"
Adler said. She, in fact, credited imagination with 9/10ths of the acting. Imagination
makes the actor's work honest. Without the use of imagination, words are just words, the
place is no place, the objects are nothing, the characters are nobodies, the actor is
empty and his acting is fabrication. With imagination, words have meaning, the place and
objects have reality, the characters are embodied, and the actor is replete with images,
sights and feelings, giving him the need to do something. With imagination, the acting
proceeds from a source. |
