Preparation Pt. 3: Sex and Ambition!

It was the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, who said that there are only two reasons why anyone does anything. When you begin to question your motives on any given day, you’ll see that Freud was onto something. I believe that there are no self-less acts, that there is a selfish reason behind everything that you do. And according to Freud, that reason has to do either with Sex or Ambition. So if this adage works in the real world, what’s to stop us from thinking that it works on stage? It’s a logical jump to say that if the stage imitates life and life is ruled by sex and ambition; the stage is ruled by the same. So now it’s time for the ultimate question: Which is it?

With this in mind, go back and search through your script again, to all those places where you’ve jotted down notes about your motives and tactics, and ask yourself that question. Which am I after? Is it a sexual urge that drives me to make these decisions? Or is it ambition, the thought of furthering myself? Or is it both? If you’re Malvolio in Twelfth Night, which I recently was, the answer is both. Malvolio’s burning desire is to marry Countess Olivia and to become the ruler of the house he now serves. Malvolio’s drive is sex and ambition!

But let’s pause for a moment and talk about what ambition is, especially on the stage. Let’s stay with our Twelfth Night example for now and look at a few more characters. Sir Toby Belch is certainly after sex, doing his best to get his niece’s chambermaid, Maria, into bed. But Sir Toby has other ambitions as well, he wants to humiliate Malvolio, and above all he wants to drink! Feste the clown is out to amuse himself and make money . . . and ruin Malvolio. Maria is after Sir Toby, writing letters to amuse herself and . . . to ruin Malvolio. I never noticed it before, but I see a pattern emerging. Onstage, ambition doesn’t have to mean that someone is trying to achieve power; it simply means that a character is striving to somehow better their situation. To make themselves happier than they are right now. Drinking will make Sir Toby’s nights better, money will make Feste rich and nobody likes Malvolio very much.

So using Shakespeare’s merry bunch as examples, we can see that the answer to our ultimate question is 42 . . . I mean both. The answer is usually both sex and ambition, although sex is often overlooked. It’s funny, but actors tend to think of ambition first and sex last, I’m not sure what that says about us exactly, but it’s got to say something, right? When quizzed on how they view their characters, most actors will describe all of the ambitious things that their character wants, while managing to skirt around the issue of sex. They tend to want there to be some deep and universal truth behind their character’s actions, apparently sex doesn’t fit that category.

Let’s all take a moment and get acquainted with sex, shall we? Let’s get comfortable with it. Let’s all shout it one good time! SEX! Louder! Prouder! SEX! . . . I’m not fooling myself, I know you didn’t yell it. It was just me, wasn’t it?

It’s time to get comfortable with the idea that sex is a viable reason why any character does anything. How many times in a day do you do something on the off chance that it might impress someone else? It’s more times than anyone wants to admit, I know, but you have to remember that characters onstage do the same things for the same reasons. Everybody is after sex, even Malvolio for heaven sake!

So as you go through your script, remember to ask yourself what you’re after. Is it flesh or feast? Are you horny or do you want to destroy Malvolio? . . . I mean ambitious. Whatever the reason remember everything we’ve said about preparation up to this point:

1. Keep it Simple

2. Make it Real to You

3. Raise the Stakes

4. Never Come in with Nothing

And if you can’t remember that, just remember Cameroon, or KaMeRooN. Haha, you didn’t think I was done with the acronyms so quickly, did you? That was a bit unrealistic now wasn’t it?

Sin Boldly!

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