Great Acting: Catching Lightning in a Bottle
“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does all the work.”
–Mark Twain
On stage today I suddenly knew just what I had done wrong all of those times before. It suddenly struck me what the difference was between my successful performances and my not so successful performances. Like a bolt from the blue it came into my brain; the difference between good acting and great acting. Suddenly I knew. This time it was right. This time it would work. And the answer was something I already knew, I just hadn’t truly understood.
So what is it? What is this magical secret? It’s what we’ve all always known, but few of us have ever truly understood, and even fewer have ever mastered and replicated. It’s stream of consciousness.
Sandford Meisner
I contemplated that for years; struggling to find the difference between the times of success and the times of mediocrity. Somewhere inside I always knew that the difference was the mythical “being in my head.” Mediocrity came from being in my head and thinking as I acted. Success came from letting go of my consciousness and allowing a higher self to come forward; or being “out of my head.” These, however, are vague answers at best.
What is the difference between being in and out of your head? We know that it feels different, and we know that performances are different, but the question is why is there a difference? What causes the difference? Today it occurred to me that I had known the difference all along, I just never truly understood it.
We’ve heard all our careers that “acting is not acting, it’s reacting,” but that’s crap. I always thought it was true, but it’s not. Not really. It’s too simple. We’ve always heard that the key to reacting was listening but that, too, isn’t right. What it should be is: “acting is not acting, it’s living.” The difference between reacting and living is stream of consciousness.
What occurred to me today is that my character doesn’t know what is about to happen to him, he doesn’t know what’s about to be said to him, he doesn’t even know exactly what he’s going to say next. I’ve heard this before in acting classes, but I guess I just never truly understood what that meant. It was hard to understand because it’s such a mind-boggling concept. To think that you must somehow forget this script that you’ve read twenty times in the last month is insane, yet that’s what has to happen. If on any level you aren’t surprised by what comes next, the performance is lost. I know everything. My character knows nothing. For my performance to be truly great the two must never meet.
I can listen and still know what’s coming. I can react without truly experiencing. I can pretend not to anticipate. I can pretend not know what’s coming next, but pretending is still pretending, I don’t care how good a liar you are. Somehow we must find out how to leave ourselves behind to the point at which we are truly living on stage. In your everyday life you never truly know what’s going to happen next. You never know what anyone is really going to say; even yourself. That is the way your life on stage must be lived: by the seat of your pants.
I do not yet know how to recreate this phenomenon, but I am convinced it is the secret to turning “good” in to “great!” I now understand this idea, but I can’t replicate it . . . yet. I am certain now that it can be replicated. It cannot be condensed into a “method” that will work for everyone, but I’m convinced that we can all develop our own. We can discover a pathway to lead ourselves into the right state of mind to achieve this stream of consciousness. Perhaps it cannot be replicated every time without fail, but perhaps, just perhaps, it can be reproduced a higher percentage of the time.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I think I have cracked the acting code for myself. I’m sure there are many actors reading this who are rolling their eyes and sighing heavily, “Well, duh!” but I think I have made a discovery for myself. I thought perhaps I should write it down here so that maybe others could begin to think about their own pathways. Maybe, just maybe, there are others like me who never truly understood what it meant to “live in the moment.” Maybe there are those like me who never truly grasped the idea of experiencing every second anew. If there are those people, I hope we can go along this journey together. If, however, there are not any of those people and I’m just the last horse to cross the finish line . . . well in that case, disregard the above article.
I’m off to continue cracking this code . . .
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I think my background of roleplay helped me.
I’ve always understood Character and Self. Or, as in roleplay, IC (In Character) and OOC (Out of Character). And you learn to get *completely* in your character’s head, even if you know the plot. (Least I did.) So I’m not afraid of playing a sociopath, (it’s not me, it’s my character) and it’s quite fun, actually.
I then realised this is somewhat like acting.