243-3 Winter 2003
Final Presentations
After working fall quarter to develop your ability to perceive human behavior meaningfully, the focus of this quarter’s work was the actor’s creative imagination. If the first quarter concentrated on the “stuff” you create with, this quarter dealt with the powerful force by which you create.
One of the major areas of focus was vicarious behavior as opposed to fall quarter’s concentration on direct observation of behavior. Metaphor was a major component: animals and plants and objects looked at from the point of view of behavior through which to build the experiential bridge to understanding human behavior. [“I am a sea gull”. Roy Cohn from Angels in America, the cigar-smoking octopus. Juliet’s nurse the tuba creating her relationship with Juliet as a kitchen tabby cat and a kitten.]
The musical comedy character song as a way to motivate responsive behavior attracted your notice. (What is your characteristic tune? How would someone creating your character understand something about you by embodying your habitual inner melody?) Some of you responded to letting the interplay of elements within the play activate your imagination: Why is this chair an Ibsen chair and that one a Williams chair? What does a typical Chekhov furniture arrangement look like? Why? What does it suggest about the nature of Chekhovs’s people? Apply to Noel Coward, to Mamet, Pinter. Beckett. Gaev’s bookcase in Act I versus the shadow on the wall in Act IV literalizes something about the theme of The Cherry Orchard. Late night, thunder and distant lightning, closed windows and open doors, Vanya drinks, begins to realize something that is leading to “I could have been a Dostoevsky”, Astrov gets Waffles to play the balalaika and the music helps revelations to be made—things add up. Character names touch off creative response: Malvolio versus Toby Belch. Maggie the Cat versus Brick. Play titles: What does the Norwegian word translated as Ghosts really imply? Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play takes place in “A great hole. In the middle of nowhere. The hole is an exact replica of the Great Hole of History.” The first character is named “The Foundling Father as Abraham Lincoln.” This quarter’s work was designed to go past intellectual grasp of such elements and get your actor’s imagination sensing it all, responding to it all, and creating it all in terms of response to stimuli.
The Nineteenth Century novel of character helps you to discover details of character and environment as a developmental process. We spent time at the beginning of the quarter illustrating such qualities as era (every period puts its stamp on the individual—apply to yourself), social class, age, gender and race (ditto). Bridget’s and Arjun’s work at the beginning of the quarter began to illustrate this process. And Rebecca’s work on Tess suggested that a novel can send you off to other sources of stimuli—museums, photos, illustrations from novels, books of period furniture, landscape, etc. to look for stimuli to send your imagination galloping. If you are who you are in response to the significant elements of your world, of your environment, then novels can help you to develop your sense of what “significant elements” means for the actor.
Novels can help you to clarify the idea of a human being responding on several levels at once: what is the mind thinking as the tongue speaks? What are the hands doing that reveal something that the eyes conceal? What opposites play against one another as you “discuss” your friend’s relationship with someone else? Novelists can provide significant details of response that a playwright cannot.
I was hoping each of you would choose a novel that would encourage you to explore these ideas (and more!) throughout the quarter. We had time set aside once each week to take a sampling of that work. The final was meant to be a culmination of that work rather than an isolated five-minute presentation.
Create/reveal elements of character through response to stimuli of the environment and create the environment through response to stimuli. Hannah turned the Struble into the precipices of a Nineteenth Century English shoreline even as she revealed something about Christabel La Motte and her relationship to Ash. As we noted in the early finals, Rachel, Jeannette, Rebecca, Bridget using the same furniture turned the stage space into specific rooms of specific times. Katie did something more than just strew the stage with clothes to create that particular room and that woman in it. We knew/experienced the situation, the relationship—all from the responses of a woman waking up, getting dressed, leaving. How did they (and others) do it? This may seem obvious as Greta wondered in her email yesterday; but note the various degrees of success in such creating of environment this past week. Think it over. What elements must be present for that ease of what seems like obvious creation to happen? If it is more difficult—perhaps--to create a jail cell in Eighteenth-Century Newgate for Moll Flanders or a sixties New Orleans side street for Confederacy of Dunces than the living room of a small-town fifties American home for Lolita, get to the why behind this seeming, obvious truth. What must an actor “know” and “do” in order to create with ease and utter believability? How can you learn to use narrative writing and other research sources as a way to stimulate your actor’s creative imagination to help you “know” and “do”?
Even though The Beautiful and the Damned may be an inferior novel, Nicole created a character whose character(istic) behavior/responses asked her to go way outside who she is. (How Performance Studies of me to include parentheses, eh?) I especially appreciated the behavior on the train platform. Erica and Nicole did this with their Lolitas too. Josh Hime created a character who took advantage of the Josh’s own character and yet went way beyond it. Note, too, that Lauren built on the work she first brought to class in creating an Anna of greater maturity and depth—and also more a woman of the 19th C. Russian aristocracy.
Some of the novels did not ask for complex characters. This led Cano into having to take us on a quick tour through the story of Ernesto rather than being able to reveal more about him through response to environment. David has a straightforward ease of response and an uncomplicated access to his emotional self that everyone should note. Now he has to learn to trust it, to intensify it when called for, to eliminate any tendency to “indicate” by creating false responses just to make sure the audience knows what his subtle interior self is experiencing. Josh Limor also chose a novel (I think!) that assumed a simple character and then focused on the story the character finds himself in rather than what a novel of character does, which is focus on revelation of characteristics and change in character as a result of involvement in environment, situation, story.
In the Presentations-with-Lots-of-Dialogue category, Ryan and both Lolitas came out well. For them, the dialogue was only the verbal part of the situation, of the responses to environment and one another. All had true responses to specific stimuli that illustrated/created character, relationship, situation, so that talking became just one part of the responses. (In class we discussed the differences and similarities between the characterizations of Humbert and Lolita and what this work points to in interpreting characters in plays.) Hime found himself in a novel with a character who reveals himself constantly through dialogic interaction with others. In some ways, it’s the same problem that Josh Limor had. Ignatius is a character of certain traits who is then put in a picaresque series of situations that are the real focus of the novel. Still, Hime created Ignatius well—I was eager to see if his stilted, pedantic language would come out as logical and inevitable…and it did. But the presentation focused so much on comic dialogue that the entire New Orleans side street environment disappeared.
I wish we could have worked more on Madame Bovary throughout the quarter. Chrysandra naturally embodies the graceful, erect spine of the Nineteenth Century woman. I would love to have worked with her to create the passionate, Romantic young French girl who becomes the passionate, romantic woman who finds herself sneaking out into the mud to meet her lover and who is rejected in most un-Romantic ways, etc. Sons and Lovers is another novel that the class would have benefited from more incremental work on. As it was, Allan’s work had the clarity I have come to appreciate in his creating. And it was good to see him as at ease with a simple and serious situation as he is with comic, energized stuff. But working on Paul in more detail over the quarter would have been good for Allan and the class. Moll Flanders is a “pre-novel”. It spends most of its time telling rather than showing. So there isn’t much detailed character to grab onto, especially since it’s told in the first person. Still, Greta’s experience with dance allows her to move with a grace and a totality that incorporates opposites and possibility in spine, in gesture, in behavior. These result in an easeful suspense that keeps us watching her. It is something that y’all should work to master your own version of. Since I did not know Blake Silver’s novel, I can respond mostly to Blake himself. He has the ease of direct response to immediate stimuli that is one of the “principles” I wanted this work to illustrate. I noted with appreciation a relaxed presence different from the lark of his fantasy work. In fact, his presentation was one of a few that I thought should have included more.
Finally, take some time to think this idea through: You all have dominant behavioral characteristics that are direct manifestations of your central character drives. Most of the characters took advantage of these behavior patterns: Matt, Rachel, Hannah, Katie spring to mind. Others brought such manifestations to their characters without harm to a character who may not rely on such characteristics: Besides those I mentioned elsewhere above, David, Silver, Arjun, Ryan, Steve fit here, I think.
All of you must ask yourselves questions like this: What would I bring to my creation of Paul Morell? To Ernesto? To Anais Nin? Lily Bart? What behavior of my own do I eliminate as I transform myself into Anna Karenina? Humbert Humbert? What descriptions does each novel supply that can lead me to look for behavior in life models to help me to create a Lolita? A Becky Sharpe?
Well, the principles, aspects, elements, of creativity that I am trying to illustrate here are infinite in their manifestations. It is my job to find the clearest way to present them. It is your job to work hard to turn every illustration into your own thinking, into your own creative capacity. It should be our jobs and our joy to work on it all. I look forward to going at it again next quarter.
In preparation read these:
*Tennessee Williams. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Streetcar Named Desire, Night of the Iguana
*Edward Albee. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance
*Eugene O’Neill. Long Day’s Journey into Night
*Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman
*Tony Kushner. Angels in America (both parts)
We will use A Delicate Balance and Angels in America from the beginning to illustrate the work of the quarter. Your final character work should come from plays such as these—though not restricted to these--that focus on realistic, complex characters.