Subtitle: 
What Are Actors Really Thinking?

There's a secret script behind every show.

Some thirty years ago, playwright Robert Patrick, best known for prize-winning Kennedy's Children, wrote a very different drama, Play by Play, which depicted a seemingly ordinary performance of Hamlet—except the text wasn't by Shakespeare. Knowing that audiences knew the plot enough to dispense with the dialogue, Patrick cleverly substituted what he imagined were the real thoughts of the actual actors as they made their entrances, speeches and exits. The players' true-life emotions created a perfect case of life imitating art. Often they took a dramatic departure from the situation at hand, deflating the soliloquies into rote recitation and one actor's survival strategies.

We want—no, we need—to believe, or at least suspend disbelief. We need to feel that this is honestly Hamlet, not a simulation who owns his own story called a bio. Robert Patrick exposes the grand illusion, showing how the man behind Shakespeare's haunted prince is in fact more upset over being upstaged, underlit, poorly propped, or unflatteringly attired than he is over the death of his father by his uncle. Ophelia is not so demented she can't notice that the audience is restless during her scenes: Is it something she's doing or not doing? Laertes is angrier at his sword for not smoothly springing from his scabbard (as it did during rehearsals) than at Hamlet for driving his sister to suicide. In the worst possible scenario, the windbag Polonius worries more about getting his next line right than giving it meaning.

Actors, of course, are a lot like politicians, saying one thing but believing another. But even in Congress you sometimes get the real thing: a speaker who so means what he says, even a mind reader can't find a shred of difference between word and thought. His/her speech is soaked in sincerity. This rare bird is a candidate who means to keep his word. Or the thespian who really thinks he's Hamlet, at least until the lights come up. You hope they don't pay too great a price for their unnatural fidelity.

But, even if the actor is completely immersed in his role, the audience may not be. Patrick's depiction of the inner voice versus the outer actor applies equally to the folks in the dark. A player can emote from the depth of this heart and the bottom of his soul, but if audience members would rather brood over whatever the babysitter's doing with their child, the laundry not picked up, the menus for upcoming meals, the risk of triggering inflation by lowering interest rates, or the distracting smirk on the actor's face—well, the play is now a one-way street when it should be a thoroughfare.

The trick—no, it's more art than technique—is to synchronize two illusions, the actors' attempt to simulate a stranger and the audience's willingness to buy the lie. So many things can spoil this synchronicity. The audience can fall prey to its own distractions—latecomers, coughing fits, candy wrappers opened during hushed confessions, inappropriate laughter. Equally perversely, actors can supply their own damnable distractions—upstaging their colleagues, stepping on lines, fussy stage business, sight gags that tell an audience to look rather than to hear. These in effect punish the audience for paying attention, in turn triggering the very signs of boredom that then distract the actor from his own often fragile make-believe. It's a vicious circle, the actors' sloppiness fueling the audience's indifference that undermines the performance. This cannot end well.

A horrible thing happens when these distractions intersect:

The audience begins to contemplate the two most terrible words you can apply to a production: "So what?" It's the ultimate formula for failure, the law of diminishing returns. Like a train derailing, every moment takes it further off the tracks. The actor has lost his audience, and they're glad to be gone. The better players must work overtime to re-suspend the disbelief created when one player loses his grip on his role. Happily, the opposite holds just as powerfully, when the actors' technique and authenticity ignite the audience's curiosity and empathy.

Slowly, then surely, there are no more audience-generated "laundry lists" filling up the vacuum created by phony line readings or wooden postures. A complete silence suggests the proverbial test of the inaudible pin drop. To mix metaphors even more, the studio and the radio share exactly the same frequency. The audience isn't punished for paying attention by being jerked out of its trance by excessive affect. The actor can almost pretend it's happening for the first time.

Of course, no play will ever reach the point where an audience is certain they're seeing a real murder enacted before their eyes, where the "killer," convinced there are too many witnesses to his "crime," gives himself up to the authorities immediately after the performance. Dangerous collective insanity like this is better left to be the kind of mass delusion of a Jonestown suicide pact or Nuremberg propaganda rally. (That's partly why Bertolt Brecht wanted his "alienation" techniques to destroy the audience's capacity to identify with any particular character and thus miss the play's larger message.)

But there's a happy medium—just pretending. We're eavesdropping on a story that must be told, with or without us. The best shows make you feel they're inevitable – they'd be done whether there was an audience or not. There was, well, "something in the air." Our applause breaks the spell, instantly separating stage from auditorium as we thank the actors for their splendid fiction. How often in life do we get to feel so good about being so fooled?

[END]

Writer: 
Lawrence Bommer
Writer Bio: 
Lawrence Bommer is a Chicago arts writer who has suspended so much disbelief that, if it ever drops, well, it won't be pretty.
Date: 
February 2008
Key Subjects: 
Acting, Hamlet