Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

38 Chapter 3 The Actor
extraordinarily rewarding. The thrill of delivering a great
performance, the roar of validation from an enraptured
audience, the glory of getting inside the skin of the likes
of Hamlet, Hedda, and Hedwig with his Angry Inch—
these are excitements and satisfactions few careers can
duplicate. Nor are the rewards purely artistic and intellectual;
audience appreciation and canny marketing can
catapult some actors to the highest income levels in the
world, with salaries in the millions of dollars for “star”
status in films. And the fame that can follow is legendary:
the private lives of the most universally admired
actors become public property, their innermost thoughts
the daily fare of television talk shows and Internet gossip.
And yet, for all the splendor and glamor, the actor’s
life is usually an anxious one, beset by demands for sacrifice
from every direction: psychological, financial, and
even moral. Stage fright—the actor’s nemesis—is an
ever-present nightmare that often increases with experience
and renown. Fear of failure, fear of competition, fear
of forgetting lines, fear of losing emotional control, fear
of losing one’s looks, fear of losing one’s audience—this
list of concerns is unique to the trade. Acting is a strange
mixture of total confidence and, occasionally, crippling
insecurity.
Acting can pay well, but more often than not, the
economic rewards are paltry. The six- and seven-figure
salaries of the stars bear little relation to the scale pay for
which most actors work; actors often realize less income
than the custodians who clean the theatres in which they
perform. And although the stars billed “above the title”
may be treated like celebrities or royalty, and can be the
most prominent aspect of a particular play, they are also,
paradoxically, at the bottom of the pecking order. Actors
take orders from directors, get bossed about by stage
managers, are hired and fired by producers, dangled and
deceived by agents, squeezed and corseted by costumers,
pinched by wig dressers, poked and powdered by
makeup artists, and disparaged by press agents. And yet
the allure and thrill are great. As you are reading this,
someone, somewhere, is undoubtedly deciding—with
a mix of excitement and fear—to pursue acting as an
occupation. Certainly no other profession entails such
numbing uncertainties and sacrifices while offering such
rich rewards.
Upcoming star Nina Arianda won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Actress
for her brash, comic and mainly sexy portrayal of Vanda, an actress who
arrives late for auditions but, as shown above, captivates the director
(played by Hugh Dancy) in Broadway’s Venus in Fur, written by David Ives.
Arianda also made a stellar Broadway debut as Billie Dawn in Garson
Kanin’s classic comedy, Born Yesterday, and has since gone on to starring
onstage in Sam Shepherd’s Fool for Love, Woody Allen’s film Midnight in
Paris, and TV’s The Good Wife. © Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux
What is Acting?
Since the first published discussions of acting, more than
two thousand years ago, theatre theorists and practitioners
have recognized two different and seemingly contradictory
notions of what acting really is. The first notion is that
an actor creates a performance externally, first by imagining
how his or her character should walk, talk, and behave,
and then by imitating these imagined behaviors when
performing the character. The second notion is that acting
is created internally, by concentrating not on imitating
behavior but actually experiencing the life of the character—his
or her emotions, memories, and sensations—as if
they were the character, not just performing it.
These different modes require quite different
approaches. The external method, as the name suggests,
starts from “outside” the character: How do they speak,
move, carry themselves? External acting is based on learning
and mastering specific techniques, such as vocal skills
(articulation, resonance, and projection), an appreciation
for spoken rhetoric (phrasing, persuasive argumentation,
and pacing), and a physical dexterity that allows for complete
control over their every movement. Such an actor will
also seek to master a wide variety of performance styles,
such as singing, dancing, miming, and fencing.