Actors at Work
Faber & Faber
Now Available
The tendency of intellectuals is to think of actors as stupid. And of singers, particularly tenors, as being even dumber. This is not true. Actors and singers need to specialize rigorously, and the result is that their education will lack distribution. Rare exceptions aside, they will remain uninformed in many areas, which may give the impression of stupidity.
Otherwise put, actors make it on aptitude rather than knowledge. Aptitude for memorization, adaptability, mimesis, vocalization, even physical stamina. These are noteworthy gifts, but they are not what commonly passes for intelligence, which, rightly or wrongly, is associated with erudition and culture.
So when we read Actors at Work, 14 interviews with prominent actors conducted by Rosemarie Tichler (a well-known casting director) and Barry Jay Kaplan (a little-known playwright), several shortcomings of both interviewees and interviewers emerge. The actors' chief flaws are repetitious prolixity, privately meaningful but uncommunicative utterance, incomplete or irrelevant response. But there are also the interviewers' poorly worded questions, failure to push for clarification of muddled, ungrammatical answers, and insufficient editing of raw replies for greater clarity.
The trouble is that an average interview runs to 23 pages—which may not seem much, but is enough rope for most respondents to hang themselves. For example, Hoffman properly pinpoints the actor's trauma: "In front of strangers, you have to bring in vulnerability and privacy that normal people run screaming from." Good too is his observation about the need to convey "a logical moment-to-moment life, so that one moment can't happen without the next, that the next moment can't happen without the previous." But then what sense does it make to describe Willy Loman as "napping...living in a pre-orgasm world…in a just-about-to-take the beautiful-woman's-clothes-off world"? And later, contradictorily, "You have to make it something other than you to get past it all."
Self-contradiction can be instantaneous. Thus Billy Crudup: "I wanted to be taken seriously for something. So I thought, Who do they [William Hurt, Daniel Day-Lewis] take seriously out there and what do they do? Consequently, what happens is you begin to develop your own aesthetic within that."
And one actor contradicts another. Estelle Parsons says, "Whenever I am onstage, you never see me." Mandy Patinkin opines, "You only see me when I'm onstage."
Told she's never been bad, Meryl Streep says, "Yes. I've been boring." Patti LuPone allows how "When I'm bored is when I do my best work 'cause I'm not acting anymore." (By the way, almost all interviewees say "'cause" for "because." Is that possible, or is that some tic of the interviewers?)
Sometimes the answers to a simple question are much too long for cohesion: Estelle Parsons and Ruben Santiago-Hudson ramble on for pages. Other answers are short, charming and evasive. So Meryl Streep's "I don't have any idea how to get ready" and Dianne Wiest's "I'm sorry to be so inarticulate." But sometimes they are genuine revelations, such as Marian Seldes' "What I had to get rid of was a sort of search for beauty and elegance and speaking beautifully and moving beautifully and feeling immense tragic thoughts." Or this from John Lithgow about his father's failings as a theater manager: "He wasn't enough of a son of a bitch... He did not like prima donnas, and you know the best players are prima donnas."
So whom is this book for? Young actors may get some useful insights—perhaps the best being that big stars tend to have the same problems as they do. Fans of the 14 stars will get to know them just the tiniest bit better. And skeptics will be confirmed in their belief that the essence of what makes for good acting is incommunicable.