tymeless

Got this from the book that Betty's reading. Some quotable quotes from the book "Audition" by Michael Shurtleff.

- To go into acting is like asking for admission to an insane asylum. Anyone may apply, but only the certifiably insane are admitted.

- It’s filled with ironies, the profession of acting. Most people go into acting to get out of themselves, to get away from their everyday humdrum selves and become someone else who is glamorous, romantic, unusual, different. And what does acting turn out to be? Using your own self. Working from what’s inside you. Not being someone else, but being you in different situations and contexts. Not escaping you, but using yourself naked and exposed up there on the stage or the silver screen.

- There’s only one person like you in the entire world. Trust yourself to use that with truth and imagination.

- As soon as an actor puts such a limitation on his work, he’s being less than himself, imprisoned in a straitjacket of don’ts. With so little freedom to feel, how can an actor give a good audition? Put aside the limitations that instant characterizations inevitably instill; allow anything to be possible; make choices that give you the maximum possible involvement.

- There are two important physical aspects of readings that actors tend to forget: being seen and being heard.

- What do the auditors expect from a reading? An opening night performance. That’s all. Directors and producers will deny this, of course.

- Creating relationship is the heart of acting. It is basic. It is essential.

- Until you expand your concept of what love is to include the various peculiar and perverse forms it can take in human relationships, you’re going to have a hard time as an actor finding an emotional commitment to the scenes you’re trying to act.

- The desire for love, to give it or receive it, and preferably both and simultaneously, is the chief propellant in human beings. An actor had best learn that love comes in all forms, and in many more forms than only those he himself admires.

- An actor must make the most active choice possible for every scene.

- An actor is looking for conflict. Conflict is what creates drama. Plays are not written about our everyday lives or the moments of peace and placidity but about the extraordinary, the unusual, the climaxes.

- Maximum conflict is what you should be looking for.

- That’s why there’s so little romance in our world now: everyone thinks romance is weak. Yet romance is everyone’s secret dream – it’s why we’re alive. Never distrust romance; nothing could be stronger.

- We never knew for sure what you might do next. I think that makes acting most interesting.

- Humor is a relaxation to me. It means you stop for a minute to see how ridiculous you are or she is, how absurd this situation we’ve got ourselves into.

- But refusing to use your imagination isn’t dealing with the problem. It’s being defeatist; it’s limiting you in ways you don’t need to be limited.

- Attractions to someone don’t get “used up” – not if they are love, not if they are needful, not if they are emotional rather than just sexual. Attractions that are emotional grow.

- There are opposites in every scene. The actor may have to dig for them, for the playwright may well have implied them under the surface of the character and not have written them into the dialogue at all; but they are always there for the digging. They are well worth digging for; they result in the most interesting kind of acting: the complex.

- Actors need to work from real-life situations, not literary or character concepts. Most often the discoveries aren’t written on the surface of the script; the actor has to dig in the subtext to find them. They come out of the actor’s own life questions.

- Acting is supremely a task of communication. It is not enough for the actor to feel, if that feeling is not being communicated.

- The most successful actors are those who are able to project what they are feeling to someone else. This sending of feeling to another person becomes so strong that it is projected to an audience.

- Plays are not concerned with this everyday behavior of ours, but with the unusual moments in a person’s life when his need to communicate is at its greatest. These are the needs the actor must furnish.

- Receiving the feelings of another is even harder than sending out feelings of your own. It requires sensitivity, a heightened awareness of another person. It requires the investment of real caring; otherwise why will you undertake thee formidable task of opening yourself up to true communication?

- Receiving requires that we be open, willing. How can we receive it we are closed up? Being open is an act of both generosity and selfishness: generous in opening yourself up to receive another’s needs; selfish in the greed of wanting to know another person, for there is power in knowing another.

- There are occasions when we need to know another person, where it is difficult for us to live unless we do know them.

- Unselfish motivations lead to passive, saintly, and very dull acting.

- Communication is the desire to change the person to whom you are communicating.

- No one wants to admit he is competitive in human relationships of love and friendship. But without competition between the characters, drama is dull indeed, since it feeds on conflict and dies with agreement.

- I hammer away at it: an actor must compete, or die.

- Plays are written about the most important moments in people’s lives, not about their everyday humdrumness. If they featured the humdrum, who would leave home to go see a play?

- People live for their dreams, not for the oppressiveness of truths.

- The truth is not enough for a play unless it is invested with sufficient emotion to make it important.

- Peacefulness and the avoidance of trouble won’t help him in his acting. It is just the opposite he must seek.

- The truth we seek in acting must be a highly selective truth, not an everyday, ordinary household variety.

- What an actor must look for in a play is something unusual. Something important.

- Important does not necessarily mean significant to others. It means emotionally important to you at this moment. We make trivial things important to us at the moment, even if a day later we will have forgotten them. Important things are made even more important to us.

- Make the stakes in each scene as high as you can. Look for the maximum importance. Add importance. If you don’t, no one will be listening to you.

- Every play is about love. Sometimes it’s about hate, which is the reverse. Hate happens when a person is deprived of love. That’s why you hate your mother; you never had love from anyone. The more you are deprived of love, the more you are in need of it.

- A play must move, it must progress, it cannot stand still. Events make a play progress; character or behavior alone will not do that. Something has to happen to move the narrative forward.

- Clearly, actions are always more interesting than mere talk.

- The immediate reality of a bare stage is a real down; an actor would do well to lift himself up, with a place of his own.

- Since an actor is free to choose any place he wishes in which to do his reading – for it is he who provides the place in his imagination – it would be wisest for him to choose a place he knows well.

- Install a lover, and when he leaves, you’ll hate the place you liked before. All the same place, but how you feel about it changes depending on the emotional events that take place there.

- Once you have chosen the place, once you see it clearly in physical terms, then you must look for how you feel about it. The feeling is most important. That is what will elevate your use of place into emotional value.

- You played your judgment of a nun. That isn’t going to help me give some dimension to the role. A nun doesn’t feel she’s a disagreeable taskmaster. You’ve got to show opposites, not just one side.

- Play to win. Play to get what you’re fighting for. No one in all this world plays to lose. Not even the self-destructs.

- Usually there’s an exception to any well-kept secret, which is one of the fascinating things about secrets: sooner or later you tell someone. Human beings can’t seem to bear keeping a secret totally to themselves, not forever.

- Consistency is the death of good acting.

- And remember, once more, that it is more important at an audition to show the auditors the extent of your emotional equipment as an actor than to illustrate your understanding of the script.

- The terms of loving. This is a highly important concept for an actor. Most scenes in plays (as in life) are negotiations of terms between two people, whether they are lovers or enemies. Attempts to come to some agreement whereby one can hold onto one’s own and so can the other person. This is conflict. Conflict is drama.

- A lot of actors roar their protest when I say friendship is competitive. They conceive of competition as not nice, as aggressive and unattractive. One would not compete with one’s friends; that would be a dreadful state of affairs.

- But we do compete with our friends. It’s one of the major reasons we have friends: stimulation. You can’t stimulate each other unless you compete.

- Competition is healthy, yet actors (as do most people) regard the word competition with horror, thinking it only connotes cutthroat business or aggressive countries at war with each other. Of course, competition can be aggressive and warlike, but it can also be a healthy stimulus, such as wanting to play tennis with a partner who is as good or as better than we are.

- Friendship is perhaps the only relationship of equality we have in our lives.

- We don’t like to do things we don’t do well; we don’t like failure; we like success. It wouldn’t matter to us if we succeeded or failed if we didn’t compete.

- There is an acceptance in friendship that enables us to relax and enjoy competing. Friendships – good ones, true ones, basic ones – tend to last longer than most other relationships. It’s because there is trust, freedom to compete, freedom to criticize and to receive criticism – freedom because we are accepted and therefore honesty is possible. No other relationship in our lives is likely to be as honest as our close friendships. No other relationship is able to relax into competitiveness that is acceptable on both sides.

- Actors are very worried – rightfully so – about being truthful in their acting. The tendency is to prize truth even when it’s tiny, mundane, everyday truth. But that’s not enough. What good is truth if it’s dull and boring? Exciting truths can be truthful, too. Learn to prefer those.

- You should embrace melodrama, not run away from it.

- “I didn’t want to be melodramatic.” Why not? Who gave melodrama a bad name? People are melodramatic in life every day.

- It’s investing melodrama with belief that makes it work. It you decide it’s melodramatic in order to withdraw from it, you can never fulfill it. Withdrawal is just another inhibited actor being uninteresting; the woods is full of ‘em. Plunge in. Give us actors who are willing to take the risk.

- The purpose of a reading is to show who you are.

- You’re not at an audition to do the scene right, but to show the auditors who you are. Give yourself a chance. Worry less about the material and more about what you would do and feel if you were in that situation. The play gives you a situation; your job is to put yourself in it.

- Always take into account what’s different. Use your imagination, your instincts. Rigidity is death in an actor’s life.

- Acting is seeing. We see our entire lives in images.

- We see everything that way: not an isolated close-up of a face, but a person in a specific environment.

- Acting is about what we do, not what we should do.

- Acting is predicated on the ways in which human beings behave, not the way they should behave.

- Acting is doing what people do. It is not a moral act.

- Actors rarely pick revenge as the goal they are fighting for, yet revenge is one of the most important motivations in human nature. When we are deeply hurt, we want to hurt back.

- If you’re going to be an actor, you’ll have to start exploring the intricate, hidden, and frequently unfair behavior that is caused by our need for revenge.

- Many a self-made important executive is the result of being overlooked as a child.

- Many creative people are “getting back” at being considered untalented or uninteresting.

- Some Hollywood beauties are proving to the world they can be wanted, after a childhood of neglect and rejection (the classic, and typical, example is Marilyn Monroe). These are all acts of revenge. Keep in mind that revenge is not harmful or destructive; frequently it is highly creative, an enormous life force driving people to prove their worth.

- Isn’t all our creative work the achievement of revenge against all the doubting Thomases who said we couldn’t? There are always the dubious standing in the sidelines to say we can’t achieve our ambitions. If we show them we can, we get our revenge.

- After all, we do know about any human being can act like shit, but what we’re looking for in most actors is likability, warmth, and feeling.

- For even the seducers are seeking love. They guise it from themselves (and more contemporary people do it than ever before) and insist they just want to get laid, but they do want to be wanted, and that is wanting love, even if you have no intention of giving it. The actor is always better off making the choice, then, of seeking love rather than seduction.

- A maxim for actors. Use what you know. Don’t worry about what you don’t know.

- The action of being shy is wanting not to be shy but to be confident, bold, aggressive. The shy person dreams of being the opposite of what he is. His entire effort is to overcome his shyness.

- Listening is not merely hearing, it is receiving the message that is being sent to you. Listening is reacting. Listening is being affected by what you hear. Listening is letting it land before you react. Listening is letting your reaction make a difference.

- Listening is talking while you are being talked to, not out loud but creating silent dialogue that answers what is said to you. This is active. Active listening is answering.

- The more specific your silent dialogue answers, the better your listening.

- When an actor hates the character, there is usually a profoundly personal reason. Sometimes because it’s revealing a trait the actor doesn’t like in himself; or it re-creates a real-life relationship that is so uncomfortable the actor wants to run away rather than deal with it (hating is a way of running away). We rarely have such a strong reaction as hatred unless it involves us deeply.

- A curious fact, I find, is that actors get in trouble when they love the character, also. Their favorite role in their favorite play is sometimes the one for which they give the most unsuccessful readings.

- All human beings love to suffer. The reason people love to suffer is that it makes them right.

- What’s the good of suffering if no one else knows?

- Fear is what we don’t know. The solution is to know what it is you are afraid of; then you can deal with it.

- But most of the time our fears are groundless: we don’t know why we are afraid.

- Through the years, I have found most actors are terrified of the audition. They don’t know why. It is a nameless, unspecified terror.

- Learn to function, instead of being prey to your undefined fears.

- Actors should react on the line, not in between.

- Physicalizing is a strong way to express feeling. Physical expression is not a substitute for feeling but an extension of it.

- Learn to use all levels of awareness. Actors feel they are really in a scene when they are totally unaware of the audience or of anything except what’s going on between them and their stage partners.

- Acting or writing or directing in theatre or television or screen is only for the irrevocably diseased, those who are so smitten with the need that there is no choice.

- If actors would use life as their source rather than stage convention, they’d find the answers to everything that happens in a play.

- One great missing ingredient in current acting is romance. Everyone secretly wants romance, but in these harsh, “realistic” days, no one will openly admit it.

- People are motivated by dreams, by visions of what might be, not by realities and harsh views of what is.

- The actor’s process is the distillation of complexities. The simplest choices are the most telling. When you put it all together, find simplicity.

- Most actors fail not because of lack of talent but because 1. They don’t work hard enough. 2. They aren’t disciplined. 3. They are literal rather than truly imaginative. 4. They are victimized by their limitations and prejudices. 5. They are ruled by their negative side. 6. They are not persistent.

- It should be a cardinal rule of an actor’s life: Always audition.

- Half an actor’s life is auditioning, half is performing. Why stint on the auditioning half?

- The actor must always know more than the character does.

- Literary choices are not dramatic. Make your choices from emotional need rather than intellectual understanding.

- Silence is a form of communication that is an alternative to verbal communication. It is a way of saying something to someone else. Silence is silent dialogue.

- Every moment, every move, every silence must speak.

- Conflict, not contemplation, is dramatic truth. Save contemplation for philosophic essays or for sitting on the toilet all by yourself.

- Pursue the answers until they lead to more questions that require turmoil and the deepest parts of your awareness to answer. Acting hurts.

- Your everyday life is not the criteria of what you are. Your fantasy life is who you are. Everybody’s fantasy life is richer than reality.

- An act of imagination is what makes being alive possible.

- Love is not always ideal. It takes peculiar forms sometimes. Don’t be so idealistic in your concepts. You overlook a lot of the strange places where love occurs, a lot of the strange, bizarre images that can be above love, too.