CONCERNING THE THESPIAN CRAFT(Charles E.J. Moulton) CONCERNING THE THESPIAN CRAFT

A close look at the craft of acting and singing

By Charles E.J. Moulton

Traditionally, we are taught that the people who change the world are the hardliners, but the men and women who want to destroy life never bring the world forward to a brighter place. You might find them in the history books, but they are not the ones with the triumph. The people who dare to hope are the ones with the profit in the end. They are not brought down just because the world doesn’t live up to expectations. The soul does. The people who keep the world going are the ones who do not lose their capacity to love in spite of hardship. Talent gets you nowhere if you don’t know how to dig in and feel the heat. There are very huge talents with no career and bad actors that become genuine cult phonies.
Sensitivity is the artist’s game, but it is a sensitivity that needs a hard casing.
But what is the core of acting, the centre of that sensitivity?
Method, yes. Craft, yes. Physicality, yes. Security, yes.
Depth, voice, skill, movement, intelligence, truth.
But beyond the skill and the education, what is the core of acting?
I believe it to be love. Of course, the technique of acting is far more complex.
The core, however, is simple.
Let us, for the sake of structure, analyze love.
Without love we are a lost species.
With love we can have everything we want.
We can love our job or our profession. We can love our pet or our favorite neighborhood tree. We can love our wives, our children or our siblings.
We can love our mothers, our fathers, our teachers, our friends, our mentors, our interests and hobbies and we can love ourselves.
Love comes in a million shapes and sizes. It can be theological, philosophical, amicable, memorial, sexual, sensual, spiritual or habitual. Love is not just sex. Love is not just marital. Love is not just popular. Love is not just varied. Love is not just religious. It is all of these things and more. Narrowing love down to relationships or sex is like hoping that a loaf of bread will bake itself just by the appearance of flour, yeast, water and salt.
Why am I talking about love?
I just want you to introduce to an idea: without love we are useless instruments and basically there are just a few basic feelings. They are the rainbow from which all other feelings derive. Love is one of them. Fundamentally, we have to love what we do: our profession, our craft and our vocation. This is very close to the idea that whatever we do on stage has to come from a positive choice. The character we play can’t think he is evil.
He is doing something out of love.
He might just love hating someone, but he does love. He loves himself, freedom or fame.
I once again refresh my memory about Lee Strasberg.
He was born in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and immigrated to New York City as a small child. At age sixteen he joined the Students of Arts and Drama course and was soon inspired to see the troop of Stanislawski ensemble players perform on tour in the States. This drove him to study acting and eventually become a prize winning director. In 1948 he founded the Actor’s Studio on the basis of Stanislawski’s teachings, but with a new American twist. It became The Method with a big M. People like Johnny Depp and Rod Steiger kept on referring to it as to what they did when they worked on the craft.
There are many roads that lead to Rome, as they say, and not every actor has to bring out sense memory to be good. Some prefer to remain technical. Clear is that the actor has to convey a sense of truth to the audience. Make them believe that what is happening is real and not pretended.
Acting is not pretence. It is making yourself feel how it is to be another person. That is the fine difference between what people think this profession is and what it actually is in real life. I don’t pretend to be someone. I usually choose characteristics from people I know and try to feel how it is to be them in that kind of scene or I choose situations from my own life and try to reproduce what it was to be in that circumstance.
So, in that way, acting is like a quilt. It is a patchwork of emotions that endeavours to recreate another human being’s map of spiritual work by recreating real emotions. It is not pretending to be someone. It is being someone else.
It is tough because you have to be so sensitive and feel so much in order to be real and then try to close yourself off to certain people who don’t mean well. That is why some artists are such divas. They turn to arrogant snobs, because they have been hurt too much too often. A factory worker or accountant can close his book at six and go home. We carry our work inside, because our work is equal to what we are. We use our souls as instruments on stage just as we use our bodies. We learn to talk like another person or walk like someone else. We learn to feel like someone else. That is what people miss. It is not that our professions are more important than our private life. It is that we use our souls on stage and we get influenced privately by our own emotional work
I mean that the essential reason why people go to the theatre is to see their own lives displayed on a stage in a different setting. If they see themselves in a better light or from another angle, then life is easier for them. We are just a mirror of their lives or we should be. Whatever goes on in society also happens onstage. This is a noble trade.
That is why even doing a show 700 times like I did in Vienna with Dance of the Vampires never really got boring, because every audience was different. The work was a code, similar to the license plate of a car. Mix two letters and three numbers and you get a million possibilities. Mix thirty actors and an endless array of people and you have to get a different situation every night. Basically, I could be humming The Star-Spangled Banner in F-Sharp Minor every night eight hundred times a year and it still would be interesting. I would never know what kind of audience was waiting for me out there. That is why film work is so different. You have to communicate with a crowd that is not there yet. They are just in the future. You are making love to a camera lens.
On stage you make love to the audience on the spot. I have known opera singers who get tired of a show before the premiere opens, who never want to do performances in the first place. That is the test of a real performer. No matter how talented someone is or how educated his real passion lies in not getting tired of what he’s doing only because his urge is to keep learning and surviving his profession just to keep it exciting.
I don’t know how gifted I am.
I am just passionate about my work.
I have been a professional since I was 15. I am now 40, which gives me twenty-five years of professional experience. Professional work is technically getting paid for work and in that prospect I have been on stage even longer. I was on stage even before I was born. My mother expected me whilst singing Ortrud in Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin.
So, actually, I was on stage before I was born.
I could give you a biography of my life, but that is not why I am here. I am here to give you a short summary of what stage work is all about. Professionalism is much more than getting paid. It is an attitude. Being professional is doing your work not in order to become famous, but in order to be true to your vocation by respecting your calling.
This is a craft. It is just as much a handiwork as being a baker or a tailor or a carpenter. The difference is that the tools a baker uses can be seen or bought. Our tools as actors are our own bodies and minds. Stage work to me means dancing, acting and singing. That is why we speak of the three crafts. Singing It’s Not Unusual’ in your bathtub is not real singing. Professional vocalization is an instrument that takes years to perfect. It involves teaching the support of your back and bowel muscles to give you the power to help your vocal chords produce the tones without effort. It encompasses producing sometimes two and a half octaves of tones within an aria and learning, step by step, where to sing loud or soft and where to smooth the melody out and where to make the tones hard and edgy.
These things have Italian expressions: piano, forte, portamento and staccato. Needless to say, we are talking about an athletic precision and a craft of educating muscular memory. Equally, dancing is drilling the muscles to recall certain habits and moves.
Acting is also a craft. How do you move on stage? How does a factory worker move as opposed to a priest? How does a taxi driver talk? He does not talk like an agent or a criminal or a baker. Is he Dutch or does he have a thick Cockney accent. Now imagine doing all these things simultaneously. You are in a musical, in a scene you are expected to sing a high F for four bars. That takes vocal work and years of training. At the same time, you have to twirl your female partner around and do a pirouette. That takes dancing skills, knowing how to turn your head and fix your eyes on one point in the turn so that you don’t fall down. At the same time, your character is angry at his girlfriend and you have to show this whilst singing and dancing.
In real life, though, that partner is lesbian and gives you zero feedback. You have to twirl from the back of the stage, singing your high F, and somehow look at the conductor whilst all this is going on.
This situation is maybe exaggerated, but not a lot. It describes what we do for a living. We take risks and we are frequently working in situations that need concentration. What we do may look easy and that is the point.
The work behind the stage is sweat. A large musical has at least ten or twenty stage hands, a light team, a sound team. It has a stage manager that calls out four hundred commands to thirty different departments on cue every night. He knows how to read music, because he needs to tell the departments when to lower a tree or raise a curtain.
He needs to do this right on the very note written in the score or some actor might get it on his head as he is entering the stage a moment later in the next bar. There are people working sixty feet up toward the roof of the house and there are people in the pits all lead by a director or a conductor that try to give you a good time. We work with relaxed concentration and rarely get the admiration we need. We get type cast and dismissed and yet we wouldn’t want to do anything else.
Acting is work. You take your time to read the play at least twice from the character’s point of view, before actually asking yourself where the guy you are playing came from. What made him get to the point he is at now? Why did he become a criminal, a schizophrenic or a baker? What did he do before his first scene and what does he do when he leaves the stage? You fill in the blanks between scenes and know what he does even when he is not on stage. What is his goal and why does he do what he does?
Is he after the girl or is he just hungry for cash? Is he confused or manic-depressive? You create a biography for him that leaves no questions open. You know that the character comes home from work before his first scene and leaves the house to get a pizza before the second scene and outside meets an old friend and comes back to tell his wife about it. You check the records and make a plan of where your character is at all times. That is dramatic continuity. We use or bodies and emotions to convey to you a sense of wonder. We try to tell you a story by holding a mirror in front of you that might be enlightening to your heart. People ask for messages in theatre. Maybe the message lies not in blunt psychology, but within something that simply is as old as time. We tell stories. Basically, that is all we are: storytellers. Like those old storytellers by the fireside, we don’t ask the story where it came from. It is obvious. The story comes from us, from our hearts and hopefully reaches the hearts of those want to listen to us give them something unique: our personality.

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