The Intent to Live: Achieving Your True Potential as an Actor by Larry Moss

Author:Larry Moss [Moss, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Acting & Auditioning, Reference, Personal & Practical Guides, Professional/Educational
ISBN: 9780553901153
Google: 2H_IHeI5tIkC
Amazon: 0553381202
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-12-28T06:00:00+00:00

16

THE MOMENT BEFORE:

STARTING THE SCENE WITH LIFE

In this brief chapter I want to focus on a subject I’ve touched on without naming it: the moment before—the time immediately preceding your entrance. I discussed it in regard to Janet McTeer’s entrance as Nora from the cold Norwegian winter in A Doll’s House, and all the characters’ entrances up those five flights of stairs in Barefoot in the Park. Creating behavior based on a moment before makes you more involved with your character, and it involves the audience, too. They care because you have built their belief that you have a full life offstage. That’s why it’s a mistake not to do the work that’s required to build what happens to you right before you walk into any scene on a stage or on a film set.

The set for Eugene O’Neill’s play about lost souls, The Iceman Cometh, is a bar. In the 1999 Broadway production starring Kevin Spacey, each character made an entrance suffering from his own particular hangover. When you are a dyed-in-the-wool alcoholic, the only thing that counts is your next drink. Every alcoholic has a certain tolerance for the amount of liquor they consume, but at a certain point you either have to sleep or pass out. If you’re playing one of the customers in The Iceman Cometh, then the moment before is the moment before you enter the bar. If you are staying in a fleabag hotel upstairs, you know that every morning you are close to that first drink. Your body literally needs the alcohol because the blood sugar content was high when you fell asleep but now that you’ve awakened your body is trembling; not having a drink for hours, your blood-sugar level has gone down.

There are specific physical sensations when you wake up with that kind of a hangover. You are nauseated, your head aches, your mouth is bone dry, and possibly you have defecated or urinated in your bed. Walking down a flight of stairs or a hallway to get to that bar is the longest walk of your life. Your body is screaming, Get me that drink and get it to me now! Depending on your age and the severity of your hangover, you’ll walk from your bed to that bar in a certain way based on the physical obstacles that your particular quality of hangover puts in your way.

Every character entering the bar in The Iceman Cometh comes from that kind of moment before—the moment before they get their first needed drink. Some of the characters don’t mind being seen as hungover, others disguise the fact and try to pretend that they are in some state of sobriety, but the physical, sensorial obstacles are there even if you try to hide them—for example, your hands may tremble but you pretend the quality of joviality and clearheadedness. If you’re playing one of these characters and you want to enter on shaky legs, with a lack of equilibrium, maybe imagining you have pebbles in your shoes would make you walk carefully the way a drunk with a hangover might.

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