An Improvised Life: A Memoir by Alan Arkin

Author:Alan Arkin [Arkin, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780306819667
Google: QMIVe9way7gC
Amazon: 030681966X
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-10-14T11:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

There is an unconscious ritual that actors go through in nearly every play I’ve directed. We’ll have been rehearsing the play for about three weeks, and during a break an actor will come up to me in a state of intense agitation and say, “I can’t understand this scene; it’s driving me crazy. I don’t know what the character is doing here. I’m at a complete loss, and I feel completely hamstrung.” My inevitable answer is “You’re playing the scene right now.” The actor stops in his tracks and realizes the truth of what I’m saying. The emotional state he has put himself in while telling me about his impasse is exactly where the character needs to be during the scene.

I thought about this for a long time before I realized that it was because actors don’t like to look confused. Who does? Who wants to appear to an audience as if they don’t know what they’re doing? It makes people look amateurish, and who wants that?

But what’s taking place in rehearsal is that in each instance the actor is confusing his own loss of control with that of the character. What I have to impress upon the actor each time it happens is that this loss of control, this confusion, this being really stopped in one’s tracks without a clear place to go, is riveting. It’s a place of pure potential, a place where anything can happen, a wonderfully deep and empty place. I’ve seen this moment over and over in people’s faces when I watch old episodes of Candid Camera—the perplexed look, the totally empty space people fall into when they’re confronted with outlandish behavior. I laugh at this emptiness far more than I do at most controlled, thought-out comic behavior. When actors have the courage to present us with this open, vulnerable, empty moment it is pure gold. “I don’t know who I am, I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what I’m doing.” It’s the essence of the ideas expressed so beautifully in the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki. He says in the prologue: “In Japan we have the phrase shoshin which means beginner’s mind.... This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”

When an actor has the courage to really embrace this state, which will occur over and over again during the course of his career, his work will get richer and more interesting.

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