O’Neill and the “Big” Problem.

Older, not bigger, is better. 

This is because the more mature the artist the more economy there is in expression. Direct energy outward seems to be the default stance of inexperienced actors performing O’Neill’s plays. But power and tension are different things and power takes on new meaning as we progress. As we mature we grow to prefer subtlety to the overwrought acting that once captivated us. 

Less is obviously more, so why do we still push? Perhaps it is because we are still seeking the kind of approval we first received from people who didn’t know what they were applauding.

A more important question is what does it cost us to continue to overplay? By my estimation, the cost of pushing is a loss of flexibility in the short term and the eventual erosion of natural talent.

The reason for this may be that pushing is usually accompanied by a constriction of the breath, which, in turn, triggers a panic reflex. Such is our natural response when we feel deprived of oxygen, even if we are the ones depriving ourselves of it.

As fear accumulates, rather than let the panic sink us the actor numbs himself to it. The result is a loss of interpretive ability. Instead of acting he/she is merely managing fear and the performance becomes “big” by default. 

Performance stress is the main occupational hazard of the acting profession, and the higher stakes the higher the risk of panic.

Actors know the importance of physical relaxation, but often do not always address the role of the breath in it. In this context, the job of the breath to deliver oxygen to the nervous system and keep it balanced. The “flinch” reflex relaxes once the natural breath flow is restored.

But when the actor is locked up, the he/she grows progressively tighter and the result is usually a speeding up of the text. In an effort to unlock, they overplay.

That is why the first step toward reconnecting is for the actor to slow down and allow a steady breath flow to return. As it does, emotional connection is gradually revived.     

That is the easy part. Navigating the accumulated fear is trickier as the temptation to tighten returns again and again. In The O’Neill Studio we address this through song.

Singing engages the breath in a way that accelerates the reconnection process. Even though the emotion that is released may be of an unpleasant nature, the release of it is usually a pleasurable one when the actors sing simple songs with which they have an emotional connection. The goal here is not good vocalism, but a steadying of the breath and a free flow of feeling.

Free of the old restrictive masochism, the actor becomes progressively freer. As he/she does,in our Studio they work to sustain this emotional flow through a series of three monologues.

Throughout the process, our actors work on a contemporary monologue to establishing flow, a classical monologue to accommodate the demands of style and gravity and then finally an O’Neill monologue which usually requires both lyricism and weight. 

As actors work through the twelve-week/three monologue process, they become comfortable in their skin again. As a result a simple breath is eventually needed for all that is required for connection.

With the new freedom, new colors constantly bleed into the work and the monologue evolves into a series of “found,” reliable beats as the actor surrenders to their imagination, which is revived in the process. Then the possibilities, once limited, seem endless. 

By the conclusion of the process rather than “locking down” the actor “drops in” into emotion and rides the emotional stream that comes from the breath. Once inner life has accumulated on a piece, it can be done “big” for the stage or “small” for the screen.

The aforementioned process is called The Independent Artist Track, because through it the actor also learns to work more effectively on his or her own. And most importantly, the actor will more easily incorporate whatever adjustments are required of them by a director because the actor is always working from a free place.

Flexibility allows for all options. Tightening precludes all of them. When you are playing big by default, rather than by choice, big is all you can play. Big is good, but older is better and flexibility keeps your gifts fresh and powerful throughout your artistic life.

Marian Seldes, a key mentor of our project, (who received a lifetime Tony Award in 2010) had the following to say about breath in one of our sessions at The Players Club:

“I fill the vase and I empty it.”

O'Neill and the Fist

The sensation of tightening can be exhilarating when you act. Sometimes it feels great to be so full of emotion that you "make a fist" and punch a line here or there.

The problem is reconnecting after you do. If you have been working from a closed place for a while, tightening presents the problem of reestablishing connection. It feels good to explode, but once you have it is hard to return to reconnect to inner life.

When you feel "the steam" gathering, let it rise in you until it manifests organically in your behavior rather than just in your voice. This means leaving yourself in a neutral place and letting the work surface of its own. You won’t always have to do this, but while you are in the early stages of “the continuum of opening up,” it’s the better choice.

It’s like surfing. When you are waiting for a wave, lots of white caps come by, some of them the size of small waves, but they have no real power. You let them pass and wait because you know they are just “wind swell” and you won’t get a ride out of them. You wait for “ground swell” which begins well beneath the water, has real power and can carry you.

O’Neill offers deep waters on which to surf, but you have to get them gather in you and lift you up.

O'Neill, Supertext and Song

I have come to think of Eugene O’Neill’s plays in musical terms. Among the actors who have inspired this thinking are Tony Award honorees Julie Harris, Jason Robards, Zoe Caldwell, Brian Murray and Marian Seldes. Each has shed unique light on the subject.

Julie Harris
After a reading of Long Day’s Journey Into Night at The Roundabout Theater, Julie touched my hand to make a point as she described theatricality as “surprise”, taking me by surprise.

There was no more surprising a moment as when the actress momentarily sang. It was a moment in which speech nearly ascended to song, as if Julie had been singing all along.

As she sinks into the isolation of her morphine haze, Julie broke into a lyrical moan…

“Then Mother of God why do I feel so looonely.”

It was a moment of heightened speech that was undeniably musical.

Jason Robards
Jason reprised his stage performance as Jamie Tyrone in the 1962 film of Long Days Journey.

In it, he subjects his brother to a confession of jealous rage. When Jamie admits that his brother is succeeding in spite of him, realizing that his own accomplishments will pale by comparison, he intones his discovery.

“I made you! You are my Frankenstein!”

Jason, whose name is synonymous with O’Neill’s, was a man who loved to sing onstage and off. Mutual friends have commented on the convivial joy he took in raising his voice in song. (I was personally present for one such display).

Jamie’s realization in Jason’s voice was both a climactic and lyrical one, operatic in intensity and unmistakably vocal.

Zoe Caldwell
Zoe played Mary Tyrone to Jason’s James Tyrone in the 1988 O’Neill centenary production of Long Days. She reprised an excerpt of her stage performance in a recent O’Neill Studio Forum.

As Mary pities the ravaging effect time has had on her hands, she speaks of her “poor hands.”

As she spoke of what Mary had lost, her ability to make music, her voice dropped (in musical terms) the interval of a minor third. It was a lilting motif that was music itself.

Zoe, who also played diva Maria Callas in Master Class, is a master of the spoken musical line.

Brian Murray
Brian played James Tyrone in the Irish Rep production of Long Days Journey.

In the last act of the same play, Tyrone turns off light bulbs to save money; he says “we don’t want to make the electric company rich.” At this moment, the accusations his family has been making of miserliness are again confirmed to the audience.

In Charlotte Moore’s production, Brian seemed to ride a wave that finally peaked as Tyrone admits to being a skinflint and asks…

“What was it I wanted to buy?”

In Brian’s mellifluous voice this illumination echoed with the resonance of “supertext.”

“Supertext is what the subtext first hints at and into which it later erupts” to quote Brian, who first introduced me to the idea. “Supertext is confirmation of what the audience is expecting.” A supertextual moment can send a performance into flight.

Brian’s performance was so subtly lived, you could barely hear the ascent to supertext. Even so, the breaking moment was unmistakable as his Tyrone admits what the audience had known all along.

In four different performances of the same work, four leading actors brought their own unique musical instincts to moments of realization. Julie, in a lonely moan of sorrow, Jason in his steely, spiteful baritone, Zoe in doleful pity for her hands and Brian in his rolling bass of regret all found music in word. Each brought high lyricism to moments of revelation in O’Neill.

Marian Seldes
In a recent O’Neill Studio Forum, Marian offered a clue as to how one finds the lyrical possibilities in text. After reading excerpts from Long Day’s Journey, she was asked by a young actor how she remains emotionally alive during a performance.

Marian, who recently performed a speaking role in La Fille du Regiment at The Metropolitan Opera, described her process in the same way an opera singer might.

“I fill the vase and I empty it… I fill the vase and I empty it.”

For O’Neill to be song, actors must think of themselves as singers. While not lyrics, his lines must be approached lyrically. After all, he had the touch of a poet in him and was more than a little Irish.

When music is in the air, his plays are charged with the promise of surprise. As a result, O’Neill’s dark tragedies ring brightly.

Tracee Chimo is in Orbit

Join this blog and former O'Neill Studio Independent Artist Tracee Chimo on it.

Tracee recently attended the Lucille Lortel Awards for which she was nominated for Best Actress (in a category that included Edie Falco and Laurie Metcalf, a beloved theater favorite who won).

Only days later she received the coveted Clarence Dewart Award for most promising young female artist in the theatre. (http://www.playbill.com/news/article/150804-Tracee-Chimo-and-Santino-Fontana-Win-Clarence-Derwent-Awards).

She made her Broadway debut in 2009 in Irena’s Vow and has since made an indelible impression on critics and audiences in Circle Mirror Transformation, Break of Noon and
Bachelorette (Lortel Nom).

After she was recently profiled in The NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/theater/14chimo.html) I asked her to articulate what she learned at The O’Neill Studio. She wrote the following:

“You taught me to breathe. To simply be exactly where you are, wherever that may be.
‘Let the text carry you.’ I remember you saying over and over. ‘Stop trying to carry the text. Don't drag it with you..let the words bring you to all the places you're meant to go. You'll surprise yourself every time, if you let it be your guide.'

You taught me to ‘let go,’ dude. You were the one who taught me to ‘surrender’.
I'll never forget that.”

When she received her first award in 2009, our Studio's O’Neill Credo Award, it was presented by Marian Seldes. Afterward Marian spoke, Tracee had her turn and said to the group of young actors “you have no idea how nice is feels to hear the word 'yes.'”

Yes, dude.

O'Neill as Opera

Theatre is opera and opera is theatre. Or so goes the theme of my 20-year conversation with legendary director Frank Corsaro. It has taken place at Juilliard, The Actors Studio and in Italian restaurants near both.

When Frank received an honorary doctorate from Juilliard in 2010, he shared the stage with Tony Bennett, Patty Lupone, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Tony Kushner. When a list of his accomplishments was read from the stage, Juilliard president Joseph Polisi organized the salute into two separate categories, theater and opera.

In theater, Frank is known as the original director of Tennessee William’s The Night of the Iguana and Michael Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain. He was artistic director of The Actors Studio for a decade. Among his acting students were Steve McQueen and Harvey Keitel.

In opera, he staged over 50 new productions as a resident director at New York City Opera and a guest director at The Met. His 22 years of teaching at the Juilliard Opera Center have made an indelible impact on the art of acting in opera. His students included Renee Fleming, whom he recently directed in her first La Traviata.

At commencement, Mr. Polisi acknowledged Frank’s impact on both worlds, but for me his legacy also includes the impact of each side of his art on the other.

Frank spearheaded theatrical realism in opera, and has been its leading proponent and its finest practitioner. But he also brought an unusually heightened sense of theatricality to spoken theater, and a specifically operatic one at that.

I had the opportunity to observe both of his lives at close range. This first hand experience took place simultaneously as a member of the Playwright-Director Unit at The Actors Studio and as an assistant director at The Juilliard Opera Center.

But the real apprenticeship took place at the Italian restaurants. “Directing is a very special art” he would say over pasta, spinach and wine. By “special” he meant that there was no book or manual for directing opera, not even a modern tradition such as can be found for performers. In his case it is an exceptionally special one when you consider that his perspective is equally informed by both sides of his art.

His ecumenical view of musical and spoken theater has guided the course of my work with O’Neill’s plays. Since he emphasized the musical qualities of spoken theater, his influence led me to first think of O’Neill’s plays in operatic terms.

This realization first struck me when I did a turn it as an actor in one of his workshops with “method” actors. I was working on a monologue from an O’Neill play and was straining to be believable. The result was resoundingly unsuccessful.

Frank asked me what I was thinking while I worked. I told him that I was trying to not be over-the-top or “operatic” as I put it. I wanted to be truthful. He then asked me to do it "operatically," or what I thought of as such.

When I did, I felt the power beneath the words take hold because he told me to embrace the very thing I was consciously avoiding.

This experience began me thinking of O’Neill as opera. The length and scale of O’Neill’s works find a musical equivalent in grand opera, in which characters from legend, myth and classical drama often fill the stage. Staging these works requires the presence of an orchestra of symphonic scale as well as singing actors with voices that can be heard ringing above it.

On the American stage, Frank added the ring of truth to the mix. He raised the standard of acting in opera through his pivotal role in creating a modern theatrical tradition for it.

Thos theatrical values were of the highly realistic tradition of The Actors Studio, where Lee Strasberg was artistic director, a position which Frank would eventually assume himself, having once been a protégé to Strasberg.

When Frank first invited me to observe his work at The Actors Studio, I entered a world where a where the Studio membership was fixed on “sense memory,” “effectively memory” and other tools of the “method” as Strasberg’s approach came to be known.

I watched Frank impose his own independent vision to the work at The Actors Studio, a sensibility informed as much by his work in opera as in theatre.

Frank stated outright that the membership of The Actors Studio was lost in memory, specifically that of Lee himself, the father of “the method.”

Frank challenged some of Strasberg’s basic principals by emphasizing the benefits of using the imagination, instead of memory, as the doorway to inspiration for the actor.

Similarly, his message to the opera world was a wake-up call to move on from the pre-war view of the singer as a solely vocal instrument.

Naturally, he met resistance along the way in both situations. But from where I was standing he was doing what he did best, that of daring closed minds to open.

From Kevin Spacey - "Let O'Neill Carry You."

"By yielding you may obtain victory" Ovid

You need free flowing emotion to play O'Neill. That said, emotion, like a cat, seems to come when you don't call rather when you do. So what do you to summon it?

You try to establish flow and then, as Kevin Spacey said to me, "let O'Neill carry you."

Here are some thoughts from our Independent Artists and my response to them all related to the battle for flow.

MICHEAL
"...I constantly feel great energy on stage that I somehow can't release or don't know what to do with.

However, when I worked I was not thinking about the upcoming moments and just trying to deal with what I had and also to not tense up.

It created a natural flow of energy that was terrifying and very real to be in. This made it alive for me, and surprising for me…because I was actually there”

Micheal, this is exactly the problem I had when I was working with Mr. Meisner. I wanted to explode. Hell, for me that was the whole point of acting. It wasn’t until I learned to leave myself alone that I began to understand how to use myself in my work.

LYNN
It was a great session last week. With Michael it was like a wall was broken down.

I feel myself being able to go bigger in my work, and feel the space that is there for me on stage."
Since you are getting ready to begin work on O’Neill’s Anna Christie, I think you’ll see that the freedom that is creeping in your work a new is essential to beginning work on his plays. With it comes freer flow of emotion.

DANIELLE
I am very much someone who likes to have control of the situation- not sure of why I chose a career in acting ha-ha- but when you do take your moment, take a deep breath, and start to speak- you would think you could have a little taste of it...

..but for me that is usually when the doubt creeps in the "resistance" - for me it takes form in tightness in my jaw- and the "runaway monologue syndrome".

Try to not tighten when you feel the grip start to close. Slow down the runaway train, take a searching breath and you'll begin to restore the flow. You'll find that the negotiation with tension becomes more and more managable and the flow enjoyable, even in O'Neill's darkest material.

Once the flow is restored, O'Neill will carry you.

POLAR ACTORS

Actor Polarities

In a recent session we discussed some polarities which the actor often faced, specifically “actor vs. entertainer,” “talent vs. skill” and “open vs. closed.”

ACTOR VS. ENTERTAINER
Alex and I had an interesting exchange about the difference between being an actor and an entertainer. Entertainers have a way of leading you exactly where you know you want to go.

But an actor exists on another plane, by being willing to always find a new road to the known conclusion, they take the audience to a new place though paths hitherto unknown. Even when the entire audience knows the follow up line to “to be or not to be” the artist finds it a new by living in a state of non-expectation. This is no small feat when both actor and audience meet in familiar material.

Some actors are solely entertainers. They play “a single wash of color,” to quote Alex.

I can enjoy entertainers, but there is nothing like watching truly adventurous actors play their edge. In playing O’Neill you have no choice but to do so, since the alternative is anything but entertaining.

TALENT VS. SKILL
Lynn and I discussed a reliance on your rather than skill. It’s a fresh use of the word, but let’s consider it.

You can skip steps and just “go with” your talent, which is what usually happens when working fast as in film or TV. But if you break it down and work your way and then just “go” with it, the place you go is infinitely richer.

In the end our talent is all we have. Mr. Meisner used the word a lot, but in doing so made us young’ins feel like we had none. But what he was saying was once you know how to work and do the work you know, you get so acting is just going with it.

OPEN VS. CLOSED
Micheal's email to me beautifully articulated what its like to be in the “genuine confusion” stage of the process best called “the continuum of opening up.”

From inside the envelope, if you will, the place where the actor lives while he works, the new level is one of utter fog. You feel you are on when you are off and vise versa. As you settle into comfort with that stage, the sense of confusion changes from an adversarial to a friendly one.

In Mike’s case constriction of breath was the obvious problem. The “control” reflex that we are trying to disable in favor of a more “surrendered” one immediate tries to retake the wheel.

As my teacher, Peter, would say: “the ego doesn’t like being put out of a job.”

But in fact ego is the problem. I am not referring to vanity or but to the system of fears and flinches with which we negotiate as we seek to find emotional transparency on stage.

Not that the characters in a play or film show all of their feelings all of the time but when the actor seeks to find a more direct connection to emotion, the immediate goal is to play simple reality.

And not surprisingly, playing simple reality is anything but simple, there are contridictions and polarities to manage along the way. But when you manage them successfully acting is its own reward.