From my June 24, 2010 performance for the Meeting Professionals International Rocky Mountain Chapter Annual Awards Gala (MPIRMCAAG for short) at the Cable Center in Denver, CO.
To close the show, I told a Japanese folk-tale while illustrating the story with a special bamboo mat.
(All photos courtesy of Bill Cronin at www.croninphoto.com)
Introducing a 350-year-old piece of Japanese magic -- Nanking Tamasudare.
Using the bamboo mat to depict a large fish, the Sea King.
A mysterious box from the Sea Princess.
Depicting the rising sun
The end.
Given my long-standing policy of self-imposed silence, one may wonder what dire event has incited me to launch a feeble missive to my blog. The answer is that David Mamet has published a collection of essays on theatre entitled, Theatre.
Like he did in his previous collection of essays, True and False, Mamet pulls no punches as he skewers Method acting and the related schools of training, insisting that an actor’s responsibility is merely to speak the text clearly so that everyone can hear.
This time around he also rails against set designers and directors, declaring that a group of actors (left to their own devices – sans director) would instinctively know how to create an engaging production.
Let me begin by saying that I’m not convinced that Mamet fully endorses his own arguments. In the same way that Henry David Thoreau once claimed that a person could forgo owning a home and could live instead in a more economical coffin sized box, Mamet’s arguments are designed to force us to reevaluate what element of theatre are truly necessary, though it is not surprising that as a playwright, Mamet should extol the primacy of the script.
It is not my intention to provide a through refutation of Mamet’s claims, as I think his writings on theatre are important and deserve to be read and contemplated.
It is clear, however, that he has had more experience with bad schools of acting, bad designers, and bad directors than I. And having suffered at their hands, he is ready to cast them all out of the temple.
My experience with the Method has been more benign and beneficial. When we worked with Stanislavsky’s emotional memory it was to used to develop emotional facility. It was a part of the actor’s training to foster greater access to one’s emotional spectrum, but was never used on stage, in performance, much the same way that an athlete might warm up using the hurdler’s stretch but never strike such a pose while competing (unless they were a hurdler).
The purpose of such training was to enhance the actor’s range of response so that, immersed the circumstances of the script, they might respond appropriately.
The Meisner technique (as I experienced it) was used to help strip away calculated, overly-polite, and logical responses. Actors who could shed their calculated responses were more able to embody the unfolding drama of the script, the clichéd response being the scourge of all actors as it is simply dull to watch.
Mamet takes to task directors who feel the need to inflict new concepts on perfectly sound scripts. And while I’ve never worked with such a director, I have seen my share of Shakespeare-set-in-a-novel-time-period, which I agree (aside from drawing audiences to admire the shear spectacle of the affair) does little to enhance the production.
Mamet, however, seems to overlook what for me is the key role of the director, and that is that someone must evaluate the performance of the actor, as the actors are rarely capable of evaluating their own performance.
Often, an actor will not realize that their actions are drawing focus, that their exit is too hasty, that their emotion is too big (or too small). Even if the only concern is that the actor speak the lines clearly so that everyone can hear, actors need someone to give them direction.
Mamet suggests that a good actor will be able to self-direct. This may be so, but it does not mean that a director is not necessary, only that in Mamet’s view an actor should possess the skills of both actor and director.
Perhaps (in addition to the skills of the director) the actor could also master the skills of a storyteller so that they might improvise a well-constructed and dramatically compelling story, and we could dispense with the playwright as well.
