FACTS ARE DEATH TO THE ACTOR

There is a reason we don’t just hand out a script to the audience, let them read it,

and then all go home. The opening lines of Death of a Salesman are “Oh, boy. Oh,

boy.” On the page it means nothing, and yet in the hands of the right actor, the

entire character exists in those two sentences.

There is no play that can be done without serious script analysis work. Achieving

the size of a play’s theme can only come after a full and complete exploration of

the facts of the play, an exploration that gives the actor a key to the

understanding of a character’s relationship to the world the playwright has

created. What emerges is the experience of the facts of the play.

As Stella Adler remarked: “Facts are death to the actor until they are fed through

imagination and become experience.”

In script analysis, Stella called the initial reading of the text: “Impressions.” You

are not worrying about the performance, you are not even worrying about the

choices. You are taking in what’s there. It might be the plot, it might be the

characters, it might be the social moment in history, it might be the theme. It

could be any of the countless number of facts of the play.

These “facts” are meant to get you thinking. Like switching on a light in a

darkened room. It is the process where you discover what you have to work

with. The room is filled with possibilities. All of these possibilities are there to

feed into your understanding of the play.

Stella gave us another key: “every play is a fiction. It’s the actor’s job to defictionalize

the fiction.” Or to appropriate the title of one of Harold Clurman’s

books: “lies that look like the truth.” The fact is a lie until the actor gets hold of it.

The process to get from the facts of the play to the experience of the play is what

the actor’s technique is about. As with any lie, every time you go back to it, you

see more clearly, you understand it better, there’s more detail. You begin to

believe it more. You connect to it more thoroughly. The experience of the lie is in

you.

The actor’s connection to the part, and the character’s world is what brings a play

to life. And the more gifted the actor, the more in-depth the choices are in

making this fiction real. Another Adlerism: “Facility is fine, but greatness must

be paid for in blood.”

Working out loud rather than writing your choices down – or merely thinking

about them – begins to open up the actor’s instrument to the experience of every

choice and every line of text. There’s almost a physiological response when the

actor is totally connected, when the understanding penetrates not only the mind,

but the bones and muscles and skin. It also helps in achieving that joyful

moment: “I’ve got it.”