When I was first learning about actions and objectives, I used to scribble action verbs in the margin of my script to correspond to the beats in the text: "to convince," "to seduce," "to incite," and so on. That approach might be useful in the initial learning process, but once you're actually acting, it's not the right way to go about that most basic of techniques, playing actions. More about that later.
Psychological actions are the choices we make about how to behave, moment to moment, in order to overcome obstacles and fulfill our goals. Actions are important because they keep us focused on doing rather than emoting.
In her book A Challenge for the Actor, Uta Hagen wrote, "To act means to do.... [Actions] must travel toward a target in order to interact with the physical, verbal, and psychological actions of others. And what is done to you by someone or something causes your responses, your sensations, and your feelings, about which you will want to do the next thing." In other words, how you respond in any given moment is mandated by what's being done to you (by people, places, things, obstacles, circumstances, etc.) and by what you need.
Actions, as most of our teachers have drummed into us, are expressed as active verbs. The more specific the verb you choose, the more specific your behavior will be. In The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, Bella Merlin mentions a few possibilities: "warn, threaten, educate, assure, impress, undermine, delight, intimidate, and enchant." Just as the varieties and nuances of human behavior are endless, so are the possibilities for action verbs. Don't hesitate to consult a thesaurus for ideas to stir your imagination.
Hagen counseled actors to avoid thinking in terms of adverbs -- "sadly, angrily, smilingly" -- which will trap you into playing a generic attitude rather than a clean, specific, forthright action.
As Ed Hooks notes in The Actor's Field Guide: Acting Notes on the Run, actions should not be confused with simple behavior. "If I am standing in my living room scratching my head, that isn't an action unless I have lice," he writes. Actions are focused, purposeful, and goal-oriented.
Before we get too mired in jargon, let me add that some teachers refer to actions as intentions. In Advice to the Players, Bobby Lewis wrote: "Some call this element of the craft 'objective.' Others refer to it as 'action'.... Still others simply say it's the subtext. The terminology doesn't matter as long as you understand that this process, which is ever-present in acting, is as important as breathing is in singing.... Without it...acting becomes mere line reading and the actor indicates what is supposed to be happening instead of creating it." Lewis believed intention was the most important element of the craft. "The sense of the play," he wrote, "is carried forward through the intention.... A wrong intention, or the inability to act with intention, can distort an entire scene or a whole play."
In The Intent to Live, Larry Moss -- who also uses the term intentions -- writes, "Intentions are active doings aimed at overcoming obstacles and achieving your objectives.... Objective, obstacle, and intention are the triad of all acting." Remember in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when Martha says to George, "Poor Georgie-Porgie, put-upon pie!" and goes on to mock his sulk? Martha, writes Moss, is "making fun of him [action] in order to get him to respond to her in a feeling way (her objective), because he withdraws and she feels unloved." Playwright Edward Albee has made Martha's action pretty clear there, and an actor who understands Martha's needs will make that action specific and focused in the given moment. There are lots of creative ways to go about poking fun at someone, and those ways can vary performance by performance depending upon the circumstances of the moment. Moss says it's the ways you behave to get what you want -- the actions you play, that is -- that move the story forward and keep the audience interested. It's all about doing things to other characters, he explains, to "remove obstacles and get what you want." He adds, "Believe me, you do it in life every day."
Where the Action Is
As I mentioned earlier, I used to mark changes in actions in my script according to the changes of beat indicated by the text -- a rote way of approaching the technique, as I now realize (no wonder I switched from acting to writing). Actions need to change according to whether they're working or not. If the atmosphere changes, if your thoughts change, if your partner is not responding the way you want, if someone new arrives on the scene, if you feel a specific surge of emotion -- those are the kinds of things that should propel you to change your action.
Beware, though. As Hagen wrote, "There is no room in a real action for homework, for weighing how it feels, watching how you're doing it, listening to how it sounds, or considering its effect upon the audience. You must send and receive while caught up in the imaginatively stimulated circumstances of the play."
Naturally, you want your objectives to be strong enough to propel you toward actions, writes Merlin: "Your actions become the only way for your internal desires to find sufficient outlet, like a boiling kettle or a stopcock under pressure." And, she explains, Stanislavsky taught that it is through actions that we most directly contact our emotions. In fact, he warned against immediately going for the "psychological core" of an emotional role. By bypassing the playing of actions, you risk generalizing the emotion.
All this being somewhat theoretical, I asked actor Warren David Keith, who teaches at the American Conservatory Theater and elsewhere, how he approaches the teaching of actions. Keith says the concept of actions as he learned it at the Yale School of Drama felt like an unimaginative way to go about acting. Then he read Declan Donnellan's The Actor and the Target, which showed him how to take a sort of reverse approach to actions. "What's coming at you [the actor] from the story, the circumstances, the environment, your partner -- these are what create the feelings you have," he says. "And these are what propel you to your choices, to an action, an objective."
Keith compares his concept to real life: We don't make ourselves fall in love or be angry, he explains. Feelings require a source: a partner's behavior or a traffic accident, for example. "We have the feelings and we choose an action and we try to follow through with various strategies," he says. Before he viewed actions this way, he was always thinking to himself things like, "Okay, she's doing that, so now I must do this." (That may work in absurdist drama and other styles, he says, but not in realism.) He was always trying to control the action, just as I was when I dutifully scrawled my verbs in the margin. "Donnellan says controlling the action is how we control our fear," Keith explains. "But when we're having the most fun is when we lose control. And that's what's close to human behavior. It's about being in a place where you've prepared so thoroughly that you're not controlling."
Keith gives his students exercises to help them see and listen carefully; the exercises almost always produce an emotion or feeling, which leads to a concrete action. "If someone is creating that feeling in you and you don't like it, what can you do to change that? That's an action," he says. Now that he's reversed the way he allows actions to propel him, he adds, his acting has changed: No longer does he have stage fright or feel self-conscious.
How do you know when you're truly playing an action? According to Hagen, it's "when you are engaged by it, engrossed by it, alert to its target, to the discovery of its consequence, whether it matches your expectations, whether it will succeed or fail."
Jean Schiffman can be reached at jeanschiff@earthlink.net.