The ironic thing about acting in realistic, fourth-wall plays is that the more private you are--the more involved you are with that little complete universe you've created--the more enthralled the audience is. "Ideal communication between actor and audience occurs when the actor is intensely alive...within the magic circle of his playing area," wrote Uta Hagen in A Challenge for the Actor (Scribner, 1991). Yet at your most private, you're still aware of the audience's existence in one way or another. They rustle, they cough, they gasp, they sigh, they laugh, they yawn, sometimes they snore or actually leave, and finally, usually, they applaud. We're doing it all for them, yet we're pretending they're not there. Hagen wrote, "When all of our five senses are sharply attuned to our character's existence, our sixth sense, the actor's 'extrasensory perception,' gives us a subliminal awareness of the audience." She explained that because this sixth sense is inevitably there, we must counteract it by being even more involved in our onstage life.
So what exactly is our relationship with the viewers? Even Stanislavsky was mystified by the age-old bond between actors and audience. He considered pleasing the audience to be the super-superobjective of the actor, as professor Robert Cohen of the University of California, Irvine, writes in Advanced Acting: Style, Character, and Performance (McGraw-Hill, 2001), but he also found the whole matter elusive.
The issues involved seem to fall into two categories: Who is our audience, existentially speaking, and how should we reach them?
To start with the second category first: The simplest and most obvious way of connecting with the audience is to "cheat" (that is, to turn downstage slightly) and to project (our voices), even in small houses. But how do you do that and still retain that sense of privacy and authenticity that master teacher Lee Strasberg so famously promoted in his "private moment" exercise?
In a phone interview, Cohen responds by pointing out that we routinely take private battles or quests into the public sphere--that theatre exists to do just that. We all behave in a public fashion most of the time, he says. For example, when walking down the street, we're maintaining a certain image of ourselves--we're not homeless, we're not criminal, we're attractive, we're dignified, whatever. At restaurants we project an image to the waiter. "It's not a big deal, but it is a public image," he says. And when we're talking, we talk loudly for many reasons, including getting our point across to another person when arguing. It's a matter not of your vocal chords per se, but of your actorly adjustment. In other words, if we accept that even when we're private there's a public aspect to our behavior, then we can justify turning slightly out so the viewers can see our facial expressions and allowing our voices to carry to the back row of the house.
Cohen also observes that at times in real life we want to proclaim our feelings--or summon witnesses or supporters--to the world at large, or perhaps to a deity. "We all live in a fantasy world of people," he says--parents dead or alive, teachers, mentors, lovers, others. We invoke them mentally at times. The same holds true for our characters. If we can create a substitution in which we imagine the audience to be the people churning around in our character's mind, we can create a more direct sense of connection to the world beyond the fourth wall. That substitution can justify opening up physically and vocally to the audience.
The Sixth Sense: I See Live People
But more than that, we want to affect our viewers emotionally. San Francisco Bay area actor-teacher Ron Campbell also believes in that sixth sense that Hagen observed, which he calls the actor's "spider sense," a tingling you feel--even when you're doing something incredibly intimate onstage--that keeps you aware of your audience. Campbell says that whether you're breaking the fourth wall and thereby delivering your performance presentationally or the fourth wall is intact and your feelings are more internal, you are always essentially giving yourself. It's all a matter of the degree of interaction with the audience. "Whenever I talk to anyone about their favorite theatre experiences," he says, "they talk about the moments. Not what led up to the moment, but just the moment itself. As a theatre practitioner, you're trying to manipulate the audience to feel those moments. You're using the tools of full-on presentational theatre even in the most intimate Pinter play." What he means is that in commedia dell'arte, for example, you're displaying your emotions broadly, sharing them fully with the audience, whereas in a Pinter play those emotions are more covert. But, says Campbell, the same muscle is at work in both cases; you're still sharing yourself with the audience. You're just covering up more--and that in itself is alluring.
Michael Chekhov, in discussing the relationship between actor and audience in On the Technique of Acting (Harper Perennial, 1991), referred to "atmosphere": "The performance is in reality a mutual creation of actors and audience, and the Atmosphere is an irresistible bond between actor and audience," he wrote, "a medium with which the audience can inspire the actors by sending them waves of confidence, understanding, and love." His point was that the audience will send out these vibes only if the actor is living fully within his stage reality, so the audience is "not compelled to look into empty psychological space." The question remains, though: In the mind of the actor, who is the audience and how do we-how should we-feel about them?
In his book The Actor's Wheel of Connection: How to Integrate Your Skills and Refine Your Performance (Smith & Kraus, 2005), professor Richard Brestoff, Cohen's colleague at the University of California, Irvine, writes about actors' often-paralyzing fear of that big, heaving mass out there in the dark. "It is 'us' and 'them,' " he writes. "And sometimes 'they' are frightening." If actors feel the crowd is hostile or unresponsive, they can sabotage themselves in several ways, including by ignoring the audience, so that the performance simply fails to reach much beyond the stage, or by overcompensating, being too big, fast, and/or funny.
But when things are working, writes Brestoff, "there is a sense in which the actors and audience live just as intense a moment-to-moment reality as the actors do with each other. It is as if there are thousands of fiber-optic connections running from one actor to the other, out to the audience, and back." Audiences, adds Brestoff, "do not wish to be the primary focus, only to be included."
Brestoff's book includes an intriguing quote from the late, great Joseph Chaikin: "Is the audience to be addressed as fools or saints?" he mused in an essay excerpted in Actors on Acting (Three Rivers Press, 1970). "Whom is [the actor] secretly addressing? The casting agent?... His parents? The ghost of Gandhi? His greatest love?... In other words, to whom does the actor personally dedicate his performance?" Brestoff posits that perhaps our "secret actor objective" is to "create a performance so true...that it prompts the person [in the audience] who has lived through the very circumstances of the material to feel that we know more about those circumstances than even he or she does." Our purpose is to move another human soul, he suggests. Thought about that way, the audience is no longer "strangers sitting in judgment," he says, but individuals who have come to be transformed by art-our art.
More than that, adds Brestoff, the characters we play--and the playwrights who created them--deserve to have their voices heard. We are responsible for creating that connection. Dedicate your performance, he urges, to anyone--to whomever might best understand your character's situation. By doing that, he says, your talent will find its purpose. And if in your mind's eye you place that person in the audience, that should complete the sacred circle.