The first and perhaps hardest lesson I ever learned about acting was how to listen. I was working on a simple two-person scene, but no matter what I did, my teacher, the Bay Area's esteemed Jean Shelton, interrupted me. "Darling," she said, and said, and said again, "you're not listening." What on earth did she mean?
In Acting 1A in college, when the teacher told us to listen, we obediently hunched forward and cocked our ears and assumed intense facial expressions. We had the "attitude" of listening. But we weren't really listening. Los Angeles acting teacher Judith Weston told me that some of her students think if they hear their cues, they're listening.
I learned soon enough what listening is not: It is not "indicating" listening. It is not anticipating what you're going to hear. Nor is it a read-my-lips kind of thing. I'm convinced you use a certain part of your brain when you focus intently on the other person's words; maybe you can even repeat them verbatim. But when you're concentrating in that way, you've shut off the part of your brain that allows you to understand the language on a more impressionistic level. And you're too tense to notice the nuances, so the words fail to have an emotional or sensorial or intellectual impact.
The kind of deep, relaxed listening that's required for acting means using your mind in a different way. And it involves taking the time to "process"‹that is, to fully absorb what has just been said in order to respond in an organic way. But there's even more than that to what Uta Hagen calls active listening.
Here's a test for you, based on Hagen's comments in A Challenge for the Actor: Ask someone to tell you a rather complicated, detailed narrative, a paragraph or two in length. Did you see specific images in your mind as she told you the story? Can you paraphrase the story? If so, you're probably listening. (Weston notes in her book Directing Actors that if a film actor's lines are coming out exactly the same take after take, that actor is probably not listening.)
Not Only With Your Ears
But there's listening and then there's listening. Onstage and on screen, we want to use more senses than just our sense of hearing.
What senses would those be? Weston writes that eye contact is a tool that enhances listening. You are looking for deeper meaning, for physical clues‹facial expressions, tics, unconscious gestures that reveal more than the words themselves. On the other hand, you don't want to go overboard with that technique: In real life, we don't "eyeball" each other constantly. So you also need to listen to the vocal timbre, inflection, and volume of the other actor; you can even smell him, Weston suggests! As Hagen writes, "We listen with our entire being when we are engaged in truthful dialogue."
Of course, the point is that you must allow all this sensorial input to affect you. The other actor's words, grimaces, tone of voice, body language‹all that must roil around inside you, meshing with your own personal stuff (for want of a better word) and with your character's stuff. Hagen writes that listening entails "the interpretation of what is being said to us as it interacts with our own battery of psychological and mental actions."
Out of all that mishmash, your lines emerge, hopefully intuitively and spontaneously, based on your identification with your character's circumstances, objectives, etc., and without such a delay that the director is yelling, "Pick up your cues!"
Are there dangers inherent in too much true listening? I believe not. In fact, I've seen good, connected actors go astray by focusing too much on their own inner life and too little on listening. Many teachers have abandoned the affective memory exercise (sensorially dredging up a specific personal experience to activate a needed feeling) because actors sometimes misuse it, tapping into personal emotions at the expense of connecting with onstage realities.
Weston has found in her classes that almost every acting problem can be solved by more active listening. She thinks it's the best tool an actor has, and that it prevents overacting. Hagen writes that listening is "essential for total participation in any dialogue." (Stanislavski approached the concept of listening from a broader perspective, calling it communion, by which he meant the listening-connection you establish with the audience, with yourself, and with the other actors.)
Danny Glover, in an "Inside the Actor's Studio" interview, said, "Listening is the key [to acting]. Listening and relaxing, because if you're not relaxed you can't listen." And as Joan Allen pointed out in an interview in the Jan. 28 Back Stage West, if you lose your focus when acting, you can regain it by turning outward, by really listening.
Earmuffs
What prevents actors from doing such a seemingly simple thing? Weston told me that one big culprit is the pre-set line reading (which you may not even know you're doing). To jog her students out of those patterns and cadences, she has them improvise the scene, paraphrase the lines, and gradually move to the lines as written. Or she has them go through the scene three times, each time playing a different action (for example, demand, beg, and seduce). Sometimes she has them read their lines very, very slowly, and/or very, very loudly, or even while hitting the couch with a pillow. She said, "This creates an energy strong enough to break through whatever energy they have invested in their preconceived line reading. Then they can be open to stimuli coming from the other actor."
Are there other ways to encourage the elusive process of listening? Uta Hagen advises that women work on the silent role in August Strindberg's two-character one-act, The Stronger. Great idea.
A helpful classroom exercise is for two actors to exchange the lines of their scene while moving farther and farther apart, until they're in different rooms shouting to be heard, and straining to listen and stay connected as though by an invisible cord. In that exercise, you have only your hearing to rely on, so you can see how deeply you need to use that particular sense.
Of course, Sandy Meisner's famous exercises, in which two actors repeatedly exchange the same two lines of dialogue, are very helpful for sensitizing you to meaning beyond words, to subtext.
Weston summed up for me her definition of listening: "It's really more like surrendering to your scene partner, giving your attention and concentration to your partner, letting your partner's feelings be more important than your feelings." She added, "We don't do it much in real life... that's why it has to be learned as an acting technique." BSW