In a newsletter to his students, Chicago acting teacher Ed Hooks asks, "When you first acted in school plays, it was fun, wasn't it?... When did the joy go out of it?" If you sometimes find yourself working so hard at acting that it seems you've lost the simple pleasure of it all, read on.
New York–based actor Kathleen Turco-Lyon told me about a crisis of faith she had several years ago. "My early training was to believe that [as an actor] I could change the world," she says. "I believed that without question for years." But as she got older, she began to lose that faith, to wonder if she'd lost her passion, to contemplate changing careers.
Things came to a head when, four or five days after Sept. 11, 2001, she found herself on stage in the play Dinner With Friends thinking, How can I possibly be doing exactly what an artist should do right now? About half an hour into the play she realized "you could hear a pin drop." She understood that the audience wanted nothing more at that moment than to be in the theatre listening to personal stories about people's lives. And her faith that she was doing what she was supposed to be doing—and her joy in that—was restored.
For some, that sense of deep purpose in your art is what generates joy. Another New York–based regional theatre actor, Remi Sandri, says actors can lose their joy if their work is constantly being critiqued. He himself is at an age now where his confidence is strong enough that criticism doesn't bother him.
But another threat to pleasure, Sandri says, is working with bad directors—those who don't understand your working process and actually interfere with it, forcing you to make choices that go against your understanding of the script and character. "A series of [experiences like that] could lead you to despair pretty easily," he says. But "when you're pursuing your objective, when you [know] where your character lives inside you, there's joy." It's not about ego; it's about being the vessel.
In his newsletter, Hooks suggests that what sometimes prevents actors from reveling in their work is the obsession with "being 'honest' instead of having fun.... Do you feel guilty if you have fun when you think you ought to be working?" he challenges.
Yet for some, work is fun. Just ask University of Washington professor of acting and directing (and the famed longtime artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville) Jon Jory. "When people ask me about happiness, I say, 'In my view, it's profound concentration on an interesting problem.' " Jory cites the experience of seeing a film of NASA engineers watching a successful landing on Mars. "The reaction in the room to the landing was sheer joy. What that was was the fantastic pleasure in solving an incredibly complex problem." In other words, it's the difference between defining the thrill of acting as "whoopee!"-type euphoria and "identifying and solving various problems that the text and the moment present," Jory says. "Acting is a sort of three-dimensional crossword puzzle. If you don't like solving problems, you don't like acting." He opines that the euphoria some might define as joy in acting is "a state in which there aren't any problems. Any state that isn't addressing problems of the moment is unhelpful."
Jory's description is a far cry from the sense of being in the zone that I think many see as the pinnacle of acting—what one actor describes (in Janet Sonenberg's The Actor Speaks: Twenty-Four Actors Talk About Process and Technique) as "sheer joy when everything seems to ring true and one sails free as on a magic carpet."
If you've lost the joy in your acting, for whatever reason and however you define it for yourself, here are some remedies.
Turco-Lyon reminds herself that she's also a citizen of the world—and in some senses a spokesperson for the world's better, or nobler, nature. "I pretend I'm addressing issues that all the people in the audience secretly believe but haven't had the guts to say—that I'm speaking on their behalf," she says. "Then it becomes much more important to me and invigorates me. The material begins to drop down into my gut." She reminds herself of something her own teacher taught her: to believe that her expression is the most important thing at this moment, and that no one else can say what she's saying in just this way.
Sonenberg, who is chairman of music and theatre arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, remembers seeing an interview with Willem Dafoe in which the actor was asked how he created the role of the vampire in the film Shadow of the Vampire—seeing as he himself is a human. "I just pretended," he said. Sonenberg comments, "If one of my students said, 'I'm pretending,' I'd have bridled. But [Dafoe's] performance was incredibly joyful. His craft is so completely solid that he can successfully unbraid himself from following [its] dictates."
When Sonenberg interviewed Alan Arkin for her book, he talked about feeling the tyranny of Stanislavsky, feeling so internalized that he was losing his sense of joy. For a film role as a crazy director, he broke out of the box by playing every single crazy director he's ever known—a different one for each scene. "The joy for him was in subverting the Method, in pretending," says Sonenberg. He broke a fundamental rule: that one must create a coherent arc for the character. Still, he adhered to the basic element of the character, which was that he was crazy. Of course, actors like Dafoe and Arkin are past masters; even if they bend the rules and "pretend," their sense of truth is hard-wired into them.
Los Angeles stage and film actor Stephen Tobolowsky, who teaches improv, has four good suggestions for rediscovering the bliss.
First, he says, don't be your own critic: "Remember the first element Stanislavsky talks about: Will! When you watch yourself, when you're overcritical, you destroy your will." He adds, "I tell my students, 'There is no ultimate truth of the part. You are whatever you're willing to bring to the table that day. Embrace it and enjoy it.' "
Second, choose to be a "student" rather than a "master" of your craft. "There's a lot more joy in being a student," Tobolowsky says. To go in that direction, reread plays you read in high school or college. "They haven't changed, but chances are you have," he says. "Read Shakespeare, Chekhov, Our Town. Read an element of theatre history you never cared about—say, Restoration drama. Reinvigorate yourself with learning."
Third, go to children's theatre or school productions. Tobolowsky saw his 17-year-old son play Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a role he himself has played twice. Through watching the youngsters, he rediscovered his delight in the play. And attending a sixth-grade staging of Cats "filled me with such love and joy of theatre again, it was amazing." He promises that watching 16-year-olds in Guys and Dolls will put a smile on your face.
Fourth, take a new class. (In a future Craft column, we'll discuss the ways in which experienced actors can relearn from masters of the craft.)
Turco-Lyon, herself a teacher at Cornell, takes classes whenever she can. "Anything that provokes me as an artist out of my psychic La-Z-Boy is a good thing," she says. She learned from master Tadashi Suzuki the value of being off-balance physically—a metaphor for challenging yourself, not allowing yourself to feel too comfortable. There's a special joy in that discomfort.
Finally, Sandri waxes philosophical. "As you grow as an artist, it's wise and good to grow as a human being," he says. "If you work a lot, I think you need to find your inspiration through all corners of your life: personal relationships, maybe teaching or writing, maybe hiking. Make sure you keep those things strongly a part of your life. Then the chances of losing the joy are lessened."