I recently came across an essay by the Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi about his approach to playing Macbeth. The essay was a revelation: Here was a performer who studied every moment in his character's evolution, who let no word in his dialogue go unexamined, who decided in advance the detailed quality of each of his relationships so that on stage they would appear instantly credible and apt. For example: At one point, Macbeth compares pity to a "naked, newborn babe;" Jacobi decided that Macbeth chooses this image (note: Macbeth, not Shakespeare) because "the evil side of him … is getting the upper hand and in order to balance it he brings up the best, the purest, the most innocent of images." Or later, after Macbeth has committed murder, Jacobi felt that what was needed was a change in physical presence: "He has aged in the interim and returns an older and a physically different man … The hands are still, the speech is quieter and slower. It's as though his blood has been let, as though the leeches have been at him." Finally, Jacobi said, his interpretation was meant to show Macbeth's "journey from the golden boy of the opening to the burnt-out loser … of the conclusion." And the 50 shifts and changes that accompanied that journey were plotted out by him with precision.
Reading this essay, I immediately realized that Jacobi was talking about one of the things I most look for in actors — attention to every detail of a personality-in-progress. His words made me think about some of the other qualities that distinguish great actors, including several who perform on area stages. In homage to their work — and also as an explanation of what I look for when I assess a performance — here are five traits of great acting that, to me, seem pivotal.
Great actors appear to live in the present. Whenever I see an actor speak a speech as if he's memorized it, whenever an actress crosses the stage as if she's been told to, I'm thrown from the experience of believing a play and reminded that after all, I'm just watching people pretending. Great acting, on the other hand, feels constantly unpredictable, as unplanned and spontaneous as life itself. For example, Brian Shea in Stageworks' Waiting for Godot several years ago. I still remember how Shea played the great speech in Act 2, how the realization slowly came to him that "At me, too, someone is looking. Of me, too, someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. I can't go on!" The idea seemed to be born to him right before our eyes, and with it came terror and despair and deep sadness. Great acting always happens right now, and if it doesn't, it looks canned and doesn't touch us.
Great actors solve the problem of a character. Every dramatic character is a puzzle to be solved, but some are particularly baffling. Hamlet is one of these; so are Medea, Shylock, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Chekhov's three sisters (why do they never make it Moscow?), Genet's maids and several others. But a great actor doesn't leave the mystery a mystery; she finds an answer to the conundrum so that we're conscious of watching a human being and not a brainteaser. For example, Tess Hogan as Hedda Gabler at Sarasota's Banyan Theatre some years ago. How were we to understand a woman who married a weak man for whom she feels contempt, who plays with guns, who finds sex humiliating, who chooses suicide rather than be in an acquaintance's power? Hogan answered every question persuasively. Her Hedda was a man born into a woman's body: Naturally she dominated her husband, naturally she found her role in the sex act unspeakably inappropriate, naturally she emulated her general father in the use of firearms. I've seen Hedda several times, but only when Hogan played her did the character make sense to me. Which doesn't mean, by the way, that there aren't other solutions quite as convincing — if the actor's good enough to find them.
Great actors can't be distinguished from their roles. This is the most magical thing about great acting: No matter how many times you've watched a performer, no matter if you pass him on the sidewalk every Wednesday, you still can't separate him from his character when you see him on stage. An example: Paul Potenza in The Pillowman, some weeks ago at Jobsite Theater. Potenza played Michal, the brain-damaged brother of the hero Katurian, and very possibly the perpetrator of certain horrendous crimes against children. Now I know Potenza well enough to say hello to him when I see him, and I've reviewed him many times in many different roles over the years. But on the night that I saw The Pillowman, Paul Potenza was not on the Shimberg stage; a man named Michal was, a dangerously demented man, pathetic but potentially deadly. Potenza's acting was so powerful, it was as if a foreign personality had taken over his body and changed him forever. And this is a constant with great actors: Again and again they lose themselves in the character. And we have no choice but to believe in their reality.
Great actors have multiple levels and colors. No genuine human being is limited to two or three emotions, to a couple of personality quirks, to an unchanging psychological climate. But mediocre actors typically find a color or two on the spectrum and leave all the others untouched. Great actors don't make this error: They know that even the most dependable personality can be made up of scores of shades, and that as circumstances change, those different tints and hues will show themselves. For example, Katherine Tanner in Proof, back at American Stage this week after a year-and-a-half's absence. In Tanner's hands in that earlier production, the lead character was brilliant, impulsive, angry, sarcastic, subject to depression, worried for her mental health, funny, compassionate, irritable, tender and sexually uninhibited. And it all seemed to flow from one single psyche, and you didn't dare take your eyes off her for fear that you'd miss something. Great acting rewards scrutiny; mediocre acting can't bear it. It's acting like Tanner's that makes theatergoing so addictive.
Great actors appear to have an inner life. They don't just play the lines they're given; they convince us that it's useful to try to read their minds, that there's a whole world within that can't be found in the text. For example: Julie Rowe in A Moon For The Misbegotten three years ago, also at American Stage. Rowe played Josie Hogan, a crude, uncultured girl whose mind is set on marrying wealthy James Tyrone. When it turned out that James wasn't interested in wedlock — that all he really wanted was a night in Josie's virginal arms, a night during which he could believe himself forgiven for his crimes against his deceased mother — Rowe's Josie gave him this gift with a heartbreaking self-erasure, a merciful self-denial that was nowhere in her lines but seemingly everywhere in her mind. We looked at Rowe/Josie and we knew what she was thinking, pitied and admired her for her self-defeating magnanimity. It was Rowe who led us to this, not author Eugene O'Neill. Great acting encourages us to read every silence, not just every word.
So there it is. No doubt other critics have their own criteria when it comes to judging actors. But that's what I'm looking for. And the good news: Occasionally I find it.
This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2006.