March 2, 2011

Acting class last night. G, a high school kid, was doing an exercise, breathing on every phrase of his speech (Oberon), and the effect was striking, overwhelming. It revealed a life the words owned beneath the life of the phrase and sentence, as if the words were stone and each syllable had to be carved by labor and concentration. As an actor I have typically worked on a level above that, concentrating on the meaning of the whole, trying to deliver a speech to the comprehension of the audience. Delivering the inner life of each word is a different process, and one so applicable to all poetry that my head spun with revelation. As a playwright I have felt that most “methods” were superfluous, a sort of self-indulgence on the part of those who taught them. Maybe not. Maybe I thought that because I resisted doing any of them. Day by day am more honored by the labor that an actor puts into the words he says, which are sometimes my words. It humbles me into trying harder to make those words worth the effort. Even if I don’t hear it in the finished speech, G has an understanding of those lines which must communicate, must make a difference on some level. My understanding of them was altered. Errors in fact are made, and I’m the sort of person in whom that instills mistrust, but all those are borne away by the laborious, awkward revelation of a boy on a stool, speaking words as though they were the first words spoken by anybody, ever.