NEW ACTING FOR OLD
Acting is the oldest thing in the theater. It comes before the play,
because in the beginning the actor and the playwright are one. Drama
originates when two or three people are seized with a desire to give an
old legend or an old ritual a living form. They want to act. As they
act they make up their play. The theater becomes the spot that seems a
good place—either spiritually, physically, or by force of tradition—in
which to give the play. In time comes a division of labor. One of the
actors begins to specialize on the play. This actor studies how he can
develop the form of the play to make better use of the theater; and
then, with some leader among the actors, he begins to speculate on how
to change the theater in order to give more scope to the playwright and
to the player who interprets him.
That is the history of the theater through twenty-five centuries. It
begins with the actor, and it comes very close to ending with him.
It is rather a good thing to understand about the history of the
theater. It gives you a certain respect for the actor which actors
do not always inspire. It makes you patient with the difficulties of
writing anything intelligible on this most ancient and most complex
and most unsubstantial of all the things of the theater. It makes you
realize the dangers of dogmatizing on the subject. And, if you can look
back with imagination to the day of Garrick and his great apron stage
and his Hamlet in knickerbockers, back to the day of Burbage and his
sunlit platform in the midst of an Elizabethan mob, back to Æschylus
answering the chorus of the Furies in the half circle of Athenians
that piled up the hillside of the Acropolis; perhaps, then, you will
see that the actor was not always a fellow with a false beard or the
manners of a soda water clerk, who expects you to believe that he is
no actor at all, but a family doctor or an employee of Mr. Liggett who
has taken to living in a room with one side gone. At any rate a little
hint of theatrical history, full of amazing surprises, might make you
tolerant of such speculations as the following on the four types of
acting to be seen in the theater to-day and on what is to come of them.
The art of acting is a miscellaneous sort of art. I imagine that
types of acting which we think very new and modern were to be found
in every age except the first. Probably some famous Greek comedian
made his entrance in _The Frogs_ looking so amazingly like the statue
of Herakles on the Acropolis that for half a minute nobody could be
sure that this was really the actor whom they had expected to see. In
Shakespeare’s day it is not unlikely that the man who played Caliban
got together a collection of false hair and wooden tusks which made
every one wonder who the new member of the company could be. And
probably among the Greeks and the Elizabethans there were players so
amazingly like servants or kings in face and carriage that they never
played anything else. Yet it is safe to say, nevertheless, that the
actor’s trick of trying to look like a different human being in each
new play and never at all like himself, and his other trick of never
looking like anything but himself and always playing exactly the same
kind of part, are histrionic symptoms of the disease called Realism.
There was never so much literal and deliberate impersonation as in
Europe to-day, and so much “type casting” as along Broadway.
These are two very different methods of work, but they both reach the
same end—absolute resemblance—and neither has necessarily anything to
do with art. The first—for which the word “impersonation” is commonly
and very loosely used—is pretty generally esteemed to-day. It is
considered to mark off the actor, even the artist, from the crowd of
clever mummers. It is hard to deny an instant and hearty interest
in any player who can look like and act like a tramp one night, and
like a barbaric king the next. The emotion he creates as a king, or
the artist’s vision he displays in selecting his material and making
Form out of it, may be great or small. But his ingenuity in masquerade
will always win admiration. In fact we are pretty sure to spend our
time praising such an actor as Ben-Ami for looking like a neurotic
artist in _Samson and Delilah_, and like a husky young horse-thief in
_The Idle Inn_, instead of recognizing the artistic distinction these
impersonations show.
Examined in cold blood, the virtue of this sort of acting is the
virtue of the wig-maker. The difference between a Van Dyke and a pair
of mutton chops; the difference between Flesh Color No. 1 and Flesh
Color No. 3; the difference between a waiter’s dress suit bought on
the Bowery, and a doublet designed by James Reynolds and made by Mme.
Freisinger—that is the secret of this kind of acting. Not the whole
secret, of course, for the pose of the actor’s body, the grace or
awkwardness of his carriage, the lift of an eyebrow, or the droop of
a lip is quite as important. Such things, however, have no more of
art or emotion in them than the tricks of make-up. They can give us
recollections of real persons or figures in literature, in painting, or
in other plays, about whom we have felt emotion. But it is not until
the actor puts Form of his own into this lay figure, by the movement of
his body, and the emotion of his voice, that anything approaching art
can be said to exist.
Stanislavsky may look like a colonel in _The Three Sisters_, and like
a spineless gentleman in _The Cherry Orchard_; but that is not the
measure of his art. Stanislavsky might even _be_ a colonel on leave who
took a fancy to acting, or a spineless gentleman who lost his patrimony
and fell back on his university reputation as an amateur actor; and he
would still have to prove himself an artist.
There is an amusing similarity and contrast between the two varieties
of realistic actors. The first impersonates a different character
in every play, and never himself. The second impersonates the same
character in every play and always himself. The first impersonates by
changing; the second by remaining the same.
Provided that there is a large and varied supply of types—military men,
bar-keeps, politicians, artist-neurotics, criminal-neurotics, he-men,
she-men, rabbit-men, not to mention all sorts of women—the result on
a play should not be so very different whichever system of acting is
adopted. If a play-goer were to see only one play, he couldn’t detect
any difference. If he were to see two, he would be likely to get some
added pleasure out of the knowledge that the same people were acting
both, and he would probably use up on the business of spying out the
tricks of it all a good deal of the energy and attention that he ought
to give to the play.
There is one practical difference, however, in these two ways of
casting a play. You cannot make a repertory company out of types. In
spite of the old jargon about Leading Man, Leading Woman, Juvenile, Old
Man, Ingenue, Heavy, Character Man, and so forth, no permanent company
giving realistic plays can get along without actors who can achieve
some sort of differentiation. Since the German theater and most of
the European theater is run on the repertory system, the Continental
actor is generally a man adept in masquerade. Because America has no
repertory theater, because producers in New York pick new actors out
of the apple barrel for every new play, and because almost all the
legitimate actors of America make New York their headquarters, the
system of casting by type is the natural, workable system for us.
Type acting need not mean that the type the actor plays is absolutely
identical with his own personality in private life. It usually isn’t.
But it does mean that, because of his own personality, his physical and
mental equipment, the actor is able to play a very similar type to his
own. Two excellent examples of this are Frank Craven and Ernest Truex.
In real life they are never Tommy Tucker of _The First Year_ or the
hero of _Six Cylinder Love_, but on the stage they are never anything
else. It is just possible that they could be something else, but they
began this way, and this way the managers and the public will probably
make them continue.
All of which brings up a single artistic point upon which varied
impersonations and the repertory theater defeat type casting. Type
casting is apt to tie a man to the kind of part he first acts with
any ability, and not the kind he can act best. He may be able to
play ten different sorts of characters, and one or two of these may
release something in him that permits him to be a true artist in
his impersonation. But if he happens to play some other of the ten
characters first, and play it reasonably well, our casting system may
keep him from ever reaching those characters in which he might excel.
For another thing, the constant change of parts in a repertory theater
gives an actor practice that he cannot get if he repeats type parts
in fewer plays, as he must do in America. Through this practice with
varying parts, he may come to add something of artistic significance to
his work.
A nice esthetic point arises if you find a type-actor—say Craven—giving
an extraordinarily good performance. He is playing himself, we will
say; yet within that familiar personality, he is achieving just as
interesting emotion as some other actor of a different personality,
but possessing the knack of varied impersonation, could achieve; he is
even reaching a sense of Form, selecting out of his own personality,
experience, and emotion, and combining these into a shape that moves us
esthetically—whether to laughter or to tears. Is this art? Would it be
art if the actor were Georgie Price imitating Craven, or somebody from
the Moscow Art Theater impersonating Craven? Would it be art if Craven
played a character so different from himself as the _savant_ in _He
Who Gets Slapped_, and played it as successfully as he has played Tommy
Tucker? Unquestionably the answer to the last question would be Yes. As
for the others, there is legitimate room for argument.
This business of varied impersonation _versus_ self-impersonation
arouses a great deal of dispute. The most interesting feature of
the squabble is that usually the opponent of self-impersonation or
type-acting points back with mournful pride to some of the great actors
of the past like Booth or Forrest. When he does this, he passes clean
outside of realistic acting. Moreover, he brings into the argument
actors, who, while they played a wide variety of parts, never took the
trouble to hide behind the wig-maker or to pretend to be anybody else
physically than the great Edwin Booth or the celebrated Edwin Forrest.
To-day we have this same kind of acting, I imagine—and this is the
third kind that I want to list—in the work of Sarah Bernhardt, Giovanni
Grasso, Margaret Anglin, or Clare Eames. If you started out to list
the players who use their own mask frankly for every part, achieving
impersonation and emotion by their use of features and voice as
instruments, you would find many more names of women than of men; for
the actress has far fewer opportunities than the actor to employ the
ingenuities of make-up. You would also find, I think, that your list
was not so very long, and that it contained the names of most of the
players of great distinction from Eleanora Duse to Charlie Chaplin.
There is magic in the soul of such players, not in their make-up
boxes. They create their impersonations before your eyes, not in their
dressing rooms. You may, perhaps, be tempted to say that their art lies
in the voice, that the face is a mask. But the face is obviously not a
permanent mask; it changes not only from character to character in many
subtle ways, but from scene to scene, and emotion to emotion. Also,
there is Chaplin, the voiceless; his face speaks. It seems a mask, too,
but it is articulate.
Such acting may be given—and usually is given—to the interpretation
of realistic drama. It belongs at heart to another thing, to almost
another age, past or to come. It achieves the necessary resemblance
through the inner truth of its art. But it never submits to
submergence. It reaches out towards a kind of acting that we used to
have and that we will have again, while it meets the necessities of
Realism.
This fourth kind of acting may be called presentational—a word that
derives its present use from a distinction set up by Alexander Bakshy
in his _The Path of the Russian Stage_. Presentational acting, like
presentational production, stands in opposition to representational.
The distinction is clear enough in painting, where a piece of
work that aims to report an anecdote, or to photograph objects,
is representational, and a piece of work striving to show the
relation of forms which may or may not be of the everyday world, is
presentational. In the theater Bakshy makes a parallel distinction
between a scenic background that attempts to represent with canvas
and paint actual objects of wood or rock or whatnot, and a background
that presents itself frankly as what it is—curtains, for instance, or
an architectural wall. The distinction applies to acting as well. A
Broadway actor in a bald wig or an actor naturally bald, who is trying
to pretend that he is in a room off in Budapest, and who refuses to
admit that he knows it is all a sham, and that a thousand people are
watching him, is a representational actor, or a realist. An actor
who admits that he is an actor, and that he has an audience before
him, and that it is his business to charm and move this audience by
the brilliance of his art, is a presentational actor. The difference
deserves better terms, but they do not yet exist.
It is obvious enough that the first actors were presentational. The
Greek men who shouted village gossip from the wains, and made plays of
it, were villagers known to every one. The actors in the first dramatic
rituals may have worn masks, but they were frankly actors or priests,
not the gods and heroes themselves. Roscius was Roscius, Molière
was Molière; even the Baconians cannot deny that Shakespeare was
Shakespeare when he appeared as old Adam. I would maintain that Garrick
and Siddons, Talma and Rachel were frankly actors; did they not see
the audience out there under the light of the same chandeliers that lit
their stage?
To-day our greatest players reëstablish to some extent the bond
with the audience when they abandon any attempt to represent
their characters through wigs and make-up, and present their own
faces frankly as vehicles of expression. In comedy and in tragedy
presentational acting comes out most easily. There is something in
really great sorrow—not the emotions of the thwarted defectives of our
realistic tragedies—that leaps out to an audience. Hecuba must speak
her sorrow to the chorus and over the chorus to the people who have
come to the theater for the single purpose of hearing it. There can be
no fitting communion with the characters who have caused the tragedy or
been stricken by it. The sufferer must carry her cup of sorrow to the
gods; they alone can drink of it and make it less. And the great fact
of the theater is that the audience are gods. It is a healthy instinct
that causes many an actress in a modern tragedy to turn her back on the
other characters of the play, and make her lamentation to the audience
as though it were a soliloquy or an aside.
There are gods and gods, of course, and it is to Dionysus and Pan
that the comedian turns when he shouts his jokes out across the
footlights. In fact he takes good care, if he is a wise clown, that
the footlights shan’t be there to interfere. If he is Al Jolson, he
insists on a runway or a little platform that will bring him out over
the footlights and into the lap of the audience. If he is a comedian
in burlesque like Bobbie Clark, he has the house lights turned up as
soon as he begins a comedy scene. He must make contact somehow with his
audience. If the fun-maker is Fanny Brice, the method is a little less
obvious, and it draws us closer to the sort of presentational acting
which will dominate many theaters in the future, the sort of acting
that presents an impersonation, and at the same time stands off with
the audience, and watches it. If the player is Ruth Draper or Beatrice
Herford, you have something that seems to me almost identical with the
kind of acting I am trying to define.
I present these four categories of acting for what they are worth. They
are frankly two-dimensional. They are divisions in a single plane.
Other planes cut across them, and the categories in these planes
intersect the ones I have defined. Consider almost any player, and
you will find a confusion of methods and results which will need more
explanation than I have provided. There is Richard Kellerhals, for
instance, the Munich player whose strikingly different work in _The
Taming of the Shrew_ and _Florian Geyer_ I have described. This is
not impersonation achieved with make-up. It is a thing of expression,
a spiritual thing. Take the actors of the Moscow Art Theater. They
use make-up to the last degree, but there is always a spiritual
differentiation far more significant than the physical, and there is
always a sense of the Form of life more important than either. Harry
Lauder has one impersonation—The Saftest of the Family—which is so
different from his others in almost every way that for the moment he
might be a different player. Here is a presentational actor indulging
in the tricks of the realistic impersonator, and showing that, while
the fields of realistic impersonation and presentational acting are not
absolutely exclusive, at least they are somewhat incongruous or at any
rate mutually hampering. Louis Jouvet of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier
presents an opposite phenomenon when he appears in the realistic
drama _Les Frères Karamazov_ as the horrific old father, Feodor, and
in _Twelfth Night_ as Aguecheek. These are absolutely contradictory
impersonations. In each case Jouvet completely disguises his own
personality. The interesting point is that the physical impersonation
which he brings to the Russian play is essentially unrealistic. It
is all very carefully designed in costume, make-up, and gesture as a
broad and striking expression, but not as a representation, of rough
dominance. The red face and the green coat mix in the olive-bronze hat.
His hair and his hat, his coat and his elbows flare out in lines of
almost comic violence. He is very close to caricature in a thoroughly
realistic play. Here is a curious mixture of methods and ends—planes
and categories cutting across one another and creating new figures.
Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier is to-day the most interesting forcing bed
of the new acting in Europe—unless the Kamerny Theater of the Russian
expressionists is nourishing more than scenery. Copeau’s theater, with
its naked stage and almost permanent architectural setting, its lack
of proscenium and footlights, and its steps and forestage leading
down to the audience, makes unquestionably for presentational acting.
The illusion of Realism and representation is extremely difficult
to attain. In four plays, _Les Frères Karamazov_, _Twelfth Night_,
_The S. S. Tenacity_, and _Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement_, varied as
they are, we see no great amount of the sort of masquerading which
Jouvet does so well in the first two. In the main, the actors keep
their own normal appearance throughout; but they are not, of course,
playing types. To some extent, therefore, they are working in the
vein of Bernhardt and Grasso, striving for impersonation in emotion
rather than in physique. Except for a gouty foot and a simple change
in costume, Copeau’s Peruvian governor in the comedy _Le Carrosse du
St.-Sacrement_, and his impersonation of the intellectual brother of
the house of Karamazov are outwardly very much alike. It is in the mood
alone that he registers the difference. In both, but particularly in
the comic governor, there is a touch of the presentational attitude
which fills the rest of the company in varying degrees and informs most
of _Twelfth Night_. The difference between this acting and what we are
accustomed to, is particularly plain in a comparison of the English
sailor as played in the New York production of _The S. S. Tenacity_,
and in the Paris production—the oily reality of Claude Cooper’s
impersonation against the rather brash, certainly very dry version of
Robert Allard. Allard’s performance has the stamp of almost all the
acting at the Vieux-Colombier. It is something intellectually settled
upon as an expression of an emotion, and then conveyed to the audience
almost as if read and explained. In the school of Copeau, who was once
journalist and critic, there is ever something of the expounder. It is
a reading, an explanation, in the terms of a theatrical performance. It
is, to a certain degree, presentational, because in every reading, in
every explanation, there must be an awareness of the existence of the
audience.