Ramblings About Actors and Acting Part Four

Most of my friends are by now tired of my harping on a particular scene in an inferior but pleasant "Quantum Leap" episode, "Animal Frat." Sam is in the library, trying to persuade Elizabeth to give him another chance, when Duck comes to her "rescue." He and Sam struggle briefly, and he accuses Sam of not caring about ending the war in Vietnam. Sam backs Duck into some shelving and books tumble down onto their heads; this and perhaps Sam's recollection of why he is there effectively stop the fight, and Sam walks away. Suddenly he turns back and, barely containing himself, tells Duck that he lost a brother in Vietnam (this episode precedes the "Leaps Home," in which Sam reverses his brother's fate). As he turns again to leave, Duck shouts out that maybe Sam didn't care enough about his brother. Sam stops but does not turn. We can see everything he's feeling in his back, just as Alan's hands told all. Most likely Alan didn't sit there and think, I am now going to do something with my hands. He probably wasn't even aware of what he was doing with his hands, although he might have been; what an actor intellectualizes and what s/he does intuitively is his or her own business, as long as it works. Scott surely wasn't thinking, now I'm going to do something with my back. No: he was feeling that pain all over and it came out of his back the way Soon-Teck Oh's death came out of his stomach.

The 1968 Oscar-winning Ken Russell film "Women in Love" has so many scenes in which Alan's physicality is an integral part of his expression of the character as well as of the moment that it is hardly worth picking one or another to describe, but in the same film, Glenda Jackson's dance for the bulls and subsequent taunting of Oliver Reed is astounding. She, like the four gentlemen I mentioned, is so physically present. When she is there, all of her is there.

EXPRESSION OF THE WHOLE SOUL

Although my father maintained that all actors were prostitutes, he still came to see every play I did in school (he couldn't come to the ones in L.A.) Perhaps he trusted me more than he trusted other actors, although I, like they, shamelessly gave away my emotions, bared them for all to see. What impelled me to expose myself like that, while also hiding behind my own face, the mask I wore, as the fictional Guy Burgess put it, only to be who I was?

(Motivations may be plentiful

Whether they are intensely private people or gregarious, actors must have a need to share their beings. (I recognize in myself a need to share who I am, a need to be understood and known.) True, their job entails being other beings, but the fabric from which they create those other beings is... their selves. It's all they have, finally. Oh yes, and a little makeup, sometimes some prosthetics, costumes, props, and lines written by other people, not to mention whatever was created all around them by others, from sets to interplay with other actors to feedback from audiences, and the direction they receive which comes from others, but the lowdown is they use themselves to create these others.

Why this need to share themselves? (Why does this not extend to a need to share details of their private lives? Ah, this is a whole other issue!) We call it expressing ourselves, but as much as a painting is an expression of an individual, the painter smears paint on the canvas, not literally his or her guts! This is not to downplay the personal nature of other arts; I put a lot of myself into my writing and showing it to others is showing others my soul. It's not showing them my whole soul all at once; I can send it out without following it, whereas Scott, for example, can't send himself out without following. He has to be there. He has to be that. I have to be here, writing, but no one sees the physical me, whereas even if Scott doesn't have to be there in the movie theatre with us, he sends himself out there. It does make a difference.

Even if an actor is shy, then, must s/he be something of an exhibitionist? More likely it's a cry to be known. If so, it's also a cry to know, because an actor gets to meet his or her creation, and understand and get inside that person, and get that person inside him-/ herself! So many actors have said they began to act to escape reality but I think many do it (even the same ones who are escaping) to find a reality, even more, to make a reality. They run to as well as from.

Don't we all, in our way?