There’s a funny thing about actor training school. Unless you’re careful, you’ll wind up learning some things that they didn’t mean to teach you. That is – going through this environment, in this dominant culture of classical theatre, there are a handful of, shall we say, byproducts of the education. This is one of them.
v1: Selfishness.
This is in my view the most insidious and unnatural of the things to learn from Stanislavski based actor training. The basic idea in Stanislavski is that you do things on stage – speak, move, don’t speak, don’t move – because you want something. Everything is driven by desire. You speak each word, commence each action, in order to achieve your objective. Anyone who’s spent any time at all in a rehearsal room knows the value of this basic precept. Without an actor’s intention, a script becomes meaningless drivel.
The underlying precept is that people are selfish and will stop at nothing to get what they want.
Perhaps this is a belief you share. That is fine. But drawing this conclusion from actor training is a grotesque mistake. The mistake is not in the believing of it – the mistake in question is to assume that because this type of human activity produces the most engaging drama it must also be an a ccurate reflection of what it is to be human.
Maybe we are rabidly competetive, selfish creatures. I think if you’re going to draw that conclusion you’d better do it based on something else than what’s most entertaining to watch. There are plenty of wonderful things about the people I love that wouldn’t make for good entertainment. Plenty of the finest and most meaningful moments in my life would make terrible theatre.
But acting teachers, directors, and (most tragically and most completely) actors conflate theatre with reality – constructing a completely bullshit view of human interaction.
