Acting Choices

There are no opportunities to be on stage right now, at least I hope there are not, but we can still write about acting.

I don’t have a degree.  I have been doing fringe, community theater, and improv for the past ten years in Seattle.  I have taken some classes at Freehold: Step One, Two, and Three, as well as Acting for the Camera, and one intro to performance class at Pitt nine million years ago, so my opinions may be coming from a fairly uninformed place, but here they are.  

I am still trying to understand what, exactly is meant by acting “choices.” 

If you have spent much time in Fremont, in the northern part near Woodland Park Zoo, you might have seen an old Japanese fire engine.  It’s red.  It looks something like a flatbed pickup truck.  It has Japanese writing on the sides.  I’ve lived in Fremont for the past year or so and I have seen it many times.  Today, I was walking past the apartment building at the northwest corner of Fremont Avenue and 45th Street and there was not only the truck but also a guy taking some stuff out of the bed and on his way into the building.  A desire welled up.  I wanted to ask him about it.  I thought about it.  I turned it over in my mind for a moment or two.   And then I did.  We had a brief, lovely conversation.  He confirmed that it had been a fire truck in Japan and that he used if for all kinds of things.  I said I loved seeing it around.  I said it made me happy to see it.  We exchanged names.  We smiled (more than six feet away) and went about our days.

So what about acting choices?  After I crossed Fremont Avenue and headed north toward the zoo, I noticed what I had said – that I loved seeing the truck around town and that it made me happy to see it.  I had not at all planned to say those things.  At no point did I make a “choice” to say those things, certainly not in the way that I had, in fact made a choice to begin that conversation.  But in the moment, in the flow of the conversation, I did end up saying them.

The conversation flowed naturally.  My world plus his world merged and created the context in which the remainder of our interaction took place. Off we went. 

This is where I question what acting choices are.  Nothing I said after, “Hey, can I ask you a question?” was “chosen” at all by me.  Thinking about it now, it could have been prompted by a direction, or me deciding to adopt an attitude like “friendly curiosity.”  What in fact happened though, was all a result of the context.  Had he been having an awful day and told me to fuck off, none of the rest would have happened, or if it did it would have been comically awkward.

Hey, can I ask you a question?

No, fuck off!

I just wanted to ask, what is this truck?

None of your business.  I’m tired of people’s dumb questions about this dumb truck.

I just love seeing it around the neighborhood!

I’m busy. Leave me alone!

Hi, my name’s Patrick!

I don’t think it would have gone that way.

In a rehearsal once, a director gave me this context: I was a father and had learned through a third party that my daughter had dropped out of college.  This was supposed to have been very upsetting to me.  The scene was to begin with me confronting her after having heard the news.  I approached the other actor.  She was sitting, with her head in her hands.  Patrick, the actor was at a loss for what to say.  The gears had just locked, like they sometimes do.  I stood there, staring at the other actor.  The director said something like, “ooh!” as if dad were staring an accusatory hole right through daughter.  I knew something good must have been happening and stayed with it.  A moment later, “daughter” looked up at me with a look of guilt and pain on her face and at that moment, the scene was a success.  At the same time, no “choice” had been made by me other than to stay in the unknown (and unwanted!) and see what happened.

Once I had a callback for the role of Charlie Cowell in The Music Man.  In his big scene with Marian, I made the choice of making him talk like the character in the movie.  It was, of course, a disaster.  I learned in that moment that you can’t just paste on an accent.  That choice alone, could not carry the day. 

It’s also said that acting is behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances.  This seems at odds with the idea of an actor making choices about exactly how to do a scene.  It seems like any choices come in before rehearsing or acting ever begin when you do all of the work to build the character.  Who are they? What do they want? Etcetera, etcetera.  

When people talk about character choices, they seem to be talking about things like line readings or gestures or emotions conveyed in the moment.  But those things, it seems to me, should be happening on auto-pilot based on choices, if you can call them that, there were made in a rehearsal room weeks prior.

In the father-daughter example above, that circumstance did in fact present itself in the show. Once or twice (or maybe more) I did choose to have dad give the knowing, withering stare to daughter.  It was an improvised, interactive show.  If the audience never revealed the secret to me, or if they convinced daughter to confess first, it never arose at all.  In those cases where father did confront daughter, though, the stare was an option and when I did use it, it certainly was a choice.  But that’s not how it started and had I decided to wing it in the moment, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.

In our everyday conversations, it does not seem like we make choices, as such.  For sure, as I did today, we decide to have an interaction or not, or to make a phone call or not, and so forth.  Sometimes, mid-conversation, we see that what we are doing is not working, so we consciously decide to shift to “apologetic,” or “controlling,” or “sympathetic” or whatever we think will work.  But for the most part, it’s my context meeting your context and then it goes where it goes, automatically. 

So is that what’s meant by an acting choice? The creation of the character as a whole and all of their desires and circumstances?  It seems like that is the only thing that makes sense.