Acting is Ping Pong, Not Chess
After the amazing Long Form Improv Masterclass that our great friend Cecile Monteyne gave last week, I’ve been reading the amazing Truth in Comedy by Del Close and Charna Halpern (and Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson’) and I can’t believe how many times I’m simply in awe of how close the secrets of truth in comedy relate to the basic tenets of truthful acting found within Practical Aesthetics. I know that Mamet was influenced by Second City, but now I’m beginning to see how much. In one chapter of the book, it compares improvisers with ping pong or table tennis players and I would like to offer you the same analogy for the actor…
The great actor is a great improviser. By that, I don’t mean that they can come up with witty things to say on the spur of the moment. That’s a different knack altogether, but being able to produce truthful, spontaneous, impulsive acting on the spur of the moment, now that’s a special skill. You see acting is improvising… not the words, not the things laid down in the play, but everything else, every moment is improvised and you must work moment to moment, not faking, not repeating what you think you did well or badly yesterday (it’s never as good as it was last time anyway) but living fully, entirely in the moment, dealing with what’s in front of you now, and now, and now and now. Not reliving some magic from the rehearsal room.
In beautiful, truthful acting, the action-reaction pattern is endlessly recycled with no knowledge of what will occur, other than the million possible combination practiced during training. The ping pong player does not consciously select the best thing to do, they just react based on their years of experience, training and practice. They simply don’t have the time to think. Thinking is useless to the actor, it’s all in the phrase isn’t it? ACTING, not thinking, but acting, ACTION. As Mamet says in American Buffalo - ‘Action talks and Bullshit walks’
And this is very much like ping pong. You see ping pong, or table tennis as I’ve always called it is an in the moment kind of game. It’s a game of lightning fast action and reaction and it does not require thought. It requires action and reaction. Experts practice for hours and hours every day to ensure that their skills are honed to deal with any moment, they are experts at dealing with what their opponent has thrown them in the moment, not in a moment, but now.
Chess on the other hand, you can stop, you can think, your strategy is not moment to moment, but many steps ahead, sometimes all the way to the end in your mind before you you make a move.
But ping pong is about dealing with what you opponent has served at you now, and it doesn’t matter what you’re thinking or feeling. You’ve got to deal with it now, or you lose.
In Chess, you have the time to sit and think. In Ping Pong, you only react and everything else you did to prepare was either helpful to you in making that reaction, or it was a waste of precious energy.
Acting is ping pong.