The Attempt

When you go after a real tangible goal on stage or on camera, you may know that you aren’t going to get it. That’s somewhat obvious. You can only achieve what the script allows and sometimes, often, no – most of the time, the script will not allow it, unless it’s the end of the movie. To keep the audience asking ‘what will happen next?’ requires the characters to be constantly on their toes and never comfortable and confident of getting what they want.

But if we know we’re not going to get it…? the acting students ask. Doesn’t it make it hard to go after it truthfully if I know I won’t get it? Yes. I understand, but you don’t know that you won’t get it until it’s gone and you have some new goal or desire.

Desire is the powerful thing in life or theatre but it is not the moment that we receive or are denied the goal that thrills us, it is the chase that excites us. It is the attempt.

For in the attempt, we become completely fixated, we drop our ego, we lose sense of all else, we become completely absorbed in the attempt and in the target of our attentions.

And in the moment, totally absorbed in getting the goal, with our attention wholly placed on the target that we become most authentic in our actions. We are not pretending, we are truly, authentically, genuinely and sincerely in action.

And that’s what acting is, to be in action.

“Oh but it’s not as simple” says that The Old Ham, the peddler of mythical bullshit protests.

Oh, I beg to differ. Acting is action. And as Mamet says in American Buffalo: Action talks and Bullshit Walks.