The Puzzle

After discussing this idea with two of my private coaching students Craig and Paul, I thought it would make an interesting blog post for today:

Craig and I were analysing a scene from Fargo and Craig pointed out that this way of working was fun because it’s like a puzzle. In a separate class Paul commented that it may be a puzzle for the actor but the writer never intended it to be so. I would strongly agree with both of them.

Working on text is a puzzle. It should be approached with the same open-mindedness, curiosity and tenacity that one might face a logic puzzle, a riddle or even a crossword or Sudoku puzzle.

A puzzle is a challenge that is intended to be solved. Our puzzle is how to take the literary artefact of a play (dead wood with ink blotches) and transform it into the living, breathing performance of an actor.

The puzzle is a way to view scene work which actors often find difficult and irritating – it’s the bit they often find most frustrating. In classes, we make sure that our students have strong puzzle skills before they go on to work freely on scenes. Without them, they’re simply making shit up and that isn’t acting, it’s improvising on the theme of the play, which is disrespectful to the writer and the craft of acting.

Actually, this topic reminds me of something Mamet writes in Some Freaks, so I thought I’d share some of it with you:

In his chapter entitled ‘Stanislavsky and the Bearer Bonds’, Mamet discusses Stanislavsky’s Puzzle – a scene that Stanislavsky set his students to improvise, telling them that when they could analyse and perform that scene, then they would know how to act.  Mamet says “What is the answer to Stanislavsky’s Bearer Bond problem? Stanislavsky said that when one knew how to correctly analyse and perform the problem, one would know how to act; so, then the question is, How Does One Act?’ You start with a conundrum. You have to find the answer yourself.

Great acting involves puzzle solving, faced with the conundrum, stay curious, don’t give up, don’t try to get around the problem. When you finally find a solution, you have the keys to the kingdom. Now the real work begins.