Words and Action in Life and on the Stage

Only our actions tell us who are we.  We literally are what wedo. People say they speak louder than words.  They don’t just speak louder, they define us, to ourselves, and to each other.  A person says one thing, but their behaviour often is something completely different.  This often betrays the weakness of words and highlights their lack of connection to the truth.  On the other hand, our actions often indicate the weakness in our character, for it is through the difference, the gap, between our words and actions, that we see the truth of a person’s character.

Words are the clumsy way that we attempt to make the intangible somehow tangible.  They are a weak attempt to articulate thoughts, feelings and intentions.  But they are nothing more than tactics, ways to navigate and negotiate with ourselves and others. As two swirling intangibles attempt to communicate in a language that never quite expresses the feeling, the thought, the intention. No matter how poetic, how matter how beautifully hung together, they speak, but they do not really say what the person is saying.

For that, one has to look beyond, not only to watch, but to listen, and to sense the other person.  But when we do this though, we will be disappointed with what we see.  We will see the discrepancy between word and deed.

In theatre, it is the same. The writer’s words may be the most finely crafted version of a weak way of articulating the intangible.  And they can be beautiful, but if the actor does not inhabit them through action, if we see the body unwilling to connect, the voice struggling, if they cleverly animate the lines of the script, but what we sense between word and deed is something very different, then the actor is failing us.

Why? Because they are lying.  There is that discrepancy between word and deed again.  What is the name we give to someone who displays this discrepancy, the gap between what they say and how they behave?  We call them HYPOCRITE.  Is it a coincidence that this is the ancient Greek word for ACTOR?

In Ross. W. Prior’s new book on Teaching Actors, he makes a claim early in the book about the necessary contradiction (as he sees it) between the actors revealing the truth to the audience by pretending. Unfortunately, I think that’s impossible.  I think the only way that the actor can reveal the truth, is by telling the truth, and then we can sense it, because it is in their actions, their truthful action.  We can sense that, be we ever so blind or deaf to their words.

The worst part is that in life and on the stage, we take the person at their surface depth, their most superficial level.  We do not actively attempt to sense the truth, we accept the veneer, occasionally catching a glimpse of the truth, but shrugging it off.  So does the audience, when, when something real happens on stage, we forgive the actors and move on.  Instead, we buy into their fiction, which is always brittle and unrewarding.

We speak so loudly to each other with our actions.  That’s where the truth of acting comes from.  That’s where the focus should be and that’s where it is found.  But as in life, and theatre, few of us care to look, or if we do, care to really see.

Learning to tell the truth through action, through truthful action, that’s what I teach in my acting classes.  It’s easier done than said.

COACH