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Theatre: The false dichotomy

By Robert W. Bethune
ART TIMES Fall 2014

Last March, Judith Ohikuare wrote a good piece for The Atlantic about the relationship between actors and roles, exploring recent thinking about the effect fictional characters have on the real people who play them. How actors do what they do is becoming a topic of interest to people who study the brain and to people who study human behavior, such as Thalia Goldstein at Pace and Paul Bloom at Yale.

In the process, Ohikuare fell into one of the ordinary pitfalls of the subject. It is true that modern acting in the broad tradition of Stanislavski greatly values emotional authenticity and a high level of apparent realism in physical and vocal behavior, but the relationship between that and approaches to acting that dominated earlier periods is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as Ohikuare would have it.

First and foremost, we have to specify in all these discussions that we’re talking about the best work out there, not the mediocre work that inevitably comes our way. We’re going to be talking about performance in straight spoken drama and comedy, musical theater and opera, ballet and modern dance, and we need to remember that mediocre performance in all genres of live theater does not evoke the kinds of cognitive, emotional and esthetic effects and responses of interest here. Performers can be deadly dull regardless of what style they use and the adoption of any particular style offers no guarantee whatsoever of excellence in performance.

There are two ways to go astray in this area. Ohikuare does both, nor is she alone in doing so. One is to accept the idea that a higher degree of stylization correlates with a lower degree of emotional authenticity. The other is to fail to realize that modern acting involves a great deal of stylization. Both of these errors lead to the false idea that acting has become steadily more realistic over time.

It should be obvious that a high degree of overt stylization can express a high degree of emotional authenticity. We need only take note of the tremendous emotional power of opera and dance to realize that the very high levels of stylization involved in those forms of theatrical expression not only permit, but also facilitate intense emotional authenticity. Merman, Callas, Baryshnikov, Graham—these artists were highly emotionally authentic, and the stylization involved in their various modes of performance helped them get there. Stylization can do that because it involves doing what all art must do, namely, form and organize what is presented to the perception of the audience in such a way as to evoke the desired responses.

It is less obvious that modern acting in straight drama and comedy involves considerable stylization because we accept those stylizations as realistic when in fact they are not. Every novice actor has to learn that you cannot simply walk out on stage and behave the way you would in real life. The behavior one must adopt onstage differs from that one would adopt in real life because one must convey one’s inner and outer life to an audience located at non-conversation distance. One’s voice must become easier to hear; one’s diction must become easier to understand. Movement, gesture and facial expression must become easier to see. The intensity of emotional expression conveyed by those vocal and physical means must become more easily perceptible and more capable of evoking response. In a word, the actor must, as theater people say, project. The many physical and vocal adaptations, large and small, adapted to that end constitute a much higher degree of stylization than we normally realize. That is something most people very rarely do in the real world. When they do so, their behavior immediately becomes quite similar to the behavior actors use on stage.

We do not perceive those adaptations as unrealistic (assuming, as I mentioned before, that they are done well) because they are done according to conventions that we audience members have learned to accept. In so doing, we do what audiences have always done in every age and every place where theatrical performance has occurred and does occur. It is very revealing to go back and read what was written about actors and acting in the past. Aristotle’s description of ancient Greek theater, a form that appears highly stylized to us, focuses heavily on what we think of as fundamental realism: “probability and necessity.” The actors of Roman times were praised for emotional authenticity. From the earliest descriptions of European theater down to the present, every age has experienced their theater as convincingly realistic, though we would not accept it as such today. That’s not because we are smart and they were stupid, or because we are sophisticated and they were yokels; it’s because we use our conventions and they used theirs. Furthermore, they were as nearly unconscious of their conventions as we are of ours. In this respect, theater does not progress. It changes, but it does not progress.

What does not change in theatrical performance – spoken drama and comedy, musical theater, opera, dance, and so forth – is our ability to use these practices to fall into a double state of mind, in which we are both in the real world and in a fictional one, both in control of our hearts, minds and eyes and not at all in control of them, both standing apart and profoundly affected. The ability of human brains to enter that state is well worth further study.

Bethune website: www.freshwaterseas.com