David Kaplan

The power to place an image in other people’s minds, and to make that image vivid enough to arouse listeners to emotions of their own, is rightly called casting a spell — spell being related to the German word spiel, for “story.” Radio plays, bedtime stories, ghost stories, erotic stories — any of these are familiar examples of how a storyteller can make a listener turn the mind into an amphitheater, a boudoir, or any place the action described is occurring. Casting a spell is much more wonderful than deep-felt reminiscence; the whole value of a story, on the stage and in life, is that a story transcends the personal and becomes a form of shared vision, wider than an individual’s. This magic is repeated onstage whenever a story is told. Telling a Story, Part Five in the Five Approaches to Acting Series is a chance to learn true witchcraft: the casting of a spell on audience members so that they see what isn’t there. More, the telling of a tale can reveal the occult: what takes place in the mind of the speaker. Shakespeare’s soliloquies offer an actor special opportunities to reveal the processes of thought, and there is a separate chapter in Telling a Story, Part Five in the Five Approaches to Acting Series about ways to prepare and perform soliloquies from Shakespeare’s plays. Like Mae West’s sultry recitation of nursery rhymes, Romeo’s bashful recitation of Juliet’s charms works from the principle that it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it — and what happens to you while you say it. Actors burdened with “emotional memory” in story-telling are given access to a more useful technique by identifying point of views and creating dramatic onstage action while telling a story by shifting points of view. Telling a Story, Part Five in the Five Approaches to Acting Series offers practical techniques for analyzing texts and performing stories within the context of a play, whether written by Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams, the ancient Greeks, or Shakespeare. Telling a Story suggests strategies for actors to switch between performance and story-telling in their approach to any role.

You would pack differently for a safari than for a trip to the arctic, right? You would behave differently at a formal banquet than at a picnic, right? For the same reasons, an actor approaching a role needs to understand the rules for behavior in the play in which the role appears — and how a specific role is evaluated by the world of the play. In the world of the play are you well-behaved? Rude? Strong? Weak? Beautiful? Most importantly: how do you survive in the world of the play ? How do you prosper? The cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict offers a model for actors to identify the pattern that gives measure to the world of any play. The study of cultural anthropology may seem far afield from the study of acting, but it isn’t really: actors adapt their behavior to the circumstances of a production the way voyagers adapt to a foreign land and learn the local customs in order to survive. Actors, though, go a few steps further than anthropologists: they inhabit the stage world as if born into it, learning an appropriate accent or learning how, circa 1965, to size up a divorced woman who is smoking a cigarette while waiting for a drink. Inhabiting the World of the Play, Part Four lays out a ten-part plan for actors to analyze a play and ways to create individual roles within plays. Inhabiting the World of the Play, Part Four gives practical applications in rehearsal and performance, explains how to apply a world of the play analysis to a text, and points actors towards available examples in film. A world of the play analysis is especially useful for plays that require heightened behavior: Shakespeare, Genet, Ionesco, for example, but also its an approach very useful for “realistic” plays. You think Neil Simon’s characters have the same rules in life or onstage as Tennessee Williams’s characters? Think again.

Modern acting begins with a question: Why? Why am I happy? Why am I sad? Why am I doing what I do? The answer, given by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian inventor of modern acting, turns out to be another question: What do I need to do? Stanislavsky suggested actors analyze a text for tasks, not objectives (that is his American translator’s idea). Getting to the Task, Part One of the Five Approaches to Acting Series, clarifies Stanislavsky’s approaches for actors within the context of the time in which it was created: the then-new science of psychology and the rich inner world of fiction. Of particular interest is Stanislavsky’s lifelong inspiration from yoga, mention of which was cut by Soviet censors and a racist American publisher. When acting becomes something you do out of necessity, action onstage becomes charged with desire, passion, and deep felt emotion. The tasks performed onstage contribute to Stanislavsky’s aim: communion with the audience, emotional and spiritual. Getting to the Task, Part One includes practical exercises for class and rehearsals, techniques for analyzing a text for tasks, techniques for maintaining and deepening performances, examples from film to study, and a useful working vocabulary. It explains how other approaches might expand Stanislavsky’s vision. Getting to the Task, Part One separates Stanislavsky from his inaccurate (and widely influential) translators and interpreters in America. Getting to the Task, Part One separates The System from “The Method” — itself the subject of Building Images, Part Three in the Five Approaches to Acting Series.

There was, for a time, an ongoing war between actors who worked from the outside in, like Laurence Olivier with his fake noses, or those who worked from the inside out, like the disciples of Lee Strasberg with their emotional memories. Yet these opponents had something essential in common to their approach to acting: what an actor does is create an image of himself. Some approaches to acting stress images are only to be taken from personal experience, the best, perhaps the only potent images, they claim, come from childhood. Some approaches to acting declare the most usable images are fantasies, the more outlandish the more freeing for performers and audiences. The source of an actor’s imagery may be different, but the techniques for applying them in rehearsal and performance are remarkably similar. Building Images, Part Three includes practical techniques for an actor to build imagery — external and internal — in rehearsal. Building Images, Part Three offers strategies for text analysis based on imagery, and offers strategies for maintaining and deepening imagery in performance. Building Images, Part Three gives examples in film and from the history of acting. It separates “the Method” from Stanislavsky’s System and explains why an actor would want to use one, or neither. Gluing on a nose or soul-searching for emotional memories, when actors discover images that move them to play, those images — whatever their source — can be built up with an approach that ignites a performance with an inner flame.

An episode is something that happens onstage that the audience understands separately from the whole of the play: Romeo reveals himself to Juliet, the Gentleman Caller breaks Laura’s heart, Didi and Gogo wait for Godot. Using an episodic approach a performer works to make each episode clear to the audience. All elements of a performance: actors, text, music, props, costumes, lights, décor, contribute to an episode as would the parts of a machine. Using an episodic approach, actors in rehearsals and performances create roles in a working ensemble, rather than emphasizing the illusion of a “realistic” character. Working to polish episodes, actors assign headlines that answer the questions What happens? To whom? — while questions of What do I want? and How do I feel? are left deliberately unanswered so as to involve the audience. Contradictions in motivation and action are kept in a dynamic opposition, unresolved by any simple-minded “super-objective.” The effect on stage is simple, direct, moving, and engaging. Episodic techniques developed in early twentieth century Russia and Germany, based on the study of Shakespeare’s texts and other non-realistic plays. Playing episodes became the international silent film technique and is still the basis of most film work. Onstage today an episodic approach is especially useful for Shakespeare, Brecht and Sam Shepard, but essential for any actor working on realistic plays — Chekhov, Ibsen, and Williams, for example — in which a mass of individual “objectives” can obscure the events and significance of the play. Playing Episodes, Part Two in the Five Approaches to Acting Series includes a useful explanation of terms, instruction in applying techniques in rehearsal and performance, practical classroom exercises, detailed script analysis, the history and theory behind the approach, as well as inspiring examples to be seen on film.

The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting by David Kaplan is the complete collection of his five approaches to acting with an additional section that deals with comparing, choosing and combing the different approaches. This is an excellent acting textbook that deals with theory and practice for both beginning and advanced actors. David Kaplan’s The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting contains his five approaches to acting: identifying tasks, playing episodes, building images, learning the world of the play, and telling a story. Each approach has its own definition of what it means to act, what it means to act well, what it means to be a character in a performance on stage, and, by extension, what it means to be a person in “real” life. Each approach covers history, theory and examples of its practice. In The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting, David Kaplan considers acting to be an art of human relationships, an art woven to other arts and sciences, to history, to psychology, to current events. Anyone interested in the study of acting will instantly realize that The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting is a comprehensive approach to studying acting. As David Kaplan explains, “If we can agree that acting involves the theory and practice of human relationships — not just the relationships of actors with actors, but of actors with audiences — then the study of acting merits attention from anyone interested in behavior, character, and a relationship to the world from which ideas about such things evolve.”