EPIGRAMS WRITTEN DURING A LIFE IN THE THEATRE
By William S. E. Coleman
Professor emeritus, Theatre Arts
Drake University
Epigram: A half-truth posing as wisdom.
OVERTURE
I started collecting and writing epigrams many years ago. They covered a lot of ground. Some are on my website. They range widely on subjects that interest me. I hope to add to them.
Recently, I decided to pull together my thoughts on theatre, artists and the arts in general. Each section that follows leads off with quotations from other artists and critics. Following these are my own epigrams and thoughts. I used many of these as I taught, directed, and wrote over many years. Some are repeated because they apply to more than one aspect of the arts of the theatre or because my editing was careless. I’d like to think I did that for emphasis.
I hope the following will amuse you and prod you into thinking about the arts, and especially the art of the theatre. I even hope a few will infuriate you. Enjoy!
THEATRE: AN OVERVIEW
Life is a curve and within it is an oblong.
Noel Coward
The stage ought to be the crossroad of the world . That’s what the greats made it. That’s what Shakespeare made it. Not a side stall in a market.
Edward Bond
If we understood the enigmas of life, there would be no need for the arts.
Albert Camus
Life is a moderately good play
with a badly written third act.
Good live theatre disturbs the molecules. You create an energy source around yourself and it alternates between yourself and the audience. Anyone who sees live theatre should come out a little renewed.
Glen Close
If theatres were abandoned and left to rot, then theatre would continue in life, it could not be suppressed, and the very nature of things would always be spectacle.
Luigi Pirandello
...in the theatre of the mind, nothing disappoints.
Ralph G. Allen
Once the theatre began as magic, magic at the sacred festival or magic as the footlights came up. Today…we must open our empty hands and show that there is really nothing up our sleeves. Only then can we begin.
Peter Brook, The Empty Space
Theatre fell to earth with the advent of the prose play. It has been grounded ever since. Will it ever fly again?
The glory of theatre is its imperfection and humanity; its grandeur is our striving to attain perfection through our humanity and never attaining it. It is us. Theatre has a perfection of its own within its imperfection. If we ever attain perfection as theatre artists, we will be superfluous.
Creating living theatre is like writing in water. Sometimes the ripples fan out in memories of the occasion, but eventually, they fade away. What is left? The blueprint, the play. That is, if it’s any good. Be ready to throw the next stone.
A theatre company is a tribal society in which the peasants are always out to kill their chief.
Theatre combines space with psychology. Its words are merely components within a greater entity.
Plays can become literature, but they are only fully realized when they become living theatre.
Theatre is one of the last handmade crafts in this mass producing, cookie cutter world. Because theatre is handmade, it is expensive. Therefore it is not available to the people who deserve to enjoy it.
Too often theatre is treated as though it’s a product – or worse still, a by-product.
Theatre is a tired old whore who, on rare occasions, gets turned on by that rare genius that emerges out of nowhere. The sad thing is that genius burns out like a falling star and spirals into nothingness, and then that tired old whore resumes going through the motions. She’s a renewable resource waiting for her next fix.
I have devoted my life to that tired old whore. Over many years she has given me great satisfaction. For that, I am eternally grateful.
Being untalented doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Just stay away from the created arts and become an audience member.
If it's better than not bad, it's worse than nothing.
The difference between genius and talent is a split second.
The arts remind of us of our humanity; athletics of our animalism.
If you are an artist and unknown, remember no one gives a shit about what you’re working on. That frees you. Enjoy!
An adequate production of a great play is not enough.
A bad production of a great play is a cultural crime.
While we all hope to earn a living as artists, that should not be our main motivation for working at our profession.
When you've combined your profession with your most beloved hobby, you've beaten the system. That’s why we work in theatre.
Theatre is like sex. No matter how many times you do it, it must remain interesting.
ART AND ARTISTS
An artist is like a martyr at the stake signaling through the flames.
Antonin Artaud in Theatre and Its Double
No one in Europe knows how to scream any more.
Antonin Artaud
Art isn't an aesthetic operation - it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.
Pablo Picasso
Everyone is a narcissist, but only artists admit it.
Ned Rorem
Art is never finished. It is abandoned
Leonardo da Vinci
The greatest artist in the world is an uninhibited child at play.
Pablo Picasso
There is only one God, and the artist is his critic.
Willa Cather
The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose - and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization.
John F. Kennedy
An artist's life is the best life in the world providing you can get through the first forty years
Thomas Hart Benton
Great works of art cannot be produced
in a barbarous society.
Kenneth Clark
It is only with the heart than one can see rightly
what is essentially invisible to the eye.
Antoine Saint Exupery
As an artist you're never satisfied.
Larry Fishburne
But, why, in heavens name, is it not possible to orchestrate a performance and not lose your sense of truth? What is an artist, if not the designer of truth?
Robert (Bobby) Lewis
director, actor, teacher
Only cows are content.
Old Folk Saying
There are two ways of spreading light:
to be the candle
or the mirror that receives it.
Edith Wharton
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
Oscar Wilde
Preface, A Portrait of Dorian Gray
When a system stops its artists from realizing their creativity, the system suffers. Artists are the soul of a civilization; and when their creativity is stifled, the system loses its soul.
When alien beings exhume our civilization, they will find the work of some of our artists, and they will wonder at the glorious achievements a handful of human beings achieved . All the rest will be decayed and gone. That includes the politics of the moment and the scores of sports events.
Genius is having an easy access to the subconscious. There, in that dark, mystic place, we are all geniuses. Some do the obvious, and find a way to let those grim secrets out.
After all, the arts are the most important endeavor of any civilization. Everything else is trivial. The arts are the mirror of us. They are our spirit. They are our real history.
All art is political. Comedy subverts with laughter; tragedy reveals the pain we suffer though the failure of political, moral, and religious systems. How can you take an important leader seriously when his pants are down? How can you not take action when a mother mourns her dead son? Therefore, all artists are revolutionaries.
The business of art is to infiltrate and subvert the establishment.
Being acceptable in art is not enough.
Rules are meant to be broken, but to break the rules you have to know them. Otherwise how do you know what you are doing?
Art conceals art.
Great art never confirms the status quo. It questions it.
Whatever you did, you've done it.
Artists want to show the world through the prism of themselves.
Listen to your artists. They're ahead of the game. That is, the good ones.
Just because a person is a bad artist doesn’t mean he or she is a bad person.
There is nothing as pitiful as an arrogant artist who has no talent.
Civilization is a battle between the metaphor and the statistic.
An artist must balance anger with empathy.
To look at the world obliquely is the first step toward being a creative artist,
No artist can interpret nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
All great art is a true lie.
Art pursues the truth, not a doctrine or ideology. If it does, it is nothing more than a political speech, and we know how boring they are.
When God created man and woman, he gave artists an infinite supply of subject matter.
Has anyone ever written a comedy about the possibility that we are all descended from incestuous ancestors? If so, that may explain a lot of human behavior.
A genius knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
Being multi-talented is the ultimate punishment of the gods.
No conservative has ever been a great artist.
NOTE: Some will argue that Aristophanes and Moliere were conservatives. The content of their work in context of their times is that they were revolutionaries. Aristophanes often had common men as heroes, which was unusual; but he didn’t think the common people of Athens had the sense to vote intelligently while they were being manipulated by tyrants. Moliere was protected by Louis XIV as he eviscerated the society and religious hypocrites around him. Louis came down hard on him more than once. Moliere was like the “all licensed” court jester “signaling through the flames” of a strict monarchy.
Conservatives love to repress artists. Why? They hate the truth when it is about the human condition of the many.
Conservatives live in the now, artists live in the forever.
Value conservatives. Only they can afford to pay good money to have artists insult their innate vulgarity.
Show me a great artist, and I’ll show you damaged emotional goods.
Life is a dream, and those who aspire to be artists must all reach deep into our subconscious and make that dream is a living, breathing reality, even when their dreams are nightmares.
We can only perceive greatness when we are surrounded by mediocrity.
Even the greatest of artistic achievements fail in some small way. That is why they are great. In many ways Hamlet is a jumbled mess. That is part of its brilliance.
Nothing exceeds like excess. The same goes for Hamlet.
Great art attacks the central nervous system.
Once we arrive at a consensus, an art form is dead.
Denying artists their voice kills the future.
Becoming an artist is a shrewd choice for a less attractive man. He learns early on that a majority of the female of the species is drawn to looks, athleticism, manner, style, and affluence. To offset this competition an artist offers sensitivity, perception, and empathy. Few females value those attributes beyond the lip service of saying they are attractive. Unfortunately, most women consider the province of the artist who is an alternative creative force, an effeminate intruder into their territory. That perception is their loss. It leads to inferior breeding with empty-headed fools and guarantees most women a life of dullness void of true passion. Too bad, but it serves them right.
Show the world through the filter of yourself.
The only absolute is the inexplicable.
The greatest challenge to an artist is writing about pain in a savage universe. That is the Everest great artists must climb.
There’s that one moment when you reach inside yourself, deep inside your own darkness, and seize the tangible intangible, and transcend yourself as you receive a precious, unexpected gift from that undiscovered country.
To be an artist, to visit the oracle of one's inner self, to capture the universal subconscious, a phantom dream is a reality one seeks in the shadows of oneself. How and where does one find it? In that dark well of oneself, not by effort, but by chance, by letting it happen.
Working out of a formula is creative coagulation.
There is an enormous disparity between an artist speaking the truth and a human being doing so in an ongoing relationship.
True morality always seems to be immoral to those who expedite morality to make it more efficient.
Artists deal in morality. That makes them a perpetual source of embarrassment to the less than moral general public – and those who would dictate our morals.
The ultimate morality is the truth.
Being an artist is transforming your inner image into an outer reality.
Today is built on yesterday. Know your art’s past.
The most important element in all the arts is content. The rest flows from it.
No artist can interpret nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
Very few people have been to the top of the mountain. Most don’t know it exists. Most of us are lucky to get into the foothills.
Artists must make their art their first language.
The irrational is more profound and complex than the rational. Truth is found in the inexplicable.
Great men and women are difficult when it comes to their artistic visions.
Some people grow up. Some don't. They’re the artists.
Being an artist is like the young woman who worked in a house of prostitution for a year and quit in a fit of rage when she found out the others women were being paid.
You can teach competence, but you can't teach genius. Genius emerges as it finds itself. Then it's unstoppable. How do you uncork the bottle? That's the key to good teaching – and directing. When you uncork that bottle, get out of the way.
Life is a dream, and we must all reach deep into our subconscious and make that dream is a living, breathing reality, even when they are nightmares.
You don't use your imagination for living. You use it for your art.
Artists look at the world from their own perspective, but they do look at the world.
The greatest risk is not taking one.
Doubt is part of the artistic process.
Know the history and traditions of your art.
Bad artists always admire each other’s works. It’s a sure way to get praise.
The business of art is to infiltrate and subvert the establishment.
All art is political. Comedy subverts with laughter; tragedy reveals the pain we suffer though the failure of political, moral, and religious systems.
Artists report what never happened.
An art explains itself through its own medium.
True art conceals its art.
If we understood the enigmas of life, there would be no need for the arts.
Pop culture is a weathervane indicating the newest form of mass madness.
Pop culture is a thermometer stuck up the rectum of a sick society.
To be a work of art of the first rank there must be an over-arching metaphor that soars above the humanity of its characters.
Great art never confirms. It affirms.
Being an artist is transforming your inner images into an outer reality.
Have something to say, and you’re on your way.
Nature’s cruelest joke is a genius.
If you have no talent, give up.
Artists never retire. They just stop sharing their art with others.
We are all artists. We are all poets. Some do the obvious and put it all down on paper, or on canvas, or on music staves. Or at least they try to. They are lucky. Life is so much better in our imaginations. (Is that all there is? Is that life? Is that existence?) Shall we escape together? Come fly with me! The Never-never Land is also the Ever-ever Land. Prepare to fail, even when you succeed.
ON DIRECTING
It’s the role of the director to take a number of egos on stage and make them into one stage ego.
Linda Robbins Coleman
I talk to an actor about what he should be thinking
rather than what he should be doing.
F. W. Murnau
Learn the lines and don't bump into the furniture.
Noel Coward
When you know how to break the rules, that's style.
Claude Chabrol
The purpose of technique is to feed the talent.
Konstantine Stanislavsky
Managing is anticipating problems.
Tony La Russa
Good directing makes people believe in themselves. The rest is details.
An acceptable production of a great play is not enough.
If it's better than not bad, it's more than bad.
Never cast a Method actor in a French farce.
Rehearsals should be designed to create a conditioned response within which creativity can happen.
When you direct, be the audience.
Too many of the designers I have worked with see their design through a picture frame and forget the actors move on the floor.
The glory of theatre is its imperfection and humanity; its grandeur is our striving to attain perfection through our humanity and never attaining it. If we ever attain that impossibility, then we who work in theatre will be superfluous.
Avoid untalented people. They mask their inadequacy by putting down the talented.
Good directing is tasteful theft.
If a person is flamboyant in life, he (or she) is usually a bad director.
There are deep emotions in stage space and how actors interact and move within it. At times these spatial relationships and movements are more profound than spoken words.
Bridging the gap between drama and comic relief requires a light touch.
Making it look easy is hard work.
Total focus and flow can only occur if you are 100% in the Now.
Drama is literature operating within spatial relationships.
Theatre combines space with psychology.
A floor plan should not be too easy. A director needs obstacles that actors must overcome. Any conflict, any tension you can put on a stage intensifies the theatrical experience and heightens the drama.
Dramatic movement is centered on a revelation growing out of conflict.
Think about casting away from type.
All blocking begins with a triangle and evolves from there.
Good blocking combines the metaphor of moving space within an environment with words, psychology, and human objectives.
There comes a time in rehearsal when everything looks bad. If it looked good before, step back and let it happen. I call it the immunity moment. The danger is stepping in and trying to improve something that is organically growing on its own. The momentum will carry it into the opening. A few deft notes will be all that is needed. It will be good.
What should those notes be about? Details, details, details, the details that are the essence of being alive and living.
What directing is, then, is assembling a production staff and a cast and fusing those elements with a play being into an evening of theatre. A director must free the talent involved with a production. Only then can everyone have access to that bottomless well that is our subconscious. There, beyond consciousness, lies that most elusive and valuable thing - genius. There we find metaphor and poetry. There we can probe the genius that exists in all of us.
Genius happens, and it emerges if it finds itself. Then it's unstoppable. How do you uncork the bottle? That's the key to good directing.
Style is making an audience believe in the time and place of the play.
Style is dependent on depth of characterization.
Put your characters in an impossible situation and let them work it out. (This also applies to playwriting)
Rehearsals create conditioned reflexes. Within these the actor is free to create.
When designers become stars, theatre becomes decadent.
The best directors create situations where actors have to react.
Technique is letting the audience see, hear, understand, and believe what is happening on stage.
Good directing is not filling a bucket. It is lighting a fire.
Props are an actor’s lifeblood.
Great directing allows the actor to discover what the director already knows.
Great directors make bold choices.
When you have selected the play, cast it, and accepted a floor plan, more than half your work is done.
Dictate only in a state of emergency. Usually that happens when an actor is woefully inadequate.
Half of a directors work is done after he or she selects the play, casts it, and agrees on a floorplan.
Look at the world obliquely when you direct.
When you get to the key moment of a play, drive it head on into the audience’s sensibilities.
A production can have only one concept.
Be prepared for every rehearsal, but also be prepared to throw away your preparation if something better comes to mind or arises during rehearsals.
Do what seems right at the time. Adjust later.
Trust your impulses. If they don’t work, go back to the drawing board.
Listen to your actors. They may have something interesting to say about their characters.
You don’t take over a show. What you do is enhance it, because the costumes are there to serve a producer’s vision, a director’s viewpoint and, most importantly, an actor’s comfort. To me, good design is design you’re not aware of.
Theoni Aldredge, designer. NY Times, 1984
Explore every possible avenue of interpretation, not by discussion, but by playing out these possibilities on the stage.
Don't get in the way of the material.
Make everything organic. Don’t impose.
Never tell an actor what to do – except in extreme emergencies. Instead, create situations where the actor has to do what you want them to do.
The greater the talent is, the easier the work is.
A director enlarges actors’ impulses.
Imagination is the guardrail that keeps you from skidding into the pit of the norm.
Artists make their art their first language.
Ignoring the needs of your audience is a form of public masturbation.
Style is making an audience believe in the time and place of the play.
If it’s working, leave it alone – or, in the folk vernacular, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
When you lose your sense of the rhythms of your time, quit.
Vicarious flew too near the fun.
ON ACTING
If it scares me, I've got to do it.
Jack Lemmon
Aspire to your strengths, use your weaknesses.
Laurence Olivier
We're actors - we're the opposite of people.
Tom Stoppard
Acting can be fun. Don't let it get around
Sanford Meisner
Man is a make-believe animal –
he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
William Hazlitt
Let the brush tell where it wants to go.
Vincente Minelli
It’s hard to play an asshole and make it work.
Al Pacino
I don't believe in astrology.
The only stars I can blame for my failures
are those that walk about the stage.
Noel Coward
Don't act. Behave.
Spencer Tracy
They make fun of us, they say actors are like children. They should live so long!
Alan Alda
You can’t really award prizes for acting anyway.
Acting is such a personal, imperfect kind of art.
Judi Dench
Actors have to watch each other's backs.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Acting is more exciting than living - more electric, more immediate than living. That's because life is full of random elements. In acting, you select, you choose the elements. This selection allows you to get to the essence of the character, the essence of an experience.
Paul Burke
You never comment or put the character down.
Robert DiNiro
Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism.
It is not quite the occupation of an adult.
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier at his best is what everyone has always meant by the phrase "a great actor." He holds all the cards; and in acting the court cards consist of (a) complete physical relaxation, (b) powerful physical magnetism, (c) commanding eyes that are visible at the back of the gallery, (d) a commanding voice that is audible without effort at the back of the gallery, (e) superb timing, which includes the capacity to make verse swing, (f) chutzpah - the untranslatable Jewish word that means cool nerve and outrageous effrontery, and (g) the ability to communicate a sense of danger.
Kenneth Tynan
Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention
and shortened period of mental assimilation.
Konstantin Stanislavsky
Acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
Sanford Meisner
I don't believe in astrology.
The only stars I can blame for my failures
are those that walk about the stage.
Noel Coward
Plant your feet, look the other guy in the eye, and tell the truth.
James Cagney
Actors! They travel the world,
all they ever see is a mirror.
Jack Driscoll’s line in the 2005 “King Kong”
A star is a self-contained mass of gas.
Dictionary definition
Great acting is joyous precision.
Good acting emerges from alert relaxation.
Never act. React. Reaction generates an honest action in your character, but only if you react in character.
Acting doesn’t exist until there is eye contact within the ensemble.
Truth is found in honest transitions.
Never blur a transition. Take the audience with you cleanly.
When the persona gets ahead of the material, you're in trouble.
Never make a moral judgment on a character. Let the audience do that.
The best acting occurs when you don’t give a damn while you give a damn.
If you are playing Hitler, be Hitler. Do not demonstrate his evil. Let us see the whole man. If there was any good within that evil soul, then that makes his wickedness all the more repulsive. If you’re playing Jesus, find his flaws, his humanity, and not his divinity. The more human he is, the more remarkable he will be as a character.
Stage fright is a seizure of adolescent insecurity.
Always be ready to enter a scene. Never rush.
Vary how you pick up your cues.
Great acting comes out of relaxed concentration, total focus, and with the mind, emotions, and body ready to react to all that was created in rehearsals.
On days of performance get to the theatre as early as they will let you in. Remove yourself from the world you live in and prepare for the world you will be living in.
When a great actor enters a scene, everything is functioning at its peak. It's as though he's in the midst of the fuck of a lifetime.
Gestures below the waist are wasted.
Move or don’t move. Don’t drift.
When you hang an entrance or exit, establish yourself when you arrive and make them remember you when you leave.
Trust your impulses. They may be wrong, but they are honest.
When you try harder, you perform less.
Always be specific. Life is lived in specific moments.
Know the externals – what is off-stage, where it is, and how far away.
Actors show private emotions publicly.
Acting in plays is "being"; acting in musicals is showing off.
Acting is knowing what you are doing and letting it happen. However, once in a while the inexplicable sneaks up on you and spices up your performance.
Once in a while let your hero behave like horse’s ass.
Technique is letting an audience see the action while not letting them know it is being shown to them.
An honest impulse is worth an hour of rehearsal analysis.
Don’t tell me. Show me!
Truth is found in the details.
Virtuosos make the profound seem easy. Sometimes they make it look too easy.
Great acting comes out of relaxed concentration, total focus; but with the mind, emotions, and body ready to react to all that was created in rehearsals.
When a great actor enters a scene, everything is functioning at its peak. It's as though he's in the midst of the fuck of a lifetime.
Some people grow up. Some don't. They’re the interesting ones.
Actors are children playing with adult emotions and ideas.
Virtuosity is making the difficult seem easy.
An actor must play an audience like a good angler.
Acting isn't about lying, it's about transformation.
Never look at the audience unless you are delivering a soliloquy or a narrative bridge.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
When the persona gets ahead of the material, you're in trouble.
Acting is looking out into darkness, a mystery.
Be sure than when you make your last exit the audience has seen your character, not you.
Acting is when you become someone else while you stand slightly outside of that someone else and make slight adjustments.
Acting only begins when there is eye contact. Beware of the actor who looks through you.
Beware of the actor who looks through you or who reads his or her lines off your forehead.
Great acting comes out of relaxed concentration, total focus; but with the mind, emotions, and body ready to react to all that was explored in rehearsals.
Rehearse so you are far ahead of your lines.
Some people walk on stage and you have to turn on a spotlight. Some walk on with the spotlight inside them.
Don't get in the way of the material.
If you don’t understand what you are saying, say it with conviction while you make it mean something.
Technique is letting an audience see the action while not letting them know it is being shown to them.
An actor must play an audience like a good angler.
Pause, breathe, and sigh judiciously. Never let an audience gets a toehold on you. Never give them time to think. Sweep them up in the action. Move them, and never ever let them control you. Be their master. They are as masochistic as a group of sycophantic fascist followers who have to be told what to do. In the end they will be grateful and your devotee for the rest of the evening.
One pause per paragraph. No more. Probably less.
Acting is the art of searching for the particular.
Acting is precision and within that precision is creativity, nuance, and subtle invention.
Let great playwrights take you by the hand and lead you to their truth.
The basis of all acting technique is the lock. It puts an edge to the action and defines it. That slight hold allows the audience to see the point of what you are doing. In comedy, it gives the audience that split second needed for the mind to recognize the comedy in what you just said. The level of comedy is established by how long you hold the lock. Subtle comedy is an infinitesimal pause. It is like a grace note. Broad comedy is a very long pause. That long moment is like a pie in the face.
When you try to learn something, you don’t.
Amateur actors move about in ways that no human being ever thought of doing.
It's hard to soar with the eagles when you're surrounded by turkeys.
An actor shows private emotions publicly. Therefore all actors are exhibitionists. Some are even flashers.
When a star is on stage, the audience thinks , “I am watching a great star.” When an actor is on stage the audience thinks it is watching a character live out reality.
Genius is found in focused relaxation.
Props are an actor’s lifeblood. Any technical director with an ounce of sense puts his or her best people on the prop crew.
Acting is the art of searching for the particular.
Trust your instincts.
When you try harder, you perform less.
Learning lines is implanting dozens of cues within conditioned reflexes. This cannot be done consciously.
Nothing exceeds like excess.
The basis of all acting technique is the lock. It puts an edge to the action and defines it. (This is especially true for comedy. See below.)
If you want to be discovered be where the explorers are. Or do I mean casting directors?
If you don’t stand in the field, lightning will never strike you.
Great comfort can be found in meaningless rituals.
When you try to learn something, you don’t.
If the acting is good, you don’t notice it.
An Actor’s Career:
a. John who?
b. Get me John Laroquette!
c. Get me a John Laroquette type.
d. Get me a young John Laroquette.
5. John who?
John Laroquette
An Actress’s Career:
a. Babe.
b. District attorney.
c. Driving Miss Daisy.
ACTING COMEDY
Laughter may seem to be only an exhalation of air, but out of that air we came; in the beginning we inhaled it; it is a truth, not a fantasy, a truth voluble of good which comedy stoutly maintains.
Christopher Fry
The ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others, that keeps me going 24 hours a day.
Dame Edith Everage (Barry Humphries)
I always find the cliché in a scene, and there always is one, then I try to get as far away from it as possible.
Marlon Brando
I think comedy is more difficult to play, and I'll tell you why. Because if you are capable of playing tragedy it means you have a great well of emotion in you - and you just push yourself off and roll downhill. That is what it is, in a scene. But, of course, you have to learn how not to spend it all at the beginning. Nurse it along so you really don't wear out or get in at the end - that you have to learn. Comedy - you really have to have that ear out and that eye on yourself. You really do. You have to be very up and very brilliant and faster, much faster than you are when you play tragedy. And that, of course, is very tiring, very exhausting. Also in comedy, breath control comes in more than it does in that other kind of thing. If you take a deep breath you can play with a sentence. There is no doubt you can get your laugh, you know, if you say it right. But if you don't take your breath - and you have to take a breath during the line - it is as if you'd gagged on something. It isn't as funny and you often miss your laugh. Mysterious, isn't it? Because you would think a line would be funny in any way, wouldn't you? All comedians tell you that.
Lynn Fontanne, Thoughts on Acting
Never put a first year Stanislavsky student in s French Farce.
Larry Blyden
All great comedy is based in pain.
Prunella Scales
Never move on a joke. I can kill a joke by movement.
It's disastrous.
Bert Lahr
One thing leads to another.
Max Sennett
Comedy is tragedy happening to someone else.
W. C. Fields
In a Marx Brothers' film a man thinks he is going to take a woman in his arms, but instead gets a cow, which moos. And through a conjunction of circumstances which it would take too long to analyze here, that moo, at just that moment, assumes an intellectual dignity equal to any woman's cry.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double
I am a great eater of beef,
and I believe that does harm to my wit.
Twelfth Night, I, iii, 92
Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me. The brain of man is not able to invent anything that tends to laughter more than I invent, or is invented on me. I am not only witty in myself, but the cause of wit is in other men.
Falstaff in Henry IV, 2, I, ii., 7-12
Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.
Edmund Kean on his deathbed
Comedy demands a varied pace in playing and also the topping of one another's tones.
Playing in an incessantly regular rhythm is the death knell of comedy.
Don’t try to get a big laugh on every comic line. Build!
Vicarious flew too near the fun.
Comedy is not incessant laughter. It must be a rising climax until you get to the topper. Then you back off and start to build again. Each rising arc is higher than the last. That is true if the writing supports your performance.
If the laughs continue to be the same size, even though they are very big, you are failing.
If you’re really desperate for a laugh, drop your trousers.
In any combat between a rogue and a fool the audience’s sympathy is always with the rogue.
Always audition for the rogue. They get the best reviews.
Fine comic acting can only happen when you are a mile ahead of the material.
Before you ad lib, write it down and check it out with your director and fellow actors.
If you want to act regularly, become a fine straight man – or woman. Good ones are a rarity.
If you can't be chic, be odd.
Great comedy puts us in an uncomfortable moral dillema.
The only vulgarity is good taste.
Don’t act funny. Be funny.
We must have an audience to have laughter. However, that audience, or rather audiences, are infinitely varied. Their tastes range from the refined and restrained to the bawdy and knockabout. The comic performer, to stay employed, must extend his or her range. Specialization is a risk, a narrowing of possibilities. We must be cautious in passing judgment on the taste of this nebulous, varied audience. And we must remember that there is one common denominator – all of us need laughter.
We appear sane when we keep our aberrations to ourselves. Comedy puts those aberrations on public view. (This is the sanity clause.)
Laughter puts calluses on our neurotic sensibilities.
All authority figures are vulgar and ridiculous. The study of the art of comedy begins and ends with them.
Don’t think. Let it happen.
The greatest comedians in the acting profession are certain members of the clergy and most politicians.
Low comedy is the slobs against the snobs enacted before a mob.
A well placed pause is a bomb waiting to go off.
Concentrate on the other actor. Then the laughter will be yours.
PLAYWRITING
"I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free."
Written on Nikos Kazantzakis' tomb on Crete.
Work is more fun than fun.
Noel Coward
You spend your whole life writing about your first twenty-five years.
Hemingway
Happiness writes white on the page
Henri Montherlant
The first draft of anything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway
Writers are shameless spies.
Tennessee Williams in Vieux Carré
Act One: Get your hero up a tree.
Act Two: Throw rocks at him.
Act Three: Get him down.
George Abbott
Two is too little. Four is too much.
Aristotle
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways.
Anyone who preservers is either talented or nuts.
Flannery O’Connor
In a world run by fools the writer can only chronicle the doings of the fools and their victims. And because the world is a cruel and heartless place, he will be accused of cruelty and heartlessness. If he thinks that the world is not only cruel and heartless but funny as well, he has given his critics an extra brickbat to fling and will be accused of not taking his subject seriously.
Joe Orton in his Journals
Words are more effective than actions;
in the right hands verbs and nouns could create panic.
Joe Orton in Head to Toe
...laughter is a serious business and comedy is a weapon more dangerous than tragedy. Which is why tyrants treat it with caution. The actual material of tragedy is equally viable as comedy - unless you happen to be writing in English, when the question of taste occurs. The English are the most tasteless nation on earth, which is why they set so much store by it.
Joe Orton, quoted in The Radio Times, August 29, 1964
Print was less refutable than the spoken word because the blast was greater; eyes could ignore, slide past, dangerous verbs and nouns. But if you lock the enemy into a room somewhere, and fire sentences at them you could get a kind of seismic disturbance.
Joe Orton in his Journals
The Church, true to Her ancient tradition, counsels chastity. The result - madness.
Joe Orton in his What the Butler Saw
The sane appear as strange to the mad as the mad to the sane. Remain where you are. I shall give you a capsule.
Joe Orton in his What the Butler Saw
You can't be rational in an irrational world. It isn't rational.
Dr. Rance in Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw
Don't pass it by —
the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.
Henry James
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland
Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar;
never spread it about like marmalade.
Noel Coward
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.
Graham Greene
Without the words on the page
We'd never stand upon the stage.
WSEC
Imagination is the guardrail that keeps us from skidding into the pit of the norm.
Write it exactly the way it never happened.
All human behavior is political.
Laughter puts calluses on our neurotic sensibilities.
All authority figures are vulgar and ridiculous. The study of the comic art begins and ends with them.
Writing short is hard. That is why there are so few perfect one-act plays.
Remember, the human race is a bunch of people trying to get laid. All human enterprise fans out from this universal truth.
Thinking something and writing it down are two very different things.
A simple declarative sentence is a thrilling thing. An incomplete one is suspenseful. A broken sentence is a flat tire on the road to truth.
Always leave something unsaid.
A good plot raises questions an audience wants answered. The longer the delay, the greater the suspense – and the better the play.
Put your characters in an impossible situation and let them work it out.
Let your characters contradict themselves. Beware of a clean through line.
The ultimate revolutionary weapon is humor. It is the scalpel that rips away the pompous robes of those who are in authority. To depose a leader take away his or her dignity. Reduce that leader to an absurdity and you will accomplished a bloodless coup. Unfortunately, too many revolutionaries are devoid of humor and embark upon their revolution unarmed.
Comedy results when you let your characters say what they think instead of what they should have said.
If you dream a great idea, wake yourself up and write it down. In the morning you will find out what an idiot you are. Or is it a surrealist?
Comedy received a mortal blow when Menander made its main interest who is going to bed with whom. All that followed was a polite form of pornography.
Invert a popular idea, and you will have comedy. Example: Have a wealthy man act like a Christian and start giving away his wealth.
Writing is between you and the page. No inhibitions are permitted. They come later when you edit. Save for improper for your own collection of epigrams.
Theories of comedy aren’t funny.
A fart joke has to grow organically out of the material at hand.
Satirists are thermometers stuck up the anus of a diseased civilization.
A good satirist pisses off the establishment.
Form rarely comes first. It arises out of the needs of the characters. Put your characters into a human conflict and let them speak. Get it down fast and dirty. Do not censor or hold back. Let it happen until it’s down on the page. At this point technique and structure are applied to the newly born characters. Form allows them to breathe and propels them into their struggle with the reality of themselves. Then, and only then, is drama or comedy born.
You really can't write about sex until you are well into your mid-life crisis. Then you dredge up all those 'what might have beens’ and all those retreats before Heaven's gate, all those failed marriages and relationships, and all those tormenting demons lurking in your subconscious. Then, and only then, can you write about sex. Until then it’s adolescent fantasies.
Thinking something brilliant and writing it down are two very different things.
Poetry takes so damned much work and returns so little profit. Why bother?
In the literary wars, the best writing comes from the losing side.
If you have no fantasies, you do not exist. Why? Realism is perception, what you choose to recognize. Therefore realism is a fantasy. Acknowledgement is the creation of existence, even if the creation is a fantasy. Reality is a fantasy that we live with because we accept it as real, even when it is improbable. All the rest is sordid and unreal. It is better not to recognize that.
All great art is a true lie.
A simple declarative sentence is a thrilling thing. An incomplete one is suspense. An overly complex sentence is a flat tire on the road to nowhere.
All great ideas are a currency that is continually being lost and found, lost and found, ad infinitum. The young think they are creating something new. They aren’t.
Life is a dream and artists must reach deep into our subconscious and make that dream a living, breathing reality, even when our dreams are nightmares.
We must learn to lie with ambiguity. That is the only way to find the truth.
I consider the world to be a huge steaming crock of shit, and my job as a writer is to empty it into the maw of a gullible public.
Find a primal fear, and you’re on your way to writing a truly frightening play.
Art is its own reality.
Dramatic movement is centered on revelation growing out of conflict.
The two periods when the subconscious was put on stage were in Ancient Greece and the Jacobean era.
You really can't write about sex until you are well into your mid-life crisis. Then you dredge up all those 'what might have beens’ and those retreats before Heaven's gate, those failed marriages, and all those tormenting demons of your subconscious. Then, and only then, can you write about sex.
A great artist takes you somewhere you've never been before, and you discover you are home.
Don't get in the way of the raw material.
Don't let your writing style get in the way of your characters. Decadence lies in that direction.
If you want to write a period play, eliminate contractions.
One pause per paragraph. Maybe none.
Genius is easy access to the subconscious, but it can only emerge when the preparation is total.
Godot came in his right hand.
Rigid belief is a cancer on the human mind and stops an artist short of his best work.
Time is memory, and meaning within time is an untidy chaos. Even the present is disorderly. Logic is the ultimate human conceit. It does not exist except in the artificial systems we construct. They are meaningless and pointless. Their only value is their lovely symmetry. In the end they are gloriously trivial and useless. They are decorations devised by human minds too cowardly to embrace the chaos of their world and their universe.
If you have no fantasies, you do not exist. Why? Realism is perception - what you choose to recognize - therefore realism is a fantasy. Acknowledgment is the creation of existence, even if the creation is a fantasy. Reality is a fantasy that we live with because we accept it as real, even when it is improbable. All the rest is sordid and unreal. It is better not to recognize that.
Irony grabs you by the throat and leaves you forever changed.
Form rarely comes first. It arises out of the characters and their conflict. It is then that technique and form are applied to the newly born characters and their dilemma. Form gives them their first breath, their first struggle with the reality of themselves and then drama or comedy is born.
The greatest theatrical productions exist in the minds of playwrights. The job of directors, designers, and actors is to come close to that vision.
In my mind I have written the great American play. Somehow it won’t come out on the page.
GENIUS AND WHATEVER:
Afterthoughts
A genius is someone who is either unavailable or dead.
Orson Welles
There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
Socrates
A great artist takes you somewhere you've never been before, and you discover you are home.
A professional gets it done. An artist reaches for the stars.
Genius is focused relaxation.
Genius knows when to stop.
Artists don't know what they are doing, but they do it.
Genius arises from the combined abilities to extrapolate and to apply. It is best realized when one has easy access to one's subconscious.
Talent can get you into a lot of trouble.
A great artist knows and understands things he ought not have known or understood. Where did Shakespeare learn all that stuff?
If you can clearly define a talent, it is incomplete.
Each generation discovers old ideas for the first time.
It's hard to soar with the eagles when you're surrounded by turkeys.
PLAYING THE GREATS & NOT-SO-GREATS
On Shakespeare by Allucruncules:
"Surely poor Shakespeare has a very bad hap,
For he still has a running, and still has a clap.".
The Gentleman, April, 1748, p. 184
Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we sicken, we die). But comedy was the gods’ view, from on high: our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it. The big, drunk, flawed, horny Greek gods watched us for entertainment, like a dirty, funny, violent, repetitive cartoon. And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our own follies.
Julian Gough
Greek tragedy taught me one thing: No matter what you do, fate has you by the balls.
You can never give a complete performance of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes.
You can play one of Chekhov’s major characters all of your life, and you will make new discoveries each time out.
Shaw was smarter than all of us. Accept that and say his words. But look and sound intelligent. The Brits are very good at that.
Melodrama pisses on the art of the theatre. The same goes for sentimentality.
Samuel Becket is overrated.
Tennessee Williams combines neuroses with poetry.
Arthur Miller combines structure with awkward dialog.
Thornton Wilder puts it all together.
Philip Barry combines grace, style, and wit.
Nature's joke is that it makes us horny before we can handle it. Thus we need bedroom farce.
Pinter saw drama as an overheard conversation. In a restaurant or on a subway, you can hear two or three people talking, but they never explain their relationships or the subject of their conversation. The burden is on the eavesdropper to figure it out.
The two periods where the subconscious was put on stage was in Ancient Greece and during the Jacobean era.
If you are cast in a mediocre play, fill in the blanks with yourself.
The failure of the avant-garde is its inability to take time to develop characters who live or breath.
The sooner Oedipus realizes he has caused Thebes’ catastrophe, the more heroic he becomes.
The brilliance of the avant-garde is in developing new theatre language.
Shakespeare is a messy artist. His untidiness is epic. It is his greatest virtue.
Oscar Wilde is intensely tidy in an unruly sort of way.
Talthybius in Euripides’ The Trojan Women is the ultimate ‘suit.’ He expresses his regret as he carries out the murderous orders he has been given by his superior.
Creon in Sophocles Antigone is paranoid just as all leaders must be if they wish to survive and retain their authority. This play is his tragedy.
You can’t play a symbol just as you can’t play a type.
Chekhov has endless possibilities. Do him the best you can and hope you can do the role again. By then, you may be too old for it.
Ibsen has few character surprises.
Ibsen's relentless logical structure removed Fate from the Universe and put it into his own pen. Then he became the god who tormented his characters.
OR A VARIATION: Ibsen’s structure replaces the Greek gods as an inexorable Fate.
No writer ever depicted the inherent tensions between men and women better than August Strindberg. No one was crazier. Perhaps his perception of the dilemma we all face drve him mad?
Thornton Wilder is vastly underrated. Time may prove he was the greatest playwright of his time.
Movement in Shaw is discovered in his characters’ titanic debates.
The three most cosmic plays are Shakespeare’s King Lear, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and Euripides’ The Bacchae. They are the Mount Everests of the theatre. To attempt to climb them is the supreme privilege of being a theatre artist.
Moliere proves that human gullibility is eternal, but Aristophanes got there long before he did.
THE CRITICS
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
Oscar Wilde - Preface to Dorian Gray
Critics are people who come down after the war and shoot the dead.
G.B. Shaw
I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise.
Noel Coward
Don't pay any attention to the critics.
Don't even ignore them.
Samuel Goldwyn
When a man misses one target by yards, it is kinder to assume that he was aiming at another.
Kenneth Tynan, Curtains
Prepare yourself for the critics failure to see your greatness.
A critic is a eunuch who works in a whorehouse.
Newspaper critics are invariably unqualified to do that they do.
Walking out of a bad performance is the ultimate form of criticism.
Those who can do do, those who can’t do become critics and create do-do.
If you have no artistic talent, become a critic.
Critics have everything to say about nothing.
Academic critics don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.
Academic critics make fine distinctions where none exist.
Directing a play is the ultimate form of dramatic criticism.
Time is what it seems,
not what it is.
The process of gaining wisdom begins
when you go from complete certainty
to complete ignorance.
This web page was created on June 6, 2011
