The Intent To Live: Achieving Your Full Potential As An Actor - Hardcover

Moss, Larry

 
9780553802078: The Intent To Live: Achieving Your Full Potential As An Actor
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553802070 ISBN 13: 9780553802078
Verlag: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

“I call this book The Intent to Live because great actors don’t seem to be acting, they seem to be actually living.”
–Larry Moss, from the Introduction

When Oscar-winning actors Helen Hunt and Hilary Swank accepted their Academy Awards, each credited Larry Moss’s guidance as key to their career-making performances. There is a two-year waiting list for his advanced acting classes. But now everyone–professionals and amateurs alike–can discover Moss’s passionate, in-depth teaching.

Inviting you to join him in the classroom and onstage, Moss shares the techniques he has developed over thirty years to help actors set their emotions, imagination, and behavior on fire, showing how the hard work of preparation pays off in performances that are spontaneous, fresh, and authentic.

From the foundations of script analysis to the nuances of physicalization and sensory work, here are the case studies, exercises, and insights that enable you to connect personally with a script, develop your character from the inside out, overcome fear and inhibition, and master the technical skills required for success in the theater, television, and movies.

Far more than a handbook, The Intent to Live is the personal credo of a master teacher. Moss’s respect for actors and love of the actor’s craft enliven every page, together with examples from a wealth of plays and films, both current and classic, and vivid appreciations of great performances. Whether you act for a living or simply want a deeper understanding of acting greatness, The Intent to Live will move, instruct, and inspire you.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Larry Moss studied his craft with such luminaries as Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and Warren Robertson. He began his career at New York’s famed cabaret Upstairs at the Downstairs and went on to appear on Broadway in numerous productions. After teaching at Juilliard and Circle in the Square, Moss returned to Los Angeles and founded the Larry Moss Studio in 1990. His directing credits include the off-Broadway hit The Syringa Tree, which won the 2001 Obie for Best Play of the Year, and a new play opening on Broadway in spring 2005.

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1


Given Circumstances:
Building from the Ground Up


Eighteen years ago I was invited to a dinner that was given expressly to introduce me to the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler. It was a small, elegant gathering of eight at which everyone was dressed up, no one more than Stella, who appeared in a floor-length red gown with jewels adorning the famous Stella Adler cleavage. I'd already studied script analysis with Ms. Adler for three years. But since her lecture classes included seventy-five or more people and Ms. Adler did all the talking, I knew she probably wouldn't remember me.

Except for size, the dinner party was not dissimilar to the lecture course, and I once again said nothing. As Stella discoursed on George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen, everyone at the party, many of whom were as famous as she, hung on her every word. I was seated at Ms. Adler's right. When we finished our entree, she suddenly turned to me and asked imperiously, "What do you do, young man?" "Well," I said, "I'm an acting teacher, Stella." Her eyes blazed for a moment and then she said, challengingly, "And what do you teach?" And I said, almost shyly, "I was in your script analysis class for three years and I'm hoping to carry on some of the traditions and techniques that I learned from you." Stella impulsively and startlingly grabbed my hand, stared me straight in the eye, and passionately blurted out, "Don't let it die! I beg of you, please pass these ideas on." Then she put her head down and began to weep. At which point everyone else at the table, including me, also began to weep. So there we were, eight theater people with our heads in what remained of our chicken dinners, gurgling and gasping at how much our love for the art of acting meant to each of us and what we wanted it to mean for the next generation. This book is part of my keeping this promise to her.

I'm going to teach you acting from the beginning, and the beginning is script analysis.

In a way, the technique of script analysis is comparable to the process a detective uses to solve a mystery. Just as the detective learns to examine and understand the lives of the people involved in his case (their backgrounds, their relationships, their behaviors, their motives), you will use the technique I'm teaching you to examine and understand the lives of your character and the other characters in a script and see them as real people with real lives, and in so doing you will begin to discover the overall dynamic of that play or film. You'll be able to define precisely what drives your character, the other characters, and the story.

If this sounds like an intellectual exercise, I want to assure you that nothing in this book is simply an intellectual exercise. Everything I'm teaching you about acting has one aim only: to fire you up emotionally and behaviorally so that you can give a vivid, involving, and memorable performance. So when I talk to you about using your mind, ultimately it's to use your mind to carbonate your emotions and imagination. You know how soda is carbonated? It's not just flat in the glass; it's filled with bubbles rising, bumping into each other, bursting, alive. That's the point of everything I'm teaching you--to make you not act but live.

Given circumstances is the term used in acting for everything the writer tells you in the script about your character and the situation they find themselves in. Given circumstances are the facts; they are the information that is not subject to debate. In other words, given circumstances are irrefutable. They are the ground on which you build your creative choices, the only place you can begin. Later, we'll talk about your interpretation of a role, but the facts are the facts and you cannot afford to overlook them.

I know this sounds obvious, but I've seen actors forget that the character they are playing has been written to have a cold, or is entering from a snowstorm, or has just found out that his mother has a fatal disease--the kind of given circumstance that should color how you play a scene from the moment of your entrance.

To the extent that a character's actions toward and reactions to other characters are specified in the script, they are also part of the given circumstances. Anything the script tells you about who your character is or about what the character has done before the story starts is part of the character's given circumstances.

That's why it's so important to read the text. And read it again, until nothing in the script is vague to you. I've heard some actors say, "Well, I didn't even read the whole screenplay, I just read the scenes I'm in." I think that's irresponsible and arrogant, because the given circumstances are so integral to the work that you can't give a full performance without including them.

I'm going to give you several examples of given circumstances to make the idea clear to you and I'm going to begin with the given circumstances of one of history's greatest plays, Hamlet. At the beginning of the play, Shakespeare tells you that Hamlet's father is dead and that Hamlet has come home to Denmark to mourn and to be with his mother, Gertrude, who has quickly, and shockingly, married his dead father's brother, Claudius. In the last scene of Act I, Hamlet is told by his father's ghost that Claudius has murdered him and the ghost asks Hamlet to avenge his death. Through the ghost, Hamlet learns that his mother is complicit with his evil uncle, but whether she knew about the murder or simply lusted indecently for Claudius seems open to interpretation, and this ambiguity creates more torment for Hamlet. The ghost also tells Hamlet that while Hamlet must take revenge on Claudius, he should leave Gertrude to heaven and her own inner turmoil. If you're playing Hamlet, the fact of your father's death, why you have returned, and the ghost's visit, as well as the information the ghost imparts, are not subject to debate. Hamlet's father is not just possibly dead, nor did Hamlet return to Denmark because he wants to marry his girlfriend, Ophelia, or celebrate the hasty wedding of his mother and uncle. His father's death, Hamlet's grief, the ghost's appearance and demand for revenge against Claudius, and Gertrude's unseemly lack of mourning are the absolutes; they are the given circumstances.

Taken all together, the given circumstances--the facts that the writer gives you--are the foundation of the performance; what you add to that foundation is your specific interpretation. Will you choose to make Hamlet an angry, aggressive character, a muted, tormented, self-hating character--or both? The text Shakespeare gives you allows for these and other interpretations. That is the actor's job: to interpret. But you cannot change the basic facts of the script, and if you ignore these facts your performance will begin to fall apart and the play or film will not make any sense.

A couple of years ago in my class, two young actors were presenting one of the final scenes from Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull. In the scene, the young writer, Treplyev, begs Nina, an actress whom he's long loved unrequitedly, to make him part of her life. She rejects him cruelly by expressing her passionate love for another man, Trigorin, a more successful writer whom Treplyev envies. At this point, the actor playing the tormented Treplyev started to beat the actress playing Nina and throw her about the room. The startled young actress began to speed through her final monologue so that she could escape with her life, after which Treplyev, as the script demands, burned every piece of his writing, put a gun to his head, and ended his life.

In my critique, I asked the actor where he found the evidence in the text to support his choice to be physically aggressive toward Nina right before he blows...

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Verlag
Bantam Dell Pub Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553802070
ISBN 13 
9780553802078
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
358
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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