E-Zine | February 2008 Issue

You can "act" and pretend, or you can create truth.

When actors "fake" an emotion it is called "indicating" or being "presentational." This always takes away from the individual performance and then the scene and perhaps the entire film loses the audience's sense of belief.

I am a director in Los Angeles, California, but I have studied Method Acting for years and, in the past, I was an acting coach. It is my belief that through this very intense system, an actor can learn a craft that will allow him or her to bring real truth of emotion to any role or audition.

The American approach to Method Acting started with The Group Theatre. Harold Cluman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg formed the Group Theatre in New York in 1931. The group was a pioneering attempt to create a theater collective, a company of players trained in a unified style and dedicated to presenting contemporary plays. Others involved in the group included Elia Kazan, Stella Adler, John Garfield, Luther Adler, Will Geer, Howard Da Silva, Franchot Tone, John Randolph, Joseph Bromberg, Michael Gordon, Paul Green, Clifford Odets, Paul Strand, Kurt Weill and Lee J. Cobb.

While working at The Group Theatre, Lee Strasberg developed what became known as The Method. Based on the ideas of the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, it was a system of training and rehearsal for actors that base a performance upon inner emotional experience, discovered largely through the medium of improvisation.

This system has evolved and mutated as it passed through a variety of mentors and their personalized styles. My approach came through Eric Morris and then Rob Reese whom I studied under for a few years.

I have seen stiff, guarded, shutdown actors open up and bring powerful emotions to their work through this form of training and discipline. I believe that any dedicated actor who has a serious dream and a commitment to doing good work as an actor would be deeply affected by this discipline.

Through a series of exercises the actor learns to change his "being state" or "emotional state" to be in line with the emotion his or her character is required to be feeling in any given scene. Then, the actor comes from that state as he or she moves through the given scene. This way the actor is not acting, but being, and the audience is moved by witnessing real emotions instead of indicating or presenting the character's emotions in a false way.

This approach to acting is a process that the actor commits to and is in a constant state of learning. Once entering this approach, actors find an endless source of rich emotional life based on their own personal experiences.

To be an artist takes courage, commitment and a willingness to dig deep into him or herself in order to mine the gold.

Roy Eisenstein is a seasoned veteran of comedy and hidden camera reality television Living in Los Angeles. He has collaborated and worked with many U.S. networks including Animal Planet, Comedy Central and ABC. He has made a career of developing and pioneering comedy vehicles shaping the genre. His credits also extend to the stage, having written and directed several plays on the West Coast.

PRODUCTION NOTES
Perspectives and POVs in the biz

The Way of Acting 101
by Lawrence Espinosa

For it is not a game of charades, this acting world of ours; it's the everlasting search for truth!
— Laurence Olivier

I am an actor. This is how I think of myself.

Last year I accepted an invitation to act in a dramatic amateur production of Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Despite the obvious typecasting — the role was that of a doctor (who happens to be one of the leading character of the play by the way) — I experienced some trepidation. I thought to myself: "These students are on their way to a great career. I'm going over my head or my hair literally."

Still and all I went straight away to six weeks of serious rehearsals and performances — including growing my beard — amidst all of the chaos, I was running in between work, meetings and attending to student concerns.

Now, coming from an academic perspective, it is imperative that I assess my acting debut in the fine City of Cebu. What did I learn and why am I still here?

I learned to be myself again. It was like coming from the inside to outside that my old feeling resurfaced. I found myself in reverie of emotions that I felt before when I was acting on stage or on screen — primeval emotions, a trance sense of my own romanticism long subdued. Could this be a resurgence of my acting career at this late stage in my life?

I said, "no way!"

Onstage, if a line is thrown off tempo or is grammatically changed, the whole show goes amiss. Unlike acting on film, you can still repeat the performance until you hear the word "cut!" — hoping that your director is satisfied with your performance.

To this date, I watch actors with an eye and ear. I observe how they connect, how they feel for each other and, to quote Sanford Meisner, "living truthfully in imagined circumstances." Believing in the old saying that "There are no great actors, only great (or not so great) ensembles." I just wonder where the saying started? It must have been a metaphor for life? A personal interconnectivity? I believe it is!

I learned to "pace" myself again, which means being "up" and "down". I learned to sense the audience inertia as if I were measuring it by caliper. And like any live show, your audience can sometimes be listless. As a senior actor, I gave everybody a bit of exercise to calm his or her mood. You must not let the world control your mood — as for the actors, they must control their own self. Don't you think the world is a stage? Figure it out.

So far, some of the lessons I learned have been enlightening. I saw creative students on the ground, experiencing the intensity of commitment to a life in the arts. It was after all their universal desire to perform, to move, to convince and to entertain.

As for me, it was like an unforgettable moment in an actor's life — a long journey in search for truth, which is the foundation stone of an actor's art. My search continues.

An accomplished thespian formally trained in Theatre Arts with a degree from the University of the Philippines, Lawrence Espinosa appeared in prominent theatre companies such as Tanghalang Pilipino, Bulwagang Gantimpala Theatre Foundation and Dulaang UP and UP Repertory Company. He has likewise appeared in television and film productions, television commercials and TV telenovelas (ABS- CBN, GMA 7 and Regal Films). He has similarly done successful behind-the-scenes efforts such as directing and coaching actors having worked on various forms of the creative craft, from straight plays to operas and films. He works with students as well as professional actors, singers and famous playwrights. As a director, he has supervised all creative elements of a theatre/film production.

A Love for the Craft