John Gabriel Borkman

Context:

Reading reviews of the Abbey Theatre production of John Gabriel Borkman that played recently at BAM sent me as well in search of reviews of other notable productions of past years. I found similarities in critical attitudes toward the play regardless of the production. This post is not a critique of any production, but rather thoughts stimulated by responses to those productions.

Comment:

Ibsen’s first plays were Romantic verse dramas steeped in Norse legend, history, sagas, culminating in the twin peaks of Brand and Peer Gynt. Mid-career, he switched to prose and to a realism alive with the vibrant tug of war between Romanticism, whose poetry extends experience to the far reaches of the imagination, and Naturalism, which confines drama to the world of immediate perception. Ibsen transformed the Naturalistic elements of the well-made play and the drama of ideas into a “poetry of the theatre", as Cocteau called it. He replaced the poetry of language with a poetry of visual imagery: evocative décor, clothing suggestive of character, objects as extensions of character (Hedda is a loaded pistol), lighting illuminating not only a room but the psychology of character and situation, dialogue sounding like ordinary speech yet carrying layers of meaning—to this day still pretty much the model of theatrical and media storytelling.

In his last plays the poetry of imagery, metaphor, and allusion intensifies the relationship between the world of the five senses and the Romantic world of Norse mythology and sagas.

The demons of the unseen world help fuel Hedda’s passion, trapped in its bourgeois parlor:

Hedda: (nervously, pacing the room) Well, it’s—these things come over me, just like that, suddenly. And I can’t hold back. (Throws herself down in the armchair by the stove.) Oh, I don’t know myself how to explain it.

That world hovers just out of sight in Master Builder Solness’s messianic connection to the other realm of servers and helpers; Hilda Wangel arrives almost as a Romantic agent of the troll world.

In John Gabriel Borkman, Romanticism insists, Naturalism pushes back, and Romanticism insists even more forcefully than in the immediately preceding plays, pushing toward symbolism and expressionism. (The three main characters are among ‘the already dead’.) The struggle of the individual to discover and to free a whole self is a fundamental theme in all of Ibsen’s prose plays, but in this play something of his profound belief in the significance of human lives, of Human Life, leads him back to the grand mythic underpinnings of his early verse plays.

A responsive reading of the description at the opening of each act evokes the theatrical poetry of character, place, atmosphere, and spiritual condition. It is a mistake for a reader of this play to breeze through these descriptions. If the reader is an actor, paying attention to these descriptions is essential.

There are those who profess that good acting has no need for “character” or “characterization”; that if an actor is well-cast all he or she need do is respond truthfully to immediate circumstances and the drama will just happen. But in great plays like this, the necessary character of the character is more complex and specific than any one actor can embody just by being truthful and responding to imaginary circumstances. Character must be created. Storytelling style must be created.

In John Gabriel Borkman the details of character as Ibsen describes them are as evocative as the details of the environment of each act. A miner’s son of medium height, strongly and compactly built, distinguished appearance with chisled profile, piercing eyes, curling grayish-white hair and beard. Does this mean tall actors need not apply? No. But they must ask themselves what is it about Borkman that makes Ibsen want him to be of medium height; what is the “meaning” of this? A miner’s son, medium height, strongly and compactly built: Working class origins; feet planted on the ground; a solid spine settled in his hips; not easily shaken or knocked off balance; a physical power, perceptible even under the suit coat and starched shirt of the banker he became.

His wife Gunhild calls him “a sick wolf”. He paces (Ibsen describes him always with his hands behind his back—why?). He growls (Ibsen is pointed in this).

A lone sick wolf pacing and growling is dangerous--and one with nothing to get his hands on is even more so.

The audience must experience the animal danger in the human movements.

Borkman describes himself as  “a wounded eagle”.  And Ibsen gives the wounded eagle piercing eyes. This eagle longs for restoration to former glory and the freedom to soar once again—which for him means doing what? 

How does this express itself in his behavior, his very animating energy?

Cast Alan Rickman in the role and you’ve cast a good actor who can respond truthfully to given circumstances.

But his sick wolf will likely have a lean and hungry, and probably a slightly effete, look.

The need for freedom and power of the Rickman Borkman eagle with piercing eyes will likely be venal, selfish, cold. And inner.

And will you get the son of a miner, of stocky and compact build? Not likely.

This Borkman might do well to absorb something of Liam Neeson. Or Javier Bardem.

He’s an Industrialist-Capitalist, Robber Baron, Financier. There are lots of Nineteenth Century models for this part of his character. He is driven to power, yes, but power to do what? Is it simple greed? Egotistical Ambition?

He is deeply passionate, with a single-minded obsession toward greatness. He has an artist’s drive, a poet’s heart and soul. I think that’s the most important thing about him. It’s his elemental driving force. And it is precisely what the actor can animate in himself to begin his creative work of characterization: the driving need to create, to achieve, to make a mark.

Through all of Act I we hear Borkman pacing up and down the length of the upstairs salon gallery. When we first encounter him in Act II, he is standing by the piano, hands behind his back, listening as Frida Foldal plays the last measure of the Danse Macabre. (In the following, I’ve combined his first several lines, eliminating the questions Frida asks to encourage him to keep talking.)

Can you guess where I first heard such music as this? It was down in the mines. I’m a miner’s son as I guess you know. And my father took me down with him sometimes, into the mines. Down there the metal sings. When the ore is loosened. The hammer blows that loosen it—they’re like the midnight bell that strikes and sets it free. And so the metal sings—for joy—in its way. It wants to come up into daylight and serve mankind.

This prepares for the soaring poetry of the climax of the play when, from deep within his heart, muscular, visceral poetry finally bursts out:

Ella, do you see those mountain ranges there—far off. One after another. They leap skyward. They tower in space. That’s my deep, my endless, inexhaustible kingdom!

Yes, she answers, but the wind blows ice-cold from that kingdom.

That wind works on me like the breath of life. It comes to me like a greeting from captive spirits. I can sense them, the buried millions. I feel the veins of metal, reaching their curving, branching, beckoning arms out to me. I saw them before me like living shadows—the night I stood in the bank vault with a lantern in my hand. You wanted your freedom then—and I tried to set you free. But I lacked the strength for it. Your treasures sank back in the depths. (His hands outstretched) But I’ll whisper to you here in the silence of the night. I love you, lying there unconscious in the depths and the darkness! I love you, you riches straining to be born—with all your shining aura of power and glory! I love you, love you, love you!

Critics regularly call him mad, talk about his ‘lunacy’. But Borkman is mad only if the play he’s in is social realism. Measured by the criteria of ordinary realism, Medea is mad; she’d escape the death penalty by reason of insanity. 

If Borkman is not mad, it’s because the world of his play is not simply realistic—that it reaches as far and as deep as Romantic poetry can take it.        

In his essay The Memory of Heroism, Robert Brustein writes this of the Greek tragic hero: 

Daring to transcend philosophy, daring to outface Necessity, the hero stretches the outer boundaries of his limitations to their uttermost, and, in the consequent rending and tearing, establishes new boundaries towards which men may strive. Greek tragedy, at the same time that it contains some of the most profound wisdom, is the noblest act of resistance in literature. (1960)

Something of this applies to Borkman and though he may fail to scale the tragic heights to Greek stature, he does everything in his late Nineteenth Century power to do so.

And the play reminds me of Michelangelo’s last sculptures, the captives, and their perceivable struggle to free themselves toward tragedy heights, to resist, to push against monumental forces, to reach to the gods. Romanticism struggling with Naturalism to reach for something else.

For Borkman, there are “the spirits of the gold”.

Ibsen insisted that all his characters are passionate and that implies visceral engagement, kinesthetic involvement, muscles, not simply ‘feelings’, which too often result in shrieking voices and tense bodies in untrained actors and in professionals only well-modulated voices and too controlled, too relaxed bodies. 

There is danger in true passion—the possibility of the destructive unexpected not simply the over-heated emotional. Perhaps a bit of the brawling Russell Crowe of Gladiator needs be added to our evolving Rickman Borkman.

The Romantic tragic beings of all three major characters–Borkman, Ella, and Gunhild--are mythic in their passions. They are Titans. And the force of Norwegian-Lutheran-Victorian strictures combined with the restraints of Naturalism work mightily to rein in Romantic passions that have the power of volcanos, of earthquake tremors, of lava leaping into the night air.

In JGB there are two dramas playing out: The surface Naturalistic conflict and the deeper Romantic mythic clash of Titans. Actors must play both simultaneously. Create these powerful oppositions in spine and human will, in muscles and voice—not just with physical twitches and safe, shallow emotional outbursts, even if, as the New Yorker BAM review describes it, “the trio performs with full braying force”.

I’m thinking more Jason and Medea and less George and Martha.

How to achieve the necessary physical, kinesthetic involvement to create the Romantic-Naturalistic Shapeshifters of this play?

Work at it. Go into action:

Embody Viking heroes and Norse gods storming the universe and then immediately morph into bankers shuffling papers and wives crocheting doilies.

Then back again at the clap of the director’s hands.

Try: The superhero Borkman versus The Superhero Ella. Miner’s Son-Sick Wolf-Wounded Eagle versus Towering Radiant Lava Jet Encased in Black Silk Armor.

Then the Gunhild superhero joins them. She may be ice, but deep within burns a blue-white raging fire—is it love or is hate?

Within scenes, switch back and forth from Naturalistic Human Being to Hero of Norse saga, like The Hulk or Transformers do, while continuing to respond truthfully to all stimuli in the situation.

Borkman might be a Titan of the other world. Like Prometheus he is bound to the upstairs gallery. And Gunhild and Ella are goddesses Ice and Fire that plague him.

Apply all this to the quality of Borkman’s pacing. To the Gunhild/Ella faceoff that starts the play.

The anguish of these people goes deeper than we ordinary folk seem capable of. From the moment Ella comes back into their lives, when the forces working on all three finally burst the surface and reveal themselves to the cosmos--from which Ibsen demands attention (I can see him shaking his fist at the heavens demanding that–pace Arthur Miller--attention must be paid!)--they can speak in such extremes because Ibsen believes their situation reaches into the life of myth, springs from primordial roots and extends to the ear of God himself. Giving voice to that which is beyond ordinary language, their speech reaches for the heights of true poetry.

So the voice must be one with the body. Actors must be able to burst into Wagnerian arias and duets or into elemental vocalized Martha Graham dance without so much as a moment needed to prepare.

Perhaps during a scene, shapeshift immediately from Wagnerian magnificence to John Galsworthy class-conscious smallness, maintaining the force of the Wagnerian within the confines of the Galsworthyesque. And back again.

At a clap of the hands.

What’s the suspense when these gods must further suppress their kinesthetic impulses as they deal with mere mortals: with Mrs. Wilton and Foldal and even Erhart the son?

What happens to Erhart in Act III when he must confront this trio of Titans? When he must become Erhart the Superson?

That Act III confrontation of Borkman, Gunhild, Ella as they vie for Erhart’s soul is the point at which critics blame the play for failing, for falling into ludicrous melodrama. But what does the play ask of its actors so that this confrontation becomes the major crisis rather than a major letdown? How must it play so that it prepares for the elevation to poetic tragedy on the hilltop at the climax of the play in the next act? 

Certainly not the affectless underplaying, or its over-wrought emotional counterpart, of contemporary realistic media acting.

Try creating the situation as a cosmic tug of war: Gunhild on one planet, Ella on another, Borkman on a third, and Erhart in the center of the solar system resisting as each tries to pull him into her(his) own orbit.

By the way, why does Ibsen give Borkman ‘curly grayish-white hair and beard’?

How this story is told is as important to its meaning as what the story is about.

What price Glory? Power? Achievement?

What does the troll of Single-minded, Driving Passion demand in return for its gift?

What will the gods of All-consuming love, of Obsession, exact from the human being captured by their powers?

What claims do we have on one another? What responsibilities? With what result?

What place Restitution Restoration Redemption?

Some critics of the play suggest that all the drama has happened in the past and in the present all we get is discussion, perhaps revelation. Well, what is the drama of revelation?  What is the suspense of Borkman’s waiting to be restored as a champion to the land of the living? What’s the drama of a Titan in the underworld waiting to be admitted back into the light, to ascend the heights of Olympus once again?

And in moments of revelation come moments of extraordinary realization. What does Ella realize in her upper room encounter with Borkman? What must Borkman put to words that he has for years not spoken?

And on and on: Where is the drama?

The fundamental challenge for actors and directors of this play, it seems to me, is to create the reality of people with great Romantic tragic souls and spirits bound by the trappings of a materialistic, post-industrial world. We must believe that the man who paces up and down the upstairs gallery is capable of reaching out into the hills beyond his house and with his own hands wresting iron ore from beneath the mountains; that the woman who sits and crochets in the parlor below could hurl a lightning bolt across the galaxy to fry her sister and her husband; that the sister who for years has accepted her lot could engulf them all in the bubbling lava of her rage and/or her love.

Without these powerful realities, the situations will indeed shrink to creaky melodrama, over-blown dialogue, laughable in its excess rather than profound in its tragic poetry; the verbal and emotional bombast of a shallow reality rather than the vocal and visceral manifestation of a deep, even tragic, primordial experience. 

Since I started writing this, I’ve been imagining working on the play this way with Rickman and Fiona Shaw. That’s a rehearsal process I could get into.

Now if only we could get Cherry Jones to join us.

Short Films, David Mamet and Katharine Hepburn

Question:

I am a recently graduated actor, and I'm excited to get experience acting in film by acting in student shorts. I have just been cast in two, both as the female lead, and I would like to make sure I do everything within my power as an actor to aid the quality and success of these two projects.

I once heard a writer say 'Good actors can make miracles out of bad writing.' 

On the other hand, in this brilliant letter from David Mamet to the writers of the The Unit, Mamet says:

If the scene is not dramatically written, it will not be dramatically acted. There is no magic fairy dust which will make a boring, useless, redundant, or merely informative scene dramatic after it leaves your typewriter.  You the writers, are in charge of making sure every scene is dramatic. ... if the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it will bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we’re all going to be back in the breadline.  Someone has to make the scene dramatic. It is not the actor’s job (the actors job is to be truthful).  It is not the director’s job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly and remind the actors to talk fast. It is your job.

So if Mamet is right, and if at first read I find the scripts of these short films untruthful, then this is not a sign of poor writing, it is only the sign of my work as an actor before it's begun?

It is my job as an actor to make these stories believable, no matter what the circumstances, correct?

Let's speak in extremes for the sake of example and say these stories could never ever ever happen. Does an actor have the power to still make them believable?

I might have more than one ultimate question hidden in all of this. I do not at all mean to say that these scripts are poorly written. I just want to better understand how I can best contribute as an actor to the story telling of these short films. I want to make sure my outlook is most helpful. Is the answer something like 'As long as you have a goal and a means to pursue that goal, you can do good work as an actor, in any production setting and with any script' ?

Response:

Whew.

You have a lot of stuff roiling around in here, haven’t you?

Let me start by saying first--

The following two statements are not mutually exclusive:

1. Good actors can make bad writing interesting.
2. It is the writer’s not the actor’s job to make scenes dramatic.

Further:
A good actor can be interesting without being able to make an undramatic scene dramatic.
A bad actor can make a dramatic scene uninteresting.

Also note:
Mamet doesn’t mean that it isn’t the writer’s job to be truthful or the actor's to embody drama.
What he means is that the writer’s essential job is to write dramatically and the actor’s essential job is to act truthfully and the director’s is to film it all straightforwardly.

And probably it would be wise to investigate what each of those adverbs implies.

When Christopher Reeve was a young actor on stage in a show that starred Katharine Hepburn, he asked her for advice about acting.  She said, “Be fascinating”.

Hepburn always did her damnedest to be fascinating, but some of the stuff that she was being fascinating in was still pretty boring, undramatic, redundant and useless.

For a season on Dawson’s Creek I played the high school English teacher.  During a break in the shooting of one episode, the writer came over to me. "You've made the teacher a real character," he said. "I wasn’t even thinking of a character for him. I just gave him stuff to say”.
I learned something that day.

He made the scenes dramatic; I brought character to the drama.

Actors who have learned to act in the theatre by working with the world’s greatest plays--which I believe is a most magnificent way to learn to act--must know what they are responsible for when they act in film or television and what they not only have no responsibility for but no ability to affect/effect anyway.

You were cast in these films because of qualities the directors see in you. Your job is to respond with those qualities to the given circumstances of the scene; to be truthful, as Mamet understands it. If the writer has written drama, as Mamet understands it, you too will create drama. If the writer hasn't, you won't either.
And in that event, all you can do is be fascinating as Hepburn understood it. 

And there will always be Johnny Depp and Jack Sparrow.

Teaching Acting

Question:

I've been thinking a lot about your class as I'm working up my curriculum for Acting 1; these are undergrads just beginning their acting education; I'm pretty free to teach what I want, although they encourage non-text based work for this first semester. I remember 2 exercises we did the first year in your class that impacted me and that I was able to use and connect to scene work later on, I'm wondering if it would be possible for you to remind me how you lead those exercises and what you focused on? I remember the animal exercise pretty well, but if you have any insight on that I'm all ears (I think my animal became an encyclopedia salesman, funny). But, the 2 I'm really interested in exploring are: the song exercise and the character from a book exercise. I remember preparing for them and I remember some of the performances, but I don't remember them from a teacher's perspective.

If it's too much work, I totally understand and can figure it out on my own, but, my time in your class remains a seminal influence over my work, and now that I am in a position to inspire another generation of hungry 19 year-olds I thought I'd reach out to the teacher that hooked me 15 years ago (sigh-how am I that old)?

Any words of wisdom is much appreciated.

Response:

How nice to be needed!

There are lots of ideas about what teaching acting means. And someday I may write about that.

I believe that the actor is a creative being, and acting is a creative art. So I think it's more than the belief that all you have to be is "authentic", which means you must know yourself thoroughly so you can respond truthfully to given circumstances.
And, oh my, knowing yourself inside and out is difficult at any age (and takes keeping at it pretty much your whole life). With college age people, actually, I think learning to act helps with learning to know who you are as well as the other way round.

Your creative responsibility as an actor is to dramatize the people, the relationships, the situations, the story of the play, so that you can communicate what about being human the play deals with.

And as an actor you create with your whole self, with all the experiences you have ever had (and so, yes, the lifelong study of who you are is the foundational element).
Since you create with the self, with stored up experience and images and behavior, the elementary thing you have to learn is to perceive behavior deeply, authentically, meaningfully: To come to understand your own behavior and to experience and store up the behavior of other people with as deep an understanding.

So, teacher, you devise ways to get your students to learn to perceive, truly to perceive. That means the senses, through which we perceive the world.

The first quarter's work at NU was devoted to the senses: sight and eyes, the organs of sight; hearing, touch, smell and taste; and the kinesthetic muscle sense, etc.

You take up a copy of my book on acting and you open it: what of your responses reveal "teacher"? What do you do that says "student of David Downs"?

Then try: Sarah Palin picks up the book. What do her responses reveal? Be specific. (By the way, Palin is a great life study for Natasha from Three Sisters. Read the recent Vanity Fair article. Try: Natasha sees Masha's copy of Gogol's Diary of a Madman on a side table. She picks it up. Her responses reveal something about her.)

Then: Arkadina picks up my book. She responds.

Turn my book into the play she will star in next. Let her respond. Let her reveal.

She picks up the journal that has Treplev's latest story published in it.

etc.

Do similar exercises with sight, with hearing, etc.

(This is still "non-text" work, but I think you should always lead every illustrative exercise, everything you do, toward some character from a play, some action in a play, some relationship, etc. Make sure they know Sea Gull and Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hedda Gabler, and something contemporary like Adam Rapp and Rebecca Gilman.)

The animal exercise and the novel exercise came the second quarter with emphasis on Imagination. First, you learn to perceive behavior, which is what you create with. Then the fueling power of creativity is the Imagination.

Just as people have motivated spines, so do animals. Metaphor helps us to get to understand the unknown by way of something that we already know. Is there something about your big ole house cat that helps you to understand/embody something about Juliet's nurse? Demonstrate.

What motivates a sea gull? Become a sea gull and discover.  Ride the wind currents. Soar above the lake until you truly sense the freedom and the security of the lake. Now let your motivated sea gull behavior become human and let Nina glide around the lake with such freedom and security.

The novelist can help you to understand people you can't study and perceive directly. Tolstoy's description of the way Nineteenth Century Russians dressed and behaved, what their houses looked like, what kinds of furniture they sat in, what their gala balls were like, etc., can help your actor's imagination to say: If I were a Nineteenth Century Russian... before your imagination says: If I were Anna Karenina.

You're leading to: If I were an Elizabethan before you get to: If I were Macbeth.
Where do you go to help your imagination create the experiences that can turn you into a Nineteenth Century Norwegian before you become Judge Brack?
etc.

And:
Novelists provide detailed descriptions of character and behavior; they suggest metaphors for understanding character.
Have you found a character in a novel that can help you to understand/imagine/create Tilden from Buried Child?
What contemporary writer is likely to have created such a character?

Also:
The novelist can tell you in much more detail than a playwright what a person is thinking and doing that reveals the unspoken even as they speak. Illustrate this with passages from Tolstoy, with Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy.

Then:

Describe/write in words a particularly dramatic interaction you had with a friend, a parent, a lover. Then other acting students create the experience based on your description.

Become a novelist and write a description of Hedda's first entrance. Then become an actor and do it.

Become a novelist and describe what Kate and Deeley are thinking and doing as they speak in the first scene of Old Times.

This kind of work can help you get your actors to learn how to become novelists in behavior instead of in words.

The idea behind the song exercise was to get you to free something about yourself and to communicate it to the audience. Pick a song--usually from a musical--that expresses something deeply true about you. Don't worry if you can or cannot sing. It isn't about "singing"; it's about "selling" the song. In fact, often the students who were the musical comedy stars had a hard time with this exercise because it wasn't about cheap or fake selling and they often had learned to do just that and so found it difficult to access something simple and true and then simply and truly to communicate it to/with the audience.
This is a great way to help students learn to make a direct connection "across the footlights" that is essential to all acting, even drama of the most indirect relationship with an audience.

This also connects to Imagination work:  Songs from musicals (mostly from Oklahoma to Sondheim) that express character, motivation, attitude toward life, etc.  As with animal metaphors, see how the song as metaphor--the music, the rhythms, etc., as well as the words--manifests the character.  Pick songs such as I'm Just a Girl Who Cain't Say No, My Bill, As Long as He Needs Me, You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two, etc.  Explore implications for motivated behavior in the melody, in the musical accompaniment, etc.

Happy working!

Alvina Krause on Farce

Context:

Last night I saw a production of a new farce and I was reminded of these notes from Alvina Krause, written early in my study with her when we were working on The Taming of the Shrew. (Read this note in conjunction with the Krause note I included in the previous post of November 12.)

Krause Note:

Farce—the most technical of all drama. Timing must be perfect. Laughs come exactly on schedule. Actors signal laughter—it comes right on cue. When it stops, the farce falls to pieces, becomes merely gimmicks. Rules are strict, must be strictly followed:

1.  Go straight to the end of the line, the end of the speech; no pauses or stops within the line! (Pauses are for thought or shadings of emotion--ruin to farce.)                                                                                                           
Good morrow KateFOR  that’s your nameI  hearWELL  have you heardBUT somewhat hard of hearingTHEY  call me KatherineTHAT  do speak of me

The underlined word indicates an intensification, a swelling of sound, followed by the capitalized word in bold which indicates topping of self or partner. No stops until the end of the sequence! [Note from David: I've tried to adapt to typing formatting what Krause wrote in longhand with other symbols--I hope this makes sense. If you say it out loud, I'm sure you'll get what she's after here.]
Try those two lines until you have them perfectly timed—then go on:

2. Snap or punch in some way the last word of the line or last of the sequence. The snap releases the audience chuckle or laugh. To achieve this, sense that your partner is not next to you or in your arms or on your lap but in the balcony. Send the last word of the speech or the last word of the sequence like a swift ball straight to the balcony. Hear it land:

“moved to woo thee for my WIFE.”

Snap and toss to the balcony.

                                                                                        

“Moved in good timeLET  him who moved you hitherREMOVE  you henceI  knew from the beginning you were MOVEABLE.”

Straight to the balcony—hear it land.

3. Action follows the landing of the line. Action mid-line distracts and muddles. Land the line clearly, exactly, with a snap, click—Move swiftly, exactly to new position (for return of the ball) and thus you have “played the laugh” which the snap has released.

4. Use straight direct tones. Hit the bull’s eye with clean straight shots. No inflections! They distract. Farce is situation, farce is action. Inflections are character revealing, are emotional entanglements. Farce is not concerned with inner conflicts, with thought behind the line. If we get involved in subtleties, we cannot laugh. Play the situation. We don’t care about Katherine’s mother—whoever she was—We are interested only in the shrew who has met her match. Ditto with Petruchio. So—bright, alive, direct tones with no insinuations or subtleties. Front tones, bright tones, tones that hit the target.

5. On the straight direct way to the end of the speech, lift or toss up, the important word, the word that carries the import [indicated by  ^ and italicization ]:

In truth KateYOU  are too  ^waspishIF  I am too ^waspishBEST  beware my ^sting ...where it LIES

Work on sequences like this until your timing is perfect.

In action, it is a clean, swift, professional ball game, played with a professional’s tuned up sense of total participation. Minds are alert to match the opponent, bodies are alert from toe to crown to guard, to attack, to give, to return; vocal mechanism is tuned to accuracy of delivery. No fumbling mental, physical, or vocal!

Work on a fragment until you have achieved perfect timing. Add another—work for perfection. Never trust to accident to land a laugh! Audience laughter, perfectly timed, is part of the show. Go into training as you would for basketball, tennis, etc.-----

Footnote from David:

If you master the technique skills described in this note, they apply, with variations, to every form of comedy.

When actors tell me that they rely on their own comic timing, I often wish it was what is described here that they were talking about.

Hamlet: The Middle

Question:

One of my teachers said Hamlet is so badly written or constructed or something that it shouldn’t work as a play. Or something like that. I know he was just trying to get our attention, but I thought I would ask you what do you think about this?

Response:

Hamlet can be a messy play. Even those who have seen lots of productions of it have difficulty remembering exactly what happens and in what order things happen—especially in the middle. We remember separate scenes: the nunnery scene with Hamlet and Ophelia and Claudius and Polonius; the closet scene with Hamlet and Gertrude and Polonius and the Ghost; or Hamlet’s “words words words” encounter with Polonius; maybe his “what a piece of work is man” with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and oh yeah, the gravediggers—or “digger” if one of them has been cut from the production.

But mostly it’s a jumble. There seems to be no actual necessity for events to happen in a certain sequence. Scene follows scene like beads on a string, one after the other, each a separate even self-contained entity. And much of it is recalled in the same blurred emotional tone, the same talky tempo, the same tepid wittinesses.

All this difficulty is not, however, because Hamlet is a badly written play. I think you’re right about your teacher: he’s just saying that one of the genius aspects of the play is the way it breaks the rules of writing a revenge play so that it can get at something else.

I think the messiness and the sense of faulty construction come because readings and too many productions don’t actually focus on much more than the plot—and for productions, usually in trimmed down versions meant to clarify the plot so much that they lose sight of what it's all about. And it is in the "what it's all about" thrust of the play that you find the connective tissue that takes the play with a sense of mounting inevitability from beginning to end.

In the 2004 Marvin Borowsky Lecture on Screenwriting given at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, screenwriter Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, Pleasantville, Big), referring to Aristotle’s Poetics, said (the address is not published, so the following are not exact quotes):

There are two kinds of plots: simple and complex. A simple plot is one where the question asked at the outset is answered at the end: Can they steal the gold? Yes they can. 
But a story like that can only ever be about stealing gold.

…. There is a richer kind of story, one that Aristotle called a complex plot, in which the theme of the piece is complex enough to reveal deeper questions in the middle. And those deeper questions will inevitably demand a richer more satisfying answer. And that richer answer becomes a more satisfying resolution. And that inevitability is structure. That is clarity. And it all comes from challenging yourself with the right kind of questions at the outset. 
Then suddenly it’s not a movie about stealing gold; it’s about greed and desperation and illusion and self-deception. …and it turns into The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

If we as writers ask complicated enough questions and we put characters in conflict that express those contradictions, then the plot will organically complicate and a central question will emerge. That question builds and builds until it demands a resolution, and that is a three-act structure. That’s all it is.

…I honestly feel, sometimes, that I have a career just because I think about the middle of a movie.

Although Ross is dealing with how writers work toward a finished screenplay, his ideas can help actors and directors work from a finished stage play to create a production that communicates that play.
Before considering Hamlet in Ross’s filmic three-act structure, let me mention something about film director Robert Altman. In some of his films Altman offers his own takes on conventional genres to get at something not usually associated with those genres. In the same way, Shakespeare with Hamlet offers his take on the Elizabethan Revenge Play to get at something else. The “Will They Find Gold” question in a simple plot British murder mystery is “Who Dunnit”. But Altman’s Gosford Park asks complex plot questions about social class and responsibility and cruelty and blindness to others.

The “Will They Find Gold” question of a Revenge Play is, “Will the Hero Avenge a Relative’s Murder”. If that means “Does Hamlet Kill Claudius”, then the answer for Hamlet is Yes he does.

But the deeper complex plot questions, the questions that are Hamlet’s corollaries of self-deception and illusion and greed in Sierra Madre and of social class in Gosford Park, are questions about Ideals and Youth versus Realpolitik and Age; about Fidelity to Family, to Partner and Lover and Polity; about Ethics, Integrity, Honor and Corruption.

The central consideration of this post is: How do we clarify those questions and go deeper to discover Ross’s “central question” in Hamlet and how do actors and directors work to give the audience the joy of experiencing/discovering that in performance?

In Ross’s three-act structure Hamlet’s traditional Act I and my proposed Ross First Act coincide. They dramatize the main characters and their relationships with one another and the essential situation of the play and they set in motion the driving machinery of the Revenge Plot. Our Ross Second Act, the middle of the play—and what I am primarily concerned with in this post--extends from Act II, sc i through Act IV, sc iv. And the Ross Third Act extends from Ophelia’s Act IV sc v “mad scene” to the end of the play.

Opening the Ross Second Act, Polonius instructs the courtier Reynaldo about how to discover what son Laertes has been up to in Paris. Just as Reynaldo leaves, Ophelia comes running in to tell her father of her encounter with Hamlet; Polonius the Problem Solver has a eureka moment and takes Ophelia off to tell Claudius. In the meantime, Claudius meets with Hamlet’s school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, enlisting their help in sounding Hamlet. Polonius enters and lets the courtier Voltimand report to Claudius what’s been happening with another father/son (okay, actually uncle/nephew) in this story, Old and Young Fortinbras, after which Polonius delightedly informs Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet is crazy and that his love for Ophelia is the cause. As evidence he reads aloud a love letter Hamlet has written to Ophelia. With a plan to loose my daughter to him as a way to test this [theory] further, everyone leaves as Hamlet enters so that Polonius may board him.

This sequence serves as a Ross Second Act prelude to Hamlet’s coming back into the story. We haven’t seen him since he told Horatio he might need to assume an antic disposition and we haven’t heard of him since Ophelia described him to Polonius As if he had been loosed out of hell. What’s being dramatized in this prelude is the world that Hamlet must navigate as he undertakes the mission of Avenger in the revenge plot.

It all seems straightforward enough. What happens during performance to blur the edges?

One of the things that happens is actors whose primary concern is with My Character and not with The Play:
What is My Character feeling? What would My Character do? What does My Character really mean when saying this? My Character wouldn’t say that. My Character needs to take a moment here.

Ross helps:

Does plot spring from character or does character service plot? Does story drive character or is it the other way around? …They may take away my WGA card for this, but I don’t think that films are character-based. …I think characters are an instrument of the story-telling process. They service your vision when you write; you don’t service theirs.

The actor’s main responsibility is to communicate the story of the play and what’s being dramatized through the story. Notice that Polonius is active in all but one scene of this beginning section of our Ross Second Act. In a sense, he takes over the play for a while. When My Character actors play Polonius they tend to see every scene he’s in as a chance to demonstrate the comedy of his character (and not incidentally their own cleverness). Their primary goal is to touch off the Pavlovian audience chuckle at all costs.

But:

What is being dramatized in the Polonius scene with Reynaldo? How is this scene dramatizing the world that Hamlet must learn to navigate? 

Here is how fathers deal with sons; here is how the world conducts its business.

Polonius strikes the note: By indirections find directions out.

Every response of Polonius and Reynaldo should be aimed at that point. Even the responses that demonstrate Polonius’s comic over-qualifying of every thought, his driving of every point into the ground, etc. must throw focus not on Polonius’s comic character but on the part it plays in creating the developing tragedy of this situation.

The same consideration applies to Polonius's interaction with Ophelia that follows Reynaldo’s exit. What has the Problem Solver set in motion by instructing his dutiful daughter to refuse Hamlet’s attempts at further communication? What should be a father’s response to Ophelia’s situation? What will happen as he continues to solve problems with blindness about the human beings involved? How does the actor focus on the irony so that the audience remembers it when they witness how he responds to Ophelia immediately after Hamlet leaves from the nunnery scene? And what part does this play in the larger tragedy? What gets sacrificed in the name of fidelity to country and leader?
How does an actor lead us to this experience and not just to moments of “comic characterization”?

Every little pause or stumble or tic from Polonius that is primarily an opportunity for the actor to showcase Polonius’s foolishness must be eliminated. If not, those moments add up to a drag on the play and a blurring of the communication of its themes.

It’s sometimes a subtle, but always a profound, distinction that true actors recognize in their very creative beings.

Next, Claudius and Gertrude greet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. What traits specifically does the play need from R and G? Create these and no more and use them to further the story, the plot, and most importantly, the theme.

What is being dramatized in this scene? Claudius’s version of by indirections find directions out. Even Hamlet’s outside friends are being sucked into the situation and enlisted on the side of rotten Denmark. The rottenness reaches outward.
Anything that does not contribute directly to communicating this should be eliminated.

Claudius contributes to focusing on the thematic current by trying to figure out, from the moment Hamlet appears in the public court in Act I, what Hamlet knows, what he suspects, what Hamlet’s motives for any action must be. It plays beneath Claudius’s actions throughout this Second Act. All of Claudius's responses must point to this undercurrent.

Now Voltimand gives an account of how Old Fortinbras handles his nephew in a different manner and with different results. What is the dramatic point of this interaction beyond the necessary plot exposition? No indirection between this father/son(ish). Directors and actors must focus the audience not just on the information being given but on the contrast that this information offers with the way we’ve seen Polonius and Claudius deal with their sons and with all political governance issues—family matters are state matters. 
It is Young Fortinbras at the end of the play who will begin to lead Denmark back to health.

Then Polonius the Problem Solver, in announcing Hamlet’s madness and its cause, dramatizes how to overlook the human aspect of a situation as you seek to respond to perceived difficulties in that situation. The question for the actor of Polonius: Why does he express no pity? No horror? Why does he show no care in broaching the subject to the boy’s mother? And how do you focus on this so that the audience adds it up as a significant part of the tragedy? How can we get the irony as well as the obvious comedy of Polonius the Father and Counselor?

What do we experience in this scene when attention goes to the silent (or absent) Ophelia? What happens to the innocent and the uninformed in a world of indirection, behind-the-arras manipulation, intrigue and corruption? This is taking her directly to her confusion in the nunnery scene and to escape through madness. And to the grave.

What should be Gertrude’s response to Polonius’s analysis? It's taking her directly to a violent confrontation with her son.
How do directors and actors tell this story?

Upon the entrance of Hamlet and his encounter with Polonius, the Second Act takes off. Yes, it’s comedy, as Hamlet’s intellect runs rings around Polonius’s lame attempts to sound him out. But why does this scene often come off as tired, obvious, tepid--typical--Shakespearean wordplay? The actors of Hamlet and Polonius mustn’t be satisfied with simply yet another demonstration of Polonius’s foolishness and Hamlet’s quick wit. What else is the play getting at here? If the production has created a world of suspicion, intrigue, indirection, a world in which hiding behind arrases and importing double-agents as fact-finders has become the norm; if the opening scenes of this act have dramatized the major rules of the world Hamlet faces in his revenge scenario; then now we experience Hamlet jumping into the fray with The Mad Hamlet serving as his invisibility cloak and allowing him his own version of by indirections find directions out.

Before Hamlet even gets a chance to recover from Polonius (These tedious fools!), R and G accost him. And Hamlet the School Friend springs to the fore. A little undergraduate sexual banter and even as for a moment Hamlet frees himself from the rank, gross, unweeded garden of his world, he is reading his friends’ behavior beneath their words. What are they doing here? How do they fit into the world of the rotten state of Denmark? 
His disclosure in the second half of the scene is sincere, sad, truthful: the world’s a cesspool, Denmark’s a prison, and I’m pretty much in despair about it. But he perceives their real concerns are elsewhere. Even one’s friends cannot be trusted. 

Hamlet enters our Ross Second Act alone and he becomes progressively more alone right to the end of the play.

Jerking Hamlet out of the quiet moment with R and G is the arrival of the players. And Hamlet the Prince and Host and Connoisseur of Art snaps to.
Each new character who enters activates a new Hamlet persona. What does the audience experience about Hamlet they have not experienced before? What new quality in Hamlet’s behavior? What new tone of voice? as he makes his way in this increasingly precarious and over-populated situation.

The Players’ scene has the same actor trap as the Polonius and R and G scenes: a new character enters and the actor is tempted to showcase his character at the expense of the part the character plays in the forward progress of the play on its several levels. Why is the First Player in the play? Compare the lushness of the poetry of the Priam speech with the poetry of the actual play in the several preceding scenes. Hamlet knows this speech, the play it comes from—he recites lots of it. The audience should be as moved as Hamlet is.

Note: Polonius is surprised that Hamlet is such a good actor.

If at the final He was likely to have proved most royal moment in the play there were a film clip-like montage of previous Hamlet moments, surely his giving over to the poetry of the First Player would be one of them. Here is an image that most clearly reveals…what?

The deep relief of the sustained long vowels and the resonant m and n of Now I am alone give a clue to what must be the overriding tenor of the whole sequence from Hamlet’s entering reading a book up to this moment. The audience must experience the assaulting, intrusive, demanding, exhausting bombardment of people after people in Hamlet’s life and his need to change persona with each new confrontation while still being alert and wary.

This whole sequence must feel swift and even disorienting and it must gather to the climax that is Hamlet’s soliloquy. This is not a question of speed, nor even of pace; rather of focus, of eliminating all responses, however justifiable and authentic they may be, that do not contribute to this deep sustaining driving current of theme and drama.

The next sequence begins with a taut enclave trying to figure out what’s going on with Hamlet: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, and Ophelia, who top the Hamlet the play’s the thing soliloquy that climaxes the last sequence.

Then the nunnery scene (See May 5 post), which is topped by Hamlet as anxious about the success of the Players’ Play as Treplev is at the beginning of The Sea Gull. Hamlet’s concern keeps the pace going, creates anticipation of the promised confrontation with Claudius.
Take note of the lush, forthright poetry of the Player King and Queen. Here’s another opportunity to give the audience the joy of discovering, through experiential contrasts, something elemental in the play.

(By the way, what does The lady doth protest too much, methinks actually mean? What's the irony?)

R and G come to Hamlet, followed immediately by Polonius. A frantic distracted pace; overlapping dialogue; Hamlet playing now you see it now you don’t, now time to slow the pace, now a reversal, etc. And beneath it all the promise of that climactic confrontation.

Claudius prays and Hamlet might kill him. But on to Gertrude’s closet and the fractured reuniting of the family--an unexpected climactic confrontation.

When the promised Claudius/Hamlet confrontation finally does happen, what is its tone? Why?

The by indirections find directions out thematic current climaxes with Gertrude and the death of Polonius and it morphs into something else, something that descends into the dark heart--even viscera--of the play right up to the Captain's revelation about Fortinbras and Hamlet’s soliloquy, which ends our Ross Second Act.

What are the deeper questions being asked in Hamlet? As Beckett’s Clov has it: Something’s taking its course. A production of Hamlet must clarify that something and hold every character and every interaction to dramatizing and communicating it. Hamlet uses the revenge play form to get at something about the tragedy of young people who must try to keep their values, their belief in the greater positive virtues, while confronting a world that is venal, duplicitous, corrupt. Why does Hamlet hesitate to act? I do not know why yet I live to say “This thing’s to do". What’s the play’s response to that frustration?

What must a young person give up in order to move into the so-called adult world? Can any action you take be pure, absolute, right, in a world that has gone rotten to the core? What is the tragedy of good sane youth trying to right wrongs in a world gone madly corrupt? O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right!

If there were a sound score to this Ross Second Act, what would the music be doing during each sequence? Imagine such music expressing the roller coaster momentum of our entire Ross Second Act.
Classic symphonic music expresses viscerally the experience of a deep suspenseful current carrying a play along; it provides a musical version of a kinesthetic goal to aim for. Listen to recordings that at every moment play the sweep of the music, that put at the forefront the suspense and promise of what’s to come, even as every note is clearly struck along the way. 

How does an orchestra of actors, rather than playing moments of individual instrumental cleverness, learn to play the suspenseful momentum of the thematic current carrying the performance of a play along from the first moment to the last?

Conductor Willhelm Furtwangler’s Wagner recordings create the depth and complexity, the grandeur, of Wagnerian music while never relinquishing the deep, strong, cumulative drive toward the inevitable climax. They can help actors and directors in maintaining the momentum of a whole play and in not getting caught in the possible side-pools and eddies of the plot.

Toscanini’s Beethoven recordings illustrate the idea of playing the music rather than the notes, of building to climaxes, of creating the suspense of one note promising the next; which is to say, of playing the drama rather than the character, rather than the emotional or the comical or the what-have-you moment at the expense of the drama. 

(If to your ears Toscanini is too swift and metronomic, try Von Karajan’s Beethoven.)

It is the responsibility of actors to play the music of the play, to build sequences and to let nothing interfere with the builds to those climaxes. What is the mini-climax of each scene that clicks one more temporal experience into place, to be topped in by the next scene which leads to its own climax, as it creates inevitability and carries all along to the final climactic moment?

Hamlet is an intricate play with lots of events and situations and characters. It’s easy to let a production wander off course. And I'm not convinced that ruthless cutting of the text is the best way to address the issue. 
Actors must be alive to the questions of the deeper currents of the play. “Alive to” not just “intellectually aware of”. Lots of actors can “stay in the moment” and “respond truthfully to given circumstances”. They can get authentically from A to B, from B to C, C to D. But they still can go off in unproductive directions. 
Actors need to know how to get just as authentically and directly from A to Z. It is these actors who truly “serve the play”.

Alvina Krause wrote the following notes to actors in a 1979 production of Chekhov’s The Sea Gull she was directing for The Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble:

Begin on technique.

A good dramatist builds to the end of a sentence, to the end of a speech, to the end of an act, to the end of a play. Get that innate feeling of building in your subconscious, in your very bones. Never throw away a line unless it lands somewhere. Usually, if a line is thrown away, it lands in the audience - right square in their hands. Therefore build every sentence to the last word; if it is not the end of the speech, top that last word and get to the end of the speech. Periods, commas, etc. are for the eye. We do not put them in oral communication. Therefore, no stops within speeches. If you, the speaker, stop even to get a breath, the listener should come in to express what he is thinking. If he does come in, you must top him and get on with what you have to say. Then, unless it is a pause indicated by Chekhov, the listener tops in before the last word is finished and carries on to the end of the sequence. In fact, you should be interrupting each other coming in with a word or phrase before the speaker finishes. In which case the speaker tops you and finishes his speech or you carry on.

…Within speeches of more than one sentence there are reactions from listeners who want to get into the conversation, or by listeners who are bored, or lost in their own thoughts. The speaker must be aware of them and top them to hold his own or shrug and give up. Movement within speeches is not scene stealing if the speaker is aware of it and responds to it by topping that response.

…Realize how every scene foretells the end.

In its techniqueal essentials, this note is as true for Shakespeare as it is for Chekhov.  

How do you embody the implicit expectations/requirements of dramatic poetry without forfeiting the muscular improvisational wrestle that is the heart of drama?  

How do you create complex characters and full relationships and complicated situations, and then trust that it's all there so that in performance (and rehearsal) you can focus the totality of your artistic energies on communicating to your audiences the deeper questions of the play?