Watching Actors

Tzachi Zamir
Theatre Journal, Volume 62, Number 2, May 2010, pp. 227-243 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/tj.0.0375
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Theatre Journal 62 (2010) 227243 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Tzachi Zamir is a philosopher and literary critic afliated with the Department of English and the Depart-
ment of General and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main publications
include Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (2006) and Ethics and
the Beast (2007). More of his work on the philosophical dimensions of theatricality is forthcoming in
Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Watching Actors
Tzachi Zamir
Why does one act? And why would someone else be drawn to watch such acting?
The frst aim of this essay is to delineate a linkage between theatrical spectatorship and
powerful dramatic actingmore specifcally, a linkage between the act of acting and
watching such an act. I will argue that acting is able to importantly touch a structural
dimension of subjective experience. Acting offers what I will call existential amplifca-
tion: the imaginative bonding with the amplifcation experienced or projected by the
actor, which partly draws the audience to watch live acting and partly accounts for the
pervasive attraction to live theatre. Moreover, it is such amplifcation that explains why
people might be drawn to act in the frst place. To say only this much runs the risk of
confusing between amplifcation through acting and more familiar claims regarding
living more through fction/literature/art. To pinpoint the uniqueness of existential
amplifcation in the theatre, much of this essay will involve distinguishing the kind
of imaginative embodiment that acting involves from overlapping yet distinct types
of empathic bonding and experiential expansion that readers undergo while reading
literature. The essays second aim is to thus distinguish between literary and theatrical
imaginative participation. Finally, if acting is a form of existential amplifcation, some of
its instantiations might be morally objectionable. I will close by reestablishing this old
objection to acting by showing how existential amplifcation helps distinguish pretense
from role-playing (though I will not attempt responding to the objection as such).
Watching Plays, Watching Actors
Philosophers of theatre no longer assume that the best performers are transparent, or
that performance is a mere addendum to the process of reading a play. The idea that
we look (or should look) through the actors is now perceived as descriptively false and
as normatively implausible.
1
The transparency view both mis-describes actual viewing
experiences (since the audience typically does explicitly think about the actors) and
diminishes theatres aesthetic range by ignoring the performers themselves.
1
Paul Thoms main contemporary exemplifer of this older view is Susanne Langer; see chapter 6 of
his For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
David Osipovich, in his What Is a Theatrical Performance? (Journal of Aesthetics and Arts Criticism 64,
no. 4 [2006]: 46170), regards Aristotle as the originator of this view. James Hamiltons recent The Art
of Theater (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007) is a detailed disengagement of theatre from literature.
228 / Tzachi Zamir
We come to the theatre to see a play, to watch people enacting a play, and to witness
the act of acting as such. Let me focus on the latter, beginning from its most rudimentary
description. We come to the theatre to look at people imaginatively transforming into
somebody else. Sometimes we are meant to be taken in by the illusion; sometimes, as
in Brechts theatre, the actor dupes us into the illusion only to wrench us out of it in
order to create a critical distance between actor and role. Not only actors are involved
in imagining this transformation: the audience also is supposed to be actively shar-
ing in the creation and acknowledgment of an imagined construction to which it can
then respond.
Acting is not a full-blown metamorphosis of one person into anothera dramatic
role is not a person. It is therefore mandatory to pinpoint the precise identity shift we
are witnessing. On the most obvious level, the role donned is discontinuous with the
actors biographical self; yet the biographyrole dissociation is incomplete and more
interesting to both experience (as actor) and perceive than a complete rupture. Note,
for example, the following description of Michael Chekhovs acting:
In the early part of his career, critics, who had never seen such a seamless and startling mix
of deeply emoted realism within a portrayal of grotesque fantasy, even questioned whether
what Chekhov did on the stage was actually acting. It was as if the real characters from the
pages of Shakespeare, Gogol, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Strindberg had mysteriously
dropped down to earth, momentarily interacting with other performers, who then appeared
wooden and stagebound.
2
What is actually acting? One wonders when reading Mel Gordons description of
Chekhovs acting. What was it for those critics? What is it for Gordon? Chekhov was
apparently disclosing something of his personal experience onstage, whereas those
watching him were all of a sudden missing the actorrole gap that should have been
maintained or was readily perceivable when watching other actors.
The idea that one kind of excellence in acting is achieved if the actor manages to
obliterate altogether the distinction between identity and role underlies highly popular
acting techniques. Actors are trained to sometimes draw on genuine experiences. They
recycle traces of a past biographical event or respond to fctional characters around them
by imaginatively substituting them with real people whom they knowfor example,
imagining that one is talking to ones real father when addressing a fctional father,
in order to generate and express an authentic and convincing response. In such cases,
the audience perceives more than a fctional role. It is diffcult to say something more
precise regarding that which is perceived behind the role. Kendall Walton is surely
right when he claims that the audience cannot be expected to have a clear idea of
an actors personal thoughts and feelings while he is performing [since] that would
require being intimately acquainted with his offstage personality.
3
However, the audi-
ences lack of acquaintance with the intimate facets of the actors personality should
not mislead us into thinking that the audienceactor connection is limited to the role:
the audiences perception can apprehend the actors movement into a role; it can also
grasp a dimension of the actors own biography and identity in ways that need not be
2
See Mel Gordons introduction to Michael Chekhovs On the Technique of Acting (New York: Harp-
erCollins, 1991), ixx (italics mine).
3
Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 243.
WATCHING ACTORS / 229
clear-cut to either the audience or actor. I shall now offer an explanation of why we are
interested, even fascinated, by such an act of actual or projected transformation.
Existential Amplication
In all the anxiety over the show, worrying whether it was clear, whether
everybody knew where to come on or go off, I had no time to think about
my performance, no time to wonder about its effect on the group, or on
Christopher, or to ask, Was I funny? or Was it clever? I just did it. Suddenly,
for the frst time, I was acting. Not performing, or posturing, or puppeteering. I
was being in another way. At a stroke the mask that I had screwed on to my face
fell away. I was free, easy, effortless. For the frst time since Id arrived at the
Drama Centre I understood what playing a character was. It was giving in to
another way of thinking. Giving in was the essential experience. Leave yourself
alone, theyd been saying to us since the day we arrived. Now suddenly I was.
Simon Callow, Being an Actor
4
The idea that we are what we can become is in itself a familiar thesis in Western
thought.
5
According to this position, personal existence is partly reducible to a set of
possibilities; a person is a collection of possibilities, a small portion of which she or he
will actualize. Our lives resemble a pyramid: we have numerous possibilities to begin
with, and these possibilities gradually diminish throughout our lives.
Thinking of existence in this way can explain various responsesfor example, our
sense of pity toward people born with radically fewer possibilities. It also discloses a
modal dimension that plays a part in perception, either of animate or inanimate ob-
jects: we do not merely take in the thing/being, but also some of what she/he/it can
become. What the object is just means some of its possibilities; the charm of a baby or
the diffculty in meeting the gaze of a terminally ill friend relates to our response to
the possibilities (or lack thereof) that we apprehend, however incompletely.
6

Foregrounding the centrality of possibilities in existence can also account for some
forms of fascination. We experience fascination when we recognize a force that extends
possibilities and is, in this sense, life-amplifying. Consider money or time. The nonin-
strumental fascination with money as such or the quest for the fountain of youthfor
endless youthful timediscloses the allure of increasing ones possibilities. Having
more life time, or far more money, is tantamount to having more possibilities to enact.
The desire for more transcends the instrumental craving for a specifc this or that; it
reaches into something that pertains to the structure of life as a set of possibilities, one
that is enlarged by acquiring more time or more money. The accumulation of money
4
Simon Callow, Being an Actor (London: Vintage, 2004), 31.
5
In his Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Alexander
Nehamas associates such a view of personal experience with Aristotle.
6
It is unnecessary to couch these remarks in a specifc ontology of possibilities. The centrality of
possibilities for subjective experience can be formulated in the language of each of the main competing
ontological approaches to what a possibility is. In his The Ontology of the Possible (in The Possible
and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality, ed. M. J. Loux [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1979], 16681), Nicholas Rescher usefully delineates four metaphysical renderings of the possible
that have prevailed in Western philosophy: nominalism (possibilities exist in language), conceptualism
(they exist in the mind), conceptual realism (they exist in the mind of God), and realism (they exist
independently of human thought). Foregrounding the centrality of possibilities for subjectivity can
be alternatively formulated in any of these ontologies, and does not mandate choosing among them
for our purposes.
230 / Tzachi Zamir
as an end in its own right can appear pointless, because it may betray some distorted
disproportion between generating more and more possibilities and simultaneously
refraining from actualizing them. The accretion of wealth as such can also be self-
defeating if it involves missing other desirable possibilities that should be pursued.
But given these qualifcations, money and time still fascinate, and rightly so, because
both overlap with a metaphysical dimension of life as such, and both can be potentially
enlarged, time in fantasy, money in reality.
How is dramatic acting connected to this model of subjective experience? Actors,
I suggest, amplify their own lives by imaginatively embodying alien existential pos-
sibilities. Like the pining for the fountain of youth or the aimless counting of hoards
of money, such as Spensers Mammon, Eliots Silas Marner, or Marlowes Barabas,
acting forges a link to a potentially unlimited range of new, hitherto unimagined pos-
sibilities through the intimate identifcation required by theatrical embodiment. Actors
either experience or merely project such expansion; the audience only perceives it. But
the audiences perception is itself not some passive encounter with an external input,
but a form of imaginative participation. In a good performance, a bond is gradually
formed between actor and auditor, one in which the audience is socially validating the
extension that the actor is momentarily appropriating, playing along with the request
implied by the actors acting to be recognized as someone else. The audience is thus
not merely present in the theatre as a passive recipient of a creative offering, spending
some of its lifetime simultaneously with the actors,
7
but is completing the act of acting
by recognizing and responding to the actor as character. Actors need an audience not
just because only an audience can praise their artistic success or because of fnancial
motives, but because only a spectator is able to give the external indication that the actor
momentarily exists in this amplifed form. The audience provides the inter-subjective
context of recognition, playing along with what the actor undergoes.
8

7
Theatre means the collectively spent and used up lifetime in the collectively breathed air of that
space in which the performing and the spectating take place. The emission and reception of signs and
signals take place simultaneously; see Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. K. Jrs-Munby
(London: Routledge, 2006), 17.
8
Here are three alternative formulations to what I have just described. Bruce Wilshire provides a
different formulation for the relationship between audience and actor through the concept of standing
in: the actor populates both the nonfctional and fctional world, and, using his dual citizenship (as
character and as actor), stands in for the audience in the other world. Standing in involves the audi-
ence, because it is the problem par excellence of our own identity as selves (see Wilshire, Role Playing
and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982], 43). In his
The Actors Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama (New York: Viking, 1975), Michael Goldman sees the actor
as bridging the gap between the self and the worlds otherness: You are merely a self . . . assaulted
by otherness from within and without. In taking on the spirit of another body, the actor leaps the gap
between the fearful self and frightful other. . . . The actor is a fgure of power and danger, of pity and
fear, because he is at once the otherness that threatensnow uncannily animateand the threatened
self, daring in its exposure and ambition (122). Actings capacity to disclose the otherness within the
actor is also described by Josette Fral in her introduction to a special issue of SubStance devoted to
theatricality: the spectators gaze is double: he sees in the actor both the subject that he is and the
fction that he incarnates (or the action he performs); he sees him as both master of himself and subject
to the other within him. He sees not only what he says and what he does, but also what escapes him
what is said in himself and in spite of himself (SubStance 31, nos. 23 [2002]: 313, qtd. on 12). A third
option with regards to the subliminal links between audience and actor involves endorsing Richard
Hornbys account of the psychosexual basis of acting in his The End of Acting: A Radical View (New
York: Applause Theatre Books, 1992). In chapter 2, Hornby associates the dissipating borders of identity
that acting involves (the collapse of self into role) with a regression into the oceanic state described by
WATCHING ACTORS / 231
Two Objections to Existential Amplication
Before I turn to further clarifcations of acting as existential amplifcation, I need to
respond to two immediate objections. The frst relates to the unreal nature of fctional
expansion; the second to schools of acting that discourage actors from trying to become
someone they are not.
Unlike money as a facilitator of existential expansion, acting enables embodying
fctional possibilities, but this unreal quality of the expansion does not undermine the
experienced amplifcation. Consider the following remark by Simon Callow about his
struggle to play Titus Andronicus:
For me, the titanic emotions of the role were cruelly diffcult to attain. I always felt false. The
series of blows that befall Titus is very nearly comic in its relentlessness. . . . I felt myself
too small, my voice too weak, my means too limitedand I was right. Only experience and
the gradual expansion of ones instrumentoneselfcan enable one to play such scenes.
In fact, just playing them goes a long way towards it.
9

For Callow, make-believe expansion enables a convincing acting of future fctional roles.
This feat can occur, because fctional embodiment is not some feeting daydreaming;
it is a long and arduous process of progressively inhabiting an aliens world. Inhab-
iting is an important word here. The actor does not become the character, nor does
he merely pretend to be the character; the actor visits an existential space, occupying
it in an intimate, repeated, and planned way over time. Such distance between the
actor and the space, the fact that they are not one and the same, does not diminish
the life-expansion, but actually lends it unique force. The reason is that the ability to
plan and rehearse the living of the fctional possibility permits inhabiting it in a more
intense, precise, and full way than nonfctional life would allow. Here, as elsewhere,
art does not merely imitate life, but captures a moments essence and pursues its
meaning and optimal projection. Fictionality is thus not opposed to truth, but can
sometimes tease it out.
The second objection relates to non-Stanislavsky-based approaches to acting. The
following anecdote, reported by Uta Hagen, succinctly captures this objection: One
night, after having received accolades for his performance from the audience, the
nineteenth-century French actor Coquelin called his fellow actors together backstage
and said: I cried real tears on stage tonight. I apologize. It will never happen again.
10

The objection is that existential amplifcation seems suitable for approaches to acting
that stress creating (or recreating) a vivid inner process. Such approaches to acting
rely upon a now-contested interpretation of Stanislavsky and his selective appropria-
tion by popular actor-training systems (most famously Method acting). According to
Robert Gordon, these approaches to acting are the most dominant in Western acting
schools today,
11
but other approaches nevertheless deny that acting is or should involve
Freud. The audience is partaking of a quasi-masochistic pleasure in identifying with a disintegration of
selfhood. For Wilshire, the selfs construction through awkward participation in fctional roles is a salient
problem of modern identity; for Goldman and Fral, what is central is the selfs separation from others;
for Hornby, it is the selfs desire to withdraw from identity and dissolve into nondifferentiation.
9
Callow, Being an Actor, 84 (emphasis added).
10
Uta Hagen, Respect for Acting (New York: Wiley, 1973), 12.
11
Robert Gordon, The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2006), 35456.
232 / Tzachi Zamir
identifcation between actor and role.
12
Representational or non-Method acting would
belittle the importance of internal transformation in acting, stressing techniques that
instead enable projecting inner states. Brecht-inspired approaches even invite actors not
merely to alienate themselves from their roles, but to strive to hamper the emotional
or empathic bonding between audience and actor-role by alerting the audience to the
act of acting. The Brechtian actor is urged to show or demonstrate acting rather
than to be the role.
Do such approaches to acting modify what I have been describing? Yes and no. For
the audience, the actors precise inner state does not matter. Acting, whether the kind
that prompts actors to undergo and feel what they act or the kind that encourages them
to perfect their capacity to project such states, involves experiencing or convincingly
externalizing a form of existential amplifcation. The audience takes part in a form of
imaginative existential expansion that the actors are embodying with or without the
actors experiencing it. The choice of acting technique does, however, determine whether
or not actors themselves undergo an imaginative amplifcation. In acting that strives
to attain inner change, such amplifcation takes place. Such schools devise acting drills
that aim to instill in would-be actors the capacity to freshly undergo and convey such
experiences. In acting schools that focus on projection rather than inner state, ampli-
fcation need not be experienced. It may be the case that an actor like Coquelin, cited
above, is the only person in the hall who is not experiencing such amplifcation, but
is merely facilitating it for everyone else.
In any case, watching acting is not affected by the acting technique chosen.
13
The single
counter-example that does remain uncovered by this analysis is Brechts theatre, though
here much depends on how Brechts precise position is interpreted. In some versions
(based on texts like The Street Scene or A Short Description of a New Technique
of Acting Which Produces an Alienation Effect), Brecht is radically opposed to any
form of actorrole identifcation; in others, he allows such identifcation, asking his
actor to comment on the role after embodying it.
14
The frst version does not involve
existential amplifcation, the second does.
Fictionality and Intensity
Having addressed these initial objections, we can probe more deeply the precise
nature of existential amplifcation through acting, setting it apart from overlapping
modes of living more through art/fctions. The idea of living more through fctions
is mostly aired in the context of vindicating literature. The essence of this idea is that
literature creates an empathic involvement in relation to unfamiliar contextsthe
reader thereby lives more. We read Ishigurus Never Let Me Go and reach a new sense
regarding how systematic exploitation can be experienced by its victim; Banvilles The
12
For limitations of the Method and its contested historical genesis from Stanislavskys work, see
chapter 5 in John Harrop, Acting (London: Routledge, 1992); see also chapter 2 in Hornby, The End of
Acting.
13
Spectators can sometimes themselves be more interested in an actors technique than in her/his
inner state. But while such a focus is a common aspect of the aesthetic appreciation of a performance,
particularly in seasoned and informed viewers, if spectatorship remains on the level of noting and ad-
miring technique, it becomes study rather than the fuller experiential dialogue one looks for in art.
14
For a nuanced account of developments in Brechts position, as well as discrepancies between his
theories and his practice, see Gordon, The Purpose of Playing, chapter 8.
WATCHING ACTORS / 233
Sea invites us to partake deeply of the particularities of grief; Egolfs Lord of the Barn-
yard will probably extend our experience of revenge. Expanding and extending
mean that literary fctions familiarize worlds that are only dimly and fragmentarily
perceived in life; literary works thereby become gateways to other lives. In particular,
and in contrast to many other arts, literary fctions render intimate the frst-person
perspective of another, thus encouraging empathic involvement rather than detached
eavesdropping.
While theatre is usually far more oblique than literature in disclosing a frst-person
perspective, it offers a similar form of life-enlargement. The fctional events onstage
present the audience with unfamiliar lives, states, and conficts, turning these lives from
abstract possibilities into vivid, detailed, and personalized instantiations. We might,
for example, think that we know what jealousy means, but engaging with a character
like Othello or Leontes either on page or onstage takes us into the internal rhythm of
such a mind: the rationalizations, jarring suspicions, the thrust and counter-thrust of
hope gnawed away by doubt. Actors are less important when considering such life
extension: the reason is that while, unlike the audience, actors fctionally live through
the situation portrayed, the audienceas far as this specifc function is concerned
basically sees through them into the play and the world that it discloses.
Since the experience portrayed onstage is carefully constructed, it often facilitates
an intensity of expression and an emotional depth that real-life experiences seldom
offer. Accordingly, such expansion through immersion in a fction does not amount to
merely adding more of the same lived experience that one possesses in life. As Rich-
ard Shusterman reminds us, to dramatize, both in English and in German, is, among
other meanings, to treat something as, or make it seem, more exciting or important.
15

Dramatization is, in this sense, intensifcation. Acting a well-constructed fction or
watching one permits the actor to release, explore, and experience intense possibili-
ties with which an audience can then engage. It is not merely the movement into a
different biographya queens, a beggars, a drunkards, an adulterers, a murderers,
a misers, a gods, a saints, an animals, a courtesans, and so forthbut into specifc
energized confgurations of such states, when they have been well-written.
This part of theatrical experience is related to theatres literary dimension and can be
accessed by a reader without recourse to theatre. The audience is here looking through
the actors and connecting with the meaning that resides in the words. Some examples
follow of such literary intensity:
In dismissing a Rome that cannot accept his heroism and is banishing him, an
enraged Coriolanus bursts out: You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate
as reek o th rotten fens, whose loves I prize as the dead carcasses of unburied
men that do corrupt the air, I banish you (Coriolanus, 3.3.12731).
16

A soon-to-be dethroned Richard II tells his company: Throw away respect, /
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty, / For you have but mistook me all this
15
Richard Shusterman is citing the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary in his Surface and Depth: Dialectics
of Criticism and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 234. He is harnessing this insight
to an ambitious attempt to perceive dramatization as capturing a vital aspect of all art (the chapter is
titled Art as Dramatization), which, when reaching its most rewarding potency, is not merely mir-
roring life, but is a means of framing heightened experience.
16
All quotations from Shakespeares plays are from The New Cambridge Shakespeare editions.
234 / Tzachi Zamir
while: / I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: / Sub-
jected thus, / How can you say to me I am a king? (Richard II, 3.2.17277).
A torn-to-shreds Lear beseeches his dead daughter: Cordelia, Cordelia, stay
a little (King Lear, 5.3.245).
In all these, the actor is not merely regurgitating a mental state or hypothetically placing
himself in the staged situation, but is, rather, allowing the words to elevate him into
achieving an emotional intensity that life usually falls short of. The same holds for the
reader of the text, who is accessing not some simple description of an inner state, but
a pinpointing of its essence. Essence does not here imply linguistically formulated
necessary or suffcient conditions that hold in all states of outrage, depression, or grief;
essence means, rather, the surfacing of a stable encapsulation of an evasive meaning
that lies at the heart of many appearances of these states, an encapsulation that can be
reapplied. Nondramatic poetry and literature offer many such moments.
Intensity is not tantamount to strength: nonfctional experiences are stronger than
fctional ones, in that experiences such as those above, when taking place nonfctionally,
are more personally signifcant, bear important practical ramifcations, entail central
interpersonal consequences, and carry an altogether different emotional weight than
those provided by fctional texts. Yet the literary articulation of such experiences en-
ables that which typically remains vague or simply overwhelming when personally
undergone to be expressed in detail. Such articulation does not merely duplicate an
internal state or present more living of the kind with which one is familiar; it heightens
these experiences. Heightening covers two interrelated operations: frst, rather than
merely naming or categorizing, detailed linguistic articulation renders intelligible and
powerfully conveys the underlying complex makeup of a state that, when directly
experienced, can appear deceptively monolithic; and second, the language provided
by gifted authors can capture the essence of the expressed moment. Literaturein
the examples aboveis thus not merely modeling itself after life, but after a precisely
distilled articulation of an experiences essential meaning at some unique moments.
A well-written fction is intense in these senses, and one accesses such intensity as an
engaged reader. Existential amplifcation thus covers not merely experiencing more of
what one already undergoes, but attending to and bonding with qualitatively intense
experiences.
Similarly to reading of the kind I have just described, playacting can satisfy a need
to experience more than actual life. Actors experience more existential possibilities
that are shaped out, particularized, and personalized by the text; actors also experi-
ence what they experience in a heightened intensity, a process facilitated by the or-
ganized, predetermined nature of the states portrayed and the language of the play.
They project such processes to spectators, who are able to enter these dimensions of
existential amplifcationdimensions that in fact involve looking through the actors
to the fctional events and the words of the author.
But while acting overlaps with reading in these ways, it also involves unique dimen-
sions to which I shall now turn. It is here that one needs to look at the actors, rather
than accessing what can be gained by looking through them. One of these dimensions
relates to intensity. Unlike readers, the intensity experienced and/or projected by actors
relates to the act of actually verbalizing some words and linguistic sequences, relating to
the tactile dimension of language. Uttering aloud words such as those in the Shake-
WATCHING ACTORS / 235
spearean examples above affects the speaker differently than mentally reading them;
verbalizing them as part of a comprehensive embodiment of the role mobilizes an even
more intense experience. The reason is that locked into the wordsthe consonants and
vowels of a well-written dramatic textis an emotional force that can be released by
the actor. In a strong performance, such energy is radiated to the audience.
17
John
Gielgud gives a nonverbal example of the conveying of such energy:
I have a vivid recollection of Lucien Guitrys acting in a drama called Jacqueline, produced
in London in 1922, in which he played an elderly rou who strangles his mistress in the
fnal scene. It was the preparation for this denouement in the second act that impressed
me the most. The scene was in a hotel bedroom where he had taken the girl for a weekend.
Guitry stood over her as she lay on the bed, and she suddenly shrank from him crying,
Oh! You terrify me. For a few seconds he seemed to grow inches taller and become a tow-
ering and sadistic creature. Then, suddenly breaking the tension completely, he resumed
his normally charming manner for the rest of the scene. I watched him most intently, and
am convinced that in fact he did absolutely nothing, not moving his hands, his face or his
body. His absolute stillness and the projection of his concentrated imagination, controlled
and executed with a consummate technique, produced on the girl and on the audience an
extraordinary and unforgettable effect. I knew I had seen a great actor.
18

One might be tempted to regard such energetic intensity as that which distinguishes
the actors existential amplifcation from what readers or authors experience. But as
important as energizing the text is, there are additional crucial differences between
imagining fctions and incarnating them that do not relate to intensity in general or
energy in particular. Accessing these differences requires exploring further the imagi-
native activity that is particular to theatrical embodiment.
Identication versus Embodiment
Although both reading and acting partake of hypothetically placing oneself in
anothers shoes, spectatorship (or readership) differs categorically from theatrical
embodiment. The difference is both qualitativein terms of the level of commitment
and compenetration with the characterand quantitativein terms of the degree of
detail sought, the sheer time spent by the actor-as-character, and the attempt to inter-
relate body, language, and the inner state (rather than merely imaginatively attempting
to glimpse into anothers interiority).
Consider, frst, the different role that identifcation plays in relation to theatrical
embodiment, as opposed to its looser connection with involved reading. Literary
17
Theorists typically summon the notion of energy to account for such intensity. Goldman says:
Acting is never simply mimetic; it appeals to us because of some other or more inclusive power. We
feel an energy present in any good actors performance that goes beyond the demonstration of what
some real person is like (The Actors Freedom, 5). Susanne Langers analysis of dance as the embodi-
ment of virtual powersthe vital force emanating from dancersa play of powers made visibleis
also relevant to fathoming the impersonal, larger-than-life dimension that theatrical acting exudes;
see Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribners, 1953), chapter 11. Phillip Zarrillis
Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavsky (New York: Routledge, 2009) is an
extended exploration of the cultivation of energy as part of performance. Zarrilli prefers to regard
acting in terms of dynamic energetics rather than in terms of representation, speaking of the actors
immediate and appropriate deployment of her energy in the act of performance and the spectators
experience of that performance (50). See also Lehmanns Postdramatic Theatre for a description of
energetic theatre (3738).
18
John Gielgud, An Actor and His Time (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1997), 39.
236 / Tzachi Zamir
critics can surely spend weeks, months, even years, honing and deepening their
understanding of a character and its perceptions. But such understanding is not the
same as identifying, and the latter is not necessary for the purpose of interpreting a
literary work well or responding deeply to it. Much literary criticism does not rely on
or even mention identifcation, which strikes many as a somewhat rudimentary and
unschooled response to literary characters. Even when identifcation takes place in more
demanding literature, it is not ubiquitous: some complex characters lend themselves
to identifcation, others do not.
The ability to avoid incorporating identifcation into literary theory is fortunate, since
identifcation (or, for that matter, empathy) is at best a theoretically dubious concept
that critics eschew for many good reasons. Here are some of its problems:
1. Identifcation misleadingly suggests identical emotions between empathizers
and their object.
2. It tends to collapse comprehending/understanding and the distinct act of
justifying.
3. The term is indiscriminately used in relation to real people in multiple contexts
(friends, patients), as well as to fctional characters in plays and novels. Ac-
cordingly, relying on the term in literature or the performing arts risks lumping
together what we allow ourselves as part of aesthetic response and the altogether
different empathic operations that we depend on in nonfctional life.
4. Finally, there is the difference between the distinct shape identifcation takes
in a variety of states (sadness, happiness, fear, hope, depression, love, joy).
Conceptually and emotionally, diverse processes and capacities appear to be
involved when identifying with each of these, contributing to altogether dif-
ferent mental states on behalf of the identifying individual.
19

And yet, while it may be a dispensable attitude when theorizing literature, iden-
tifcation cannot be avoided when refecting on acting. Theatrical incarnation is the
most powerful form of identifcation imaginable; it is a planned act of deeply thought
identifcation on behalf of actors who have to imagine and assume an alien existence, to
experience and convincingly project it. The actor cannot afford to endorse some merely
sympathetic attitude to a character: to act is to create and inhabit another persons
physicality, dress, body language, belief system, emotional sensitivities, and so forth;
unlike cinematic acting, in the theatre, acting involves undergoing this repeatedly in
a planned and comprehensive way over time, sometimes through a span of years of
performing the role. Actors can and often will maintain a critical distance from their
roles; sometimes, as in Brechts theatre, actors will be called upon to project this dis-
19
Bence Nanay offers a useful summary of existing accounts of identifcation and the problems that
beset them, formulating an intriguing account of theatrical identifcation predicated on the relations
between action and perception; see Nanay, Perception, Action, and Identifcation in the Theater, in
Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy, ed. David Krasner and David
Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 24454. David Krasners essay Empathy and
Theatre in the same collection offers an erudite discussion of the relations among empathy, identifca-
tion, sympathy, compassion, and understandingsignifcantly different processes that, while interlacing
in various ways, should be set apart.
WATCHING ACTORS / 237
tance. But most forms of actingMethod/non-Method, feelers/presentersshare the
requirement to experience or project an intense identifcation of actor and character.
Embodied versus Literary Particularization
Acting is embodied identifcation. Here is Stanislavskys unfolding of what such
embodiment requires from the actor:
Every invention of the actors imagination must be thoroughly worked out and solidly
built on a basis of facts. It must be able to answer all the questions (when, where, why,
how) that he asks himself when he is driving his inventive faculties on to make a more
and more defnite picture of a make-believe existence. . . . To imagine in general, without
a well-defned and thoroughly founded theme is a sterile occupation.
On the other hand, a conscious, reasoned approach to the imagination often produces a
bloodless, counterfeit presentment of life. That will not do for the theatre. Our art demands
that an actors whole nature be actively involved, that he give himself up, both mind and
body, to his part. He must feel the challenge to action physically as well as intellectually because
the imagination, which has no substance or body, can refexively affect our physical nature
and make it act.
20
What distinguishes the kind of imaginative partaking in a fction that Stanislavsky is
talking about from an imaginative engagement with literary characters? Answering the
question is crucial if we desire to pinpoint the precise nature of existential amplifcation
specifcally as part of theatrical role-playing, and to set it apart from literatures close
yet distinct form of living more through imagining the inner lives of fctions.
Begin with particularization. The immersion in literary fctions involves a loose
form of specifcity, gaining some of its power from the freedom and intellectual edge
of not particularizing certain features of what is being written or read. By opposition,
the actors form of embodiment is, by defnition, concrete, and it is necessarily circum-
scribed to particular selections of tone, movement, and positioning. Specifcity adds to
the audiences experience the sharpness and vivacity that were missing when the play
was merely read, and, concomitantly, it detracts from its unique open-endedness as a
literary text. Such delimitationthe inevitable abandoning of some exciting interpre-
tive options that cannot be held together in a single cohesive performanceexplains
why even strong performances can be somewhat dissatisfying for spectators who are
deeply familiar with the literary work
An example would render concrete these abstract claims. Consider Dorotheas dis-
enchantment with her bloodless marriage to Casaubon in George Eliots Middlemarch.
When we empathize or imagine Dorothea as part of a reading, we access a range of
highly particular feelings that are brought out by what she thinks and what she does
not allow herself to think, by what she does, or by her attempts to come to terms with
her dissatisfaction. All this is not obvious, and it requires a patient and highly sensi-
tive literary analysis to expose the multiple and complex insights that Eliot provides
into this state. But at no stage is the reader compelled to imagine what shoes Doro-
thea wears, or how she brushes her hair, or how she conducts herself physically in
the presence of her husband, or how her body language might alter when Ladislaw
enters the room.
20
Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares, trans. E. R. Hapgood (New York: Routledge, 1989),
7677 (emphasis in original).
238 / Tzachi Zamir
Eliot also, and not just her readers, may abstain from imagining such matters. The
authors literary imagination does entail following a character through in a highly
particular way. When J. M. Coetzees Elizabeth Costello (a fctional author) is described
by her son, he says about her: my mother has been a man. . . . She has also been a
dog. She can think her way into other people, into other existences. I have read her; I
know. It is within her powers. Isnt that what is most important about fction: that it
takes us out of ourselves, into other lives?
21

The author is committed to particularize an imaginative possibility, to patiently
pursue it. In discussing Kafkas role in relation to a fctional character (the ape in An
Account for an Academy), Elizabeth Costello (the same fctional author) says:
Kafka had time to wonder where and how his poor educated ape was going to fnd a mate.
And what it was going to be like when he was left in the dark with the bewildered, half-
tamed female that his keepers eventually produced for his use. . . . That ape is followed
through to the end, to the bitter, unsayable end, whether or not there are traces left on the
page. Kafka stays awake during the gaps when we are sleeping. (32)
While this image powerfully contrasts authorial imagination and readingthe authors
existence as an involved guardian of fctional creations even at the points ignored or
slept through by readerswe can still note how, unlike Stanislavskys guidelines to
his actors, the authorial imagination, even here, at its most conscious commitment to
particularize and follow a character through, is free from the need to provide a con-
sistent physical, visual rendering of what the author has only partly imagined. Kafka
probably did not imagine the precise cage size in which the ape is cooped up or the
specifc accent in which the ape utters particular words in his speech.
Authors may watch their characters while readers are asleep, but authors watch them
as imaginative constructs, exercising a form of particularization that is at once specifc
and open-ended, refned though not fully defned. By contrast, theatrical embodiment
requires that the actor master the various insights that can be culled from the text,
similarly to how a careful literary critic would proceed, but from that point on, an
entirely new dimension of particularization (and existential amplifcation) opens up.
A simple act, such as sipping tea, differs when Dorothea performs it with Casaubon at
different stages of the story. When Eliots novel is transformed into an enacted work, the
actress becomes accountable for such changes, weighty onstage and imperceptible on
page. Indeed, the actress becomes accountable for every aspect of Dorotheas worldly
manifestation: clothing, movement, gesture, body language, voice, the hows and whys
of each moment of her fctional existence, and the fne details involved in projecting
the transitions between such moments.
Acting has to do with particularization in another sense also: the necessity to ac-
tualize a single possibility that is merely included in the cluster of possibilities that
confgure the text. And if you poison us, do we not die? asks Shylock of his Chris-
tian antagonists. This question can be abstract and rhetorical like the ones preceding
it, but poison could alternatively refer to the elopement of Jessica (her spiritual
poisoning by Lorenzos suit, convincing her to escape her Judaism). The sentence
can even be elocutedas actor Warren Mitchell didas a joke.
22
The line on the page
will merely suggest this possibility, whereas an actor will particularize it and turn it
21
J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Penguin, 2003), 2223.
22
The Merchant of Venice, directed by Jack Gold (BBC, 1980).
WATCHING ACTORS / 239
into Shylocks specifc meaning by, for example, looking at a portrait of Jessica as he
asks the question. A line like Let him look to his bond (in the same speech) can be
uttered as a warning relating to Antonio, but it can also be playedas Olivier did
as expressing the dawning realization that Shylock can genuinely pursue Antonios
fesh (which in turn implies that the original contract was, as Shylock said and they
disbelieved him, a genuine act of trust and friendship, rather than some premeditated,
diabolical plan on his part).
23
The Role of the Fictional Past
How many children did Lady Macbeth have? In literary circles, this famous ques-
tion has come to be a hallmark of critical confusion. Literary readers do not have to
know whether or not Lady Macbeth had children. If they preoccupy themselves with
such worries, they betray various distinct errors of perception and literary sensitivity.
They are confating between responding to a biography and the distinct act of literary
appreciation. Yet for the actress playing Lady Macbeth such a question matters, and
deeply so. The answer determines how she will render: I have given suck, and know
how tender tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my
face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had
I so sworn as you have done to this (Macbeth, 1.7.5458). The actress will probably
make a decision respecting whether or not her fctional character has had any children,
whether they are alive or dead, or even the manner of their deaths. And she might
prepare herself through detailed improvisations in which loving transactions between
her and them are played out. Such exercises are sometimes carried out in rehearsals.
Directors can ask actors to improvise scenes that relate to the pre-play; such exercises
establish the characters state when referring to or implying a past. The goal is to
reconstruct and create a believable biography, one that is not merely intellectually
adduced by the audience, but experienced in a moving and rich way.
References to the past, tinged by specifc choices made by the actor, also modify,
particularize, or create new dimensions of meaning for the work. Here is an example:
when Othello tells the Venetian duke and council how the narration of his life-story
won Desdemonas heart, he goes into details: I spake of the most disastrous chances
. . . of the cannibals that each other eat . . . and men whose heads do grow beneath
their shoulders. This to hear would Desdemona seriously incline (Othello, 1.3.13345).
Some Othellos deliver these lines solemnly, introducing something of the wild imagi-
nary world that underlies Othello throughout the play; others convey them jokingly,
stressing the seriously above. Othello is thus able to defuse the explosive potential
of his questioning. He invites the Venetian council to partake of the tricks by which
an experienced male suitor allures a beautiful, young, and rich woman. What is im-
portant for our concerns is to note that the actor is, in effect, deciding whether or not
Othello is genuinely disclosing a painful biography or boastinga choice left open
when reading the play. Such a participation in and embodiment of a fctional life
beyond the temporal boundaries specifed by the written fction is different in kind
from the looser engagement required by literary imagination, even when the latter is
nonsimplistic and involved.
23
The Merchant of Venice, directed by John Sichel (ATV, 1973).
240 / Tzachi Zamir
Focused versus Relational Identication
A further discontinuity between identifcation as readeraudience and theatrical
embodiment relates to the general difference between enjoying art and producing
ita difference I have so far been ignoring in comparing the identifcation experienced
by the recipient of a work (a reader of literature) and by a creator of it (an actor).
Whereas reading and acting are both forms of participation in a game of make-believe
(to borrow Waltons terms), some of the differences between them affect existential
amplifcation.
Some genres depend upon their readers or audiences experience of empathy (trag-
edy), while others often rely on its withdrawal or suspension (comedy). In opposition
to spectators, the actor has to intimately embody the fction, even when the dramatic
effect intended for the audience is one of detachment. Here, for instance, is a terrifed
Falstaff mulling over his narrow escape from drowning after being unceremoniously
ditched into the Thames:
Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow of butchers offal, and to be thrown in
the Thames? . . . The rogues slighted me into the river with as little remorse as they would
have drowned a blind bitchs puppies. . . . And you may know by my size that I have a
kind of alacrity in sinking. If the bottom were as deep as hell, I should down. I had been
drowned but that the shore was shelvy and shallowa death that I abhor, for the water
swells a man, and what a thing should I have been when I had been swelled! I should have
been a mountain of mummy. (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.5.414)
Falstaff is horrifed by momentarily imagining how his bloated corpse would have
appeared foating down the river. The comic effect here depends on the actor experi-
encing or projecting utter dreaddecidedly not what the audience experiences upon
hearing this confession. A successful performance of comic roles (or of villains, shrew-
ish wives, or bullying husbands) sometimes depends upon the capacity of actors to
insulate themselves from the radically different response that their actions prompt in
their audience. This situation indicates how different the actors embodiment and its
spectatorship can actually become. Unlike the reader, the actor is not only delving into
the experience of a character, but into a compound one that will be simultaneously
perceived and responded to by an audience. The actor will not simply empathize with
Falstaff, but will embody Falstaffs horror and shock while the audience is laughing
(hard). Theatrical embodiment is accordingly relational; it engages in a constant dia-
logue with something that lies outside the boundaries of the workaudience response.
Reading, on the other hand, entails a gravitating into the fctional characters world,
which remains confned to the world created by the work.
Acting and Being
If acting is a powerful form of existential amplifcation, we have to take seriously a
very old objection to the moral dimensions of this process. Should some forms of am-
plifcation be avoided on moral grounds? Plato thought that honorable people should
not embody some characters, since the role might seep into the performer (Republic,
3.395c). Such concern was endorsed by anti-theatricalists in later ages.
24
Nowadays,
however, it tends to be cavalierly dismissed as excessive: [I]t must be remembered
that it is perfectly possible to give representations, even repeatedly, without identify-
24
For examples, see Joseph R. Roach, The Players Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1993), 49.
WATCHING ACTORS / 241
ing with what is represented.
25
Yet the problem with an overly causal dismissal of
this objection is the dubious implication that Plato was overlooking a trivial logical
gapand it is safe to suppose that he was not.
Theatrical identifcation does not import the role into the actors identity; merely
calling attention to the difference between role and identity, however, is too easy an
evasion of the complex relationships that actually take place between the two. Some
tricky rolesenacting sexually intimate scenes, portraying a humiliated character,
playing a sadistic psychopath, acting a character with a different sexual orientation
than the actors owndo make us wonder how comfortable the actor feels in the part,
and what might be released, suppressed, or overcome within him or her when playing
it. What Plato perceived was not, I believe, that if one is acting, say, a rapist, one is
likely to become one; the moral dubiousness of such imitation does not reside in the
chronological relation of role-playing leading to self-modifcation, but, rather, in there
being something intrinsically objectionable in the acting itself.
The most obvious example of this danger is pornography. Does participating in a
porn movie constitute an act of infdelity to ones partner in real life, or is it merely an
insulated role-playing that is segregated from identity? The same ambiguity holds for
acting in erotically intimate scenes that are not pornographic; actors and their partners
sometimes explicitly set limits to what they are prepared or unwilling to do in such
scenes. But sex is only a physically palpable sphere in which the infltration between
role and identity is made manifest; Jewish or Muslim actors might recoil from eating
pork as part of a role, and a vegetarian would refuse to eat meat.
What Plato saw was that role-playing does not magically safeguard ones iden-
tity.
26
Indeed, one might even lose sight of what ones identity actually is. As Laurence
Olivier wrote: Nowadays people often ask my wife, Joan, How do you know when
Larry is acting and when hes not? and my wife will always reply, Larry? Oh, hes
acting all the time. In my heart of hearts I only know that I am far from sure when
I am acting and when I am not.
27
Sadistic roles, chauvinistic roles, or mawkish roles
can all modify the actors sense of identity, particularly when the actor is required, as
in theatre, to repeatedly enact the same role.
28
Actors do not become sadistic or mawk-
25
Thom, For an Audience, 131.
26
For the manner by which theatrical role-playing can structure intimacy as part of a sadomasochistic
relationship, see my The Theatricalization of Love, New Literary History 41, no. 1 (2010). For another
nontheatrical exploration of role-playing in relation to identity, see Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal
Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), chapter
7. Markovits is probing the plausibility of using role-playing as a justifcation that can neutralize a
lawyers misgivings about, for example, suppressing information that can incriminate her or his client.
The question is whether lawyers can pacify their own reservations about such an act by perceiving
themselves as playing a role that is itself morally necessary in a just system. Like theatrical acting, the
lawyer also encounters the blurry divide between role-playing and identity, and how the former does
not necessarily safeguard the latter. For more general accounts of the fuzzy divide between identity
and role-playing, see Erving Goffmans The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor,
1959) and Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity. A more recent argument regarding the ubiquity of theatre
in seemingly nontheatricalized contexts is Paul Woodruff, The Necessity of Theatre: The Art of Watching
and Being Watched (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
27
Laurence Olivier, Confessions of an Actor: Laurence Olivier, an Autobiography (New York: Penguin,
1984), 21.
28
Ronald Harwoods The Dresser is an insightful play focusing on how exhausting such a repetition
can be for an actor. I take up the signifcance of repetition in relation to existential amplifcation in
my Theatrical Repetition and Inspired Performance, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 4
(2009).
242 / Tzachi Zamir
ish by playing such roles, but the existential amplifcation that they are undergoing in
becoming such characters in fction can be experienced by them and others as morally,
emotionally, or theologically objectionable, since it affects what they are during the
moments of embodiment.
Pretense versus Role-playing
Thoms dismissal of Platos concern as excessive would be accurate if role-playing
was merely a synonym for pretense. Reducing acting to an elaborate pretending is,
indeed, precisely the position endorsed by no less an authority than Olivier: For what
is acting but lying, and what is good acting but convincingly lying?
29
Yet Olivier is
wrong: while acting can involve pretense, and while prolonged pretense can develop
into acting, the two are distinct operations. Here is Declan Donnellans much more
careful description of actings relation to pretense:
As soon as we show, we pretend. And pretending is not acting. Certain things cannot be
acted; they can only be pretended. States can never be acted. . . . You cannot act being
asleep. You can only pretend to be asleep. . . . This is not really acting. It is something else,
but it may be theatrically crucial for the audience that you do it.
30

When we pretend, we are involved in mimicking a state while maintaining a clear sense
of who we are and what we are pretending to be (as in Donnellans example above,
pretending to be asleep). Offstage, pretense is often negatively colored, associated
with an objective to cozen someone else into forming specifc beliefs. It is usually a
subset of deception. Pretense is typically instrumental: one desires to elicit a particular
response from another, and little matters beyond that. The extracted response is often
subordinated to some ulterior objective, say, swindling someone into giving money
by pretending to be a pauper.
Theatrical role-playing is different. First, it educes fctional beliefs in the audience,
not false ones, hence it is not a form of deception. Second, while it is designed to draw
out a specifc response, dramatic role-playing is also signifcantly dissociated from this
goal, whereas pretense is thoroughly instrumental. Actors can drive an audience to
laughter or tears yet still be dissatisfed with their performance. By contrast, con art-
ists who obtain victims money through fraudulent pretense would never experience
such disappointment; if they do, it would mean that cheating has become an artistic
outlet for them. Third, in terms of the addressee, pretense and acting are experienced
as different communicative acts: pretense is manipulativewhen deceived, we feel
used, played upon; acting, on the other hand, is an invitation to partake of anothers
experience. Such an invitation may occasion a response, and, if successful, it would
usually induce it. But acting aims at an altogether different effect than the one elicited
by pretense: an opening up to others, rather than a manipulation of them. All three
distinctions help us realize why pretense is usually experienced as aggressive, while
acting is not. In some highly demanding forms of actingJerzy Grotowskis theatri-
cal experiments come to mindthe actors invitation can be resisted by the audience,
who might feel overwhelmed and unable to follow the actor.
31
But such resistance to
29
Olivier, Confessions of an Actor, 20.
30
Declan Donnellan, The Actor and the Target (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005), 81.
31
Jerzy Grotowski writes: [The actor] must learn to use his role as if it were a surgeons scalpel,
to dissect himself. . . . The important thing is to use the role as a trampoline, an instrument with
WATCHING ACTORS / 243
some daunting depth that an actor is able to expose (reconsider the description of
Chekhovs acting with which we began) is not to be confused with the moral recoil
that pretense evokes.
Pretense enables keeping identity and role apart, involving no threat of confusing
between the two. Perhaps this difference in relating to the selfs insulation, as opposed
to the prospect of its dialectical shaping by something other, is itself an important
distinction between producing a falsehood and creating fction: the opening up to an
interpenetration of the self with the imagined space, rather than an act of intentional
misrepresentation in which the self remains insulated. The con man who pretends to be
starving is not interested in how hunger is experienced or projected, or how he would
personally feel and act if he were genuinely famished. Acting, on the other hand, is
predicated on inquisitiveness regarding how states are experienced and manifested
in a living body. Such curiosity then fuels a dialogue between identity and role. In
Grotowskis words: For both producer and actor, the authors text is a sort of scalpel
enabling us to open ourselves, to transcend ourselves, to fnd what is hidden within
us and to make the act of encountering the others; in other words, to transcend our
solitude.
32
While actors will not confuse role-playing and identity, opening themselves
up to a fully engaged, embodied dialogue with some existential possibilities can still
be problematic. Even a technique-oriented, projection-oriented actor who dismisses
inner process as unnecessary will have to carry out such an intense dialogue to be able
to unlock the characters expressive dimensions.
Actors do not pretend, they do not lie. Platos concern registers a perception on his
part of an intimate connection between role and identity that will not be dissolved
by simply noting the logical hiatus between the fctional and the real. His objection
indicates that he understood acting not as mere pretense, but as a form of becoming,
an existential amplifcation.
which to study what is hidden behind our everyday mask . . . in order to sacrifce it, expose it. This
is an excess not only for the actor but also for the audience. The spectator understands, consciously
or unconsciously, that such an act is an invitation to him to do the same thing, and this often arouses
opposition or indignation, because our daily efforts are intended to hide the truth about ourselves
not only from the world, but also from ourselves; see Grotowski, The Theatres New Testament, in
Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 37.
32
Ibid., 57.