Saturday, March 7, 2009

Do Be Do Be Do

"Try to find verbs . . . and avoid adjectives."
Sam Waterston

A lot of people have questions about what they should be doing to survive—or, if possible, thrive— in this economic downturn. We certainly can’t say acting techniques are going to solve the problem, but they do provide a helpful way of looking at the whole concept of an action plan. Sam Waterston’s advice about adjectives and verbs is a central idea in acting theory. Like most of the smartest stuff, it pretty much boils down to common sense, but not enough actors (or real-life decision-makers) take advantage of its full power.
 
Say you’re Dorothy, plopped down in the Land of Oz. Things are scary and you’re unhappy. What do you do?
 
Well, before you can decide what to do, you have to know what you want.
 
Since you’ve seen the movie before ending up in this horrible situation, you know you want to get home to Kansas. But say you don’t have the benefit of this foreknowledge. If all you know is that things are scary and you’re unhappy, you might think what you want is to find security and happiness, anywhere you can find them.
 
Now say you’re just you, but in the following situation: You’ve just been laid off. Things are scary and you’re unhappy.
 
What do you do?
 
Like Dorothy, you should start with determining what you want. And also like Dorothy, you may well want to find security and happiness.
 
The problem both you and Dorothy face is that that goal, though a great one, is not specific enough to be achievable. There’s no direct route to security and happiness. Would that there were.
 
In Dorothy’s case, she takes the first important step toward her goal when she gets concrete and decides that what she wants is to get home. There’s a person (a wizard, actually) who has the power to get her there (or at least so she thinks). She sets out to persuade that person to give her what she wants. There may now actually be a direct route to her goal. (In this case it happens to be yellow.)
 
Once she has specified her goal, it becomes—not easy, certainly, but easier—to do things that might help her achieve it. Pick up some potential helpers along the way. Throw a few apples. Steal a broomstick.
 
An actor playing Dorothy, if she’s any good, is going to concentrate on Dorothy’s specific, achievable goal and finding ways to actually achieve it. She would not be well advised to put most of her energy into making sure the audience thinks Dorothy appears Dorothy-like, whatever that might mean. This is a fundamental misconception a lot of non-actors have about the craft of acting. They think it’s primarily about taking on lots of characteristics that are not your own, turning yourself into "someone else." And yes, being flexible, able to take on non-habitual attitudes and behaviors, is important to an actor—but a good actor puts her focus not so much on how she’s being but on what she’s doing. Not the adjectives, but the verbs.
 
Dorothy herself (if she were real) would probably not be particularly worried about how Dorothy-like she’s being in this situation. She might even find that the whole idea of "being in character" flies out the window when she discovers herself capable of doing lots of "uncharacteristic" things in pursuit of her goal. Is melting down a witch, even accidentally, a Dorothy-like behavior? Who cares at that point?
 
So the actor playing Dorothy puts most of her energy into pursuing Dorothy’s goals, by doing everything she can to achieve them. Many of the elements of acting that non-actors often think constitute the craft (facial expression, line delivery, emotion) actually arise largely as by-products of that active pursuit of a goal.
 
It’s a technique that makes a lot of sense in "real life," as well. If you’re laid off, you’re not going to get very far by focusing on being resilient or being ruthless or being employable. If your child has broken an expensive dish, simply being angry does no good on its own, and neither does being reasonable. Those are not goals, and they’re not steps toward achieving goals.
 
Part of this is vocabulary, but the way we put things says a lot about how we’re thinking. If "be reasonable" really means, among other things, "use examples to make points that might change the child’s behavior," then great—just choose the latter way of putting it, and you won’t get caught in a vague, passive stance. If you decide the active equivalent of "be resilient" is "make a list of all the transferable job skills you’ve acquired and brainstorm about possible job opportunities," then great—that’s how you should put it to yourself. And then you should do it.
 
Take Sam Waterston’s advice and find the verbs, because that's where the action is. Take the emphasis off who you are and what you’re like and put it on what you do and might do differently in the future.

Monday, March 2, 2009

The Roles of a Lifetime

"Vanessa was usually the President of the United States and Corin was usually the Prime Minister. I was usually the dog."
Lynn Redgrave, on role-playing with her siblings


We play roles. Like it or not. You can make your own list: parent, child, sibling, boss, employee, co-worker, instigator, consoler, motivator, prime minister, terrier ….
 
We play roles. Like it or not. So why not like it?
 
Well… there are reasons. One reason role-playing is not always seen as a ton of fun is that it comes with all the negative connotations of fakery, deceit, manipulation—or insincerity, inauthenticity, and partial truth at best. (Of course, those qualities are exactly what make role-playing fun for some people, but let’s not be those people.)
 
Where did all those negative connotations come from? Our Puritan roots? (They hated actors of all kinds, including "Papists," who they saw as putting on a show rather than having true faith.) Our fear that we’ll be manipulated by the people around us, who may be playing all sorts of roles without our knowledge? (Con artists certainly do exist, and that’s a form of role-playing that may have given the whole practice a bad name.) Or is it our own insecurity about who we really are and who we wish we could be?
 
Ultimately, the origins of the negative connotations don’t matter all that much. When we play a role like "good spouse," "tough-love dispenser," "patient tutor," "truth teller" or "cheerer-upper," we tend to be pretty okay with the role-playing thing. It’s a question of the particular role—is it one we can be proud of, and one we (therefore) assume comes naturally? We might get around the whole issue by not acknowledging praiseworthy behaviors as roles at all, but of course they are.
 
Notice that it doesn’t make much sense to talk about playing a role all by yourself, with no one else there to praise you or blame you or be immediately and directly affected by your actions. When you’re by yourself, you’re just…yourself. But that doesn’t mean we "put on a mask" or somehow cease to be ourselves when other people are around; it just means we behave differently when we have different people to interact with. We play roles in relation to others. To some extent, our relationships with other people define the role or roles we play with them.
 
When you’re with your boss, one obvious role you might play is that of employee. No-brainer. Directly determined by your relationship.
 
When you’re with your mother, one obvious role might be that of offspring. But what does that really mean? That role is not necessarily well defined. That’s because every mother/offspring relationship is different from every other one. And, come to think of it, every boss/employee relationship is unique, as well.
 
But sometimes we allow ourselves to think that our roles are completely defined – written in stone, even—and that’s one way the role idea can seriously backfire. "When I’m with my mother, I play the role of enabler." "When I’m with my brother, I play the role of conciliator." "When I’m with my minister, I play the role of hypocrite."
 
Isn’t it true that sometimes when you’re with your mother, you play the role of … mother? You can mother anyone you please, including her.
 
We have more choice in this matter than we sometimes allow ourselves to believe. The idea that a role can be played at will is another thing that makes people uncomfortable—if it doesn’t "come naturally," then it partakes of the evil of play-acting—but the simple truth is that we consciously choose various roles for perfectly benign reasons and with perfectly benign results all the time. In fact, the world would be a better place if we all did a lot more of that.
 
Good actors never let themselves get stuck in a narrow interpretation of a role, but in real life we do it all the time, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Many of the roles we choose to play are appropriate and useful, but others are unhelpful or downright counterproductive. It would really help if we could all be better actors in our lives.
 
Since the terms for these roles are all so poorly defined—boss, mother, servant—maybe we’d be better off talking about specific behaviors—what we choose to do rather than who we think we are. That approach might allow us to find more helpful variations of the roles we think we’re doomed to. A mother might be a caretaker, a motivator, a teacher, a challenger, a needler, a clarifier, or a shoulder to cry on. Like an actor making a role her own—a good actor, who knows how to access herself in a thousand authentic modes—she gets to choose.
 
So the next time you’re facing a situation that puts you in a narrow box—I hate evaluating my employees because they treat me like I’m the enemy—try doing a better job of casting yourself. If the version of "evaluator" that you're playing is being received by your employees as "enemy," maybe "evaluator" is not doing the trick. Choose a more specific and active role—try teacher, or ally, or mentor, coach, cheerleader, doctor…something as far from "enemy" as you can imagine. Even if you use the exact same words in your employee evaluations, changing your sense of your role may completely change the way your "performance" is received. Give it a whirl—and please report back on your results.