What Do You Want From Me?!

by David Fairhurst

When actors entertain each other with tales of the awful experiences they’ve had with directors—and every actor has at least one good “bad director” story—I feel sort of left out. I’ve never really had what I would call a bad director.

(Well, there was the guy who had me run face-first into a cement wall, knocking out a tooth, but he wasn’t so much “bad” as just flat-out nuts.)

As a student at the Actors Studio Drama School, I was privileged (or punished, depending on how you look at it) to attend three years’ worth of tapings of “Inside the Actors Studio,” and one of the standard questions that James Lipton would ask every guest was “What do you want from a director?” Surprisingly, almost every actor responded the same way: “I want the director to trust me.”

Or maybe not so surprisingly. I was reminded of this recently when I read Jean Schiffman’s excellent Craft column in the Jan. 11 issue of Back Stage, in which she turns the tables and asks, “What do directors want from actors?”

Her conclusion: “They want thinking, experimenting, passionate collaborators, not Gordon Craig’s übermarionettes.” Well, not all of them, unfortunately. Little annoys me more as an actor than to feel as if a director is using me as his own personal “übermarionette” to play out his preconceived “vision” (Robert Wilson notwithstanding; geniuses get a free pass). I can’t be the only actor who’s been in rehearsal with a director like this and found himself muttering under his breath, “If you already have all the answers, then what do you need me for? Just play the part yourself.”

Which is why it’s so baffling that some actors willingly give up their role in the creative process. “Occasionally you’ll get somebody who just wants to memorize lines and be told where to stand. That’s frustrating,” says one of the directors Schiffman interviews. True, but not as frustrating to the rest of the cast as the actor who monopolizes every rehearsal by peppering the director with endless, needy questions: “How should I say that? Should I pause before the line or after? What should I do when I’m finished? Should I cross now or later? Should I walk fast or slow? Should I turn clockwise or counterclockwise?” And on and on and on, until the whole cast wants to scream, “Just shut up and pick one! If it’s wrong, he’ll tell you! But make your own damn choices!”

A smart director once told me (and he learned it from another smart director, who learned it from one of the deans of American regional theatre, Adrian Hall), “A choice that comes from the actor is always better than one that comes from the director.” Which I take to mean that no matter how thoroughly a director may analyze a script, he or she will never have the kind of insight a good actor gets by living in the character’s skin and thinking the character’s thoughts. It also explains why that clichéd question with which unthinking civilians like to characterize actors, “What’s my motivation?,” is one that no self-respecting actor would be caught dead asking of anyone but himself.

On the other hand, when it comes to being told where to stand, that’s something I actually appreciate from a director; I don’t even mind having every inch of my blocking mapped out for me. In fact, I enjoy it, perhaps for the same reason that poets find a paradoxical feeling of freedom within the constraints of, say, a 14-line sonnet: the freedom of structure. Having to make blocking choices on top of acting choices on top of character choices can almost feel like too much freedom, resulting in a sort of “paralysis of unlimited choice.” But tell me you want me to cross up left on a particular word and, by God, I’ll find a reason to justify it, while thanking you for giving me one less thing to think about.

But one director Schiffman quotes might have me worried. She says he “arrives at his first rehearsal with questions about the characters and their relationships and expects a healthy conversation.” Nothing wrong with a healthy conversation, but I’m not sure how much I can contribute at the first rehearsal.

As another smart director once told me, “The purpose of rehearsal is to figure out what questions you should be asking, not to confirm the answers to questions you’ve already come up with in advance.” Which is why I try to approach the first rehearsal with as few preconceived ideas as possible, and why a director who bombards me with questions about my character at the first table read—and it’s happened more than once—is likely to be met by shrugs and blank stares. I mean, if I already knew the answers to all those questions, there would be no point in rehearsing, right? We could just do the show now.

But ask me those same questions at the last rehearsal—after several weeks of thought, experiment, and debate—and I’ll write you a doctoral dissertation on my character. That’s what I love so much about rehearsing (and I may love rehearsing more than any actor I’ve met). In some ways, I love rehearsing more than performing. Yeah, feeding off the energy of a live audience is great, but for me that pleasure is fleeting. The true creative excitement—the real “craft” in the craft of acting—happens where the public never goes: in the rehearsal room.

(Never goes until now, that is, as the producers of both “Saturday Night Live” and CBS’s “The Class,” perhaps sensing there was one last realm of show business that had yet to be thoroughly cannibalized, recently announced they’d be running live webcasts of rehearsals.)

Which brings us back to the issue of trust, and why actors and directors both need it for the whole process to work. I won’t speak for directors, but for actors, trust gives us the confidence to experiment, to be vulnerable, to try anything the director suggests, to act on any impulse we get, no matter how ridiculous, without fear of criticism. So I guess the deal we make with directors goes something like this: I’ll trust that you know where you’re taking us, if you trust that I can figure out how to get us there.