by Jason Bennett

Master actors are experts at creating theatricality. If you want to be a successful actor, you must learn to assemble the specific ingredients of theatricality into a performance. This takes a great deal of training. If you are willing to work hard, you can learn to activate the ingredients of theatricality and distinguish yourself from average aspiring actors.

The essential elements of theatricality are: creating intense relationships with the other characters and demanding a response from them, in spite of huge obstacles; struggle; urgency; life-and-death importance; discovery; universality; vulnerability; and heightened energy. These elements are part of what add up to a compelling performance. Serious actor training will teach you how to create these things in a performance. Most actors are not born knowing how to do is. You must work on the ingredients one at a time.

Being in an intense relationship with someone and demanding a response from them is, by definition, extremely confrontational! It is war, but not always loud and screaming war. In acting, wars can be quite still and vulnerable. First, you must learn to create an intense relationship between yourself and the other characters. Then, you must learn to demand a response from the other characters. Wars can also be internal, between different parts of you – your many selves or archetypes. Great actors create both internal and external wars.

Demanding a response can take the following forms: you can be doing something to the other person; you can be trying to change something about them; you can be trying to convince them of something; you can be trying to get something from them; and you can be trying to get them to do something. You can think of "demanding a response" from the other characters as going after your objectives, goals, or whatever. The point is -- you must work until you care so much about the other characters that you go after them, demanding the response you must have.

Many young actors understand these concepts intellectually, but do not realize the huge energy expenditure required to really experience these things. Your energetic commitment must be extreme. Your acting must be "life with the boring parts cut out," virtually every moment. It isn't fair to waste the audience's time with casual, slow acting.

In general, your attention should be on the other character while you act, not on yourself. You should know exactly what the other character will look like (or what you will get) if you win the war you are in with them. Through physical and vocal actions, improvised in rehearsals, you must try everything you can possibly imagine to win the war, no matter what happens in the story. Try to change the play while you are acting through demanding the response you must have from the other characters. The audience does not know what is going to happen in the end and neither does your character. Play to win the war!

It must be extremely difficult for you to achieve your goals. It must be a struggle filled with obstacles. It must be very hard for you to get the response you seek. The obstacles, inside yourself or in your environment, increase your struggle. The more you are struggling while performing, the more interesting your acting. The situations the writer gives you are not supposed to be easy for your character. If they seem easy, then the writing may be bad and you must learn to add in the struggle yourself. Because if you are not in a titanic struggle, you are wasting the audience's time. Audiences want to see you having a life-and-death struggle while you act, virtually every moment. Again, understanding this intellectually is not enough. You must learn tools to create this experience for real. Acting should make you sweat.

Great actors "agitate" the given circumstances by adding internal and external obstacles: those things, ideas or people that are in the way of your character getting what you want. Obstacles can be a war of conflicting desires inside you, troubling memories that enter into your mind, or the desires of the other characters coming into conflict with the desires of your character. The tension between your pursuit of your character's goals and the obstacles in the way is part of what adds up to an amazing performance.

If this all sounds confusing, don't worry. It is confusing. It's hard to write about all this in a short article. Most aspiring actors have no idea how to create all this in their acting. These kinds of things are what separate the serious actors from the average actors. You cannot learn how to really do all this "on the job" or in audition workshops. It's what real acting classes are for.

Moving on to the next ingredient, theatrical acting is also urgent and has a feeling of life-and-death importance. People pay to see actors engaged in life-and-death, extremely efficient conflicts. People go to the theater to see actors grappling with issues that are relevant to their lives. All great acting is therapy for an audience. Audiences demand efficient storytelling. You must ask yourself, is each moment of your acting truly a life-and-death struggle? Do you know how to create these experiences for real?

You must learn how to make your acting seem urgent. Urgency (or immediacy) means that you feel you must achieve your goals and work out your problem NOW. Audiences don't appreciate casual acting and casual, slow storytelling. Urgency is not naturalism, because of course in real life everything is not urgent and of life-and-death importance. But great actors find ways to make their acting urgent and of life-and-death importance, even when the writer fails to provide that in the script.

You must also remember that virtually everything the character does as the play moves forward is a discovery. No matter how many times you perform a role, it must be as if you are experiencing all the thoughts, realizations, feelings, actions and words of the character for the first time.

Sanford Meisner said, "Find in yourself those human things which are universal."

Your struggles and life-and-death conflicts, the goals you pursue, and the relationships you create between yourself and the other characters, must resonate with audiences. In part, this is achieved by making your character's desires and struggles universal.

To achieve universality in your acting, you need an education in some humanistic psychology. You need to learn about vulnerability. You need to learn how to experience, truly, your own vulnerability, so you can call on it when you act.

You can start with searching the Internet for "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs." Read all about the universal human needs observed by Abraham Maslow and psychologists like him. You should be able to trace everything your character cares about back to these basic human needs. The more of these basic needs your acting includes, the more your acting will resonate with all kinds of audiences.

Vulnerability is a key to great acting. Most actors lack vulnerability in their work. It isn't possible to be theatrical or successful without a true connection to your vulnerability. Many old-fashioned comments given in acting classes can be reframed as the teacher complaining that the actor lacks vulnerability in their work: "you have to raise the stakes," "you have to be willing to let it affect you," "you have to invest more fully." These are not comments I ever hear myself saying to actors. Anyone can simply diagnose the problem; actors need the solution. Archetype Work and learning The Psychology of Selves is the surest way to connect an actor to his or her vulnerability. The last generation of teachers had a harder time helping actors do this. Now we can.

Finally, heightened energy must permeate your work when you act. Your acting should "buzz" at a "higher or faster vibration" than daily living. Michael Chekhov described theatricality in terms of "radiating" energies and living in specific "atmospheres" with specific "qualities." He was referring to access to many kinds of archetypal energy, only he didn't quite have our modern understanding of psychophysiology. Acting takes an incredible amount of energy. If you aren't expending a great amount of energy, combined with a "feeling of ease" while you work, something is terribly wrong.

Actors at our school engage in intense "energy training," in the form of Archetype Work, Sound and Movement Improvisations, and intense ensemble warm-ups. This trains you, experientially, to access and communicate with tremendous amounts of heightened energy while you act. You cannot achieve this through script analysis alone. It is an experience you must have many times.

When you succeed at combining all these elements into a performance, you are on your way to a profoundly memorable performance. Look for these elements when you watch professional actors. They are often missing. But you will find them all in the work of truly great actors.

As you learn how to create theatricality with increasing confidence and consistency, you will experience more joy and success in your work. Robert Cohen said, "Great acting is not easy; anyone who says it is is either shallow or a charlatan. And one of the hardest things about acting is admitting that it is hard." Many of the ingredients of great acting can be learned with hard work.

Sanford Meisner said, "Your acting will not be good until it is only yours. That's true of music, acting, anything creative. You work until finally nobody is acting like you." The performing arts need your unique contribution now more than ever. Work, work, work!