A Practical Handbook for the Actor
By Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previto, Scott Zigler

With an introduction by David Mamet

Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York, 1986

Chapter 10
The Myth of Character

As briefly mentioned in chapter 3, it is impossible for you to become the character you are playing. In the theatre, character is an illusion created by the words and given circumstances supplied by the playwright and the physical actions of the actor.

Human beings are by nature highly suggestible. If an audience is told that you are the king of France, unless you violate the spirit of the play, it will accept that fact. That you are the king of France is a given; it is your job to find out what being the king of France means to you - i.e., what your actions are.

Aristotle defined character as the sum total of an individual’s actions, and his definition holds true for the theatre. Figuring out how you might hold a handkerchief or how many lumps of sugar you should take in your tea does not create a life in you because these things do not necessarily help you fulfill your action. Don’t fall into the trap of substituting externals for actions. If you have analyzed a scene correctly for action, you can easily make any external adjustments the director may ask of you. The same holds true for externals demanded by the playwright: saving a loved one from making a terrible mistake is a strong action that is as doable with a Polish accent as in your everyday speech.

Be wary of using an external to avoid a difficult problem. If you can’t analyze a scene correctly, playing it with a limp and an Australian accent may be superficially entertaining but doesn’t solve the problem of what is really happening in that scene.

The reason great actors are so compelling is that they have the courage to bring their personalities to bear on everything they do. Don’t ever play a part as someone else would play it. Remember that it is you onstage, not some mythical being called the character. For your purposes, the character exists on the printed page for analysis only. If you have done your analysis and memorized your lines, you have fulfilled your obligation to the script and the illusion of your character will emerge. You have the right and the responsibility to bring to the stage who you are. Your humanity is an absolutely vital contribution to any play you act in. Whenever you find yourself worrying about whether you are “doing the character” correctly, reflect for a moment on the words of Stanislavsky: “The person you are is a thousand times more interesting than the best actor you could ever hope to be.”

Acting One
Third Edition
Robert Cohen
University of California, Irvine
Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View California, London, Toronto, 1998

Page 23-24
The Character

Here’s an important question that may have occurred to you already: When you make your partner smile, or when you imagine your partner as a long-lost sibling, or when you ask your partner if

he or she can see you on Sunday, is your partner a classmate, or an actor, or a character? Philosophers may answer that question in a variety of ways, but for you there is only one answer: Your partner is always a character. The moment an acting exercise begins, it exists within a theatrical context. At that point, all participants are characters, and all behavior is acting, or “playing.”

This is a liberating answer. It means that the interactions between your partner and yourself take place within an overall context in which you have agreed to “play,” or to interact as characters. Therefore you can experience your feelings fully; you can experience the depth of love, lust, violence, and ambition within a dramatic context (even in an exercise or improvisation) without committing yourself in any personal (outside of class) way. Indeed, you can explore the extremities - and profundities - of feelings within the “playing” arena and return to your more private personality when the exercise (or play, or improvisation) is over. The ability to see your classmates as characters - which extends to seeing your best friend as Iago and your worst enemy as Romeo - is the ability to free your feelings so as to act vividly and intensely with other people.

The Moving Body
Teaching Creative Theatre
Jacques Lecoq
A Theatre Arts Book, Routledge, New York, 2002

Pages 60-62

Characters

States, Passions, Feelings
All the work accomplished in the first year is moving towards one main objective: character acting. Just as they have taken on different elements, colours, insects, students must be able to take on characters, even if this involves a more difficult approach. When we begin the work on characters, I am always afraid the students will fall back on personality, in other words talk about themselves, with no element of genuine play. If character becomes identical with personality, there is no play. It may be possible for this kind of osmosis to work in the cinema, in psychological close-ups, but theatre performance must be able to make an image carry from stage to spectator. There is a huge difference between actors who express their own lives, and those who can truly be described as players. In achieving this, the mask will have had an important function: the students will have learned to perform something other than themselves, while nevertheless investing themselves deeply in the performance. They have learned not to play themselves but to play using themselves. In this lies all the ambiguity of the actor’s work.

In order to avoid the phenomenon of osmosis, and to give us purchase on that elsewhere which we so desire, we make considerable use of animals. Each character can be compared, in part, to one or more animals. If we take a character based on the pretentiousness of the turkey, we must be sure that the turkey is indeed evident in the actor’s playing. Rather than a simple encounter between actor and character, we have a relationship which is always triangular: in this case the turkey, the actor and the character.

I begin by asking students to come up with a first character freely inspired by someone observed in the street or in their own circle. They simply have to have fun being a different character. We start by defining characteristics. These are not to be confused with the character’s passions, nor with motivating states, nor even with the situations in which it finds itself, but consist of the lines of force which define it. Their definition must be reducible to three words. A given character might be: ‘proud, generous and quick-tempered’. In this way we simplify the definition as far as possible in order to establish the basic structure which will permit the actor to play the character. With three sticks we can create a first space: a hut is already a home! Two elements would not be enough, because they would not be able to balance. For a character, just as for a house, the rules of architecture require a tripod. Once the three elements have been defined, we can begin searching for nuances: ‘he is proud but brave’; he is ‘quick-tempered but king’. Little by little, the actors develop their own nuances, their own complexities, and thus their characters are built on firm foundations with a clearly defined structure.

The students come to class in character, appropriately dressed. Some of them make the journey from home in character and occasionally we do not even recognize them, so great is their physical transformation. We treat them as if they were new students and they are put into the introductory classes on movement or acrobatics. This is amusing but tiring, and so we agree on a signal which will allow them to stop playing and to relax briefly before going on. For, try as one may, characters always tend to revert towards personalities. We must remember that the students are improvising in their own words and cannot rely on the distancing effect of a text written by an author. This is why I insist on them presenting a genuine dramatic character, in other words, a character stemming from real life, not a real-life character. The difference is subtle but essential.

When they show themselves, one by one, in front of the others, we question them about their identity: their name, age, family situation, origins, work, etc., and they have to reply. After this we place them in situation so that their character can reveal itself. For, of course, character cannot be separated from situation. It is only through situation that character can reveal itself. ‘Bring us to life!’ is the cry of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.