The Unbearable Confusion of Defining Terms

from The Craft column by Jean Schiffman
backstage.com – December 04, 2007

The terminology for the contents of an actor’s toolkit can be downright confusing. Case in point: the definition of that most essential tool, the objective. “Some call this element of the craft ‘objective,’ ” wrote Robert Lewis in the “Intention” chapter of his book Advice to the Players. “Others refer to it as the ‘action’.... Still others simply say it’s the subtext.” Yikes! But there’s more: In On the Technique of Acting, Michael Chekhov wrote, “Each character has both an Objective and a Super-Objective.”

Lee Strasberg defined objective (as explained by Lorrie Hull in Strasberg’s Method) as “Whatever the writer, director, or actor wants to achieve…. For each actor there can be an overall objective as well as smaller objectives within each scene…. In every play there is usually one overall objective, sometimes called the spine.” Bill Howey wrote in The Actor’s Menu that an objective is “what one character wants from another character” and an intention is “what you want to do.”

The word action is also confusing. Not only do some teachers interchange actions and objectives, as Lewis suggests, but action can mean internal actions in pursuit of your goal, or it can mean physical activities. How confusing is that?

I polled a few acting teachers to find out what words, phrases, and concepts most befuddle their students due to misleading or murky definitions or to different approaches to the craft having different vocabularies. Not surprisingly, several immediately mentioned the word objective.

“It sounds so scientific,” says University of California, Irvine, drama professor Richard Brestoff, noting that many acting terms were first used in Russian and thus can have different translations. “I’ve always tried to interpret it the way Stanislavsky meant it: He talked about the problem to be solved. I say to students, ‘What is the object of your desire?’ That way the word objective gets in there.”

Brestoff says the early American disciples of Stanislavsky broke the concept down to spine, line objectives, scene objectives, plot objectives, and character objectives: “It starts to feel like an equation almost.” He explains that Stanislavsky meant superobjective (sometimes called the spine of the play or character) as almost a thematic statement, which is nothing an actor can actually play. Another way to think about the concept, he says, is to divide it into long-range and short-range objectives.

“The whole point of an objective is that you don’t necessarily get what you want,” says Melissa Smith, the conservatory director at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. “Young actors tend to pick objectives where the stakes aren’t high enough or that they know they can win. We want to see you in pursuit of something, running into whatever you run into”—those would be your obstacles, another concept that actors have trouble understanding—“dealing with it…but actors tend to unconsciously choose goals they can achieve easily.”

Howey, whose book includes a small glossary, agrees that conflicting definitions can be problematic. “Objective is one example of a word that is used alternately with intention by actors or avoided altogether,” he emails. That’s why he defines both in his book. In defining objective, he explains that you want what you want “because of the reward.” “Actors I work with become more personal when the objective ends with a benefit,” he explains. “We all want something from what we do, and this definition becomes more personal and motivating to many actors.”

MIT professor Janet Sonenberg agrees that the concept of objectives can be perplexing. “On TV, if a character wants something, there’s no sense that it’s stated in terms of what the other person can give you,” she says. “It’s always stated in terms of an emotional need. But an objective should be stated in terms of what you want the other character to give you.” She defines an objective as having four components: I want it now; it’s personal to me; it’s selfish; it’s something the other person can give me. She finds that actors tend to say, “This is what I want,” and then give an “emotionalized performance that doesn’t take into consideration, Am I getting it now? Do I need to change my tactics?”

Monsoon of Meanings

Speaking of tactics, Brestoff points out a confusion regarding the definition of tactics and strategies. “They sound like they’re something a character thought out ahead of time,” he says. “And sometimes characters do have tactics and strategies, like Iago. But most of the time actors use it the wrong way,” thinking tactics are something to be planned in advance. Stanislavsky’s word, translated as adaptation, is closer, he says. “That means that when something happens in the moment, you adapt and change. Audiences don’t want to see preplanned tactics. They want to see them unfold in the moment because of what’s actually happening.”

Then there’s what should be a simple concept: truth. Brestoff thinks it’s a slippery word. There’s personal truth and character truth, he explains: “Actors often feel their personal truth is sufficient to play the part—how they feel as opposed to how the character would feel—since of course there’s no such thing as ‘the character.’ ” There’s only what’s inside you. “So actors sometimes stop their work when they feel it’s truthful, when they’re having an emotion.” But there’s a whole other level of truth toward which actors must strive: using your own complex, multifaceted self to serve the playwright’s script.

The word personal, too, can confuse. Walt Witcover, in the glossary of his book Living on Stage, nails it by defining personalizing as “an actor’s means of bringing himself closer to his role and his role closer to himself by use of private personal analogies, recalled or imagined.”

Another confusing vocabulary term is moment before. According to acting teacher Doug Warhit, “Actors sometimes interpret that literally. When you ask them what their moment before was, they’ll say, ‘I was in the other room’ or ‘I was waxing my car.’ It is literal, but more importantly, it has to be something that puts you in the emotional state of your character.” For example, your moment before may be that you just came home from work. But you have to add other elements, depending on the scene to follow: Your boss yelled at you, or you were stuck in traffic for two hours with no air conditioning. Your moment before needs to be something you can repeat to yourself like a mantra before you enter: “I’m afraid I’m going to lose my job.”

Warhit notes that the moment before should also include an evocative sense of place. It’s not enough to decide you were sitting in the library. What specific meaning does the library have for the character? Were you caught stealing books there as a child? Is it a place of solace?

Smith says the moment before is sometimes confused with preparation. “Preparation has to do with getting centered, warming up,” she explains. Sometimes actors do that and think they’ve created the moment before. The moment before is not in the script; it has to be invented. But Richard Pinter, head of acting at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse, reminds that preparation can be defined differently by different teachers. At the Playhouse, the word is used to mean the condition in which an actor enters a scene.

And while we’re discussing moments, Howey believes the term moment to moment is often misunderstood. It means just what it says, but actors tend to forget about it when focusing on the lines or when trying to get to what they think is the best part of the scene. “Confusion occurs when there’s some change and the previous moment is abandoned without transition to meet the change,” he says.

Other confusing terminology: beats, sense memory, affective memory, subtext, even listening (we’ll discuss subtext in an upcoming Craft column). What’s the addled actor to do? Says Pinter, “Ask your director, ‘What do you mean by that? Be specific.’ You have a right, an obligation, to ask questions. And they should be able to clarify.” It’s all about communication.

Jean Schiffman is a freelance arts and entertainment writer/editor specializing in theatre. Her website is www.jeanschiffman.com.

Jean Schiffman can be reached at jeanschiff AT earthlink DOT net. Her column The Craft appears in Backstage – the actor’s resource for casting calls, movie auditions and other news.

Link to original Backstage West article though they are online only for a few months.