Joseph Wiseman, best known as “Dr. No,” the first James Bond film villian pass away(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091021/ap_en_ot/us_obit_wiseman). IN the article, his daughter states, “Stage acting was what he wanted to be remembered for.” It’s almost cliche to hear a Hollywood actor/actress say that he or she wants to "go back to my first love, theatre."or something to that affect. William Petersen, aka “Gil Grissom,” supposedly left “CSI” for that reason. So, what’s the difference between the two and desire to leave one for the other?
Two words:
Live Audience.
And
Theatrical Actors are revered in the entertainment business because they perform live. They can’t do retakes and can’t take a coffee break.
I think this is better suited for Cafe Society than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
For an actor there is nothing like the stage. Every performance is a unique and wonderful experience (even the bad shows). Everything is on the line everytime you go out there; I don’t care how small the part or how small the production. The audience is a lot of it as pan1 said but not all.
That being said the money is wonderful in film and the recognition is also nice. I have been in three (argueably four but it open to debate) films and two (short-lived) TV series - all incredibly minor roles. More people have recognized me for those than 20 years in the theater. I also made more money from those than my time on stage.
But God I love the stage.
Think about the experience of being an actor for a movie or tv show. You may spend half a day waiting for a 20 second shot of you getting out of a car, which you have to do 18 times to get it just right. Or you get to have a dialog scene with another actor, but because of the editing and coverage you only really get to say about 2 phrases before the cut. Again, you do it 11ty times until you get it just right.
Now contrast that with performing in a live play. You get to be in front of an audience who gives you feedback while you are performing, either by laughing when you are funny or hanging on every word when you are being dramatic. You have to inhabit your character for 2 to 3 to 5 hours with no real “break”. You interact with the other actors on stage in real time so you get into a feeling best described as “flow” with very real feelings of emotion and relationship, for a sustained period of time.
So, yeah, for a lot of actors it’s no contest which they like best.
There is already this thread on the subject.
Actually, that thread is about a particular actor and his career, and this thread is about the difference between stage performances and other kinds of performances.
I’m leaving them both open.
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
:smack:
So how many lashes is this going to run me? 
Theatre acting is a totally different beast than film and TV acting. They really are very different art forms. The answers given so far, the live audience, the sustainability of a performance, are only two of the many things that make acting on stage different. And the live aspect is probably why many actors love the stage so much. The difference between them to me, though, is one of craft. With the theatre you work towards totally different goals than you do on the film. Note, I am not saying that one is better than the other, but only that they are different and it’s the differences that create preference.
First, with theatre you are working without a net. You are up there in front of an audience of people performing in real time, and errors are going to occur. You have to deal with them, handled them and incorporate them into the performance. You also have to try avoiding any errors that are going to stop the show. It’s tense, but exhilarating for everyone involved, not just the actors. With film it’s not about managing imperfections, but rather about creating perfection. You have the ability to get it just right, and are expected to do so. There is no audience so you get to try, try again.
Secondly there is the question of time. Theatre works with long time frames (the performace), film with short ones (the take). Theater works linearly while film bounces about in the timeline of the story in order to create efficiency. With theatre you have to give the same performance eight times a week for (if you are luck) months on end, but your performance disappears the second it’s finished. With film you only have to do it right once, and the it’s there forever.
There is also the question of size. This is the part that causes a lot of actors to not transition between mediums well. Film is about continuity and restraint, theatre is about flow and creating size. With theatre everything needs to be just a bit bigger than life or it doesn’t look like anything. With film everything needs to be much smaller than real life or you look like a ham.
I could go on and on and on, (I am happy to talk about acting until everyone around me is bored to tears.) but I won’t. Many, many actors are taught that film acting isn’t real acting because they don’t have to sustain the performance for film the way they have to for the stage, and this generally leads to a lot of very sloppy actors turning in passable performances. You can easily get by as a good working actor, and really not have a lot of vocal control, or physical control over your body. Stage actors can’t get away with this at all because without the vocal and physical conditioning they can’t turn in consistent performances time and again for the whole run of a show. That being said, working in the fractured environment of film and television and managing to turn in any sort of consistent performance is something of a minor miracle if an actor is actually creating a character the way some of the great actors do. So I think that actors who discount film acting as lesser are missing a bit of the point. That said, it *is *a whole lot less fun.
Excellent post. I concur 100%.
Thanks! I respect your opinion, so that means a lot to me.
I am going to assume that my post was so chock full of informative material that no one else had anything to add, and not that people grew disinterested about halfway through thereby killing the thread deader than disco. 
Well, I for one would be happy if you kept going. 
Reading David Mamet’s True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, I’ve wanted to learn more about acting theories.
I’m more than happy to answer questions, with the disclaimer that I come at acting from the perspective of a director, not an actor, and that I have some of my own ideas about the subject that are a result of studying various styles over the years and synthesizing them based on what does and doesn’t work. These days I am very into physicality and movement creating emotion and building character from outside in rather than using emotion to create physicality. (That’s not a good way of describing it, but it’s a decent shorthand) I tend to let actors do whatever inside out work that they want (who am I to stop them?), but I personally don’t do a lot of emotional work with actors instead focusing on physical and vocal work.
This doesn’t make me in any way unique, most directors I know work this way these days, but it does give you a different perspective on the acting process.
I tend to work in the opposite way (from intention to physicality), but in the show I just directed I was trying something similar to what you are discussing, on a small scale. One of the actresses was having a hard time with a solo scene, so I asked her to press her finger into the table she was sitting it and just worry it (press it, pick at it,etc.) for the entire scene, keeping her focus on the finger. The physical focus helped her discover some stuff about the scene and the character that she had not realized before. (Sometimes I think acting is akin to magic).
That’s probably not at all what you’re process is, but the thread is slow, so what the hell 
I am ok with just talking for a bit.
The reality is, I don’t have a fixed method and I work differently depending on the situation, but that is close to how I work as a starting point a lot of time. I don’t talk about emotion at all with my actors though, if I can avoid it. Like I said (I think), as far as I am concerned the emotional reality of the character is part of the actors journey, and I am more than happy to help guide them on that journey and if they want to talk to me about that journey that’s great, but it’s a personal journey and I don’t want to screw with it.
Also, I am not looking for emotion per se when I am directing, I am looking for storytelling, so I breakdown the scenes into what action I am looking for and more or less block with that physicality in mind bringing in details of specific actions like the one you mentioned above, or giving actors objectives to work towards and then having them play with different methods of getting what they want from the other characters. So, it isn’t strictly true that I am working totally outside in, but emotion follows everything, it’s always the result of the rest of the work.
No, thread, don’t die!
A general question: regarding both the theatre and the screen, what makes the difference between good acting and great acting?
A specific question: I was reading Bronson Pinchot’s AV Club interview and he made these comments –
Can you clarify what he might have meant in the bolded portion?
Third thing: what are your thoughts on the Meisner technique?
IMO (of course) the only way to judge the quality of acting is to judge how well 1) the actor achieved their goals (hard to do, but not impossible) and 2) how well those goals tell the story. Again, I come from the camp where story is everything, and every choice made should be in service to that. It’s not always easy to judge these things outright so a lot of the time you have to look at other things and make inferences as to the intention of the artist. But that’s true of any artform. In the end you assume that everything the actor does in intentional and then judge the strength of the choices made.
If looking at good vs. bad acting there are simple objective things you can discuss. Does the actor know how to talk, walk, sit, stand, move, etc? But acting (again, in my opinion, and we will get to people who disagree in a bit) is a lot about interpretation of script and deciding exactly what each word means and why it is said. Dozens of choices are made in the recitation of a single paragraph and the good actor will make appropriate choices, where as the great actor will make equally appropriate but more accurate and exciting choices. They are the choices that are a little bit more interesting to watch, or say a little bit more about the character, or add a bit more electricity to the scene. The great actors do more than jut follow the script, they elevate the script past what it was on the page.
He is talking about the basic acting concept of simply connecting with the other actor on stage in a realistic manner. And he’s right, if *everything *else fails just try to get things to make sense. Just talk. It’s very easy to get caught up in all the intellect analytical stuff, and if things have not been adequately rehearsed you lose the flow of the reality of the situation. In those cases, if you are working on a realistic piece, the best bet is to just get back to basics and start making sure that you are connecting and interacting with the other actors on stage.
If you are working on a realistic piece. This works better on film than on stage and better in realistic drama than other areas, but it’s important. Connect with the people who are around you. Act *with *them.
I dislike it myself as a singular method. I think it doesn’t work well for one. When it does work at all it only works for one particular style of drama, and it creates actors who don’t really act but rather give self indulgent performances. I think it works terribly for stage because you never nail anything down creating wildly inconsistent performances that can not hold up over a long run of a show and is an attempt at a shortcut that removes a lot of the actual work of acting and replaces it with emoting which is not the same thing.
You get the same character from a Meisner actor every time you see them because Meisner teaches you to show yourself onstage rather than teaching you how to bring the character that was written to life. These people, along with Method actors, would be the ones who generally disagree with me that acting is about analysis and physical work. They would say it is about emotional truth. I say that’s bullshit myself, and that acting is a group effort to create art and any one individual paying that much attention to themselves weakens the whole.
But again, that’s me and to be fair, I have never (to my knowledge) worked with a Meisner actor directly, so I can only judge them based on what I have seen in performance.
If you are interested, I am a fan of Meyerhold, Stanislavsky(particularly the later works), Michael Chekov, Grotowski and Brecht, and what they had to say about acting. The only one of the old Group Theater people who’s teachings I really care for is Stella Adler’s.
I am otherwise generally anti Method.
My acting training was the Meisner Technique…and if you knew my IRL name, your jaw would drop and you’d ask me for autographs.
OK. Not really. At least not about the autographs. Being trained in the Meisner Technique part is true.
I’ll disagree with NAF1138 that the Meisner Technique works for only a certain style and creates self-indulgent actors.
The person I studied with had us all read Bolaslavky’s The First Six Lessons, which is an excellent description of all the things an actor can draw upon to fully flesh out a character. It’s not solely about emotional reality.
Every “method” gets branded as the crutch of a weak actor. An actor with inherent talent might benefit from a technique or method that can help can help him/her strengthen what he/she has. It can also give a mediocre actor a bag of tricks to call upon.
Fair enough. I would like to point out that I said I dislike it as a singular method. If you want to use it as part of a bag of tricks things get different.
(bolding mine)
I think this is important to note, and I completely agree. I think the worst possible direction is to tell actors how they should be feeling. “Play it angrier.” :rolleyes:
I’ve done very little film work, but I have seen this kind of direction in film, and I wonder how often it is done. I suspect it is harder for actors/directors to get into the flow in film, and I can imagine them falling back on that kind of thing as shorthand/a crutch.