What did my acting professor mean when she suggested this?

In My Humble Opinion
1

When I was an undergrad, one of my majors was Theater. I wasn’t an actor, but the administration didn’t care, and made every theater major (stage managers like me, plus lighting designers, set welders, sound operators, etc.) take Acting For Actors. I didn’t mind – I was as good an actor as anyone in the class (and much better than some of those poor saps. Eeesh). I just wasn’t interested in the career.

The class was about 15 actors and 3 non-actors. The 50-year-old professor (who assumed everyone in her class wanted to pursue a career in acting) was a very new-age-ish type: when she directed mainstage shows, she only chose those with no plots where everyone ran around wearing unitards spouting nonsense verse and lots of fabric was draped over everything. Very Emperor’s New Clothes Theater. Most of her feedback on our acting projects was along the lines of “No no no no: you need to feel the space more. I can sense that you’re not feeeeeelng the space. Center yourself with some breathing exercises and try again. This time, really try to enter into your power bubble.”

Anyway, we were assigned to choose a 5-minute scene and perform it with a partner. I have completely forgotten my scene, but I don’t think it’s important to my question. It was something modern and somewhat realistic, like Neil Simon or David Mamet. I did a fine job of it, I seem to remember, and my partner was fine too. Nothing too unusual.

When we finished we sat down and waited for the professor’s comments. She was leaning back with one finger over her lips and her eyes narrowed in an elaborate “thinker” pose. After a dramatic pause, she said to me, “Randy. Tell me. Do you smoke cigarettes?”[sup]1[/sup]

“No,” I said, somewhat nonplussed, “I don’t.”

"You should really start," she said, "I think it would help put things in perspective for you."

And that was all the feedback she gave me for that scene, instead of the usual 5-minute chat. She moved right to my partner and started giving her some comments.

This was six years ago, and I STILL have no idea what the hell she meant.
[sup]1[/sup] (From the casual way she said “cigarettes,” I assume she meant the tobacco variety. She smoked them like a chimney, although it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume she smoked a lot of pot too, I guess.)

2

I thought about this for a while…then I thought about it some more, then I went off and read some other threads, and came back here to think about it a bit more…
I got nothin’.
I think you should take up smoking, and see if that helps. If nothing else, it should help put things in perspective…

3

Sounds to me like we’ll never know exactly what she meant unless you can remember what scene you were doing. Just as a wild guess, if you were doing a Mamet scene (as opposed to Neil Simon), I guess I could see her saying smoking would help make the scene more intense, or maybe make your character more nervous or something. Mind you, I don’t think it’s great advice… just taking a stab at it.

4

If the scene involved you handling a cigarette, I imagine being inexperienced with it might make a difference. But you’d probably remember that and indicate it in your post.

Maybe she associated smokers with a certain personality type, and mixed up correlation with causation. Maybe she thought your performance was perfect, but just had to say something.

5

I suspect it had to do with your breathing and knowing where in the dialog to take a breath (or drag on your cigarette) would help you get a feel for the phrasing. But that’s just a guess. It’s a dumb way to say it if that’s what she meant.

6

Professor : Smoking cigarettes would help put tings in perspective
Me : How do you mean?

In other words, why didn’t you ask at the time?

7

Here’s how you act:

Pretend you’re somebody else, and then read the lines on the page like you’re that person in that situation.

Anything anybody else tries to teach you that is inconsistent with that method is talking bollocks and can bugger off.

In other words, ignore her. She didn’t know a tenth as much as she thought she did, and knew even less about how best to share useable insight.

8

Reminds me of Miranda Richardson’s character from the final Blackadder series :

“** A man should smoke. It acts as an expectorant and gives his voice a deep, gravelly, masculine tone**”.

9

Total WAG, but she may have been on the verge of discussing a secondary physical life with you, either as an exercise or as an addition to the staging that you and your scene partner were doing.

Secondary physical life (I’m sorry if I’m going over something you already know all about.) is about what you are doing while the scene is going on.

In real life, we rarely just sit and talk, or stand and talk - we are doing something, usually several things.

In plays, it’s now considered redundant to refer to what the characters are doing while they speak, so unless it is vital to the plot, most writers will be told to edit out any reference to what people are doing. (“Now, where did I put those carrots?” would be considered a wasted line, whereas “Now, where did I leave the knife?” gives the audience a clue about something. Both imply that the scene should be in the kitchen, both imply food preparation, but most dramaturges would question the necessity of the first. In Shakespeare’s day, it was quite different because they wouldn’t have had the scenic resources of a modern theatre company or a film, so they had to talk about what they were doing to set the scene…)

One of the great things about smoking in a scene is there is a whole set of things one has to do with one’s hands. Open the pack, take off the foil, pull out a cigarette, do you tap it?, do you smell it? stick it in your mouth, find your matches, light it, put the match in the ashtray, draw on it, tap the ashes off, hold it - all of these are actions that need to be done, and get done in a different way as a natural response to the scene. No intense choreography required, it’s just having a smoke, except you tap the ashes off in a different way when your scene partner tells you he’s been sleeping with your brother than when he tells you that cabbages make him fart.

Smoking as a secondary physical life doesn’t work well with non-smokers because they have to learn how to smoke naturally. However, there are countless examples of secondary physical lives in real life, and it is an excellent exercise for the actor to discover them. Folding laundry, food preparation, housework, carpentry, games, etc., etc. The list is only limited by your imagination and experience.

A friend with whom I studied acting made us do a scene from ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ while playing darts. We weren’t allowed to add any lines - just the script, but everything in the script had to be coloured by the game, so if you threw a bull’s eye on the line “Nix, kid; you listen!” it was different from when you missed the board altogether on that same line.

Purely a guess, but that may have been what the acting prof was going to get at. It’s just too bad she didn’t follow it up with some advice about finding a secondary physical life for the character. She is right - the hardest thing to do onstage is to do nothing, and in those kind of Beckett/Mamet/Pinter scripts, having something to do helps you to put things (about the acting) in perspective for you.

Just my guess.

10

Perhaps she wanted you to get cancer? Perhaps she thought it would lower your vocal tones and sound older?

11

This is the most awesome answer ever. If the Dope stands for anything, it’s empiricism!

This was an arts class. We were all expected to nod knowingly at whatever she said (“I know you’re hanging upside down in this scene, but you need to keep yourself grounded. Especially in your hips and your homunculus.”), and puzzle it out later. I know it sounds to an outsider like it would be antithetical to any actual learning, but I’m afraid that’s just how those classes worked.

Yeah, I know how to act. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t acting advice though. That’s why this is such a head-scratcher.

EDIT: Le Ministre de l’au-delà, very well put, and I suppose it’s entirely possible. But I got the sense at the time, and the idea still nags at me, that she intended this as personal advice, and not professional advice.

12

Maybe that was just her “artistic” way of saying “I need a live Snake shoved up my ass”.

13

I think I’m a pretty smart guy, and usually say sensible things, but I know that I’ve said stupid things, and things that, with a little thought, clearly don’t make sense.

Now it’s possible to always assume everyone else is an idiot or crazy if you don’t immediately understand them. In the psychological field, that’s technically called being an asshole.

But it’s also possible to always assume everyone else is always perfectly logical and smarter than you and waste enormous amounts of time trying to find the meaning in what is in fact a nonsense utterance.

Just saying.
(If I was a cheesy musical theatre-based spiritual advisor, I’d sentence you to sing “Nothing” from A Chorus Line, but thankfully for everyone involved I’m not.)

14

I think Le Ministre is on the right track, particularly combined with the instructor’s “Feeeeeeel the space” direction. Just like you walk and talk differently when you’re outside rather than inside, when you’re smoking you use your hands differently, your speech pattern changes, etc.

Watch a Bogart movie and pay particular attention to his mannerism s when he’s smoking.

15

Maybe she was saying “Well, you can’t act, but if you had terminal lung cancer then I guess by comparison the crummy acting wouldn’t seem like such a big deal.”

Probably not, though.

16

:rolleyes: Yeah, that’s all there is to acting. If only I had known, I could be on Broadway right now!

This, on the other hand, I agree with completely.

17

I had a theatre professor tell me to take up smoking, too, actually. Of course, he’s my lighting design professor, and smoking was not really the point so much as doing drugs in general, which he believes is critical to understanding the nature of light in general.

18

She tells everybody that. She owns thousands of shares of Phillip Morris stock.

19

I once listened to my aunt tell her son, jaundiced and dying of liver failure - “Pat, should should take up smoking again. You’re a cool smoker, you just look right doing it. Your brother Tim just looks dumb when he smokes.” Of course, Pat looked cool no matter what he did. Tim just sort of looks geeky.

Maybe she thought it would add to your “cool factor”.

StG

20

If you were really in your power bubble you wouldn’t even have to ask.