Theater for Beginners

By Richard Maxwell

- Also published by TCG: Plays, 1996-2000, a volume of Maxwell’s work
- Attended Illinois State University
- Artistic Director of New York City Players
- Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Obie Award (for House) and Foundation for Contemporary Arts
- Co-founder of the Cook County Theater Department in Chicago
- His work has been presented in over sixteen countries, including Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, Argentina and Australia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Release date: Feb 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781559367189

Richard Maxwell

Richard Maxwell brings the skills he developed in his twenty-five-year career as a screen and television writer-producer to FirstVoice's clients. In addition to his produced feature films—The Challenge, The Serpent and the Rainbow, and Shadow of China—he has worked as a script doctor, writing or rewriting films for every one of the major Hollywood studios and many independent producers. He lives in Pacific Palisades, California, with his wife, Christine.

Book preview

Introduction

I am a playwright and a director. This book was written to impart what I value in theater. What I love most is the dialogue I have with actors. I hope these words that I write form a guide for the people who want to be on stage.

In my conversations with actors, and even as I write this, I come up against the sense that what we are talking about, and working toward, is really a way of being in the world.

Theater provides the unique experience of watching the body in real time, inside a story. Because it is live, theater allows us to get closer to each other. The melodrama, the kitchen-sink drama, the restoration comedy, the avant-garde play, the musical comedy, all have something separating them from television, for example.

There is reality occurring in front of viewing eyes, and the combustible mix of reality with what is being presented on stage is enticing and electric.

The audience member in the theater watches the stage and is presented with a question, What is this thing happening before me? It’s real and it’s fake—this room, this set, this person, this story. In this room there is accountability all around and on both sides of the footlights.

While it is convenient to describe the audience as one group, theater is best thought of as a face-to-face encounter, negotiated individually. People sit next to each other and watch, having feelings about what is being presented. This happens in any public viewing situation, but in theater, these encounters and the crisscrossing sensations feed the live experience in a peculiar way; our notions of character, values, our own selves and society, take shape in this public place. Through these encounters, theater fosters community and maybe simply is a community, put into sharp relief.

You, actor, are the gateway to these encounters. And no matter how long a writer works on the writing, no matter how impressive the staging or lighting may be, the actor on stage has the final say.

You, actor, are the warm presence that gives words life, you are the medium in the room before us, you are in the present.

You, person, are interesting. You are molecules and spirit that cannot be repeated. Remember this going into any audition, rehearsal or performance.

If ninety-nine percent of actors are presently not employed, what is it that propels you forward? There are so few opportunities, generally.

I maintain this is and has to be, finally, okay. I believe the only noble path is one of selflessness. Nobility exists not through what you become but in who you are; how you listen, how you prepare. The rest is utterly elusive.

Apart from any style, I believe good performance is thorough performance and depends on a constant sense of beginning. To perform is to engage with an endless stream of dissonant forces, with two larger purposes at play: the concrete, practical side of getting from the beginning of a thing to the end; and the slippery goal referred to as genuine.

If you are charged with performing something, or are trying to get hired for performing something, you will likely try to do what they ask, whoever they might be.

Around each audition, rehearsal or performance there is an expectation. There is pressure for a display of talent, or rightness. What will you show? How shall you behave, given that that behavior will likely be repeated?

I offer my two cents from the vantage of a person watching, empathically.

I should think years of experience would have led me to rely on bankable, consistent truths, but as I swing my way through life and career, cutting off Hydra’s heads, the reasons to doubt what I have learned seem to multiply.

That’s to be expected, I suppose, when you