The Transformational Actor: Innovative Approaches for 21st Century Rehearsal and Performance

By Peter Frisch

In 180 easily cross-referenced selections, Master Acting Teacher Peter Frisch embraces the notion that the joy of acting is in the specific work of transformation through imagination and belief. His innovative techniques are complemented by pr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Performing Arts Press
• Release date: May 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578370958

Peter Frisch

Mr. Frisch has directed 160 productions in the New York and regional theatre, produced 150 hours of network television, was Head of Drama at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, and has been on the conservatory faculties at Carnegie, The Juilliard School, Harvard and Boston Universities. Awards for productions include the Best of the Fest at the Seattle Film Festival, Joseph Jefferson, Kennedy Center-American Express, Outer Critics Circle Award. He has taught and coached professional actors and directors in New York and Los Angeles over the last forty years. Publications include a variety of journals from Stereo Review to The Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs. His adaptation of Studs Terkel's American Dreams is still in print at Dramatists Play Service.

Book preview

Dedication

To all of my students over the years who have helped to refine my thinking and challenged me to come up with evolved and original approaches that work. Contrary to Alfred Hitchcock’s repeated insistence that All actors are cattle, I have always found actors to be the brightest people in the room.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the helpful guidance of Christy Tyrus and Mission Publishing, Julie Holland and Andrew Tracy for their attentive, devoted editing eyes, and proofreader Brooks Becker for saving me from (minor) humiliation. Special appreciation is in order for Rachel Pinnock for her brilliant paintings on the cover and at the end of the selections and for Vanessa Maynard, whose superb design skills can be seen throughout the book you are holding. Thanks also to Erica Hilary and Niki Byrne for their clever ideas for Rachel’s paintings. I’m indebted to Tim Angulo, Hollywood DP and special effects wizard, for his help with Appendix III: Glossary of Camera Terms for Actors. Many thanks to the amazing Juliet Rohde-Brown of the Pacifica Instutute for her psychological insights and expertise, and to Matt Cannon and April Elize of The Frisch Approach for their consistently valuable feedback. Heartfelt thanks is also due to fans, friends and sounding boards: Marley Frank, Bill Egan, Ivy Vahanian, Kenny Luper, and Sophie Bradshaw. Finally, attention must be paid to Allan Miller, Robert Shaw, Jerzy Growtowski and my recently departed friend, voice and spirit guru Kristin Linklater, for their enduring influence on what I do and how I do it.

Introduction

During my fifty years as a teacher, coach, director and producer in the worlds of theater, film and television, actors have come to me with many of the sam e questions:

What are the components of creating a character?

How do I immerse myself in the world of the character?

When and how do I emotionally prepare for a scene?

Why do my scenes work once and then go off the rails?

Are there differences between scene prep and audition prep?

I’m stuck. How do I move to the next level of work?

Should I train in the Method, Meisner or somebody else?

What’s the difference between stage and camera acting?

The book you are holding answers those questions, and a good many more. A combination of advice, insight and (hopefully) inspiration, The Transformational Actor is a guide to best practices, covering a wide range of traditional and innovative techniques entirely based on the imagination, along with pragmatic tips related to auditions, acting on camera, casting, comedy, and training.

The Transformational Actor features:

Comprehensive strategies to develop depth, consistency and confidence during preparation, rehearsals, and performances

Inspiration and motivation to keep you focused, alive, creative and dynamic every time out

Thorough yet concise approaches to the craft, enabling you to be fully prepared no matter what the situation or circumstance

Encouragement for a spirited sense of play, a desire to risk and the confidence to make bold choices in your work

Innovative information and ways of working that will expand your thinking and deepen your appreciation of the field

An invaluable resource that can be either read through, referenced by general topic, or cross-referenced for specific answers to most issues facing actors.

In these pages you will discover 12 chapters and 180 selections on various aspects of the work. While each selection is discrete and specific, all material eventually connects and integrates completely.

Specificity is key. By drilling down to the details and absorbing each individual piece, actors will achieve a more grounded and thorough comprehension of the field that will eventually lead to work at the highest levels.

Before we move on to Chapter One: Visions and Pathways, I’d like to offer a bit of my own backstory followed by the underlying philosophy, beliefs and approaches of my work with actors.

Imagination. Belief. Transformation.

Let’s start from the near-beginning.

I’m in the eighth grade at the Barnard School for Boys in the Bronx. To my surprise, I get the lead in the high school play, Billy Budd, adapted from the Melville novel.

In the play, the innocent and trusting Billy is framed by the evil Claggart. After Claggart accuses him in person, Billy strikes Claggart, accidentally killing him. Billy is then court-martialed by the ship’s captain, Edward Vere, and sentenced to die by jumping into the ocean from the yardarm, the top crosspiece on a mast.

Fast-forward to the performance. There I am, 30 feet in the air over the very hardwood stage, saying my last line—God bless Captain Vere!—and ready to jump to my death a split second after the lights black out. (Of course, I wasn’t really supposed to jump.) Well, it’s a good thing the lighting guy was alert, for I would have jumped. Really. My belief in Billy’s goodness and the nobility of his sacrifice rang through every fiber of my 13-year old being.

For the first time in my young life, I experienced the power of the imagination and the transformative nature of belief. I was hooked. I knew I had no choice but to live my life in fiction.Yes, to act is to live a life in fiction. To act beautifully—transparently—means that you believe that the power of fiction can actually be more compelling than real life; that Story possesses the power to provide the deepest insights into the human condition; that the transformative nature of belief can change lives, including your own.

In fact, the gifted actor is only free when she chooses to explore real life through fiction—when she commits all of her resources to every moment of the world of the play or screenplay. That intensity, that immersion provides the joy in acting, and for the fortunate few, the joy in life. Imagination evolves into belief which, in turn, allows for transformation into character.

Imagination. The human imagination offers us an endless landscape of material to believe in and devour. Storytelling, imagery, emotional connection, empathy, leaps of faith, character motivation—all can effectively soar when based in the resources of our imaginations. Mark Twain said it clearly: Isn’t imagination a precious thing? It peoples the earth with all manner of wonders. Whoopi Goldberg, on the other hand, looked at it from the actor’s perspective: I can turn a blade of grass into whatever color I want it to be.

But how do we get to believe consistently? How do we embody the needs and anxieties of a character, achieve immersion in the world of the play or screenplay, possess deep and motivating feelings about each and every character we encounter? Beyond these, how do we reach that near-trance state where we are in the zone, looking and listening and trusting our impulses, riding the wave, adjusting instantly to get what we (the actor-character) need, while simultaneously being vocally centered and physically responsive?

The quick answer is twofold: first, by acquiring a dynamic process of work featuring reliable tools of the craft; while second, by achieving freedom, flexibility and responsiveness. But which process, and which craft? And how can we achieve emotional, physical and vocal freedom, transcending our own personal habit patterns, so that transformation is possible?

The Complete Actor

Surely, a number of very smart people have weighed in on these questions. Throughout the twentieth century, the many American disciples of Konstantin Stanislavsky adapted his system of acting to their own beliefs, passions and prejudices forming a terrific and varied body of knowledge about the training of an actor. Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, and later Hagen, Spolin, et al, added their mostly Stanislavsky-based, inside-out approaches to the more Outside-In techniques of many international practitioners. Mask work, Suzuki, Viewpoints, Chekhov’s Psychological Gesture and Atmospheres, Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, Grotowski’s powerful psychophysical palette and Linklater’s dropping in make significant use of Outside-In approaches.

Unfortunately, the majority of teachers and coaches in New York and Los Angeles have pledged allegiance to only one of these twentieth century methods, depriving their students of a broad spectrum of learning and understanding. Lee Strasberg’s emphasis on Emotional Recall and Substitution, major components of the Method, dominated mid-century practice. Sanford Meisner, with his focus on looking, listening and responsiveness to the other actor, slowly displaced the Method as the principal technique taught during the latter part of the last century and the first part of this one.

Frankly, I’ve never understood the attraction of becoming an acolyte to a single pedagogical source. So many wonderful actors have emerged from incredibly diverse perspectives and training. Why exclude the richness and variety of techniques gained through so many years of experimentation and experience by sharp and knowledgeable minds?

I believe it is essential for the complete actor to have a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the available tools and techniques. Our task should be to maximize learning by committing to each approach, then add this new information and understanding to our growing body of knowledge.

An actor has mastered the craft of acting when she views all techniques as tools and learns how and when to apply them in her daily work. For the actor, a complete knowledge of craft is the portal to truth, depth, interpretation and transformation. This knowledge, together with a clear working process, also enables the actor to be director-proof, not subject to the whims and torments of a misled or inexperienced director.

Gaps in Training

Despite the many fine minds who have contributed their fair share to the art of training actors, I realized early on in my career that there were still two fundamental and problematic gaps in the actor’s process. After studying and experiencing the work of the major American acting teachers, and observing acting classes in four major conservatory programs, I felt that no one had dealt satisfactorily with either Emotional Preparation, what you do right before a scene to transform from actor to character, or Emotional Homework, what you do at home to immerse yourself in the world of the character.

Regarding Emotional Preparation, I had never come across a teacher or school that provided an adequate process to transfer the actor’s conscious ideas for what the character needs, why they need it and what prevents them from getting it, into any kind of preparation that went beyond the intellectual.

And as for Emotional Homework, there were two central approaches widely taught: (1) the ubiquitous character autobiography, and (2) Substitution, as practiced by proponents of the Method.

In the former approach, students were trained to write what amounted to a 40-page novelette detailing their character’s backstory. While this may have provided them with a certain intellectual perspective on the character, it remained a cognitive exercise, devoid of emotional impact. Students did not inhabit the character’s emotional reality, nor were they compelled to act through emotional necessity. Additionally, they spent hours creating details that were often irrelevant to the text and to the life of the character as indicated in the text.

Substitution, as taught by Strasberg at The Actors Studio, was certainly designed to evoke emotional results, but it was accompanied by a number of unfortunate side effects I found to be detrimental or even destructive. The practice of mining one’s personal past to revisit and relive the most painful moments and then to substitute them for the character’s experiences is fraught with issues. (Find more about this practice in Chapter Seven).

And so, I concluded that (1) there was no comprehensive process of Emotional Preparation that led directly from concept to emotional reality, and (2) existing approaches to Emotional Homework were ineffective, misguided or downright dangerous.

The Trinity-Prep Process and Projections

After identifying the problems with Emotional Preparation and Emotional Homework, my curiosity led to research—not with microscopes and petri dishes, but with actors, whose unique talents and sensitivities enable them to empathize, commit, stretch and grow.

I asked a number of fundamental questions about acting: can someone actually believe something that doesn’t exist? Should the actor always be aware that they’re acting? Can the imagination affect us as strongly as actual personal events can? (Spoiler alert: the answers are, respectively, of course, of course, and absolutely.) These were laboratory experiments concerning the nature of the imagination and the limits (if any) of belief, including the exploration of the role of the unconscious in creativity, the difference between belief and psychosis, and the effect of strong and specific choices on organic character creation.

The initial result of this research was what I dubbed the Trinity-Prep Process, which solved the Emotional Preparation conundrum through the combination of three elements: the Intention, the Why, and the Obstacle. Imagination-based techniques were then applied in order to make the intellectual choices into visceral reality. This approach was designed to consistently propel the actor into the needs, pains and stakes of the character, guaranteeing that the actor-character actually needed to play the Intention at the top of the scene. (The process can be found in Chapters Five and Six.)

The second result of this experimentation I dubbed Projections. Briefly, this approach plunges the actor into the character’s world by fantasizing on the character’s autobiography while in the alpha level of consciousness. Projections have been compared to deep meditation or lucid dreaming. While in alpha, events unfold without our conscious guidance or manipulation, and many of those events are as compelling, real and lasting as any occurrence in one’s own life. (More on Projections can be found at the end of Chapter Six.)

Achieving Transformation

In addition to breakthrough approaches to Emotional Homework and Emotional Preparation, this research also led to an investigation of the limiting nature of habit patterns and the resultant psychophysical restrictions that lead to one-dimensional perception, interpretation and expression. The habit-bound actor does not even perceive most clues in the text, unconsciously choosing similar approaches to the interpretation of each and every character played. His patterns undermine exploration and objectivity, making transformation impossible.

I’ve been approached many