A director who understands Shakespeare becomes a keystone of knowledge to his actors; he is able to connect the actors’ heartstrings to the text and the story embedded therein. Actors with a fine director cannot fail when performing Shakespeare.

Shakespearean text is not difficult to understand, but there are several obstacles between Shakespeare and his modern audience. The following are some of the reasons that many people feel animosity towards Shakespeare:

1) Public schools no longer train students (or even expose students) to the concept of rhetoric.

Shakespeare wrote entirely in rhetoric. Actors who have been trained in modern public schools approach his work as they would modern drama, and fail miserably in performance. Rhetorical work is actually easier than non-rhetorical work for an actor to perform, but only when it is approached as rhetorical work.

2) Shakespeare wrote in blank verse, which makes modern audiences recoil from its poetic appearance.

It is no longer popular or common to love or understand formal poetry. The soul of poetry today is expressed in song; young people don’t realize that their favorite lyrics are actually free-verse or loose-form poetry. Intellectual snobs in the last century have so alienated the common people from the beautiful use of written words that, for all intents and purposes, mainstream poetry is dead. The fact that blank verse looks like formal poetry means that the average person’s brain shuts down before a single word is read.

3) Shakespeare is not often produced for the right reasons.

Theatre companies with any kind of repute are simply expected to perform his work. Neither the producers or directors are usually much interested in the work; they would rather be doing something “new” and “vital.” As any artist knows, art that is made for the wrong reasons will never be good art. At best, it will be a low-grade average. Most Shakespeare in performance is a low-grade average.

4) Shakespeare is always cut for performance.

Because the people cutting the play (usually the director or an artistic director) have no background in rhetoric or poetic construction, they destroy the internal structure of the play. In almost every case, the play given to the actors to perform is no longer a play; it is a panache of awkward scenes that have very little to do with each other, let alone with the play from which they were taken.

5) Shakespeare is usually produced as though he was an unusually dirty playwright.

The soul of Shakespeare’s work is inescapably moral. Because Shakespeare wrote many immoral and vulgar characters, many silly people assume that he himself was immoral. A truly vulgar playwright is incapable of reproducing his own bad qualities in a play, let alone of writing truly moral and honorable characters. All of Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines are unusually moral, God-fearing, and virtuous people. When they are played as if they were not, the bottom of the play falls out and the audience is offended. To put it plainly: Shakespeare had all the sex scenes happen off stage because he was a good playwright who understood that romantic love goes hand in hand with a respect and reverence for sexuality.

You may notice that all of Shakespeare’s immoral or vulgar characters end badly; their choices inevitably catch up with them. The difference between a Shakespearean tragedy and comedy is that in a comedy, the immoral characters make relatively small bad choices which are finally resolved with consequences devolving only on themselves, while in a tragedy, the immoral characters make such catastrophically big bad choices that the consequences spill over into a lot of other characters’ lives, ending usually in death. So called “problem plays” involve choices that are stupid, but are not the result of deliberate evil.

6) Shakespearean comedies are produced as though they were callow melodramas written to appease popular demand.

Shakespeare’s comedies are about good people who make good choices and are attracted to other good people; these fundamentally good people fall in love, overcome bad communication and bad habits, and get married. There is so much good happening on stage that everyone, particularly the audience, is overcome with good humor.

All human beings are in love with the idea of failure.

We want to fail. We plant seeds of failure in all the circumstances that surround us; if the seeds we plant fail to bring adequate misery, we begin to undermine our personal health. We feed ourselves constant criticism and negativity, and when we have reached a comfortable low, we begin to feed ourselves physical poisons.

If you owned a brand-new black Porsche, and you wanted that Porsche to break down, what would you do? You could smash it to bits with a sledgehammer, or push it off a cliff. You could drive it into the ocean, or put abrasive chemicals into the engine.

Now what if you wanted to break your Porsche, but you wanted to blame someone else for the breakage?

You would get sneaky.

You would put low-grade gasoline in the tank, and you would drive for too long without changing the oil. You would carefully nick the car on curbs, signs, and corners to dent up the body, and you would drive too quickly over speed bumps and dips to damage the undercarriage. You would screech at stop signs and swerve unexpectedly, and you might drive off-road to see what you could do to the brakes and the alignment. If the Porsche held up for too long, you would drive through water. When alarming sounds developed in the engine you would stay far away from a mechanic.

You get the picture. Eventually the car would not go, and you would stand beside it and talk about what a horrible car it was.

Isn’t that about what you’ve done to your life?

Why?

Everyone in the world who has not experienced Home– by Home I mean the unshakeable feeling of security that comes when someone loves and understands you in all extremities–

Everyone who has not experienced Home (and most of us have not) feels off-balance. Alone. Tired.

We give up on waiting for Home, and we grow tired of living without Home.

We assign the failure of Home-feeling on ourselves, and we punish ourselves accordingly.

Stop doing this.

If you have not experienced Home, it is because your parents were lonely and unhappy and had no Home themselves. Don’t blame them and don’t blame yourself. Understand them and change yourself. It is never too late to make the Home feeling, and it is never too late to bring Home to the people around you– particularly to your family, who needs it the most.

If you want to feel Home, live in accordance with sound principles. Have faith that you are a Porsche; treat yourself like one. It is easy to care for a high-powered machine. The only hard part about life is believing that you are as wonderful and magnificent as you really are.

Start believing. It gets easier over time because as you treat yourself well, you will begin to perform well. You will have evidence of the wonderful person you are, but only once you give yourself a chance.

Bring Home into yourself, and people around you will become addicted to your presence. You want unbelievable success as an actor? Find Home.

“And here is the lachrymose Ranevskaya and the other owners of the “The Cherry Orchard,” egotistical like children, with the flabbiness of senility. They missed the right moment for dying; they whine, seeing nothing of what is going on around them, understanding nothing, parasites without the power of again taking root in life. The wretched little student, Trofimov, speaks eloquently of the necessity of working–and does nothing but amuse himself, out of sheer boredom, with stupid mockery of Varya who works ceaselessly for the good of the idlers. Vershinin dreams of how pleasant life will be in three hundred years, and lives without perceiving that everything around him is falling into ruin before his eyes; Solyony, from boredom and stupidity, is ready to kill the pitiable Baron Tousenbach.

There passes before one a long file of men and women, slaves of their love, of their stupidity and idleness, of their greed for the good things of life; there walk the slaves of the dark fear of life; they straggle anxiously along, filling life with incoherent words about the future, feeling that in the present there is no place for them.

At moments out of the gray mass of them one hears the sound of a shot: Ivanov or Triepliev has guessed what he ought to do, and has died. Many of them have nice dreams of how pleasant life will be in two hundred years, but it occurs to none of them to ask themselves who will make life pleasant if we only dream?

In front of that dreary, gray crowd of helpless people there passed a great, wise, and observant man; he looked at all these dreary inhabitants of his country, and, with a sad smile, with a tone of gentle but deep reproach, with anguish in his face and in his heart, in a beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them: “You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that.” “

Maxim Gorky

At this point there are two choices open to that actor.

1. He can make use of the power he finds within himself on whatever he may be working on at the time.

2. He can hold on to his power until he finds an outlet suitable for it.

This power is the power that makes actors famous; the power that smites both audience and director in the eyes and says “Look! I AM.” It is the power and magnetism that directors pray for in an actor, and produces the kind of stage presence that audiences will do anything to see again.

Very few actors hold on to this power for long. Even fewer actors make this power a part of their regular craft.

WHY?

Because actors wait to use it. When they develop startling urges and frightening instincts, and their emotions begin to move almost on their own, actors step back from their work. “I am only doing a commercial,” the actor may say, “I can’t bring this kind of acting to a commercial.” Or, “I am working on dinner theatre. I can’t bring this kind of acting to dinner-theatre. I would look silly.” Actors feel about this power, and rightly, that it is sacred and special. They don’t feel comfortable bringing out a real lightsaber when the director has been using cardboard swords.

Let me tell you my own experience with this phenomenon. I first developed the power of a great actor when I was nineteen. I had disciplined and conditioned my instrument; I had refined my skills and I was in a supple, good place for an actor to be in. I discovered the full extent of my power at a call-back for a show that I wanted very much to be in. I had prepared for about six months for the audition. I got the call-back.

When I performed at the call-back, it was as if all the powers of heaven poured into my body and were at my beck and call. I was ALIVE. I was more alive and more intensely aware of life in those five minutes than I have ever been. I was not working on inspiration alone; I knew what the story was, and I told it with great skill.

Bottom line, I didn’t get the part.

A few months later, the director told me that she felt she couldn’t cast me. “You were definitely the most prepared actor there,” she said, “but you stood out too much. I needed someone who could blend in.”

Why don’t actors use great powers when they feel them move?

Reason 1: Because so many actors are stilted and only half-awake that the powerful actor stands painfully out. In effect, he makes the rest of the cast and the production itself look pretty bad.

I saw another example of this in a production of Children of Eden. The show was a little above average and plugging along. I was enjoying myself. Suddenly, in the climactic scene on the boat in the second act, the actor playing Japheth showed his powers. Here was a very alive and powerful man fighting for what he wanted. It was the finest moment in the show.

In that moment, I got a glimpse of what Children of Eden should be like, and I was no longer enjoying myself. I was disappointed in the flimsy quality of the rest of the production. I wanted more of Japheth; I wanted everyone else to do what Japheth had done.

Now the ironic thing is that all actors, when they pursue their craft, can gain this kind of power. The ironic thing is that most actors have felt moments of this power, and know themselves what they are capable of. Almost no actor realizes that his opinion of other actors–that they are pretty poor artists–is actually the other actors’ opinion of himself.

All actors have a very high opinion of themselves and of their powers, because they have felt stirrings of or manifestation of power in their craft. However, unless an actor makes that power part  and parcel with his every performance, all the other actors around him condemn him for a hack. They conclude that the actor has lost his touch, is getting worse every day, and never had much talent to begin with, never suspecting that they themselves are held to be talentless wannabees.

This phenomenon is not found nearly so often in film acting; the film industry can afford to be discerning and selective in casting, and actors who don’t maintain a high standard of reality in their acting will very quickly find themselves without a career.

Reason 2: Because a conscientious actor waits for direction.

Actors instinctively assume that a director understands them; after all the director had the insight and discernment to recognize their genius by casting them. A good actor often sits down and waits for the director to say, “Now, bring out your brilliance. Dazzle me.”

Directors don’t say this.

Why?

Because in our theatre world today, very few directors understand actors.

This is silly, since almost all directors have been actors themselves. Unfortunate it may be, but an iron veil of forgetfulness drops over an actor’s mind when he becomes a director. He no longer knows what every actor knows; he no longer feels kinship to other actors. He has become a new creature, and something, sometimes, of a monster.

And so the second reason that actors don’t use the powers they know they possess is that they naturally expect their director to ask them to.

And their director never does ask.

Actors: stop waiting for permission to work well. Use your powers.

Directors: open your eyes and gain an understanding of actors. An artist who doesn’t know the first thing about his tools isn’t an artist.

Audiences: stop paying for bad theatre. Go to live theatre that you find entertaining.

Most theatre practitioners understand the need for focus, and behave accordingly. Many theatre practitioners feel guilty about their lack of discipline, but don’t think about it too often. The element of practice is the one that almost always falls completely by the wayside.

Imagine a singer who underwent years of vocal training and then was loosed upon the professional world without having once, in his years of training, been given a full song to sing. Imagine a singer who was trained entirely with sixteen bar selections.

Not much of a singer, you think?

And yet this is exactly what happens in most acting schools. Actors come to learn their craft and spend years studying voice, movement, and performing one-to-four page scenes from plays. Some actors make it through an entire program of study without being mentored through a full major role, or even a minor one.

This kind of theatre training is legitimate if it is preparing actors for the film industry, but not if it is purporting to train actors for the stage. Filming is made up of isolated scenes; film actors must be able to jump in and out of the narrative in order to suite the shooting schedule. Live theatre is another story. Live theatre needs actors who can enter the world of the play and focus within it with craft and artistry for two or three hours. Actors who have been trained to focus for ten minutes at a time are not yet capable of the focus needed to perform strong theatre.

Smart actors supplement their schooling with outside work; they teach themselves how to perform on their own time and then take their degree because it makes them look good; letters following your name make you look like a legitimate actor.

Actors who go into training programs: Go with your eyes open. Be smart. Choose your role models very very carefully. Only model your acting upon the actors whose work you truly admire. Almost all actors can sound as if they know what they’re talking about; don’t believe what you hear until you believe what you see on stage.

And remember that an artist has focus, discipline, and practice always at the forefront of his life.

For some reason, theatre people have become convinced that audiences don’t really come to theatre to see theatre. Theatre people think that audiences come to experience a live movie.

Well, why do people go to movies?

Because they want to be entertained, they want to see really good acting, and they want to feel current with the world.

Why do people go to the movies more than they go to the theatre?

It’s time for some honesty. Audiences are much more attracted to films than to live theatre because films offer a much more reliable standard of acting, and audiences are interested in good acting.

Theatre practitioners–wake up and face the issue honestly. Theatre is dying because we are offering poor theatre to compete with average to excellent films. We don’t have to make theatre astounding to draw audiences away from the movie houses–we just have make GOOD theatre. Stop moaning about the death of theatre and do something about this. Never waste time thinking about how poorly cultured the audience is; refine your art. Audiences are too intelligent to accept what you are offering as legitimate art. They want to see stories about human beings; what they want is what you want. Theatre practitioners and the kids down the street and the cranky single guy up town and the newly married couple on main street all want the same thing.

Have faith in humanity; have faith that we are all much the same inside; accept that the audience longs to love you and pay you for your craft.

Go out there and make some fine theatre.

1. He respects his position.

When a director holds auditions, he enters into a contract with his actors.

This contract can be compared to the agreement reached between a group of mountain climbers and a local guide. The mountain climbers want to climb a formidable mountain, but they need someone who will keep them from wasting their energy, getting lost, or dying on an unknown slope. The guide does just that–he shows them the path on which they can safely and successfully reach the top of the mountain.

A good director fulfills his end of the contract by taking the actors somewhere worth going.

2. He controls his energy.

The director always sets the tone for rehearsals and performances. If he is stressed, the actors will feel stressed. If he is angry, the actors will be angry. If he is bored, the actors will be bored. If he is energetic and enthusiastic about the work, they will be too. A fine director realizes the effect he has on his team and regulates himself accordingly. It is better for a director to postpone or cancel a rehearsal than to bring an irresponsible level of emotion in with him.

3. He makes decisions.

Unbelievable as it may seem, there are many directors who refuse to make decisions. They don’t want to make the wrong decision, ergo they make no decision at all. This usually manifests itself in an indeterminate prolongation of the decision-making process. “I’m still thinking about it,” is really “I am putting off thinking about it.”

This is a foolish waste of rehearsal time and is unfair to the people whose work depends up the decision.

A good director makes decisions, and he makes them quickly. If five seconds of serious thought have passed without a decision, stop thinking about it and bring a finished decision to the next day’s rehearsal. I have known many a director who, when a problem arose, spent an hour or two of valuable rehearsal time thinking about it and discussing it with the cast. Make a decision and do it quickly.

Someone expressed concern about this idea once. “What if I make the wrong decision?” he asked.

Theatre is not about knowing what the right decision is and making it; theatre is about finding out what the right decision is by making a lot of wrong decisions. Bad theatre results when the director never makes a decision to begin with. Make a decision, and chances are that you’ll find out in about two minutes (or two days) that your decision was not a very good one. Great. Now you can make a better decision. When that one turns out to be a bad decision as well, you will get another try, and another. If you continue to make decisions, you will soon find out what the best decision is and your show will be the stronger for it.

Why is this?

I believe the standard answer is that artists are naturally self-absorbed and egotistical. But that isn’t true.

Here is the situation as I have found it: Actors are naturally generous and pure individuals who have deep reserves of trust and faith. They come into the theatre world as children would come, naive, honest, and without guile. They want to share themselves wholly on stage and tell wonderful stories about human hope and love and sorrow and guilt and redemption. They submit themselves obediently and whole-heartedly to the direction of their directors and teachers. They accept with total faith any advice given them by theatre professionals.

Disillusionment follows. The actor becomes jaded, cynical, selfish, and rude.

Why?

Starving people cannot bear to see other people eat, and the vast majority of theatre practitioners are starving. Very few people in theatre know how to make consistently fine theatre, and with the lack of knowledge comes a dearth of finances and fulfillment. Theatre people are starved for good theatre, and every person in theatre has a complaint against someone else for the lack. Actors blame directors and theatre managers. Directors blame actors and managers. Managers blame audiences, directors, and actors. Technical people slush along on their own and resent everyone else. Even the audience becomes disillusioned with the theatre. Do you want to know why the movie industry is booming and theatre is threadbare? Most of the audience pool has never seen really great theatre, and if they’ve seen it, they know they can’t expect to see it consistently.

Who is to blame?

Theatre practitioners have been going in circles in the blaming game for centuries now. Our interest is not in blaming, but in pinpointing a practical solution to the problem.

What is the problem?

Bad theatre, disillusioned artists, empty seats, and insolvent theatre companies who rely on donations and grants to continue to create a product that the consumer does not want to buy.

The solution lies with the director. The director holds the most power in the theatre making process, for he controls not only the substance of a performance, but the quality of the rehearsal process as well. In most cases he controls the casting and has great influence over the production elements. He is the vital link between the audience, the actors, the playwright, and the theatre management. If you see really fine theatre, the director made it happen.

Most directors don’t know how to direct effectively. They have been taught, either in school or by example, that directing means anything from merely directing traffic on stage to frenetically doing every person’s job for them. A director is just that: he directs.

A director directs the efforts of the actors. The actors act and the director coordinates and refines their efforts. The confusion about the role and responsibility of the director is at the root of all theatre problems.

A really fine director knows that actors are pure and true. He sees their bad behaviors as symptoms of the theatre problem and quietly creates a corrective rehearsal space. He makes room for the actor to get back to innocence; he makes it possible for the actor to risk with his whole soul and return to the enthusiasm and trust of the beginning.

An actor should learn to understand the director’s role because it will make him a better actor. A director must understand the actor before he can begin his work.

Be nice to the director, guys. He’s trying very hard to do something that you have never done. You might not be interested in doing his job, but without him doing that job, you can’t do yours.

Being nice to the director and understanding his stresses is an incredibly advantageous choice for you as an actor. Benefits follow.

• You will be cast more often

Directors, more than anything, want to work with intelligent, self-regulatory artists who can explore emotion deeply on stage and then come off the stage and behave like normal, well-adjusted human beings. Actors who are nervous, insecure, or superstitious may choose to carry their emotions off the stage and into their interaction with the director. Directors don’t like this. This kind of behavior makes the director think that you, the actor, are stupid or immature. When a director meets an actor who can feel deeply on stage and then come off stage and relate to him as a kind and cheerful colleague, you can bet he will cast that actor. If he can, he will cast that actor again and again.

When you go into an audition with understanding and empathy for the director’s position, the director experiences an immediate rush of relaxing endorphins. He feels good around you, and he will certainly seek to be around you more often. In most cases this means he will cast you.

• You will become a much better and more prepared actor

When you ponder on the stresses of the director’s position, your own responsibilities as an actor become both easier and more reasonable in scope. One example of this is line memorization. All of you have doubtless experienced a pleading director who begs you, cajoles you, and commands you (ineffectually, of course) to memorize your lines. You, as the actor, say to yourself, “You are overreacting. I will be memorized in time for performances.” You ignore the pathetic, pleading director and continue to come to rehearsals only partially memorized.

Actors.

Imagine for a moment that you are directing a show. Imagine yourself directing a group of five to fourteen actors who don’t know their lines from one scene to the next. Imagine the looks of blase unconcern on their faces when you remind them that they have to get memorized because you open in three days.

As actors, we are in the habit of never thinking about anyone but ourselves.

You will become a great actor when you deepen your character and become a truly good person, and you become a truly good person by gaining understanding of other people’s perspectives.

As an actor, the first person with whom you should seek an understanding is the director. He holds all power over your life and career. Get to understand him and sympathize with his problems. I promise you, it will bring you success in your work.