Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self

Unethical Acts

123 Unethical Acts In a fundamental way theatre and prostitution are public and private versions of each other . . . if either profession were absolutely perfected, the other would vanish. Richard Schechner1 The extraordinary thing about acting is that life itself is actually used to create artistic results. Lee Strasberg2 Jonas Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice is rightly considered a classic of modern scholarship. Carefully compiling the various strands of antitheatrical thought, Barish exposes and analyses its vicissitudes and implications . Caustic wit animates his evaluation of the literature produced by the “legions of hard-­ shelled, mole-­ eyed fanatics” who could find nothing of value and yet much danger in the theater: “an unmistakable crackpot streak runs through much of it,” he observes—­a remark that is exemplary of virtually all that is said about this grim literature.3 But the consensual dismissal of anti-­ theatricality to which Barish’s sense of humour appeals, also leads to an important crippling consequence; one that affects both contemporary acting and its theorization: due to the repetitious and religiously flat worldview underlying past denouncements on theater, an unappealing shadow threatens to swallow up anyone who wishes to subject contemporary acting to moral scrutiny. No one wants to be a Malvolio. Yet the introduction of moral dimensions and prescriptions into acting threatens to push the critic precisely into such a preachy stance. Theater and acting no longer require an apologetics, and can now afford a less defensive reappraisal of past attacks. The repeated uneasiness with the theater—­ sometimes by minds whose sharpness in other matters cannot 124 acts 124 acts be ignored—­ contains a grain of truth that is still applicable today. Antitheatricalists have hoped that their moral critique would banish theater. Yet such is not the only option. I will argue that clarifying the moral undercurrents implicit in some performed acts provides the vocabulary needed for articulating an undertheorized source of personal complexity that acting sometimes involves. Such understanding need not demote acting’s dignity, as enemies of the theater have argued. Paradoxically, it may even promote it. But for this to take place, acting as a practice must open itself to an evaluative prism that, up to now, it has largely ignored. An Actor’s Dilemma Jim is an actor participating in a production of Julius Caesar. He plays Mark Antony. The scene he is presently rehearsing is Antony’s discovery of the assassins standing over dead Caesar. Upon reaching the lines in which he expresses Antony’s attachment to Caesar (“He was my friend, faithful and just to me . . .”) Jim repeatedly experiences an inner deadness. He intuits implicit criticism from his colleagues, and his frustration is aggravated, since other actors he had watched before have performed this episode movingly. His frustration with the quality of his performance leads him to experiment with an acting technique called “emotional recall”: he draws on an actual biographical memory that resembles the enacted episode—­ his witnessing the drowning of Steve, one of his best friends for many years. During rehearsal, Jim tries this out: as he looks at Caesar’s body, he envisions the tragic moments in which Steve was dragged out of the water. He had planned to do this, so before the rehearsal he recalls the episode more leisurely: the time of the year, the clothes he was wearing when Steve died, the sights he saw just before the drowning, the smell of the air. Surely enough, as he talks about Caesar, Jim experiences authentic feelings of gnawing loss. His acting becomes mesmerizing, and he is enthusiastically applauded by his colleagues. Jim is elated—­ but also disturbed. He feels that he has prostituted the memory of his friend for professional ends. The prospect of having to repeatedly draw on this memory in the numerous performances ahead dismays him. He worries that his pain over losing Steve would be blunted. His past anxiety over mechanical acting is superseded by a present fear of assuming a mechanical sense of self. “Would my cherished memories Unethical Acts 125 become reduced into items in a professional toolbox, to be picked, used and returned as the need arises?” he wonders. He is now convinced that, although no one noticed or was harmed by it, what he did during rehearsal was unethical. Jim browses through his books on acting. He is familiar with the debate between acting as “presenting” as opposed to acting as “re-­ presenting”; between those who follow...