Watching Actors

Tzachi Zamir

Theatre Journal, Volume 62, Number 2, May 2010, pp. 227-243 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/tj.0.0375

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Watching Actors
Tzachi Zamir
Why does one act? And why would someone else be drawn to watch such acting? The first aim of this essay is to delineate a linkage between theatrical spectatorship and powerful dramatic actingmore specifically, a linkage between the act of acting and watching such an act. I will argue that acting is able to importantly touch a structural dimension of subjective experience. Acting offers what I will call existential amplification: the imaginative bonding with the amplification experienced or projected by the actor, which partly draws the audience to watch live acting and partly accounts for the pervasive attraction to live theatre. Moreover, it is such amplification that explains why people might be drawn to act in the first place. To say only this much runs the risk of confusing between amplification through acting and more familiar claims regarding living more through fiction/literature/art. To pinpoint the uniqueness of existential amplification in the theatre, much of this essay will involve distinguishing the kind of imaginative embodiment that acting involves from overlapping yet distinct types of empathic bonding and experiential expansion that readers undergo while reading literature. The essays second aim is to thus distinguish between literary and theatrical imaginative participation. Finally, if acting is a form of existential amplification, some of its instantiations might be morally objectionable. I will close by reestablishing this old objection to acting by showing how existential amplification helps distinguish pretense from role-playing (though I will not attempt responding to the objection as such).

Watching Plays, Watching Actors

Philosophers of theatre no longer assume that the best performers are transparent, or that performance is a mere addendum to the process of reading a play. The idea that we look (or should look) through the actors is now perceived as descriptively false and as normatively implausible.1 The transparency view both mis-describes actual viewing experiences (since the audience typically does explicitly think about the actors) and diminishes theatres aesthetic range by ignoring the performers themselves.
Tzachi Zamir is a philosopher and literary critic afliated with the Department of English and the Department of General and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main publications include Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (2006) and Ethics and the Beast (2007). More of his work on the philosophical dimensions of theatricality is forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Paul Thoms main contemporary exemplifier of this older view is Susanne Langer; see chapter 6 of his For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). David Osipovich, in his What Is a Theatrical Performance? (Journal of Aesthetics and Arts Criticism 64, no. 4 [2006]: 46170), regards Aristotle as the originator of this view. James Hamiltons recent The Art of Theater (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007) is a detailed disengagement of theatre from literature.
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Theatre Journal 62 (2010) 227243 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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We come to the theatre to see a play, to watch people enacting a play, and to witness the act of acting as such. Let me focus on the latter, beginning from its most rudimentary description. We come to the theatre to look at people imaginatively transforming into somebody else. Sometimes we are meant to be taken in by the illusion; sometimes, as in Brechts theatre, the actor dupes us into the illusion only to wrench us out of it in order to create a critical distance between actor and role. Not only actors are involved in imagining this transformation: the audience also is supposed to be actively sharing in the creation and acknowledgment of an imagined construction to which it can then respond. Acting is not a full-blown metamorphosis of one person into anothera dramatic role is not a person. It is therefore mandatory to pinpoint the precise identity shift we are witnessing. On the most obvious level, the role donned is discontinuous with the actors biographical self; yet the biographyrole dissociation is incomplete and more interesting to both experience (as actor) and perceive than a complete rupture. Note, for example, the following description of Michael Chekhovs acting:
In the early part of his career, critics, who had never seen such a seamless and startling mix of deeply emoted realism within a portrayal of grotesque fantasy, even questioned whether what Chekhov did on the stage was actually acting. It was as if the real characters from the pages of Shakespeare, Gogol, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Strindberg had mysteriously dropped down to earth, momentarily interacting with other performers, who then appeared wooden and stagebound.2

What is actually acting? One wonders when reading Mel Gordons description of Chekhovs acting. What was it for those critics? What is it for Gordon? Chekhov was apparently disclosing something of his personal experience onstage, whereas those watching him were all of a sudden missing the actorrole gap that should have been maintained or was readily perceivable when watching other actors. The idea that one kind of excellence in acting is achieved if the actor manages to obliterate altogether the distinction between identity and role underlies highly popular acting techniques. Actors are trained to sometimes draw on genuine experiences. They recycle traces of a past biographical event or respond to fictional characters around them by imaginatively substituting them with real people whom they knowfor example, imagining that one is talking to ones real father when addressing a fictional father, in order to generate and express an authentic and convincing response. In such cases, the audience perceives more than a fictional role. It is difficult to say something more precise regarding that which is perceived behind the role. Kendall Walton is surely right when he claims that the audience cannot be expected to have a clear idea of an actors personal thoughts and feelings while he is performing [since] that would require being intimately acquainted with his offstage personality.3 However, the audiences lack of acquaintance with the intimate facets of the actors personality should not mislead us into thinking that the audienceactor connection is limited to the role: the audiences perception can apprehend the actors movement into a role; it can also grasp a dimension of the actors own biography and identity in ways that need not be
2 See Mel Gordons introduction to Michael Chekhovs On the Technique of Acting (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), ixx (italics mine). 3 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 243.

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clear-cut to either the audience or actor. I shall now offer an explanation of why we are interested, even fascinated, by such an act of actual or projected transformation.

Existential Amplication
In all the anxiety over the show, worrying whether it was clear, whether everybody knew where to come on or go off, I had no time to think about my performance, no time to wonder about its effect on the group, or on Christopher, or to ask, Was I funny? or Was it clever? I just did it. Suddenly, for the first time, I was acting. Not performing, or posturing, or puppeteering. I was being in another way. At a stroke the mask that I had screwed on to my face fell away. I was free, easy, effortless. For the first time since Id arrived at the Drama Centre I understood what playing a character was. It was giving in to another way of thinking. Giving in was the essential experience. Leave yourself alone, theyd been saying to us since the day we arrived. Now suddenly I was. Simon Callow, Being an Actor4

The idea that we are what we can become is in itself a familiar thesis in Western thought.5 According to this position, personal existence is partly reducible to a set of possibilities; a person is a collection of possibilities, a small portion of which she or he will actualize. Our lives resemble a pyramid: we have numerous possibilities to begin with, and these possibilities gradually diminish throughout our lives. Thinking of existence in this way can explain various responsesfor example, our sense of pity toward people born with radically fewer possibilities. It also discloses a modal dimension that plays a part in perception, either of animate or inanimate objects: we do not merely take in the thing/being, but also some of what she/he/it can become. What the object is just means some of its possibilities; the charm of a baby or the difficulty in meeting the gaze of a terminally ill friend relates to our response to the possibilities (or lack thereof) that we apprehend, however incompletely.6 Foregrounding the centrality of possibilities in existence can also account for some forms of fascination. We experience fascination when we recognize a force that extends possibilities and is, in this sense, life-amplifying. Consider money or time. The noninstrumental fascination with money as such or the quest for the fountain of youthfor endless youthful timediscloses the allure of increasing ones possibilities. Having more life time, or far more money, is tantamount to having more possibilities to enact. The desire for more transcends the instrumental craving for a specific this or that; it reaches into something that pertains to the structure of life as a set of possibilities, one that is enlarged by acquiring more time or more money. The accumulation of money
Simon Callow, Being an Actor (London: Vintage, 2004), 31. In his Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Alexander Nehamas associates such a view of personal experience with Aristotle. 6 It is unnecessary to couch these remarks in a specific ontology of possibilities. The centrality of possibilities for subjective experience can be formulated in the language of each of the main competing ontological approaches to what a possibility is. In his The Ontology of the Possible (in The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality, ed. M. J. Loux [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979], 16681), Nicholas Rescher usefully delineates four metaphysical renderings of the possible that have prevailed in Western philosophy: nominalism (possibilities exist in language), conceptualism (they exist in the mind), conceptual realism (they exist in the mind of God), and realism (they exist independently of human thought). Foregrounding the centrality of possibilities for subjectivity can be alternatively formulated in any of these ontologies, and does not mandate choosing among them for our purposes.
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as an end in its own right can appear pointless, because it may betray some distorted disproportion between generating more and more possibilities and simultaneously refraining from actualizing them. The accretion of wealth as such can also be selfdefeating if it involves missing other desirable possibilities that should be pursued. But given these qualifications, money and time still fascinate, and rightly so, because both overlap with a metaphysical dimension of life as such, and both can be potentially enlarged, time in fantasy, money in reality. How is dramatic acting connected to this model of subjective experience? Actors, I suggest, amplify their own lives by imaginatively embodying alien existential possibilities. Like the pining for the fountain of youth or the aimless counting of hoards of money, such as Spensers Mammon, Eliots Silas Marner, or Marlowes Barabas, acting forges a link to a potentially unlimited range of new, hitherto unimagined possibilities through the intimate identification required by theatrical embodiment. Actors either experience or merely project such expansion; the audience only perceives it. But the audiences perception is itself not some passive encounter with an external input, but a form of imaginative participation. In a good performance, a bond is gradually formed between actor and auditor, one in which the audience is socially validating the extension that the actor is momentarily appropriating, playing along with the request implied by the actors acting to be recognized as someone else. The audience is thus not merely present in the theatre as a passive recipient of a creative offering, spending some of its lifetime simultaneously with the actors,7 but is completing the act of acting by recognizing and responding to the actor as character. Actors need an audience not just because only an audience can praise their artistic success or because of financial motives, but because only a spectator is able to give the external indication that the actor momentarily exists in this amplified form. The audience provides the inter-subjective context of recognition, playing along with what the actor undergoes.8
Theatre means the collectively spent and used up lifetime in the collectively breathed air of that space in which the performing and the spectating take place. The emission and reception of signs and signals take place simultaneously; see Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. K. Jrs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 17. 8 Here are three alternative formulations to what I have just described. Bruce Wilshire provides a different formulation for the relationship between audience and actor through the concept of standing in: the actor populates both the nonfictional and fictional world, and, using his dual citizenship (as character and as actor), stands in for the audience in the other world. Standing in involves the audience, because it is the problem par excellence of our own identity as selves (see Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982], 43). In his The Actors Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama (New York: Viking, 1975), Michael Goldman sees the actor as bridging the gap between the self and the worlds otherness: You are merely a self . . . assaulted by otherness from within and without. In taking on the spirit of another body, the actor leaps the gap between the fearful self and frightful other. . . . The actor is a figure of power and danger, of pity and fear, because he is at once the otherness that threatensnow uncannily animateand the threatened self, daring in its exposure and ambition (122). Actings capacity to disclose the otherness within the actor is also described by Josette Fral in her introduction to a special issue of SubStance devoted to theatricality: the spectators gaze is double: he sees in the actor both the subject that he is and the fiction that he incarnates (or the action he performs); he sees him as both master of himself and subject to the other within him. He sees not only what he says and what he does, but also what escapes him what is said in himself and in spite of himself (SubStance 31, nos. 23 [2002]: 313, qtd. on 12). A third option with regards to the subliminal links between audience and actor involves endorsing Richard Hornbys account of the psychosexual basis of acting in his The End of Acting: A Radical View (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1992). In chapter 2, Hornby associates the dissipating borders of identity that acting involves (the collapse of self into role) with a regression into the oceanic state described by
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Two Objections to Existential Amplication

Before I turn to further clarifications of acting as existential amplification, I need to respond to two immediate objections. The first relates to the unreal nature of fictional expansion; the second to schools of acting that discourage actors from trying to become someone they are not. Unlike money as a facilitator of existential expansion, acting enables embodying fictional possibilities, but this unreal quality of the expansion does not undermine the experienced amplification. Consider the following remark by Simon Callow about his struggle to play Titus Andronicus:
For me, the titanic emotions of the role were cruelly difficult to attain. I always felt false. The series of blows that befall Titus is very nearly comic in its relentlessness. . . . I felt myself too small, my voice too weak, my means too limitedand I was right. Only experience and the gradual expansion of ones instrumentoneselfcan enable one to play such scenes. In fact, just playing them goes a long way towards it.9

For Callow, make-believe expansion enables a convincing acting of future fictional roles. This feat can occur, because fictional embodiment is not some fleeting daydreaming; it is a long and arduous process of progressively inhabiting an aliens world. Inhabiting is an important word here. The actor does not become the character, nor does he merely pretend to be the character; the actor visits an existential space, occupying it in an intimate, repeated, and planned way over time. Such distance between the actor and the space, the fact that they are not one and the same, does not diminish the life-expansion, but actually lends it unique force. The reason is that the ability to plan and rehearse the living of the fictional possibility permits inhabiting it in a more intense, precise, and full way than nonfictional life would allow. Here, as elsewhere, art does not merely imitate life, but captures a moments essence and pursues its meaning and optimal projection. Fictionality is thus not opposed to truth, but can sometimes tease it out. The second objection relates to non-Stanislavsky-based approaches to acting. The following anecdote, reported by Uta Hagen, succinctly captures this objection: One night, after having received accolades for his performance from the audience, the nineteenth-century French actor Coquelin called his fellow actors together backstage and said: I cried real tears on stage tonight. I apologize. It will never happen again.10 The objection is that existential amplification seems suitable for approaches to acting that stress creating (or recreating) a vivid inner process. Such approaches to acting rely upon a now-contested interpretation of Stanislavsky and his selective appropriation by popular actor-training systems (most famously Method acting). According to Robert Gordon, these approaches to acting are the most dominant in Western acting schools today,11 but other approaches nevertheless deny that acting is or should involve
Freud. The audience is partaking of a quasi-masochistic pleasure in identifying with a disintegration of selfhood. For Wilshire, the selfs construction through awkward participation in fictional roles is a salient problem of modern identity; for Goldman and Fral, what is central is the selfs separation from others; for Hornby, it is the selfs desire to withdraw from identity and dissolve into nondifferentiation. 9 Callow, Being an Actor, 84 (emphasis added). 10 Uta Hagen, Respect for Acting (New York: Wiley, 1973), 12. 11 Robert Gordon, The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 35456.

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identification between actor and role.12 Representational or non-Method acting would belittle the importance of internal transformation in acting, stressing techniques that instead enable projecting inner states. Brecht-inspired approaches even invite actors not merely to alienate themselves from their roles, but to strive to hamper the emotional or empathic bonding between audience and actor-role by alerting the audience to the act of acting. The Brechtian actor is urged to show or demonstrate acting rather than to be the role. Do such approaches to acting modify what I have been describing? Yes and no. For the audience, the actors precise inner state does not matter. Acting, whether the kind that prompts actors to undergo and feel what they act or the kind that encourages them to perfect their capacity to project such states, involves experiencing or convincingly externalizing a form of existential amplification. The audience takes part in a form of imaginative existential expansion that the actors are embodying with or without the actors experiencing it. The choice of acting technique does, however, determine whether or not actors themselves undergo an imaginative amplification. In acting that strives to attain inner change, such amplification takes place. Such schools devise acting drills that aim to instill in would-be actors the capacity to freshly undergo and convey such experiences. In acting schools that focus on projection rather than inner state, amplification need not be experienced. It may be the case that an actor like Coquelin, cited above, is the only person in the hall who is not experiencing such amplification, but is merely facilitating it for everyone else. In any case, watching acting is not affected by the acting technique chosen.13 The single counter-example that does remain uncovered by this analysis is Brechts theatre, though here much depends on how Brechts precise position is interpreted. In some versions (based on texts like The Street Scene or A Short Description of a New Technique of Acting Which Produces an Alienation Effect), Brecht is radically opposed to any form of actorrole identification; in others, he allows such identification, asking his actor to comment on the role after embodying it.14 The first version does not involve existential amplification, the second does.

Fictionality and Intensity

Having addressed these initial objections, we can probe more deeply the precise nature of existential amplification through acting, setting it apart from overlapping modes of living more through art/fictions. The idea of living more through fictions is mostly aired in the context of vindicating literature. The essence of this idea is that literature creates an empathic involvement in relation to unfamiliar contextsthe reader thereby lives more. We read Ishigurus Never Let Me Go and reach a new sense regarding how systematic exploitation can be experienced by its victim; Banvilles The
For limitations of the Method and its contested historical genesis from Stanislavskys work, see chapter 5 in John Harrop, Acting (London: Routledge, 1992); see also chapter 2 in Hornby, The End of Acting. 13 Spectators can sometimes themselves be more interested in an actors technique than in her/his inner state. But while such a focus is a common aspect of the aesthetic appreciation of a performance, particularly in seasoned and informed viewers, if spectatorship remains on the level of noting and admiring technique, it becomes study rather than the fuller experiential dialogue one looks for in art. 14 For a nuanced account of developments in Brechts position, as well as discrepancies between his theories and his practice, see Gordon, The Purpose of Playing, chapter 8.
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Sea invites us to partake deeply of the particularities of grief; Egolfs Lord of the Barnyard will probably extend our experience of revenge. Expanding and extending mean that literary fictions familiarize worlds that are only dimly and fragmentarily perceived in life; literary works thereby become gateways to other lives. In particular, and in contrast to many other arts, literary fictions render intimate the first-person perspective of another, thus encouraging empathic involvement rather than detached eavesdropping. While theatre is usually far more oblique than literature in disclosing a first-person perspective, it offers a similar form of life-enlargement. The fictional events onstage present the audience with unfamiliar lives, states, and conflicts, turning these lives from abstract possibilities into vivid, detailed, and personalized instantiations. We might, for example, think that we know what jealousy means, but engaging with a character like Othello or Leontes either on page or onstage takes us into the internal rhythm of such a mind: the rationalizations, jarring suspicions, the thrust and counter-thrust of hope gnawed away by doubt. Actors are less important when considering such life extension: the reason is that while, unlike the audience, actors fictionally live through the situation portrayed, the audienceas far as this specific function is concerned basically sees through them into the play and the world that it discloses. Since the experience portrayed onstage is carefully constructed, it often facilitates an intensity of expression and an emotional depth that real-life experiences seldom offer. Accordingly, such expansion through immersion in a fiction does not amount to merely adding more of the same lived experience that one possesses in life. As Richard Shusterman reminds us, to dramatize, both in English and in German, is, among other meanings, to treat something as, or make it seem, more exciting or important.15 Dramatization is, in this sense, intensification. Acting a well-constructed fiction or watching one permits the actor to release, explore, and experience intense possibilities with which an audience can then engage. It is not merely the movement into a different biographya queens, a beggars, a drunkards, an adulterers, a murderers, a misers, a gods, a saints, an animals, a courtesans, and so forthbut into specific energized configurations of such states, when they have been well-written. This part of theatrical experience is related to theatres literary dimension and can be accessed by a reader without recourse to theatre. The audience is here looking through the actors and connecting with the meaning that resides in the words. Some examples follow of such literary intensity:  In dismissing a Rome that cannot accept his heroism and is banishing him, an enraged Coriolanus bursts out: You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate as reek o th rotten fens, whose loves I prize as the dead carcasses of unburied men that do corrupt the air, I banish you (Coriolanus, 3.3.12731).16  A soon-to-be dethroned Richard II tells his company: Throw away respect, / Tradition, form and ceremonious duty, / For you have but mistook me all this
15 Richard Shusterman is citing the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary in his Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 234. He is harnessing this insight to an ambitious attempt to perceive dramatization as capturing a vital aspect of all art (the chapter is titled Art as Dramatization), which, when reaching its most rewarding potency, is not merely mirroring life, but is a means of framing heightened experience. 16 All quotations from Shakespeares plays are from The New Cambridge Shakespeare editions.

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while: / I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: / Subjected thus, / How can you say to me I am a king? (Richard II, 3.2.17277).  A torn-to-shreds Lear beseeches his dead daughter: Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little (King Lear, 5.3.245). In all these, the actor is not merely regurgitating a mental state or hypothetically placing himself in the staged situation, but is, rather, allowing the words to elevate him into achieving an emotional intensity that life usually falls short of. The same holds for the reader of the text, who is accessing not some simple description of an inner state, but a pinpointing of its essence. Essence does not here imply linguistically formulated necessary or sufficient conditions that hold in all states of outrage, depression, or grief; essence means, rather, the surfacing of a stable encapsulation of an evasive meaning that lies at the heart of many appearances of these states, an encapsulation that can be reapplied. Nondramatic poetry and literature offer many such moments. Intensity is not tantamount to strength: nonfictional experiences are stronger than fictional ones, in that experiences such as those above, when taking place nonfictionally, are more personally significant, bear important practical ramifications, entail central interpersonal consequences, and carry an altogether different emotional weight than those provided by fictional texts. Yet the literary articulation of such experiences enables that which typically remains vague or simply overwhelming when personally undergone to be expressed in detail. Such articulation does not merely duplicate an internal state or present more living of the kind with which one is familiar; it heightens these experiences. Heightening covers two interrelated operations: first, rather than merely naming or categorizing, detailed linguistic articulation renders intelligible and powerfully conveys the underlying complex makeup of a state that, when directly experienced, can appear deceptively monolithic; and second, the language provided by gifted authors can capture the essence of the expressed moment. Literaturein the examples aboveis thus not merely modeling itself after life, but after a precisely distilled articulation of an experiences essential meaning at some unique moments. A well-written fiction is intense in these senses, and one accesses such intensity as an engaged reader. Existential amplification thus covers not merely experiencing more of what one already undergoes, but attending to and bonding with qualitatively intense experiences. Similarly to reading of the kind I have just described, playacting can satisfy a need to experience more than actual life. Actors experience more existential possibilities that are shaped out, particularized, and personalized by the text; actors also experience what they experience in a heightened intensity, a process facilitated by the organized, predetermined nature of the states portrayed and the language of the play. They project such processes to spectators, who are able to enter these dimensions of existential amplificationdimensions that in fact involve looking through the actors to the fictional events and the words of the author. But while acting overlaps with reading in these ways, it also involves unique dimensions to which I shall now turn. It is here that one needs to look at the actors, rather than accessing what can be gained by looking through them. One of these dimensions relates to intensity. Unlike readers, the intensity experienced and/or projected by actors relates to the act of actually verbalizing some words and linguistic sequences, relating to the tactile dimension of language. Uttering aloud words such as those in the Shake-

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spearean examples above affects the speaker differently than mentally reading them; verbalizing them as part of a comprehensive embodiment of the role mobilizes an even more intense experience. The reason is that locked into the wordsthe consonants and vowels of a well-written dramatic textis an emotional force that can be released by the actor. In a strong performance, such energy is radiated to the audience.17 John Gielgud gives a nonverbal example of the conveying of such energy:
I have a vivid recollection of Lucien Guitrys acting in a drama called Jacqueline, produced in London in 1922, in which he played an elderly rou who strangles his mistress in the final scene. It was the preparation for this denouement in the second act that impressed me the most. The scene was in a hotel bedroom where he had taken the girl for a weekend. Guitry stood over her as she lay on the bed, and she suddenly shrank from him crying, Oh! You terrify me. For a few seconds he seemed to grow inches taller and become a towering and sadistic creature. Then, suddenly breaking the tension completely, he resumed his normally charming manner for the rest of the scene. I watched him most intently, and am convinced that in fact he did absolutely nothing, not moving his hands, his face or his body. His absolute stillness and the projection of his concentrated imagination, controlled and executed with a consummate technique, produced on the girl and on the audience an extraordinary and unforgettable effect. I knew I had seen a great actor.18

One might be tempted to regard such energetic intensity as that which distinguishes the actors existential amplification from what readers or authors experience. But as important as energizing the text is, there are additional crucial differences between imagining fictions and incarnating them that do not relate to intensity in general or energy in particular. Accessing these differences requires exploring further the imaginative activity that is particular to theatrical embodiment.

Identication versus Embodiment

Although both reading and acting partake of hypothetically placing oneself in anothers shoes, spectatorship (or readership) differs categorically from theatrical embodiment. The difference is both qualitativein terms of the level of commitment and compenetration with the characterand quantitativein terms of the degree of detail sought, the sheer time spent by the actor-as-character, and the attempt to interrelate body, language, and the inner state (rather than merely imaginatively attempting to glimpse into anothers interiority). Consider, first, the different role that identification plays in relation to theatrical embodiment, as opposed to its looser connection with involved reading. Literary
17 Theorists typically summon the notion of energy to account for such intensity. Goldman says: Acting is never simply mimetic; it appeals to us because of some other or more inclusive power. We feel an energy present in any good actors performance that goes beyond the demonstration of what some real person is like (The Actors Freedom, 5). Susanne Langers analysis of dance as the embodiment of virtual powersthe vital force emanating from dancersa play of powers made visibleis also relevant to fathoming the impersonal, larger-than-life dimension that theatrical acting exudes; see Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribners, 1953), chapter 11. Phillip Zarrillis Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavsky (New York: Routledge, 2009) is an extended exploration of the cultivation of energy as part of performance. Zarrilli prefers to regard acting in terms of dynamic energetics rather than in terms of representation, speaking of the actors immediate and appropriate deployment of her energy in the act of performance and the spectators experience of that performance (50). See also Lehmanns Postdramatic Theatre for a description of energetic theatre (3738). 18 John Gielgud, An Actor and His Time (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1997), 39.

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critics can surely spend weeks, months, even years, honing and deepening their understanding of a character and its perceptions. But such understanding is not the same as identifying, and the latter is not necessary for the purpose of interpreting a literary work well or responding deeply to it. Much literary criticism does not rely on or even mention identification, which strikes many as a somewhat rudimentary and unschooled response to literary characters. Even when identification takes place in more demanding literature, it is not ubiquitous: some complex characters lend themselves to identification, others do not. The ability to avoid incorporating identification into literary theory is fortunate, since identification (or, for that matter, empathy) is at best a theoretically dubious concept that critics eschew for many good reasons. Here are some of its problems: 1.  Identification misleadingly suggests identical emotions between empathizers and their object. 2.  It tends to collapse comprehending/understanding and the distinct act of justifying. 3.  The term is indiscriminately used in relation to real people in multiple contexts (friends, patients), as well as to fictional characters in plays and novels. Accordingly, relying on the term in literature or the performing arts risks lumping together what we allow ourselves as part of aesthetic response and the altogether different empathic operations that we depend on in nonfictional life. 4.  Finally, there is the difference between the distinct shape identification takes in a variety of states (sadness, happiness, fear, hope, depression, love, joy). Conceptually and emotionally, diverse processes and capacities appear to be involved when identifying with each of these, contributing to altogether different mental states on behalf of the identifying individual.19 And yet, while it may be a dispensable attitude when theorizing literature, identification cannot be avoided when reflecting on acting. Theatrical incarnation is the most powerful form of identification imaginable; it is a planned act of deeply thought identification on behalf of actors who have to imagine and assume an alien existence, to experience and convincingly project it. The actor cannot afford to endorse some merely sympathetic attitude to a character: to act is to create and inhabit another persons physicality, dress, body language, belief system, emotional sensitivities, and so forth; unlike cinematic acting, in the theatre, acting involves undergoing this repeatedly in a planned and comprehensive way over time, sometimes through a span of years of performing the role. Actors can and often will maintain a critical distance from their roles; sometimes, as in Brechts theatre, actors will be called upon to project this dis19 Bence Nanay offers a useful summary of existing accounts of identification and the problems that beset them, formulating an intriguing account of theatrical identification predicated on the relations between action and perception; see Nanay, Perception, Action, and Identification in the Theater, in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy, ed. David Krasner and David Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 24454. David Krasners essay Empathy and Theatre in the same collection offers an erudite discussion of the relations among empathy, identification, sympathy, compassion, and understandingsignificantly different processes that, while interlacing in various ways, should be set apart.

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tance. But most forms of actingMethod/non-Method, feelers/presentersshare the requirement to experience or project an intense identification of actor and character.

Embodied versus Literary Particularization

Acting is embodied identification. Here is Stanislavskys unfolding of what such embodiment requires from the actor:
Every invention of the actors imagination must be thoroughly worked out and solidly built on a basis of facts. It must be able to answer all the questions (when, where, why, how) that he asks himself when he is driving his inventive faculties on to make a more and more definite picture of a make-believe existence. . . . To imagine in general, without a well-defined and thoroughly founded theme is a sterile occupation. On the other hand, a conscious, reasoned approach to the imagination often produces a bloodless, counterfeit presentment of life. That will not do for the theatre. Our art demands that an actors whole nature be actively involved, that he give himself up, both mind and body, to his part. He must feel the challenge to action physically as well as intellectually because the imagination, which has no substance or body, can reflexively affect our physical nature and make it act.20

What distinguishes the kind of imaginative partaking in a fiction that Stanislavsky is talking about from an imaginative engagement with literary characters? Answering the question is crucial if we desire to pinpoint the precise nature of existential amplification specifically as part of theatrical role-playing, and to set it apart from literatures close yet distinct form of living more through imagining the inner lives of fictions. Begin with particularization. The immersion in literary fictions involves a loose form of specificity, gaining some of its power from the freedom and intellectual edge of not particularizing certain features of what is being written or read. By opposition, the actors form of embodiment is, by definition, concrete, and it is necessarily circumscribed to particular selections of tone, movement, and positioning. Specificity adds to the audiences experience the sharpness and vivacity that were missing when the play was merely read, and, concomitantly, it detracts from its unique open-endedness as a literary text. Such delimitationthe inevitable abandoning of some exciting interpretive options that cannot be held together in a single cohesive performanceexplains why even strong performances can be somewhat dissatisfying for spectators who are deeply familiar with the literary work An example would render concrete these abstract claims. Consider Dorotheas disenchantment with her bloodless marriage to Casaubon in George Eliots Middlemarch. When we empathize or imagine Dorothea as part of a reading, we access a range of highly particular feelings that are brought out by what she thinks and what she does not allow herself to think, by what she does, or by her attempts to come to terms with her dissatisfaction. All this is not obvious, and it requires a patient and highly sensitive literary analysis to expose the multiple and complex insights that Eliot provides into this state. But at no stage is the reader compelled to imagine what shoes Dorothea wears, or how she brushes her hair, or how she conducts herself physically in the presence of her husband, or how her body language might alter when Ladislaw enters the room.
20 Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares, trans. E. R. Hapgood (New York: Routledge, 1989), 7677 (emphasis in original).

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Eliot also, and not just her readers, may abstain from imagining such matters. The authors literary imagination does entail following a character through in a highly particular way. When J. M. Coetzees Elizabeth Costello (a fictional author) is described by her son, he says about her: my mother has been a man. . . . She has also been a dog. She can think her way into other people, into other existences. I have read her; I know. It is within her powers. Isnt that what is most important about fiction: that it takes us out of ourselves, into other lives?21 The author is committed to particularize an imaginative possibility, to patiently pursue it. In discussing Kafkas role in relation to a fictional character (the ape in An Account for an Academy), Elizabeth Costello (the same fictional author) says:
Kafka had time to wonder where and how his poor educated ape was going to find a mate. And what it was going to be like when he was left in the dark with the bewildered, halftamed female that his keepers eventually produced for his use. . . . That ape is followed through to the end, to the bitter, unsayable end, whether or not there are traces left on the page. Kafka stays awake during the gaps when we are sleeping. (32)

While this image powerfully contrasts authorial imagination and readingthe authors existence as an involved guardian of fictional creations even at the points ignored or slept through by readerswe can still note how, unlike Stanislavskys guidelines to his actors, the authorial imagination, even here, at its most conscious commitment to particularize and follow a character through, is free from the need to provide a consistent physical, visual rendering of what the author has only partly imagined. Kafka probably did not imagine the precise cage size in which the ape is cooped up or the specific accent in which the ape utters particular words in his speech. Authors may watch their characters while readers are asleep, but authors watch them as imaginative constructs, exercising a form of particularization that is at once specific and open-ended, refined though not fully defined. By contrast, theatrical embodiment requires that the actor master the various insights that can be culled from the text, similarly to how a careful literary critic would proceed, but from that point on, an entirely new dimension of particularization (and existential amplification) opens up. A simple act, such as sipping tea, differs when Dorothea performs it with Casaubon at different stages of the story. When Eliots novel is transformed into an enacted work, the actress becomes accountable for such changes, weighty onstage and imperceptible on page. Indeed, the actress becomes accountable for every aspect of Dorotheas worldly manifestation: clothing, movement, gesture, body language, voice, the hows and whys of each moment of her fictional existence, and the fine details involved in projecting the transitions between such moments. Acting has to do with particularization in another sense also: the necessity to actualize a single possibility that is merely included in the cluster of possibilities that configure the text. And if you poison us, do we not die? asks Shylock of his Christian antagonists. This question can be abstract and rhetorical like the ones preceding it, but poison could alternatively refer to the elopement of Jessica (her spiritual poisoning by Lorenzos suit, convincing her to escape her Judaism). The sentence can even be elocutedas actor Warren Mitchell didas a joke.22 The line on the page will merely suggest this possibility, whereas an actor will particularize it and turn it
21 22

J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Penguin, 2003), 2223. The Merchant of Venice, directed by Jack Gold (BBC, 1980).

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into Shylocks specific meaning by, for example, looking at a portrait of Jessica as he asks the question. A line like Let him look to his bond (in the same speech) can be uttered as a warning relating to Antonio, but it can also be playedas Olivier did as expressing the dawning realization that Shylock can genuinely pursue Antonios flesh (which in turn implies that the original contract was, as Shylock said and they disbelieved him, a genuine act of trust and friendship, rather than some premeditated, diabolical plan on his part).23

The Role of the Fictional Past

How many children did Lady Macbeth have? In literary circles, this famous question has come to be a hallmark of critical confusion. Literary readers do not have to know whether or not Lady Macbeth had children. If they preoccupy themselves with such worries, they betray various distinct errors of perception and literary sensitivity. They are conflating between responding to a biography and the distinct act of literary appreciation. Yet for the actress playing Lady Macbeth such a question matters, and deeply so. The answer determines how she will render: I have given suck, and know how tender tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this (Macbeth, 1.7.5458). The actress will probably make a decision respecting whether or not her fictional character has had any children, whether they are alive or dead, or even the manner of their deaths. And she might prepare herself through detailed improvisations in which loving transactions between her and them are played out. Such exercises are sometimes carried out in rehearsals. Directors can ask actors to improvise scenes that relate to the pre-play; such exercises establish the characters state when referring to or implying a past. The goal is to reconstruct and create a believable biography, one that is not merely intellectually adduced by the audience, but experienced in a moving and rich way. References to the past, tinged by specific choices made by the actor, also modify, particularize, or create new dimensions of meaning for the work. Here is an example: when Othello tells the Venetian duke and council how the narration of his life-story won Desdemonas heart, he goes into details: I spake of the most disastrous chances . . . of the cannibals that each other eat . . . and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear would Desdemona seriously incline (Othello, 1.3.13345). Some Othellos deliver these lines solemnly, introducing something of the wild imaginary world that underlies Othello throughout the play; others convey them jokingly, stressing the seriously above. Othello is thus able to defuse the explosive potential of his questioning. He invites the Venetian council to partake of the tricks by which an experienced male suitor allures a beautiful, young, and rich woman. What is important for our concerns is to note that the actor is, in effect, deciding whether or not Othello is genuinely disclosing a painful biography or boastinga choice left open when reading the play. Such a participation in and embodiment of a fictional life beyond the temporal boundaries specified by the written fiction is different in kind from the looser engagement required by literary imagination, even when the latter is nonsimplistic and involved.

23

The Merchant of Venice, directed by John Sichel (ATV, 1973).

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Focused versus Relational Identication
A further discontinuity between identification as readeraudience and theatrical embodiment relates to the general difference between enjoying art and producing ita difference I have so far been ignoring in comparing the identification experienced by the recipient of a work (a reader of literature) and by a creator of it (an actor). Whereas reading and acting are both forms of participation in a game of make-believe (to borrow Waltons terms), some of the differences between them affect existential amplification. Some genres depend upon their readers or audiences experience of empathy (tragedy), while others often rely on its withdrawal or suspension (comedy). In opposition to spectators, the actor has to intimately embody the fiction, even when the dramatic effect intended for the audience is one of detachment. Here, for instance, is a terrified Falstaff mulling over his narrow escape from drowning after being unceremoniously ditched into the Thames:
Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow of butchers offal, and to be thrown in the Thames? . . . The rogues slighted me into the river with as little remorse as they would have drowned a blind bitchs puppies. . . . And you may know by my size that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking. If the bottom were as deep as hell, I should down. I had been drowned but that the shore was shelvy and shallowa death that I abhor, for the water swells a man, and what a thing should I have been when I had been swelled! I should have been a mountain of mummy. (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.5.414)

Falstaff is horrified by momentarily imagining how his bloated corpse would have appeared floating down the river. The comic effect here depends on the actor experiencing or projecting utter dreaddecidedly not what the audience experiences upon hearing this confession. A successful performance of comic roles (or of villains, shrewish wives, or bullying husbands) sometimes depends upon the capacity of actors to insulate themselves from the radically different response that their actions prompt in their audience. This situation indicates how different the actors embodiment and its spectatorship can actually become. Unlike the reader, the actor is not only delving into the experience of a character, but into a compound one that will be simultaneously perceived and responded to by an audience. The actor will not simply empathize with Falstaff, but will embody Falstaffs horror and shock while the audience is laughing (hard). Theatrical embodiment is accordingly relational; it engages in a constant dialogue with something that lies outside the boundaries of the workaudience response. Reading, on the other hand, entails a gravitating into the fictional characters world, which remains confined to the world created by the work.

Acting and Being

If acting is a powerful form of existential amplification, we have to take seriously a very old objection to the moral dimensions of this process. Should some forms of amplification be avoided on moral grounds? Plato thought that honorable people should not embody some characters, since the role might seep into the performer (Republic, 3.395c). Such concern was endorsed by anti-theatricalists in later ages.24 Nowadays, however, it tends to be cavalierly dismissed as excessive: [I]t must be remembered that it is perfectly possible to give representations, even repeatedly, without identify24 For examples, see Joseph R. Roach, The Players Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 49.

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ing with what is represented.25 Yet the problem with an overly causal dismissal of this objection is the dubious implication that Plato was overlooking a trivial logical gapand it is safe to suppose that he was not. Theatrical identification does not import the role into the actors identity; merely calling attention to the difference between role and identity, however, is too easy an evasion of the complex relationships that actually take place between the two. Some tricky rolesenacting sexually intimate scenes, portraying a humiliated character, playing a sadistic psychopath, acting a character with a different sexual orientation than the actors owndo make us wonder how comfortable the actor feels in the part, and what might be released, suppressed, or overcome within him or her when playing it. What Plato perceived was not, I believe, that if one is acting, say, a rapist, one is likely to become one; the moral dubiousness of such imitation does not reside in the chronological relation of role-playing leading to self-modification, but, rather, in there being something intrinsically objectionable in the acting itself. The most obvious example of this danger is pornography. Does participating in a porn movie constitute an act of infidelity to ones partner in real life, or is it merely an insulated role-playing that is segregated from identity? The same ambiguity holds for acting in erotically intimate scenes that are not pornographic; actors and their partners sometimes explicitly set limits to what they are prepared or unwilling to do in such scenes. But sex is only a physically palpable sphere in which the infiltration between role and identity is made manifest; Jewish or Muslim actors might recoil from eating pork as part of a role, and a vegetarian would refuse to eat meat. What Plato saw was that role-playing does not magically safeguard ones identity.26 Indeed, one might even lose sight of what ones identity actually is. As Laurence Olivier wrote: Nowadays people often ask my wife, Joan, How do you know when Larry is acting and when hes not? and my wife will always reply, Larry? Oh, hes acting all the time. In my heart of hearts I only know that I am far from sure when I am acting and when I am not.27 Sadistic roles, chauvinistic roles, or mawkish roles can all modify the actors sense of identity, particularly when the actor is required, as in theatre, to repeatedly enact the same role.28 Actors do not become sadistic or mawkThom, For an Audience, 131. For the manner by which theatrical role-playing can structure intimacy as part of a sadomasochistic relationship, see my The Theatricalization of Love, New Literary History 41, no. 1 (2010). For another nontheatrical exploration of role-playing in relation to identity, see Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), chapter 7. Markovits is probing the plausibility of using role-playing as a justification that can neutralize a lawyers misgivings about, for example, suppressing information that can incriminate her or his client. The question is whether lawyers can pacify their own reservations about such an act by perceiving themselves as playing a role that is itself morally necessary in a just system. Like theatrical acting, the lawyer also encounters the blurry divide between role-playing and identity, and how the former does not necessarily safeguard the latter. For more general accounts of the fuzzy divide between identity and role-playing, see Erving Goffmans The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959) and Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity. A more recent argument regarding the ubiquity of theatre in seemingly nontheatricalized contexts is Paul Woodruff, The Necessity of Theatre: The Art of Watching and Being Watched (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 27 Laurence Olivier, Confessions of an Actor: Laurence Olivier, an Autobiography (New York: Penguin, 1984), 21. 28 Ronald Harwoods The Dresser is an insightful play focusing on how exhausting such a repetition can be for an actor. I take up the significance of repetition in relation to existential amplification in my Theatrical Repetition and Inspired Performance, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 4 (2009).
25 26

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ish by playing such roles, but the existential amplification that they are undergoing in becoming such characters in fiction can be experienced by them and others as morally, emotionally, or theologically objectionable, since it affects what they are during the moments of embodiment.

Pretense versus Role-playing

Thoms dismissal of Platos concern as excessive would be accurate if role-playing was merely a synonym for pretense. Reducing acting to an elaborate pretending is, indeed, precisely the position endorsed by no less an authority than Olivier: For what is acting but lying, and what is good acting but convincingly lying?29 Yet Olivier is wrong: while acting can involve pretense, and while prolonged pretense can develop into acting, the two are distinct operations. Here is Declan Donnellans much more careful description of actings relation to pretense:
As soon as we show, we pretend. And pretending is not acting. Certain things cannot be acted; they can only be pretended. States can never be acted. . . . You cannot act being asleep. You can only pretend to be asleep. . . . This is not really acting. It is something else, but it may be theatrically crucial for the audience that you do it.30

When we pretend, we are involved in mimicking a state while maintaining a clear sense of who we are and what we are pretending to be (as in Donnellans example above, pretending to be asleep). Offstage, pretense is often negatively colored, associated with an objective to cozen someone else into forming specific beliefs. It is usually a subset of deception. Pretense is typically instrumental: one desires to elicit a particular response from another, and little matters beyond that. The extracted response is often subordinated to some ulterior objective, say, swindling someone into giving money by pretending to be a pauper. Theatrical role-playing is different. First, it educes fictional beliefs in the audience, not false ones, hence it is not a form of deception. Second, while it is designed to draw out a specific response, dramatic role-playing is also significantly dissociated from this goal, whereas pretense is thoroughly instrumental. Actors can drive an audience to laughter or tears yet still be dissatisfied with their performance. By contrast, con artists who obtain victims money through fraudulent pretense would never experience such disappointment; if they do, it would mean that cheating has become an artistic outlet for them. Third, in terms of the addressee, pretense and acting are experienced as different communicative acts: pretense is manipulativewhen deceived, we feel used, played upon; acting, on the other hand, is an invitation to partake of anothers experience. Such an invitation may occasion a response, and, if successful, it would usually induce it. But acting aims at an altogether different effect than the one elicited by pretense: an opening up to others, rather than a manipulation of them. All three distinctions help us realize why pretense is usually experienced as aggressive, while acting is not. In some highly demanding forms of actingJerzy Grotowskis theatrical experiments come to mindthe actors invitation can be resisted by the audience, who might feel overwhelmed and unable to follow the actor.31 But such resistance to
Olivier, Confessions of an Actor, 20. Declan Donnellan, The Actor and the Target (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005), 81. 31 Jerzy Grotowski writes: [The actor] must learn to use his role as if it were a surgeons scalpel, to dissect himself. . . . The important thing is to use the role as a trampoline, an instrument with
29 30

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some daunting depth that an actor is able to expose (reconsider the description of Chekhovs acting with which we began) is not to be confused with the moral recoil that pretense evokes. Pretense enables keeping identity and role apart, involving no threat of confusing between the two. Perhaps this difference in relating to the selfs insulation, as opposed to the prospect of its dialectical shaping by something other, is itself an important distinction between producing a falsehood and creating fiction: the opening up to an interpenetration of the self with the imagined space, rather than an act of intentional misrepresentation in which the self remains insulated. The con man who pretends to be starving is not interested in how hunger is experienced or projected, or how he would personally feel and act if he were genuinely famished. Acting, on the other hand, is predicated on inquisitiveness regarding how states are experienced and manifested in a living body. Such curiosity then fuels a dialogue between identity and role. In Grotowskis words: For both producer and actor, the authors text is a sort of scalpel enabling us to open ourselves, to transcend ourselves, to find what is hidden within us and to make the act of encountering the others; in other words, to transcend our solitude.32 While actors will not confuse role-playing and identity, opening themselves up to a fully engaged, embodied dialogue with some existential possibilities can still be problematic. Even a technique-oriented, projection-oriented actor who dismisses inner process as unnecessary will have to carry out such an intense dialogue to be able to unlock the characters expressive dimensions. Actors do not pretend, they do not lie. Platos concern registers a perception on his part of an intimate connection between role and identity that will not be dissolved by simply noting the logical hiatus between the fictional and the real. His objection indicates that he understood acting not as mere pretense, but as a form of becoming, an existential amplification.

which to study what is hidden behind our everyday mask . . . in order to sacrifice it, expose it. This is an excess not only for the actor but also for the audience. The spectator understands, consciously or unconsciously, that such an act is an invitation to him to do the same thing, and this often arouses opposition or indignation, because our daily efforts are intended to hide the truth about ourselves not only from the world, but also from ourselves; see Grotowski, The Theatres New Testament, in Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 37. 32 Ibid., 57.