The seventh of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity is the Law of Transformation. The word transform is from Latin trans – across, over, beyond – and forma – form or shape. Form may be related to Greek morphe – form, beauty, outward appearance, which in turn is related to Morpheus, son of sleep and god of dreams in Ovid.
Acting, Strasberg writes, involves the transformation of – or we might say “dreaming beyond” – one’s human reality.
The transformation, he says, applies both to one’s circumstances of life – “where one lives, where one works, one’s acquaintances, etc.” – and in who one is. He further distinguishes the latter into working from the ”outside in” and from the “inside out.”
The exemplar of the first approach is Sir Laurence Olivier, whose portrayal of the King in Becket Strasberg cites in particular. He qualifies praise for Olivier, though, describing his portrayal as “courageous,” if not necessarily “real,” at least in Strasberg’s terms. He notes that Olivier is reported to have said that he worked realistically in rehearsal, but in performance “imitated what he had originally discovered organically.” Strasberg mentions Daniel Day Lewis, Michael Gambon, and Ed Flanders as actors who physically transform themselves from role to role. He singles out Gambon for special praise as an actor who transforms not only physically, but also “how he appears to think and act.”
Among actors who “transform their inner being” Strasberg mentions Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro, Bette Davis, and others. Notably the pinnacle of these actors’ success was some time ago – 1930s, 1940s, and later in the 1960s for Davis; 50s and 60s for Brando; 60s and 70s for DeNiro. Writing in 1996 Strasberg opines that no American actors “in recent times” have fully developed a capacity for inner transformation, linking that to a failure to spend “time and effort working in the theater doing classical roles,” which he sees as the only way for an actor to “fully expand and detail” their work.
From the audience’s perspective a successful transformation can produce a believable character, whether the actor has worked from the outside in or the inside out. An actor working from the outside in can observe and adopt the thoughts and feelings brought on by the physical behavior they discover as they build the character, while for an actor working from the inside out gestures and physical behavior can emerge from the imagined world of their character and the play.
In practice actors may combine the two approaches, for example starting from the inside, making contact with the play, drawing on memory and imagination to recall or recreate an aspect of the world of the play that leads to a particular gesture or movement. Then the gesture may suggest or imply other movements or aspects of physical (external) characterization. Moreover, an actor may work inside out on one play and outside in on another. For example, while I usually start working from the inside, while working on a role as a Greek father I found that concentrating on the character’s accent and speech opened up not only physical behavior, but emotional responses, thoughts, and feelings.
In his writings for actors Constantin Stanislavski presents “inside” and “outside” work as components of the overall process of creating a character. In his early writing, published posthumously as Part I of Creating a Role, and written between 1916 and 1920, Stanislavski outlines a three-part process: studying the role, “establishing the life of the role” by which he means inner life, and finally giving the role “physical form.” In Part II of Creating a Role, written between 1930 and 1933 after An Actor Prepares and Building a Character, Stanislavski describes an “outside in” approach to work on a production of Othello, or as the editor’s note puts it, “releasing the inner life of a role by first creating its physical life.” It’s worth noting that, although in acting training in the United States Stanislavski is primarily – sometimes exclusively – associated with psychological methods, here in his later work the initial focus is on finding truthful physical behavior.
Finding a character’s exterior reminds me of working with a mask. Masks have of course been used in various cultures since the earliest times. In the 20th century western theater, French teacher of physical acting Jacques Lecoq made mask work an important component of his training regimen. Masks continue to be used in Japanese Noh theater, which originated in the 14th century.
Thanos Vovolis, who was a visiting professor at the Dramatic Institute in Stockholm, Sweden from 2007-2010 has researched and written extensively on the function of masks in Greek theater1. He asserts that all theater in Athens in the 5th and 6th centuries BC used masks. This was arguably the heyday of Greek drama; Oedipus, the Trojan Women, the Bacchae, the Frogs, Electra, and other notable Greek plays likely date from that period.
Vovolis’ research found that Greek theater masks covered the entire head, with smallish mouth and eye openings. He believes that the small eye openings helped the actor focus. “The minimization of the sight leads to the maximization of the listening to the other actors, to a different awareness of their presence based not so much on seeing but on hearing,” Vovolis writes. “It leads the actor to the act of akroasis, the act of conscious and active listening.” Vovolis further suggests that the change in focus brought about by the mask increased the actors’ awareness of what he calls “the body’s axis,” by which he means the spine and pelvis – what we might call “the center,” as well as the actor’s physical actions in general.
The combined effect of these factors focuses the actor in space, Vovolis writes:
[P]utting him into a state of attentiveness, alertness, intensity; focusing a point outside himself, a state of total presence …. It is akin to standing outside oneself and watching oneself objectively. Being absent and present at the same time. Being absent - so the absence can be filled with a new presence, the presence of the role.
Despite the obvious differences, there are some similarities in the process Vovolis describes and the process of starting to build a character from the outside in. Both bring an increased awareness of “the body axis” and physical actions. And while “active listening” isn’t necessarily associated with finding believable physical character traits, what one hears – especially in the context of the play – can be an important factor in how the character responds and behaves.
In the US, a term like “acting technique” is often assumed to refer to working from the inside out. This is likely related to the influence of acting teachers from the Group Theater – such as Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, among others -- who derived their techniques from the work of Constantin Stanislavski. For nonactors – not to mention many acting students – work from the inside out carries an aura of mystery. Watching Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, and then On the Waterfront, or Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront and then The Pawnbroker, can seem like witnessing magical transformations.
Cultural historians such as T.H. Gaster and Mircea Eliade have shown how theater likely evolved from rituals associated with the seasons or the environment. During the rituals, priests or ordinary citizens were transformed into deities, superhuman, or other-worldly figures. In some of these rituals it is likely that the performers were understood to “become” the figures whose stories and characters they were representing.
Transformation is ubiquitous in culture. Many aspects of what we consider civilization involve transformation: agriculture, architecture, tool making, and art all involve the reshaping and re-purposing of substances, things, or people from one form to another. Eliade has written about rituals associated with the mining of the earth and the transformation of ores and metals by blacksmiths into tools and ornaments. Over time these grew into alchemy, whose goal, particularly in the West, was really about personal transformation. Psychologist C.G. Jung saw the pattern of alchemy, which involved a breaking down, separation into components, and reintegration, as analogous to the development and emergence of the self, or bringing together consciousness and the unconscious. Similarly, in his book Character Analysis, Wilhelm Reich, whose “functional thinking” influenced Strasberg’s description of the creative process, discusses the role of “the making conscious of the unconscious” in psychoanalysis2. For the actor, the goal of the transformation is not necessarily therapeutic, but creative: living spontaneously in the world of the character and the play.
When theater “works,” members of the audience may undergo transformation, as well. Bertolt Brecht was specific about intending his theater to motivate the audience to change their world. But even apolitical theater can lead members of the audience to view their relationships, environment or circumstances differently. Echoing Gaster’s view of the role of ritual and theater in connecting a society to its worldly and cosmic context, Eliade faults Jung’s view of the alchemical transformation for being too narrow. “The alchemist’s dream,” Eliade writes, “is to heal the world in its totality.”
2Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 36.