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About Arlene Schulman
Expertise
As a professional director, dramaturg, acting coach and actor for over 25 years in the NYC/NJ area, I can help with questions on acting technique, character development, audition and rehearsal techniques, dealing with directors and stage managers, what directors are looking for, and other aspects of the acting and directing professions.
Experience
A professional director, dramaturg, acting coach and actor for over 25 years in the NYC/NJ area, I have directed in professional, university and amateur theatre and have directed and acted in dramas, comedies, musicals, Shakespeare as well as collaborating closely with playwrights in the development of original plays and musicals.
Organizations
SSDC associate member
Advisory Board - Isle of Shoals Productions
Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America associate member
Shakespeare Association of America
The Shakespesare Institute -
MA "Shakespeare & Theatre" candidate, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK
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You are here: Experts > Movies > Actors' Exchange > Actors` Exchange > Actors playing real-life scenarios
Expert: Arlene Schulman
Date: 4/27/2008
Subject: Actors playing real-life scenarios
Question
Arlene,
In an episode of Oprah this week, the shows producers hired two actors and placed them in a bakery in a small town in Texas. These actors were planted among unsuspecting patrons. One actor (a white male) portrayed the proprietor and the other actor (a middle-Eastern woman) portrayed a (Muslim) customer.
The 'baker' would say 'we dont serve Muslims, get back on your camel and go home!' in front of the unsuspecting customers to see if anyone called him out on it. (And many of them did, particularly women customers).
If the male actor was actually a non-racist (he probably was), how was he able to mentally block his emotions from reacting to those racially charged statements he was blaring out to the female customer?
Answer
Hi Debby,
Every day actors play characters that are nothing like themselves. That's what acting is all about. They play murderers, racists, villains, people of different sexual persuasions than themselves, people who think differently than they do, people who are more outgoing, more shy, more lots of thing. That's part of the job.
It's part of an actor's skills to be able to put themselves in the place of someone else, and, for the time they are playing the role, to try to think and act as if they were that person. This isn't easy for everyone and it's part of what makes acting such a difficult profession. Actors - good actors - study for years - most in university actor training programs - to learn the skills and techniques to allow them to do just that, among many other things that actors must learn.
I can't, in the space of one email, describe what an actor does to achieve this - and, besides, it is different for each actor. But I can say that an actor doesn't "mentally block his emotions" at all. What he does is to allow himself to access those of his own emotions that he may not usually display. In the case you mention, there are always things that a person may feel very strongly about - even hate. Most people in a civilized society suppress those emotions. But an actor learns to use those emotions - under control - when he needs them for a performance.
Now in this case the actor might not have been racist. But what an actor deals with is not "labels" like "racist", but rather, with feelings, emotions. So maybe he feels that same kind of anger and resentment that a racist might feel for... say... someone who cuts him off in traffic, or someone who keeps him from getting a job. You might say, what has that got to do with this? The answer is that actors learn how to use their own experiences to find THE EMOTION (in this case anger and resentment) and to direct it where it needs to be for the character he's playing. The actor may not hate Muslims, but he certainly has felt anger and resentment before and knows what that feels like. He takes that feeling and redirects it, for the purpose of the acting job, to the subject that is appropriate for the character. So, in this case, he focuses that anger and resentment (and those are the emotions he has to deal with here) onto the character's targets - in this case, Muslims. And that's all there is to it. For the moment, he can play that character because the emotions he feels are real and his own; it's only the target that is the character's, and that's part of the play. He doesn't have to feel guilty or suppress his own emotions. The emotions are real and his own - only the target is the character's, and that means that he doesn't have to feel guilty for aiming his emotions at the target - it's just acting, not reality.
Does that make it a little more understandable?
Best,
Arlene (MsDirector)
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