ACTING TIP: THE VALUE OF LIES
Hopefully, this won’t sound too simplistic, but it occurred to me after one of my recent
It is not just bad people who lie. I’ll bet even the Pope doesn’t get through a day without telling at least a couple of little white ones. “How do I feel? Fine, just fine, thanks for asking”, for instance, when the truth is that he has a toothache. Or how about, after a goodnight kiss (not the Pope, I hope), “Thanks for a great date, Marie. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Some people don’t even realize they are lying. They tell the same life stories over and over, embellishing a little more each time and, before you know it, the story is mostly a lie. The truth may be that a man watched from the shore as a dog was rescued from broken ice in a lake; but over the years, he becomes the rescuer. It is a harmless fabrication, he figures, and it makes people look up to him.
It is not an oxymoron for an actor to truthfully tell a lie while in character. Shakespeare instructed that an actor should hold the mirror up to nature, and part of our nature as humans is that we lie from time to time. No, actually, we lie quite a lot. Often our motive is simply not to hurt somebody’s feelings. “Wow! That’s a beautiful color dress on you!” or “That was mighty fine raccoon stew, Bob. Just about the best I ever had.”
But there is something even more to this. There is something about the written word on the page of a script that sort of suggests that what the character is saying is the truth. I am convinced that the first impulse of most actors is to presume that the character is telling the truth, not that she is lying.
I don’t know, maybe it comes from doing too many repetition exercises and having such a high premium put on honesty when acting. Maybe it rubs the cat’s fur the wrong direction to look for a character’s lie rather than looking for the truth. All I know for certain is that actors work best when they make acting choices that invite the most conflict – choices that get them into the most trouble. And you’re generally going to get into more trouble by lying than from telling the truth.
All I am suggesting here is that you factor this in the next time you start to work on a character. Ask yourself how a scene would play if the character you are playing were to be lying. Might she be covering up something? What is her secret? The fact that there may not be anything in the script to answer that question doesn’t mean that you can’t make that acting choice. Your only obligation is to say the words the way the playwright wrote them. The interpretation of them is up to you – with a bit of input from the director.
In Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie”, Tom never does tell his mother, Amanda, that he is gay. He lets her believe that he is a straight man who just doesn’t happen to have a girlfriend at the moment. It is a lie. He may even be lying to himself. It would be an entirely different play if Tom always spoke the truth.
