James Gandolfini, Peter Jensen, and the Importance of Acting from Wholeness

Ten years ago, James Gandolfini was interviewed on Inside the Actors Studio. He spoke candidly about emotional honesty both onstage and off -- particularly dealing with intense and taboo emotions like rage.

And although it took a few years to sink in ... his words changed my life.

I have found myself revisiting those words over the years, in daily life and in my performing work -- most recently in my current scene class at the esteemed T. Schreiber Studio, with my teacher Peter Jensen. (Yes, I'm totally psyched to be working with this studio again!)

Here is the full quote (the first part can be seen here starting at 7:50, and the last bit is continued here) but I've highlighted the sentences that stuck with me:

James Gandolfini on "Inside the Actors Studio"

One of the major things in an [acting] class... is to get up in front of people and just start to be able to make a fool of yourself. ... I remember one thing [my first acting teacher] did for me that ... got me to a new level was--  I had such anger back then... When you're young ... everybody does. You're pissed and you're not sure why. That's probably why you're all sitting here [at the Actor's Studio], because you want to express something and you don't know what it is. And she kept telling me, "Go ahead, go ahead." And I never wanted to. ... Something happened ... 

I think she told a partner to do something to me, and he did it. And I destroyed the place, you know, just all that crap they have onstage. And then she said at the end of it -- I remember my hands were bleeding a little bit, and the other guy had gotten off -- and she goes, 'See, everybody's fine ... nobody's hurt. This is what you have to do. This is what people pay for. If you don't want to do it, get off. But this is what people pay for to see. They don't want to see the guy next door...'  And that was a big step for me because then I could start to go to where my anger was ... and realize that I could control it.

Although I had not done theater for a while -- and didn't plan to as I'd started bellydancing -- I thought of this interview again and again. It became a heartening refrain for emotional, psychological, and creative integrity:

"Be able to make a fool of yourself."  Go ahead and lose it, because "this is what people pay to see."

Years later, when I returned to scene study class, Peter echoed this refrain, encouraging us to allow those behaviors and qualities most repugnant to us, because "the character is basically yourself under certain circumstances."

James Lipton of "Inside the Actors Studio"

In acting, we often forget this.

We get so involved with "creating" a character, that we forget that all we have to work with is ourselves.

Even if we are portraying a character that is wildly different from us -- so wholly anathema to the person we'd like to be that it frightens us -- onstage and off we are still always ourselves.

We must reach inside ourselves to find an authentic seed of the character, or we'll end up faking our way through each line, hoping the audience doesn't catch on.

Even if they don't notice or don't care because we've turn in an entertaining "fake" performance, it won't be satisfying  because we know it's fake. And we know the audience deserves better than that.

So this is what I've been working on in class -- finding those uncomfortable "seeds" in myself and letting them be felt and seen.

A few weeks ago, Peter assigned a scene from Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind between a man who had just beaten his wife to the point of brain damage, and the man's mother ... me.

Like much of Shepard's work, it's a twisted comedic melodrama that nests disturbing emotional truths within extreme characters and interactions that stretch plausibility. In our scene, my character is spoon-feeding her grown son "your favorite [soup]... Cream of Broccoli I made it special in the blender ... just how you like it!", as he lies tight-lipped in his childhood bed.

She babies, then bullies him, then goes on about her own life, and babies him again until he explodes. And she explodes right back. And it becomes very clear very quickly that she made him into the monster he is.

This woman combines the dark, needy manipulation of Livia Soprano with the saccharine maternal cooing of a Mommie Dearest who will do anything to get what she wants -- and what she wants is to make her Golden Son stay with her forever and ever and ever and ever.

In short: she is everything I hate about women.

Peter, I think, knew I was less than comfortable with this character; plus the scene started with a massive page-long monologue that would take me a while to memorize, so he suggested that my partner Adam and I improvise a scene that occurs sometime before the action of the play.

Peter Jensen in the indie film "A Memory"

So we went about six years back, to the evening Adam's character decides to announce to his mother that he has asked his girlfriend to marry him. This, we figured, would hit every button for the mother.

As the scene began, I had no idea how I would react to this news, and I was surprised to find my/herself simply choosing not to hear him (this, I later realized, was my grandmother's strategy -- if you hear something you don't want to hear, just block it out and continue with your own narrative).

And the scene became a nasty little comedy -- of him trying to tell his mother how much he loves his finaceé ... and of her going on about Wheel of Fortune, and how he should find himself a pretty girl like Vanna White. In short, invalidating -- annihilating -- him with each exchange.

And when he finally gets upset, she/I innocently asks why he is upset, "and maybe this is why you can't find a good woman!" At each turn she forces her own reality down his throat until he threatens to leave.

And then her threats came out:  "If you leave, don't think about coming back" -- anything, anything to get him to stay.

When finally, through sheer, brute force, he slams his own reality (as in the real reality) down her throat so that she has no choice but to hear it ... I felt a desperate, searing, percolating rage ... I bellowed like a beast and raised my hand to strike his face.

His eyes flashed wide and the other students held their breath. And in that moment I felt a rush of power. He had backed down!! ... But then I saw my partner, Adam -- not my wayward strikeworthy son.

And immediately, I realized, "Whoa ... so that's why people do this -- bullying, intimidating -- anything to control the other person." And then an impulse to rein it in reached up inside me, not wanting to hurt, not wanting to control ... And my hand stopped.

But then I realized that this is what made me not her. We all have these rages, these screaming, struggling infant needs to make the world into ourselves -- but most of us have the impulse not to hurt, while this character does not.

And I needed to let go of that part of myself if I was going to be true to her.

So as my hand was raised to hit him, I felt an inner hand release control. And I ripped into him again.

And his eyes flattened back into his character's cold defiance. He battered me with maelstrom cruel truths and stormed off. I wailed for a moment and then, realizing he was gone, true to character calmly brushed myself off and went back to Wheel of Fortune.

Of course the moment the scene was over, and I was myself again, I was teary and shaken through the feedback session. After a breath, Peter began, "Both of you ... went somewhere new here."

We glanced at each other, nodding "yes."

Tears slid from my eyes as we continued -- partly because I had frightened myself by losing control (even though I hadn't fully lost it), partly because I had never consciously allowed myself to experience that level of destructive rage, but mostly because I finally understood this character and felt her icy echo in myself.

And although I have seen this behavior in others, I had never understood the impetus behind it -- never felt it fully from the inside.

So to be able to say -- "Yes, I have this in me too" -- was a blow to my ego, because I would like to believe I am for the most part kind and goodhearted and well meaning, that I would never do what this woman does.

And yet, as an actor, I must do those things; I must truthfully allow those forbidden parts of myself.

I must be my whole self.

When we perform, our audience needs that -- anything less and both they and we are gypped.

Part of the reason we prize actors like James Gandolfini so highly is that they reach those hidden, forbidden parts of the self; they express what we can't, fully and without reservation. They both express extremes cathartically for us, and reassure us that such powerful emotion can be erupt fully, truthfully, and safely -- invoked within the containment of a theatrical play, and deeply humanized through a character with which we empathize.

And in this way, a great performance opens something in us, gives us access to those parts of ourselves that we dare not see, much less express -- allowing us, perhaps, a path towards those uncomfortable emotions that we try to deny, granting a sliver towards our own wholeness.

Because when we deny uncomfortable emotions, attempting to crush their very existence -- that is when they do become dangerous, looking for breaks in our armor through which they can erupt with with all the vengeance of a repressed creature. And we become afraid of ourselves (and, consequently, afraid of others).

Theater -- great storytelling of any kind -- expresses, metabolizes, and humanizes what seems most foreign to us, and in so doing brings the performer and audience to a greater understanding and wholeness.