Casting

“ Clothes for character parts must be assembled on the moment according to the demands of the director and the imagination of the actor or actress. Realism is the great essential of character dressing. To wear the rags of a vaudeville tramp in the movies would turn the picture into a slapstick comedy. A real tramp's clothes are a mighty different matter.
The greatest difficulty which a casting director experiences is that of finding people to play the part of society folk. These parts require an understanding of drawing-room manners and ballroom etiquette, and the ability to wear smart clothes. ”

“ It is the first time I have played with any one who can properly be called an actor, and it was quite a new sensation. I could myself tell that I was acting very differently to the way in which I usually act. I seemed to catch his energy and earnestness; the scene grew almost real, and I began to feel my part. And that is the most any one can do on the stage. As to ‘being the character you are representing,’ that is absurd. I can hardly believe in any sane person seriously putting forward such a suggestion. It is too ridiculous to argue against. ”

“ I had felt myself an actor in a drama, and now I had very much the feeling an actor would have who answers to a cue and finds himself in mid-stage with the scenery and the rest of the cast suddenly vanished behind him. ”

“ Competition as a means of selecting a cast is in most cases the best method. The play once selected, the people from among whom the cast is to be formed are assembled. It is a good plan to have every one read the play first, and make a study of at least one scene of it. Then, either alone or in company with one, two, or three others, he reads—or recites from memory—the scene in question, either before the entire club or before a committee of judges. Each actor is judged on appearance, ease, voice, and insight into the character he is portraying. ”

“ To-day we have this same kind of acting, I imagine—and this is the third kind that I want to list—in the work of Sarah Bernhardt, Giovanni Grasso, Margaret Anglin, or Clare Eames. If you started out to list the players who use their own mask frankly for every part, achieving impersonation and emotion by their use of features and voice as instruments, you would find many more names of women than of men; for the actress has far fewer opportunities than the actor to employ the ingenuities of make-up. ”

“ A Broadway actor in a bald wig or an actor naturally bald, who is trying to pretend that he is in a room off in Budapest, and who refuses to admit that he knows it is all a sham, and that a thousand people are watching him, is a representational actor, or a realist. An actor who admits that he is an actor, and that he has an audience before him, and that it is his business to charm and move this audience by the brilliance of his art, is a presentational actor. ”

“ Prior to the enactment, and for the benefit of those in the audience who might be innocent of French, a British officer gave out the motif in English.
As I sat contentedly in my place—the burden of the wearinesses of the last weeks fallen from my shoulders—it was borne in upon me that much of the success of a play is in the eager and receptive mood of the audience; also that in the naïve freshness [61] of an amateur performance is a charm which has too frequently perished in the more finished production of the professional actor. ”

“ It has been said lately that I began my career on an unfurnished stage, when the play was the thing, and spectacle was considered of small importance. I take this opportunity of contradicting that statement most emphatically. Neither when I began nor yet later in my career have I ever played under a management where infinite pains were not given to every detail. I think that far from hampering the acting, a beautiful and congruous background and harmonious costumes, representing accurately the spirit of the time in which the play is supposed to move, ought to help and inspire the actor. ”

“ They have tried beauty, richness, novelty, to win back excitement. They have only just begun to see that the liveliest excitation in the playhouse may come from the art of the actor and the art of the régisseur when they are stripped to the task of providing exaltation. Present the actor as an actor, and the background as an honest, material background, and you are ready for what glories the playwright and the peculiar genius of the theater can provide. The drama is free again for its eternal task—the showing of the soul of life. ”

“ The costumer would then distribute the wardrobe for the play according to his best judgment, and the conceit or fancy of the actor, which often made the costumer's duty a perplexing one, for actors are so full of conceits and fancies that they are a hard lot to please. ”

“ Each company is presided over by a teacher or manager, who drills the actors in their tasks from rough notes, which contain only the songs and the substance of the parts assigned to each performer. In every play, without perhaps a single exception, the following characters are represented,—a king, a queen, a princess, a minister of state, a huntsman, and some kind of monster. [181] The female characters are usually personated by men, it being considered indecorous in a woman to appear as an actress. ”

“ And the actor or actress, the prima donna and the swell tenor, all generally make it their business to attend to their own beautification in this way themselves. Nearly all star actors carry male servants who are known as dressers, and all prominent actresses have maids who accompany them to the theatre and these help to complete the artiste's toilets. Formerly there were barbers and hair-dressers, as well as other specialists, attached to places of amusement, and whose business it was to shave an actor or dress a head of hair before the performance. ”

“ An actor registers grief, or amusement, or astonishment. That is, he assumes an expression which, when recorded by the camera and exhibited, will convey his emotion to the audience. In that one word there is a valuable treatise on [Pg 119] the dramatic art. The inferior actor is content with expressing an emotion. The true actor registers it.
And what a sense of permanence is in that word "register!" Alfred de Musset and many another sentimental poet lamented the ephemeral nature of the actor's fame. The painter, it has been said, the writer and the sculptor, live in their works. ”

“ The reader should be present at the first rehearsal, in order to observe the development of the play. At this rehearsal the actors need not be in costume. Each actor begins by interpreting his part as he feels it should be done. The Director should inspire and encourage his actors to do their best and guard against being too critical at this time, since everyone is feeling his way—becoming familiar with properties, and with this new kind of acting in one plane. ”

“ To the born actor his art is a delightful pastime. All his observations of art and life augment his knowledge of character and his ability to portray emotion.
The less gifted should study perpetually. The world is full of odd volumes in strange and interesting bindings. To the student of make-up the binding is of no less interest than the matter within.
Try to store vivid recollections of the distinctive types; collect caricatures and prints; they will be most suggestive and helpful. ”

“ As soon as we all three were inside the little office, I was introduced to the manager, who turned out to be an actor I had often seen on the boards, but who did not look a bit like himself, though he would have done very well for his own son; he was so much shorter and younger than he ought to have been. The clean-shaven face gives actors such a youthful appearance. It was difficult to believe, at first, that the sedate-looking boys I used to meet at rehearsal, were middle-aged men with families, some of them. ”

“ Another time she talked about her profession as an actress. 'Acting,' she said, 'cannot be otherwise than delightful—but it takes an actor away from himself. When one has been two or three years on the stage nothing is left but the stage and the dressing-room: the company behind the scenes and the audience in front. Nothing is real. Everything that happens is but a scene in a play. ”

“ These qualities must be sought for in performers of roles—obedience, dependableness, mobility, patience, endurance.
Rehearsing. A worthy play which is well cast is an assured success before its first rehearsal.
The entire group should first study the whole play under the director's comment. It is best to have each actor read his own part. The behavior of a minor character in the second act may depend upon a speech in the first. The person playing that rôle must seize upon that hint for his own interpretation. ”

“ The intrusion of the actor’s personality, sometimes enhancing the original conception, and always in some degree modifying the intended balance of the design, adds a new colour to the written page. And then, as day by day the scattered fragments are gradually united and the interpretation grows in emotional strength, there come moments of keen enjoyment of the actor’s art that equal, if they do not surpass, any later impression that may be yielded when the performance is finally presented with the added effects of costume and scenery. ”

“ First then, a valuable actor must sleep in the pit, and wake early to sweep the theatre, and throw fresh sawdust into the boxes; he must shake out the dresses, and wind up and dust the motion-jacks; he must teach the dull ones how to act, rout up the idlers from the straw, and redeem those that happen to get into the watch-house. Then, sir, when the Fair begins, he should sometimes walk about the stage grandly, and show his dress: sometimes he should dance with his fellows ”

“ Unless I set you dreaming, unless I suggest in this or that varying pose or expression, the whole world of women, I'm not a born actress. Training, study can make a good mechanical nightingale of me, a clever imitation of the real thing. That's all. But unless I have the chameleon quality of reflecting my part, the unerring understanding of any type of woman I may be called upon to represent, how can I be an actress? ”

“ Who took their daily Stands where they might best elbow the Actor, and come in for their Share of the Auditor's Attention. In many a labour'd Scene of the warmest Humour and of the most affecting Passion have I seen the best Actors disconcerted, while these buzzing Muscatos have been fluttering round their Eyes and Ears. How was it possible an Actor, so embarrass'd, should keep his Impatience from entering into that different Temper which his personated Character might require him to be Master of? ”

“ Scene rehearsals and dress rehearsals occupy the last week of preparations. Actors and actresses act at rehearsal: they have been taught and required to do so from the first, and the consequence is that a bad actor becomes a reasonably good actor, and a reasonably good actor becomes an admirable actor by sheer dint of the microscopic investigation that his acting receives from the stage-manager and from the author. ”

“ But I should say that any sort of education was of the greatest value to an actor or actress of average ability, and that the fact that the ranks of the stage are recruited to-day to a certain extent from our great schools and universities, from among classes of people who fifty years ago would never have dreamed of entering our calling, is one on which we may congratulate ourselves. ”

“ Next comes the selection of the cast to perform the work. I regret to state that in this era versatility is lacking because of the absence of fine stock companies. We actor-managers are forced to select actors and actresses who are fitted only physically, mentally (and sometimes socially) for the respective rôles. This is shocking when one considers the art seriously. However, such is the case, and we "luxuries" must accept the inevitable.
After the cast has been selected comes another reading of the play—another ordeal for the author. ”

“ Acting is a matter of pretence, and she who can best pretend a splendid passion, a tender love, or a murderous hate, is admittedly the finest actress. Time was when stage wardrobe was a pretence, too. An actress was expected to please the eye, she was expected to be historically correct as to the shape and style of her costume; but no one expected her queenly robes to be of silk velvet, her imperial ermine to be anything rarer than rabbit-skin. ”

“ In those good old days a black-shrouded mute hovered about each actor after dark, holding out a candle at the end of a long stick to illuminate his features, that the audience might see the fine play of expression. ”

“ And it was peculiarly interesting to me, because the argument touched upon problems in the actor’s art that I have always thought to be profoundly significant. How far may the personality of the performer intrude itself in the presentation of the chosen character, and to what extent are assumption and disguise part of the indispensable equipment of the artist? These are questions which every generation is apt to raise in regard to its popular favourites upon the stage. ”

“ Now, the actor on the regular stage is one kind of individual; the actor for the motion picture is quite another. The stage has a limited and well-defined category of beings and shadows, of vessels, so to speak, for the fancy of the poet in words. There is the youthful lover, the sentimental dame of uncertain years, the first hero, the first heroine, the doughty old father, the droll old lady, and so on. ”

“ This is what I am pleased to term talk versus acting. The representative actors in London are much inclined in this direction.
COPY LIFE The student may well ask, "What are we to copy, and whom are we to copy?" Don't copy any one; don't copy any individual actor, or his methods. The methods of one actor—the means by which he arrives—cannot always be successfully employed by another. The methods and personality of one actor are no more becoming or suitable or adapted to another than certain gowns worn by women of fashion simply because these gowns are the fashion. ”