Theatre turns human behavior into an art. But people are very perceptive of human behavior. We have highly developed instincts for interpreting why people do the things they do. For actors to produce realistic human behavior onstage is very complicated.
Theatre artists struggled with that problem for about 2,400 years. They found many ways to make human behavior interesting, but all of them fell short of consistent realism.
In the 1890s Constantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and director, finally solved that problem. His discoveries elevated the art of theatre to a new level. Consistent realism lets actors play characters the audience can empathize with. That makes theatre emotionally powerful on a level no other style can match. Stanislavski was the founder of modern theatre.
ACT I
Scene 1
[104 bpm]
Let’s go back to religion and follow another development.
The art of theatre in Europe began with religion. Religions are built on stories.
An especially powerful way to tell stories is to have people act them out. You can add a lot of elements to the story that way to make it feel more real. There’s costumes, makeup, props, scenery, lighting, sound effects, singing, dancing, and music.
All of those are such simple ideas that people all over the world could’ve thought of using them to help make important stories more interesting, whether we have records of people doing that or not.
Eventually people thought of the idea of acting out stories without them being part of religious rituals. The earliest written records of people doing that in Europe are from Greece around 500 BC. But again, that’s such a simple idea that people don’t need to know how to write to be able to think of it, which means people in other parts of the world probably thought of it also.
Scene 2
When you use costumes, make up, props, and so on to help tell a story, you have two basic choices. You can use them representationally or realistically.
Using them representationally means that having the thing in the story makes the story more interesting, even though it doesn’t look like the real thing.
If you lived in Africa 40,000 years ago, and you wanted to tell a story about two men using their spears to fight a lion next to a tree, how would you do it?
Your hunter friends would already own real spears, so you wouldn’t need to do anything to make their spears look realistic. But what would you make the tree out of? What would you make the lion out of?
You could tell the story next to a real tree. Or you could have someone stand there and hold tree branches.
The lion could be a person baring their teeth, roaring, and holding their fingers out like claws. If they could wear a real lion hide that would be even better.
ACT II
Scene 1
Making fake things look like real things takes effort. It takes talent, skill, time, and resources. The more realistic you want something to look, the more of those things you need.
The theatre industry has come a long way in 2,500 years. Over the years, decades, and centuries artists have invested in new skills, tools, and materials.
The film industry today is the child of the theatre industry. If people are willing to invest enough, artists can make just about anything look realistic.
What about the acting? Should it be representational or realistic?
It turns out that the artistic medium that the rest of the theatre industry is built around was the greatest artistic challenge of them all. People are extremely perceptive of whether or not other people’s behavior looks realistic, because that’s how we recognize things like what people want, what they’re trying to do, whether or not they’re lying to us, and how dependable they are.
Nobody realized it until fairly recently, but people communicating, and people interpreting other people’s behavior, were major parts of the evolution of our intelligence for the past 7,000,000 years. Making fake human behavior look like real human behavior now is hard!
Scene 2
For the first 24 of the 25 centuries of the theatre industry, actors and directors experimented with different ways of using actors’ performances to help tell stories. They found many ways to make actors interesting to watch.
They could make actors very attractive. But that’s not acting. That’s modeling.
They could make everything the actors say sound important. But that’s not acting either. That’s public speaking.
They could make everything the actors do funny. But that’s not acting. That’s clowning.
They could exaggerate all the characters’ emotions. That’s acting, but it’s only one step up from any of these others. That’s melodrama.
Artists tried other styles that were more complicated. They were all different ways of trying to figure out how the character feels, and of trying to feel those feelings.
Some were abstract. How would it feel to be a tree? Or a flower? Or a cloud? If your character was a song, what song would they be?
Some were more personal. What would happen if your character found a love letter someone left her, that she thought was written by the guy she was trying to hook up with, and it was the most beautifully written letter she’d ever gotten, but when she got to the signature at the bottom she found it was written by the most vile, disgusting guy she’d ever met? How would that make you feel? What’s happened in your life that’s made you feel that way?
Things like these produced some good results, but they all fell short of consistent realism.
ACT III
Scene 1
In the 1880s a young Russian actor and director, named Constantin Stanislavski, noticed this problem and tried to figure out how to solve it. One of his first discoveries was his Principle of Opposites:
When playing a good man, look for the bad in him. When playing a bad man, look for the good in him. When playing an old man look at how he’s young. When playing a young man look at how he’s old.
That seems at first like just a new way of making acting interesting, by throwing in some unexpected things. But instead, this was the first step on a path that Stanislavski spent the next 50 years following.
He was inspired by Charles Darwin’s discovery of evolution and his observations about people in his last two books. In his final book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin got actors to help him describe emotions. That book includes a lot of photos of actors portraying emotions.
Scene 2
We could paraphrase the Principle of Opposites as, “Acting is more interesting if you don’t do what your audience expects.”
Now remember what I said about how theatre began with religious stories. That means it started by making stories that many people already knew, more interesting.
Actors acted out the parts in the story to help tell the story. But most people already knew what the story was about. So the actors, directors, and audience already had expectations about the kinds of people the characters were going to be.
Making the characters do what the audience expects them to do in a story they already know the ending to helps to tell the story, but it turns the characters into stereotypes.
If you get onstage and play an old person that way, playing an old person means doing everything you can to make the audience think of an old person, because you need them to think of an old person to tell your story. And it’s the same thing for playing a good person, a bad person, a young person, or any other way you could describe a character.
That makes the acting unrealistic because in real life, none of us know the stories of our lives ahead of time. So we don’t know what kind of a person we need to be to help tell the story we’re in.
Think about it. If you’re a teenager and you’re in the bathroom by yourself, brushing your teeth before school in the morning, you aren’t trying to convince anyone that you’re a teenager to get them to understand something interesting that’s going to happen to you in three hours from now.
In real life we don’t spend every moment helping to tell the stories of our lives to someone else. We live the stories of our lives from the inside.
Stanislavski’s life’s work revolutionized the theatre industry worldwide. Because he discovered a framework that actors could use to see the stories of their plays from their characters’ points of view. That enabled actors to produce realistic acting consistently for the first time in history.
Scene 3
Stanislavski’s autobiography is called My Life in Art.
Consistent realism elevated the art of theatre to a new level. When actors play their characters realistically, it lets their audiences empathize with the characters. That engaged primal parts of the audience members’ brains that theatre hadn’t engaged before.
Empathizing with the characters let the audience feel the story along with the characters. That made the art of theatre emotionally powerful in ways it had never been before.
What theatre tells us about how empathy makes us see each other as people like ourselves is the next chapter in our story of Being Human on Planet Earth.