A Boo From the Crowd (An Essay About Acting)

by Blue_Notebook

There has been lots of quotations and thoughts that have been popularized throughout the past millennia. And one of those has taken quite an enormous effect on me that it made great influence upon my writing as well as in my acting. That is, ‘The world is a stage play where people are the actors. They come and they go just the way the characters enter and exit the platform.’

        From the way I see it, the quote itself isn’t entirely wrong or metaphorical. Every day, there will be a new chapter, a new scene added to the already lengthy comedy (it can have both the old meaning and the new) which never ends. What shrub has been trimmed by the gardener yesterday will not be trimmed again tomorrow and has to wait for months to be done again. Some might say that it is a cycle and not a forever renewing performance. But as far as the cycle goes, the very same elements of the past shall be repeated again without any addition or change in it, and that will be very agonizing to watch decades after decades until you die. One of the most intelligent parts of the human brain’s activity is imagination. It runs freely and refreshes every day to surpass the other or to make better of the other. As the moment passes by, a new idea forms that could be used for the next time around, thus adding a new spice to the future scene which is yet to come. Dialogues, for example, change along with the gestures and the responses to the words ejaculated. Someone doesn’t say the exact same phrase over and over again for years, someone doesn’t do the exact same movement over and over, and mostly, no human is ever encrypted to act as such for it will diminish the essence of the term “human” itself.

        The acting bit, somehow, is more natural when it comes to people (but if you like, you can count your trained dog in) and their daily rummaging about. Most humans find actors as some sort of idol, elevated individuals who are meant to be looked upon to with reverence or of disgust. The silly thing is that these individuals aren’t really that advanced or gifted with acting abilities. Now, I will reveal to you my thought upon the matter which goes as there is no such thing as “acting abilities”. What there is, is the understanding of emotions and of communication (both verbal and non-verbal) by a certain person. With a bit of an experience in acting and in directing a play, I have sort of learned in the hard way that even if I can manoeuvre my facial expressions all too well along with the right mixture and tone of my voice, without being able to feel the right sensation, the right feeling of the character I was playing, all will fall inevitably into trash. So, how did I come to do it right the second time around? The answer is easy, Do Not Act. Because no actor is acting at all. They are being the characters in the story, and the characters once given a physical body to inhabit, are alive and are of this world. Why would you act about being sad when your lover got killed by his own stupidity? If you act about it, the audience will know that it is a sham, a fake. And the trick of all plays and films is to make everyone not believe that it isn’t real. Because once they get that slight cringe in their bones, followed by a sour face, then, hello to the almighty downfall. This can also be related to a normal human being’s life. If someone jokes a real worthless piece and everybody else laughs, no matter how stupid the joke was for you, you are obliged to laugh at some point but towards another funny situation happening inside your head—or just laugh at the emptiness of his/her joke, or don’t laugh at all. Or if someone smiles at you, you smile back. Or if someone calls you a midget, you offer a strike or two to the nose.

        Point is, you do things not because the script itself tells you to. Actually, scripts are just guides and not recipes for everybody to do with that measured exactness. A singularity can offer to trail off of what was written, making the show become more real than ever. Mistakes, too, can most of the time, result in the better deliverance of a performance. Being human is already being an actor. Only that there is this invisible script which can either be written by fate or by an individual (if you want to) that may or may not bring you to the end of your act yet. 

Author’s Note:

Credits to the owner of the picture used.