I’ve written a bit about sensory recall, bitten off a morsel, one might say, and left it hanging in the middle, and I will return again and again to that subject. ‘Doublethink’ has also been mentioned, but for the sake of balance I’d like to begin investigating the gravitational force that pushes us outward, while sense memory does the opposite, pulling us inward.
I’m talking about ‘objectives.’
This is a term all actors can agree upon, one would think. When you play a part, you need to know the character’s objective. That’s true, but what does this question really mean?
Let’s work with an example: Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. What does she really want when she arrives in New Orleans to stay with her sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley?
Does she want to join them in their home? She hates the apartment where they live. In the first scene between the sisters, Blanche calls it ‘a horrible place,’ and when she finds it consists of only two rooms – without even a door between them – she is as disgusted as she is distraught.
Does Blanche want Stella to belong to her? In other words, does she want to take Stella away from Stanley? But we see immediately that the sisters have opposite likes and dislikes; they have never gotten along. Their bitter fight over which one is more to blame for the loss of Belle Reve, the plantation where they grew up, reveals the deep rift between them and the irreconcilable differences in how they view the past and issues of responsibility. At first, Blanche is unaware of the extent to which Stanley, with his blue-collar prejudices, rules her sister’s life. She is so much in the dark that noticing Stella’s ragged cuticles, Blanche asks her if she has a maid to repair them. When Blanche finally realizes that Stella is in the hands of an enemy over which charm and breeding have no effect, she calls Stanley, ‘an animal’ with ‘an animal’s habits’ and exhorts Stella to cling to ‘such things as art, as poetry and music’ and ‘tender feelings’. Clearly, Stella has no interest in art, and Stanley has long ago numbed her feelings, tender or otherwise, with a constant barrage of selfish desire.
Is her objective to get married, with Mitch as the one she fixes on? Looking at it realistically, how long could Blanche with all her flair and fine inclinations be able to live with a man as devoid of imagination as Mitch, who works at a steel plant in the precision parts department and lives with his mother?
You could argue that all these possibilities are Blanche’s objectives, and she goes through them one by one. But a character doesn’t change objectives. A character tries to reach their objective through a series of steps.
Why do I say this? Because I believe each of us has an overall objective in his/her life, and each time we think we’ve pinned it down it seems to change. The reason we are interested in acting comes from our attempts to figure out our own objective – and then relate it to whatever character we are working on. It is our relentless striving to understand our own inner force that ultimately leads us to the objective of the character.
Years ago I was assigned Blanche Dubois in an acting class, but the work kept falling apart. It wasn’t until I understood that the character is an alcoholic at the end of her rope, who grasps at one straw after another to save herself, that I could get it moving in the right direction. She is the one who is destroying her own life, while her mistaken objective is trying to get other people to save her in various ways. She wants to be saved –that is her objective. And the way I arrived at that knowledge for this role and many others will be the subject of further blog entries.
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