BLOG # 7 ACTING UP A STORM: LINKING (2)

So, as I was saying, when I left you with a cliffhanger from my last blog entry:

The storm was seriously frightening me, so I was using relaxation techniques from my acting background to occupy my mind with something more useful than fear – working on an acting problem.  As I focused it on my body – sometimes I call it ‘putting my mind into my body’ – my intuition took over and Shakespeare popped into my mind. Then I started ‘linking’ my fear to Shakespeare. A couple of plays came up that related to storms – The Tempest and King Lear, but they didn’t ‘feel’ right, so I kept on ‘breathing my mind down into my body’ until Macbeth arrived, and I felt the ‘linking’ snap into place.

I was interested by the fact that there wasn’t anything about a storm in the particular verses that initially occurred to me. Here is Lady Macbeth in the letter scene:

             Come, you spirits

           That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here   

           And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full 

           Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, 

           Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,

           That no compunctious visiting’s of nature  

           Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between 

           Th’effect and it! Come to my women’s breasts,

           And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers,

           Wherever in your sightless substances

           You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick Night, 

           And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

           That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

           Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, 

           To cry ‘Hold, hold!’

                       

What has this specifically to do with a storm, I wondered.  Of course, the play begins with the direction, Thunder and Lightening: Enter Three Witches, but Lady M., at this point is in her front yard, waiting for her husband to come home, so she can rev him up for the murder of Duncan. Then Macbeth can take over the throne and she’ll attain the one thing in the world she wants – to be a Queen.  It’s like reality TV.

A slight digression – but I need it to make my point. Many years ago, fresh out of RADA, right at the beginning of my career, I played Lady M. at The Roundabout Theatre - when it was in its first incarnation, in the basement of a supermarket on 23rd Street. I started out as Lady MacDuff, but the producer’s wife, who was playing Lady Macbeth got pregnant and wasn’t feeling well so I took over the role for the rest of the run. God, how I struggled with it, falling into every pitfall of bad acting in the book! I thought that because Lady M. pushes her husband into murdering Duncan that she’s a cold-blooded murderess – in other words, a psychopath. 

            

Later, I tackled the role again under the direction of the brilliant avant-garde director, Andre Gregory. We did a lot of work on it, using the sound and movement techniques of Jerzy Grotowski, in which Andre had steeped himself for so many years and passed along to me, through workshops and the rehearsals for Macbeth.  Although, in the end, Andre became steeped in something else - preparation for My Dinner with Andre with Wally Shawn (the film was eventually directed by Louis Malle) and abandoned Macbeth - I received from him invaluable information about acting.

Macbeth has a reputation as an unlucky play – skewered fabulously in the Canadian mini-series, Slings and Arrows, starring the incomparable Geoffrey Tennant.  (If you haven’t seen it - run, don’t walk to your nearest computer to stream it on Netflix.)   I was impressed by all the tales I had heard about Macbeth, and worked diligently to ‘skew’ my body and voice ‘to the sticking place’ where I would come up with the necessary amount of ‘evil’ to play the part.

I did have a dream, however, that was helpful.  It was a simple, very short dream.  I was walking in a forest and had come to a crossroads.  A male creature met me, covered in fur, with hooves and a tail. I forced myself not to look at him, and somehow had the strength to wake up. It was the God, Pan, and I knew, intuitively, from that dream – and the placing of it in the middle of those rehearsals for Macbeth – that fear lay, like a coiled snake, beneath all of Lady M.’s bravado and ambition.   

The night of the storm, as I quaked in my bed, the fear I felt at the raging winds transferred to Lady M.’s fear, well-placed for sure, that if she were invaded by evil, she would never get out alive. The problem of the speech is that she seems to be asking for evil forces to invade her – and indeed, on a conscious level, she is.  But beneath the surface, she is terrified.

Working with Andre, using the Grotowski methods of putting my body and voice into a particular state, I was able to find half of Lady M., not the half that people would see on the surface. That part would be taken care of by the objective, ‘I want to be Queen,’ and the actions that would be played to achieve that end - even though ‘getting what she wants’ means Lady M.’s destruction. As things begin to fall apart for Macbeth, who actually commits all the crimes, she begins to feel actual guilt and eventually kills herself. This proves that Lady M. isn’t a cold-blooded psychopath, but rather one of the victims of her own blind ambition.

Therefore, in the letter speech, quoted above, there must be a hint of her fear – and the only way to come by that honestly is to link it to a situation in which one feels that particular kind of unbeatable force. For me, being in the middle of a hurricane induces a lot of fear. The wind and the rain are merciless, nothing can stop them. By putting myself inside a hurricane, I can find the underlying layer of Lady M – and then get to work on the ‘actions’ I need to overcome the fear and move toward my overall objective.