Classic Mistakes in Acting—& Marriage
by Anne Fielding

From "The Ethics of the Great Art of Acting," presented at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation

I'm going to speak about what the art of acting says about marriage, including mistakes wives make.  The biggest mistake, Aesthetic Realism taught me, is for a woman to give way to her desire to be scornful and superior, to have contempt—for her husband and the world. This takes many everyday forms, all debilitating, all ruinous. And it's amazing that every one of these forms has its likeness to mistakes in acting. This is what I have the pleasure of showing technically tonight.


        But when a woman has contempt, when she uses her husband, as Mr. Siegel showed me in a lesson I was in danger of doing with the man I would marry, Sheldon Kranz, not to like the world, but "just for myself" to serve me, and make me the most important thing in the universe" she becomes bitter with her husband and the world, and then asks herself "What went wrong?"

         Another form of upstaging is for an actress to do superfluous activities during a scene, distracting the audience, making them pay attention to her, not the other actors or the unfolding plot. For example, there is what is called "furniture grabbing," something I did in one of my first acting jobs in summer stock, during a mystery play. The audience was tense, wondering "What's going to happen next? Who's the murderer?" [AF demonstrating].  And there I was, clutching the back of the sofa, wiping the table with quiet intensity—[BC rise and start emoting]—while the actor playing my husband was speaking some of his most important lines. The director was tearing his hair out, furious—let alone my fellow actor—this was utterly unprofessional, and I was lucky I wasn't fired!

         This has its humor, but it's ugly and anti-art; it arises from unkind competition with a husband and the world.  Women try to upstage their husbands in all kinds of ways; as a means of showing that she's the center of the universe, superior to everyone and everything—and it makes her mean.

         I'll give a few examples, using my own experiences as a wife: Upstaging occurs when your husband calls to tell you something that happened he's excited by, and you're hurt—why didn't he ask you about your day and all the unpleasant things you had to deal with?  And if, at a party, he's having a good time talking with people, you either wangle the conversation around to something you simply must express—as we say in the theatre "pad your part"—or sulk alone in a corner, getting everyone to worry about you. And at home, when he's concentrated on work he is doing, you bustle around, vacuuming loudly, doing the dishes noisily, or as I'm sorry to say I did, try to engage him in discussion about the urgent matter of what you should prepare for dinner, or his opinion of the skirt you just bought.

          "Can your desire to control Sheldon be inordinate?"  Mr. Siegel once asked me. Yes, it was.  And if a husband has a concern, a wife pleasantly but dutifully asks him a few questions—and then moves on to the more important character in this play: herself.

         For example, in a consultation, Emily Corrigan of Fairfield, Connecticut told us that her husband, Ryan, was so worried about losing his job, his stomach was in knots and he was morose and ill-natured. But as she said this, she sounded peevish, offended, as if she were the hurt person. 

        We asked her: "Are you really interested in knowing what your husband feels, what he's worried about, how you can honestly encourage him; or do you take it as an insult that you have to think about him at all?"  After all wasn't she the star of this show? 

          Mrs. Corrigan was thoughtful. She told us that as a young woman, "I felt I should just get praise and devotion from a man I was dating, and that I needed to be the center of attention at all times.  If he talked to someone else or had anything to do with other people, I became angry and aloof."

           In a lesson, Mr. Siegel once asked me at a time I was displeased because my husband was giving his thought to something important "What is your biggest desire, to have Sheldon honor you or be sincere with himself?" 

          This is also a question that can be asked of an actress—Do I want my fellow performers to make me shine, or be as good as they can be?          

3. How Well Do We Listen; or, Affecting and Being Affected        

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson, Mr. Siegel said to me: "Anything, including listening, can have the word art before it.  There's an art of skipping rope, and an art of listening."  I want to say that Mr. Siegel himself had that art consummately.   

         Onstage there are various technical showings of faulty listening. There is what is called "Stepping on another's lines," which means you interrupt a person before he's finished his sentence—and it's seen as reprehensible and unprofessional. Wives are notorious for this—and what it comes from in both instances is contempt, the false importance we get from diminishing others.    


           Here is an example. In Act I of Sheridan's The School for Scandal—a husband, Sir Peter Teazle and Lady Teazle are quarreling about the way she spends money; a frequent subject of marital fights.  The scene begins, "Enter Sir Peter and Lady Teazle"—and first, we'll read it straight:

Now, here is what would happen if, because I haven't really been listening to him, I step on Sir Peter's lines: [Example of stepping on lines, interrupting—BC and AF do scene.]

          Another mishap as to listening is coming in late on cue, or forgetting your lines altogether.  How often has a wife "dropped her cue," as her husband tries to tell her something, or asks a question. She'll take a long pause, be distracted, her mind on something else?  This is what it would sound like:  [Example of coming in late on cue, long pauses. BC begins on "Very Well, Ma'am...."]

          As an example of how important listening is in the theatre, I quote from an article of 1916 by the critic Arthur Johnson, titled "Sarah Bernhardt Here Again," on the occasion of the great actress's second visit to the U.S. He writes:

As the audience was dispersing, an actor exclaimed,... "Heaven's, what a wonderful feeder!" "Feeding," as it is technically called, is another name for the difficult art of listening, or paying the closest sort of attention to the actors with whom the scene is played....Bernhardt is never above listening--with rapt attention--to whatever is said to her by the actors on the stage.  And it is this quality, more than anything else, that has made her a permanent favorite with American audiences.

Here is the "Divine Sarah"—[on left, Sarah Bernhardt in Racine's Phedre]—the actress who has been seen as so dazzling—[on right, Bernhardt as the Queen in Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas]—and this critic says what makes her great, is how well she put together affecting and being affected; how well she listened to her fellow actors, which made the audience listen keenly, too. Every wife can learn from this.

         Hamlet, Mr. Siegel explained in The Right Of—is asking for aesthetics.  And in a class, he looked at these lines, and said: "When you mouth something, there is more energy than is necessary—and also you are louder than you have to be. And a [certain kind] of gesture [sawing the air with your hand] is also excessive."  How many wives, in kitchens and bedrooms, use their energy this way—as a weapon, to defeat a husband, make him cower, subdue him?  Hamlet tells the Players not to "tear a passion to tatters....Pray you avoid it."

       Overacting in the theatre has always been seen as reprehensible; made fun of—and the reason is audiences feel, rightly, it's insincere, fake stuff. "The test of sincerity,"  Mr. Siegel explained, "is whether there is a right involvement with the depths of yourself, the self as individual and the world as such, let alone things." When an actress over-emphasizes, "rants and raves," her purpose is to have a big effect, to show how passionate she is—usually to cover the fact that she has so little real feeling—there is not that "right involvement with the depths of herself and the world as such."

         And when a wife says, melodramatically: "What do you want from me!" or, "I asked you to bring lemons, not limes, you idiot!" "You're killing me!"—she is insincere and ungraceful  Her purpose is unaesthetic and mean; she doesn't give a damn about her effect on her husband; in fact, with all her seeming agony, she's contemptuously calm inside, and is having a terrific triumph wiping the floor with him, all to prove the world is against her. Then, she feels awful.

         I learned about this danger in a lesson early in my marriage. When Sheldon told of my getting intense about a domestic situation, and later berating myself, Mr. Siegel explained: "You use yourself dramatically. Your mistake is to use intensity for despair. At a certain point it is intelligent to mute the drama and let it speak for itself. You don't know how to be prosaic." This was the very problem I had as an actress! A frequent criticism I heard was that my acting was too intense, overblown, but not deep enough—and I had a tendency to turn each scene—be it a comedy or straight drama—into very high tragedy.

I love him for these words, and see them as useful to every wife. They also point to another constant danger in marriage and acting.

And she explains:

         When I read these sentences, I thought about what called in the theatre "the feeling of the first time." which Stanislavsky, the great Russian director and theoretician went for very much.  It has to do with freshness, seeing new meaning, wonder in lines you may have said many times, and saying them with such sincerity and naturalness that they seem to come from you, at that very moment. When this occurs on the stage, it's very exciting. 

          A wife needs to see a husband with that true wonder; not succumb to the contempt that says: "I know my husband like a book." She needs to see the man she's close to the way Miranda does in Shakespeare's The Tempest, when she says, looking at persons for the first time:
  

Said Mr. Siegel in his great lecture on the play: "[Miranda] has her sense of wonder, she has the artist's unstained eye, and unpolluted perception, and unblemished heart."  This is good will; it is what every wife and every performer needs—and Aesthetic Realism can teach us to have that beautiful purpose.