Episode 2: Substitution + Episodic Memory

[MUSIC PLAYING] Knowing what body this character has really drops me. Actions that the source that has become like a Bible to create a visualization that really set me free. I love actioning. Very specific action verb. Understanding their backstory is vital in order to be able to read. This is the actor's mind. What are we called? Well, to the actor's mind. Well, like that. Do you want to say this to me? Yeah. Do it, do it, do it. Did you like what I did? It's like you asked. Welcome to episode two of the actor's mind podcast, a podcast where we discuss acting tools from both a practical acting perspective and a psychological science perspective. My name is Kateri McGray. I'm an associate professor of psychology at the University of Denver. And my name is Ann Penner. I'm an associate professor of theater. I teach acting, directing, movement classes. And I'm an actor, director, producer. And today, we're going to be talking about substitution. That's our tool from the acting side of things. We're mostly going to be using the word substitution. But you'll also hear this phrase as if, maybe occasionally, magic if, and then also maybe transference a little bit. And Kateri's side of things is-- From a psychological perspective, most people, I think, would consider the meat of substitution to be what most psychologists call episodic memory. So we'll be talking about how that works in the brain and all of the different properties of it and how it makes substitution work. Great. So our main goal is to define substitution. And we've turned it into a three-step process, which hopefully will help some of you understand it. And a lesser but still important objective or goal for today is to, I guess, dispel the myth to some extent of method acting. Do you want to start with this, Kateri? Yeah. I think from a relatively lay perspective, I guess, me having the more lay perspective between the two of us. A lot of times when people think about acting, they think about actors doing this deep dive into a character. And that there's this danger of it being so deep that there is no more separation between actor and character, which is really distressing to think about. But also, I think there's this stereotype of acting training being basically training you to page back through your own emotional memories in your lifetime and just be really good at bringing them to the surface and dwelling in them and living them and just rehashing your own most emotional pieces of your own life. And there might be some kernels of truth to that, but I think that just that in and of itself would actually be pretty poor acting. And I too, even though I know a fair amount about theater, don't know a ton about method acting. It's taken from some Stanislavsky training. And Lee Strasburg was the 20th century teacher who did, who's best known for method acting, though there are others, or teaching method acting. And the main objective of it is great, which is for an actor to emotionally connect to character. And I'm sure he taught it beautifully. The bad, the two aspects in Kateri's already spoken to them is this idea of feeling that you need to rehash difficult hurtful memories from your life, which ultimately we'll get to the point where when we teach substitution, you'll realize we will discourage you from entering into memories that are too close to you in that way. And then the second thing is we know a lot of famous actors, who spend, who are in character 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the filming of a movie in pre-production, texting, co-actors in character. And to me, the really, the question is, yes, spending time in character is useful, but if you're doing it all the time, how helpful is that to the people around you and even to you? Yeah. And so I think what we want to do is talk about this sort of like a really kind of beautiful balance between sort of diving into some of your own memories and your own past in the service of what the character needs and in the service of, there's this wonderful word, particularizing, right, the experience of the character, the situation of the character. But then coming back out of it, almost equally as fluidly and using that experience for the given circumstances of the play. I love that. Great. So let's start by defining a substitution. And the theater acting books that I'm going to be using a lot is Uda Hagen's respect for acting to a much lesser extent her second book, Uda Hagen's Challenge for the Actor. And then also the ever-useful practical handbook for the actor. So a substitution is a way of personalizing and particularizing any single moment on stage in character. One really good example. And we're actually going to pick up where we left off from episode one, where we talked about objective and appraisal. The practical handbook for the actor talks about as if, which is a way of personalizing and objective. So once you've figured out the objective, the thing you are playing, the thing you're trying to achieve, what you want to do the next step in the analysis is to say it's as if and then find something rooted in your personal life that can attach you, can hook you in. And we could say emotionally, to some extent, but really can hook you in in multiple ways to that objective. So for example, if you're playing a fellow, right? And your objective is in some ways to kill your beloved wife, Desdemona. You think, well, how am I going to empathize with that? How am I in any way going to connect with that? You can, which is you have to maybe reconsider that objective and find a way to almost pan out to make it, I don't want to say more general, but to rephrase it in a way that you can empathize with. So for example, it is to write wrong, right? You've been wronged, you've been betrayed, you think by Desdemona, and it's you avenging, right? This wrong that has happened to you. And in that way, all of us can begin to say, oh yeah, there is a moment where I felt betrayed, right? And I think that maybe actors who do this really naturally, I suspect they probably have a really advanced understanding of one of the things we were talking about last week, which is the relationship between appraisal and emotion, right? So that there are these particular appraisal features that lead to particular emotions. So having had your goal impeded by someone other than you, most often leads to anger, for example, any experience of loss sometimes leads to sadness. So not all actors might frame it that way. So you did a really good job of framing this sort of overall appraisal of what needed to be done. And I think some actors might take a shortcut through the emotion and they might say, I need to find a time when I felt angry. And so long as they have a really sophisticated understanding that these are the types of situations that lead to anger, I think that's okay to use the emotion as the shortcut as long as you're searching through your own, what's the word I'm looking for? Your own mental rolodex for times in which someone else has gotten in your way of achieving one of your goals. Then it's okay if you search for anger. - Great, I'm gonna sound like a broken record when I say this, but it is fine to use emotion as a tool if it will backtrack you or whether you're moving backwards or moving forward to something actable to something do a good action or a want. So we have that, that's not the only example of a substitution. Udah Hagen in her substitution chapter would say, substitutions are everywhere, right? So if I am on stage, I'm gonna find substitutions for my relationships to the other characters, for my character myself. So if I'm playing someone who initially during, as I'm getting to know my character, there's aspects of the character that intuitively don't make sense to me 'cause there will be some aspects that intuitively do and that's where you don't have to do the work. You have to do the work where that character seems more ambitious than me or lazier than me or louder than me or violent than me. Then you need to find characteristics within yourself or characteristics in people you know which become the substitutions and allow you then to empathize and connect and relate to. So substitutions for character, for relationships, substitutions for the environment. So say I'm totally making this up, you're on a ship or you're having a shipwreck, right? I've never opened a scene of a tempest. Open a scene of the tempest, right? I personally have never, thankfully, been on a ship that is experiencing a shipwreck, right? So I would have to find I'm trying to now think of an example of an environment where maybe it was turbulence, like you're on a plane, we all have felt turbulence on a plane to greater or lesser extent or you've been in some kind of scary car situation. That might be a nice substitution which would hook you into the feeling of that. Have you ever been like up on an unsteady platform somewhere, like scaffolding somewhere, like in a bucket? (laughing) There's like that feeling of like, I need to get off of this. I don't know how it's gonna end. I'm sure it might, I'll be all right, but I'm not sure. Yes, 100%. And so substitutions also get into the props that you're using. And finding, substitute objects, tangible objects in your real life that would work to attach yourself, to create a relationship to all of these trace elements in the scene. So that's a quick definition of substitution. Yeah. Three-step process is number one, we've already discussed, which is you're finding, you're locating, and let's use objective for now. You're locating a substitution for the objective. The one example Gave was a fellow at this point, or same play, Desdemona is feeling, she maybe wants to, right before she's killed, she wants to quiet the dread, this is my objective for her. She wants to quiet the dread she feels, that she maybe doesn't quite know the answer to. So hopefully no one playing Desdemona has ever felt been in the literal situation in which you believe your husband's about to hurt you or kill you, right? And if they had, odds are, that would be a horrible thing to actually bring up for the service of whatever show you're doing, because that's likely a pretty traumatic experience. I mean, maybe after years and years and years if you're okay with it, but it's almost like for the really extreme, right? Like, if you're doing Medea and you've actually been there, may not a good thing to do. Right, exactly, exactly. So maybe you should be in jail. You find a non literal substitution that will then allow you to transfer those feelings. That's where the word transference comes up, I believe. That's more a psychological word than a theater world word. So the example that Uda Hagen uses, say, you're playing Desdemona, you've never been in that situation, but maybe you dread going to the dentist, right? Maybe you dread going to the doctor. Maybe you dread faculty meetings. I don't, but maybe you dread. Right, so there's that feeling of, oh God, this horrible thing is about to happen. And that feeling you have and the ideas that maybe pop up in that experience can guide you to some extent to Desdemona's feeling, right, or her objective. Step one, step two is diving really deep into that substitution. And what do we mean by that? Do you want to talk about that? So step two, again, is sort of really trying to relive or reinvigorate, like, make more vivid again. I don't know what a better word is for that experience that you've had. And a lot of that, I think, is what is referred to as episodic memory. So there are a lot of different types of memory that psychologists talk about. One of the sort of big divisions is between semantic memory and episodic memory. So semantic memory is the kind of memory you have for facts and the meanings of words and things that aren't necessarily situated in a time or place. But the fact that you know what a picnic table is, right? You probably have a pretty generic idea of a picnic table somewhere in a park, and you know what that object is. And there's some variation in it. But you probably don't remember learning what a picnic table is. And maybe you have some specific episodic memories around a picnic table. But that doesn't necessarily-- that's not required for your knowledge of what those two words mean together. Episodic memories are really specific memories. They can be really specific. And they are defined as being situated in a time and a place. And I was really excited when I was reading the substitution chapter, because when she talks about particularizing a moment, she actually talks about situating them in time and place, which is exactly what an episodic memory is. And one huge subcategory of episodic memory is autobiographical memory. And so when you said we need to personalize and to particularize, those are the two elements that has to have happened to you. And it has to be situated in a time and place. And episodic memory is kind of fascinating from a neuroscience perspective, because it's actually one of the only psychological processes that is actually quite specifically bound to a very particular part of the brain. It is very specifically localized in the hippocampus, or we actually have two, one on either side of our heads of the hippocampi. And individuals who don't have functioning hippocampi cannot lay down new episodic memories. They cannot encode new episodic memories. So this was discovered with a neurological patient several decades ago who had a pretty severe surgery to the medial temporal lobe, which is where the hippocampi live. And he could no longer form new autobiographical memories. He retained his old ones, which I'll talk about why that happens in just a second. But he couldn't even to the point where doctors came in every day. And he would reach out his hand and introduce himself to the doctors every single day. He didn't recognize their face, didn't recognize where he was. They had to remind him where he was. Really sad things like he thought his parents were still alive for many, many years, even after they had passed away. Because he didn't have-- he couldn't update that memory that they were no longer living. So yeah, so the hippocampis, basically, is responsible for laying down those episodic memories. And there's an awesome process called consolidation, which is basically how our brain filters through. And as I was going to say decides, your brain doesn't really decide, although I guess at some level it does. But decides what of our experiences actually get stored as an episodic memory. So very few people have perfect memory of everything that's ever happened to them. Those people are really fascinating. Do they exist? They do exist. And they're actually quite tortured. They have so much memory that they don't know what to do with. And a lot of them develop something very similar to OCD, where they're sorting through their memories all the time and identifying common features in them. But most people, thankfully, are not burdened by remembering everything that happens to them. And so through this process of memory consolidation, which occurs during slow-wave sleep, basically your hippocampus takes all of the different features, or these trace elements of these episodes. So where you were, what was happening, who was there, the colors that were there, the smells, the sights, the sounds, and it binds them all together. It basically says these things go together. They were all part of this one episode. And during consolidation, the hippocampus sends out these coordinated neural messages to say, these all go together, these all go together. And after they've been consolidated, they actually no longer require the hippocampus in order to activate them. But any one of these trace elements can activate all the rest of them. So they're all of these hooks or traces or access points into the memory, where if there's a really particular color of pink balloon that was at a birthday party that you were at when you were eight, seeing that color again might make you remember the music that was playing or the hairstyle that was trendy, that a bunch of people were wearing at that party or the smell of the grass in the backyard or whatever, what's going on. And when you describe this to me, you have this picture of tying up a bag full of marbles or things, tangible balls, which are all the different aspects. And then what is happening in the brain again to tie it all up? It's really complicated, but again, the hippocampus coordinates for a short term. So if you think about a bag in a net, let's look at a net bag full of marbles, yeah. The hippocampus holds it together and basically sends out pulses throughout the whole bag that says, hey, marbles, you can all stick together even after I go. And after the memory's been consolidated, the net falls away and the marbles are still clustered. It's a good analogy for it. That's not exactly how it works in the brain, like those things don't move closer together, but they become connected structurally. So again, so that if you tap into any one marble, the rest of them light up metaphorically, definitely not literally, brains don't light up. Side, pet peeve, move on. Anybody talking about brains lighting up? Can I connect this to an acting exercise I do in my acting one class, so I teach an introductory acting class. I love it. And one of my favorite exercises is called the River Story, which I learned from my teacher, Kristen Linklater, in grad school. And I ask the students, there's first a visualization exercise to prepare, and then they sort of perform what they've prepared. They visualize events, really emotionally charged significant events in their life. And I ask them to locate four of them. And each time that we do this, I ask them, with their breath, they're just lying on the ground as they're remembering them. But with their breath, they are remembering things you just mentioned, which is all the trace details, trace elements, the particulars. They are particularizing the memory, so they are remembering who is there with them. Environment, where they were. And then I go through all the senses. What are you hearing? What words? What dialogue is there a monologue going on? Are people singing? Are you hearing ambient sounds like birds or people cheering or the waves? What you are seeing, of course. And seeing as colors and textures and objects and depth and all of that. And then what you might touch or physically feel. And then what you are tasting or smelling. And then also the mood, the mood or the color of this event. So that's-- and I'm sure we could add even more details. Totally. And then they find a way then, in very short, up to a minute long, minute is a maximum. They are presenting each of these four, maybe using a song, maybe using a narrative monologue, maybe using dialogue, maybe just using six words. So that's it in a nutshell. Now, the objective of this River Story, there are a bunch of them. The one I usually focus on is I'm getting you to bring you on stage as much as possible. And that's what the start of the substitution chapter is about, which is it's not about losing-- she goes, it's not about losing yourself in the character. It's about finding yourself and finding this balance of your memories plus character. But the other thing that I want to actually drive home in my classes more is this idea of transferring this then to a character's life and being extremely particular about every single aspect of that life. And not just including the life on stage, but the pre-beak, the backstory, the history of this character. Yeah. And I think it's really telling that you do that exercise, or really why, as I should say, that you do that exercise where you're having them recall an emotional memory because, like I said before, the consolidation process is in some ways a filter. It's a filter of what we experience in terms of what gets stored in long-term memory. And one of the things that increases the likelihood that something makes it through that filter is emotion. So when things are highly emotionally arousing, literally during consolidation, I talked about the amygdala last episode, I think very briefly. The amygdala sits right on top of, and just in front of the hippocampus, and it literally like squirts neurotransmitters onto the hippocampus that goes, remember, these things, right? These things are important. These things were highly emotional, highly arousing, highly important. And so that's one of the most reliable ways to increase consolidation is if something is emotionally meaningful. So I feel like we've talked maybe thoroughly enough about number two, the deep dive, but I do want to speak about the danger inherent in this, which is, we are discouraging you from choosing a memory or choosing an aspect of your life to substitute for an objective for a character, for relationship, et cetera. That is simply too difficult for you, too traumatic, perhaps. I have a personal example, actually. I want to speak to-- Are you sure? Yeah, briefly. Is I was doing some movement training with a fabulous teacher named Charlie Oates a couple months ago. It was with a big group. And he was having us create a very devising each of our own sort of solo performance about a thing that happened to us. A story we had from our life that involved three characters. And so I chose something that involved my father and me. And my father passed away. And I was trying to-- he passed away a little over a year ago. I was trying to embody my father with his neurological disease. And I began to do-- and I knew this was perhaps dangerous, so that it wouldn't work. I was happy to begin to try it. And I tried to do the movement exercise that Charlie had asked us to do for each of these, which is, in some ways, to pan through, to scan through your body. And my body stopped. And didn't stop, like, I froze. But I simply, my brain, my imagination, my body refused to go there. And I thought, OK, we're moving out. This is not the story I'm not going to tell. I'm going to find something else. I didn't know that until I tried it. And I feel fine talking about it here. But it was, I could not go there. Yeah. And not everyone will feel that breaks. Like, for some people, it'll actually open the floodgates. And I'm sure we've all been in acting classes, or perhaps even seen people perform who've gone too far. And then they're just-- it's just a subfess about. And you can almost tell it's not quite appropriate to the character and the scene and all of that. And it's funny, so my husband is an actor and a director. And he and I actually used to be critics around town. We had our own website. And so one of the things he used to say quite frequently-- not quite frequently, but one of his favorite shorthands when we had seen something that sometimes something was funny for the wrong reasons. So a lot of times, he was referring to a cheap joke. So a really easy way to be funny for the wrong reasons is when you just throw in an anachronism to a show, just to pander to an audience. So you're doing your show in Littleton, and then you make some comment about the street you're on in Littleton, and it doesn't have any-- some shows that works really well and is funny, but it's just random. And so it takes you out of the play and then you laugh, and then it brings you back into the play. So I'd be like, that's the emotional version of substitution for the wrong reasons, I guess, or going too far. And I think sometimes you can start for the right reasons. You can be like, I really think this character needs to feel despair. And so I need to open up this time when I felt helpless and despairing. But maybe it opens up another can of insecurity, perhaps. I'm actually reminded, when I was in college, I had to do one of these exercises, really similar exercise, where I had to recreate something that happened to me in my own life. And it was supposed to be highly emotional. And I had a very blessed privileged childhood. I do not have a lot of highly emotional things that hadn't been so hot self-indulgent as this. My memory, my highly emotional memory was not getting cast in the part I wanted too. Sure, sure. But that's real. And I am not kidding you. I went to go ask the director like, why you didn't cast me? And I slapped on the ground crying into him. You did? Oh, I'll call her if I was so upset. And I thought my life would be over that I didn't get this part, and it was my only chance. And so I recreated this in my acting class in college. But that was about so many other things. Yeah. And so I don't know how useful that would have been in any real scene. And the exercise wasn't to put it in a scene, but it was so-- And part of it was the emotion itself was so self-indulgent. It wasn't about my-- I didn't have a tortured relationship with the director. I didn't have a history of being shunned for other things. It just was like, I wanted this thing, and I didn't get it. And I was like, why am I not good enough? Yeah, and I think when you're trying to find as ifs, which are substitutions for objectives, as much as possible, you want them to be in relationship with someone else. Just like objectives are best if they're going either personally. Exactly. To do it, that's such a great rule of thumb. Yeah, and that's good. Two things. That made me think of two things. Sometimes I see performances where I'm just mixed about the performance. I feel like the actor is doing so much right, or we might say, emotionally, yeah, it feels mostly right. And yet, something is wrong. Like, there's something about the circumstance. Circumstance of what this character is using, or this actor is using, that just feels slightly off. And I think that it might be in certain cases where the substitution, the as if that maybe they're using for that particular situation, is just slightly off. The other thing I want to say is these memories that we're talking about can be fictionalized. And this comes off a little bit maybe from episodic memory, which is, practical handbook for the actor in their chapter two of analyzing a scene have the most seemingly ridiculous as if situations. And I used to make fun of them. And I realized they're actually quite valuable. So for example, if you're playing Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Name Desire, and you're, they list a bunch of different objectives. And you want your beautiful wife Stella to come back to you. You are begging someone's forgiveness, or another way that they say it is, you're writing a wrong, or you're trying to clear up a misunderstanding, right? They're as if is absurd, which is something like, it's as if I were nude in the hot tub with my friend's girlfriend, and he walks in on me on us, and I have to explain that we weren't fooling around. So you read that, you're like, this is nothing to do. Wait, Streetcar Name Desire. I could count on one hand to the number, no. How many times does that happen? Do we have very little pocket change? But here's the scoop, either that event happened to that person who's playing Stanley, or he has a friend with a girlfriend, right? And he's imagining, he's fictionalizing. So maybe the event didn't happen. But there's enough rooted in episode, there's enough rooted, I don't say episodic memory, in his real life, right? There is a hot tub, there is a best friend, and there is a girlfriend, but maybe this event never actually happened, that that as if is hot enough, it kind of gets him working in that way. So the person I sort of want to drive home is an as if does not have to be 100% real to you, right? And what's interesting about that as well is that there's actually neurobiologically and overlap, pretty strong overlap in the parts of the brain that handle memory in the parts that handle imagination. And so again, the more specific and particularized that imagined experience is, the more your brain actually doesn't necessarily distinguish between that having happened and not. And so there might be some people who are better at the imaginary part of things than others, right? But the more generic your imagination, so to use my birthday party example, if you're like, oh, imagine about a birthday party, and you just picture this like floating grassy knoll in space with like generic banners and like faceless kids, and like, that's not gonna help you. But if you have this fantasy birthday party you always wanted you when you were a child and you've thought about it and made it really specific, that can really serve, you know. - I love that. And we have very specific fantasies. I mean, this is a very traditional sort of gendered way, but some people, women especially, probably have very specific fantasies about sort of their wedding day, right? Trying to think of a less gendered example, but that's sure that hasn't happened, may never happen for some of these women, right? And yet there's, I know what my dress is going to look like, I know exactly where I'm getting married, I know what my husband will look like, even if I never met him, I know what the ring looks like, I know what the flower girl, I know how I'm going to feel, I know what music is going to, you know, all your five senses are activated, even though this thing has never happened to you. - On a darker note, I have this like negative, it's not quite a fantasy, but it's an imagined situation that unfortunately in this day and age, you know, so both Anne and I have children who, when Anne's children's were younger, went to the same on campus daycare, where mine currently goes, and there's a decently busy street that goes along the back of the daycare, and I've sometimes had this like uncomfortable fantasy 'cause I always go around the block when I drop her off to go straight to my office, of like what if there's an active shooter situation 'cause there's windows just all along the side of the daycare, and I have several times, almost every time I drive by, this fantasy of what if there is a man shooting at the windows, and I'm like, and then I plow my car into him and knock him away. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - You know what I mean? And it's not like, oh, I saved the day, but it's just one of those like, I don't know, like the first time it popped into my head, it just was like this kind of mama bear, like instinct that I had, and it made me feel a little bit better about the generic fear of having somebody, having there be a shooter somewhere where I am or my children are. - So to me, that's an actual example of emotion, fear. - Yeah. - Right? Now I don't know, maybe then goes back to actually have an image of active shooter. But let's say we start with the emotion, the emotion then gets translated into something active, which is if I feel this way, or if this event is happening, I will do this thing. I love that. Can we both talk? You have an example of not knowing, can you talk about you and your twin and not knowing whose memory is what? - Yeah. - Sometimes? - Yeah, so, and this actually relates a little bit too, so I have a twin sister, her name is Tallerie, she's absolutely incredible, and she'll probably be a guest at some point, 'cause she is very knowledgeable about theater for youth, as well as about access in theater. And, you know, we're twins. We have a lot of really similar experiences growing up. My mom did a great job of even from an early age, trying to give us our own space for at least like a few hours a day. But a lot of our memories happen in the same time and place, to the point where I actually, there are some memories I have that I don't remember who they happen to. So, for the longest time, my hottest memory of embarrassment actually came from this bizarre experience I had when we were in an airport, we had just flown somewhere as a family, and we had flown to Hawaii, I remember, it was very warm, and we'd come from a cold place, so we were like overdressed for the plane and everything, and we were starving. Like, we had just gotten off the airplane, we were waiting for like dad to go get the rental car to come pick us up, and there was like a vending machine with candy in it, and of course, my mom wouldn't buy us the candy, but we were like complaining very loudly that we didn't have any candy, and one of us I honestly could not tell you who to this day was kind of closer to this man sitting on a bench, he was a total stranger to us, but he just heard us complaining louder and louder about not having candy, and he very nicely either went up and got something from the machine, or maybe he had it for himself, and he offered us a piece of whatever he was eating, so he was literally a stranger with candy, right? And like, one of us, I don't even know if we reached for it, or if we just were thinking about it, and my mom was like, "Girls, whoever it was, my mom, like yelled at us," and it was instantly like, this, you know, you know the rule, and like it was so embarrassed, she said out loud, and at least in my mind, I remember he felt bad, 'cause he didn't even think that that was like a not okay thing to do, right? And for years and years, I actually could use this in a scene if I needed to feel really embarrassed, and at some point it lost its potency, but I couldn't tell you, if you paid me $100, I couldn't tell you whether it was me or my sister, and reached out for the candy. My mom and her best friend, who have been friends since, before I was born, so over 40 years also have the same thing, where they, Miriam might be saying some story, and my mom will go, "No, no, that happened to me." And Miriam's like, "No, I think that I should have it to me." And I think a way, I'm just again, always sort of obsessively bringing back to an acting class, maybe you and your character are twins in that way, like how can you marry, memory, so that you, almost to some ways in a good way, in a healthy way, maybe forget, if you're working with this substitution, or this, you're working with these trace elements, these details, right, at any given particular moment, you might forget how much it actually happened to you, the actor, and how much you are imagining happen to the character, and how much you're maybe imagining happened to you, so that it becomes this healthy, not weird, you know, not pathological blend of, sort of the threads that you're weaving together, which is why Udo Hagen talks about it. - Which sort of brings us to the third step, right, of once you've done the deep dive into your memory, is how do you bring it back to the scene that you're in, and I think she does a really great job of talking about transferring the essence of the memory into the scene, and she had a phrase that I thought was really nice, which was, your job is to use the past to make the present real. - Yes, I love that. - And that's the sort of goal, so I think it is this sort of interweaving, and the really freaky thing, I actually think it's, so I described this consolidation thing that happened when you put the marbles in the bag, and then it strengthens the connections between them, there's actually a process called re-consolidation, and what that is is every time you open up that memory, every time you relive that memory, the net comes back, right, and there's an opportunity to actually add or take away marbles from that group, right? So every time you reopen an old memory, it becomes vulnerable again, and you can re-save it. It's almost like a save as. And so if you just, if your goal is to just go back and open up the memory and close it again, in theory you could make no changes to it. But our memories are biased, right? And we always infuse some aspects of our present experience into it, and so if you use the exact same memory over and over again, in this really literal like deep dive opened up, if you did that, then actually there are elements of which stage you're on, the other actors, the director, your current bodily sensations that are happening that get refolded into the memory, and so actually the way that memory is stored, it becomes part old memory and part what you're using it for on stage through re-consolidation. It's really freaky, and you can take advantage of this fact actually to purposefully decrease the potency of traumatic memories, right? So if you have traumatic memories, if you reopen them in a very safe space, you can basically do this save as re-consolidation and procedure in order to bind some elements that indicate safety and calm. And then it actually makes the traumatic memory a little bit less potent over time. It's a really risky, because you can imagine if you cannot feel safe, you're just opening it up, opening up the kind of worms you feel emotional all over again, and then you're saving it just as bad or maybe even worse. So it's a really, really, you have to be very confident that it's a safe environment. So I believe very strongly that there's no danger in becoming your character, right? People I think who are new to acting or in experience with acting maybe think, "Oh gosh, how do you, you know, you're gonna play this serial killer, right? How that's gonna infect you in some negative way?" For the most part that doesn't happen. However, I have a friend who's worked in the soap opera business as a producer, and she has admitted that in the cases where someone plays the same soap opera character their whole life. So from, you know, maybe they start at 18 or 20 or 25 and they're still playing literally the same role at 70. There's so much marriage between an actor and character that the actor actually does begin to take on elements of that character, which it can be kind of ugly sometimes. Sure. But there's also a frequency thing, like you're doing it almost every day. Well, there's probably, and there's like a non-independence between the actor and the writer start to write for the actor a little bit too, right? And there's all sorts of great stories about actors who have actually gone to intervene and told the writers, like, please write this thing. And to me, I think this is what happens to my character next and some writers are friendly to that and some are like, "get out of my office." Totally. But there's also not random assignment of performer to character. There are certain archetypes and there are certain types. We can talk about casting in a few weeks. Where you almost think even if you're cast at 18, there might be a limited number of types of adults that person would become anyway. So some of that might totally be due the experience of being that character, but some of it might be some sort of inherent synergy between the type of person you would cast for that role. You know what I mean? I'm not saying it's not a thing. I'm not saying it's not because of some of the substitution of the dropping in and all of that marriage, but there are a few other factors to casting and writing and all of those sorts of things that make it more likely for those two things to become even more similar as people get older. I think casting is its own episode. It totally is its own episode. There's so much to talk about around that. So just going back to number three, which I love, which you introduced. This idea of transferring it back. I think I don't always, I'm gonna be totally honest. I don't know if I always do this as fully or as thoroughly as I can. But both in practical handbook and Udo Hagen, I'm sure in some other reading, I'm taking a quote from one of her two books, finding the source of the transference or the source of the substitution is not an end in itself. A substitution is incomplete until the original source has become synonymous with the material in the play. That's actually a useful way of looking at it. The way I sometimes look at it, which makes me feel like a failure, is you have to fully disregard. You have to discard and almost forget the as if, or forget the substitution. Because the point there that healthy, the useful aspect of that is there are gonna be elements of that as if that have nothing to do. That aren't helpful. That have nothing to do with the circumstances. So for example, my hot tub with the girlfriend, scenario taking place in 2018 is not useful if I'm playing Stanley in the mid-forties. I'm trying to remember when that was published, right? So there might be aspects like the hot tub itself is not useful, right? So, but what I sometimes find myself doing is, I might still have the memory, say I'm speaking to a scene partner who is playing someone I love, a friend, a very, very close friend, and I am using, and maybe that actor may or may not be a close friend, right? It's helpful if they are, say they're not. I then am remembering and using my feelings towards some of my closest friends, right? I sometimes have those people in my brain and in my mind's eye when I'm playing the scene. The most perfect completion of a substitution would be that you actually are in a way not even thinking about them, but I think how can I not be thinking about them? They are the thing that creates the fire and then actually connects me correctly to the same partner. So I'm kind of a failure in that, but I also want to sort of gently disagree with the rating that says you have to fully forget. Sure, and if the memory of the substitution. It probably naturally happens, I'd be curious to know whether that's more likely to happen over like long runs. Do you know what I mean? I think when you have three, four, or five, even how long is CSF, like how long is the Shakespeare Festival in town? It's over, you might be performing for two months, but there's only 14, 15 shows, yeah. But still there's, but that timing between the shows is significant. That's totally true, but I guess I wonder if the more time you actually are having that scene that the scene, you don't mean like that maybe it sort of rests more over the longer run. I completely agree with that. Yeah, keep going, yeah. Yeah, I had two questions for you about like, and this is, I mean, maybe this is as a director, but more as an actor. So one of them is, okay, I loved when she, and you were talking, when Utahagan was talking about this and you were talking about this too about, it's not just the overall objective and experience, but every single aspect, like the props and all of that. So like, how do you, if you think about like, every single thing on stage having meaning to the character, how do you, what's your process for like, not having those things in hand until tech? Like, do you feel like tech helps you? Do you feel like there's a whole new wave of work to do at tech? Yes. Do you think it would be better if you got those objects ahead of time? Yes, all of those things, but they don't always come. So Utahagan is a stickler for props. She feels like you should be having the performance prop in rehearsal, but that just isn't real life. I mean, a professional theater is going to, at the very least, have rehearsal props on day one. So they're usually, they'll have a substitution, right? They'll have a thing that works because the other thing either is not ready, it's not been made, or perhaps it's so delicate that they want to save it till tech or right before tech. So yeah, so for example, the my most recent performance was with Colorado Shakespeare Festival. This is a great example 'cause one of their theaters is outside. So you are in a rehearsal room, like big room, and the dimensions of the stage are taped out, but you're in a place with four walls, right? That's inside and has a ceiling. Then all of a sudden, you're going outside to a thousand seat house, that is so outside. I mean, there are, there is a set behind you. You must get rained on, like 20% at the time. Yeah, it's great. There is a building behind you, but it's 50 feet away, and then you are, you are nestled within this U-shaped building, but those walls, I'm not great with dimensions, they're far away from you. You do not feel like you are in a room, so you are making, you have to make spatial adjustments that work for you, that remain tools that ground you in the scene that maybe you didn't have the opportunity. And again, I don't think I emphasize this quite enough, or maybe I didn't actually make this point, so one of the things that's really interesting about the hippocampus being responsible for this memory binding is that the hippocampus cares a ton about spatial relationships. Yes. And it cares a ton about time, right? So to me, that's all acting is, it's like your relationship to time and space. Yeah. And that's what the hippocampus does, you know? And so, yeah, and so there are probably like, I mean, taping things out helps a lot. And different people's hippocampus are more responsive to relative spatial relationships, versus what's the opposite of relative objective. It's like the difference between people navigating by north, south, east, west versus people navigating like when you get to the pink building turn, right? And so, that taping probably helps a lot with relative spatial relationships, but it's really bad with the objective. Yes. Next termal spatial relationships. And not to mention that if you're performing over two months, even the outside changes, right? But the sun sets at a different time during each performance, right? Yes, it's amazing. So in June, the sun is setting later, by the time you get to August, and the lights are adjusted, yeah. And when you do most of the time, you do an evening performance. So you don't, it's easy to, you're using the audience and you're performing for the audience, but you're not seeing the details of their faces. And then a matinee, which starts at 6.30 of this moment, a, there's all these people out there. How do I work with them? So that adjustment, the first time a matinee happens is always, can be super weird. Udahagan has this amazing quote, which I'll speak right now. I've completed the transference or the substitution by finding the behavior. I have used the past to make the present real, which is a quote that we're hearing this quote a couple times. I know we both, independently pull that out, I love it. And I think that's a very useful way for me to know when I've fulfilled the substitution. And what she does is she does this really cool exercise. In her class where it's her meeting, one of her, in the class, one of her students, but she changes who that person is. So say it's a super high status actor. She's her 18 year old self, right? And she meets this very famous actor she gets to work with. How she says hi to him. If she meets him accidentally on the street in New York, is going to affect her behavior. She might even bow or curtsy, because she just feels deferential towards him. She might have a hard time looking him in the eyes. That's the behavior. She's found the behavior of meeting this person, of this relationship. And then the second one might be like a shitty boyfriend, ex-boyfriend of her daughters. Now how she treats that guy, because she's higher status, he's younger, she doesn't really like him is going to affect her behavior differently. And then finally, maybe like an old friend who you just run into on the street, that behavior, right, is the information. That's step three of the substitution. And then you can forget the person you are imagining in that way. And that's a lovely cap. And again, I think really parallel to our first episode where we talk about, you know, some things are means and some things are ends. And so if your goal is to dwell in your emotional state, then you're always just going to be diving into the emotion to get that emotion back. And you can't leave it. You're afraid to leave it because then the emotional will go away. But if your goal is to really take on the perspective of the character, the behavior is the end point and the emotion is part of the journey to get to the behavior. And that's how the behavior seems more natural. If you go straight to the behavior, it becomes stereotyped and unrealistic and, you know, gestory, right? But that midpoint of reliving the emotion is what you need to get to. So I had one other question for you as a performer, which is, do you feel like in your everyday life when something starts to happen to you? Do you ever tag it with, like, I should use this later in a scene? What is that, like, does it take away? Yes, from your like real life living? Yeah, it's not that I go, oh, it's not that I go, oh, tag it, like, I'm going to use this one, I work on Queen Margaret. Like, well, no, I do that, too, actually. When I'm inside an experience that's very emotional, that feels significant, that feels hot, right? That feels important. I am experiencing it subjectively. I'm experiencing it in the present subjectively. And I am also experiencing it objectively, like a teacher, student, actor. And that's weird. That is weird. But it also is useful. I love that question. I need to come up with questions for you. It's also useful then to allow the subjective experience to be okay. It's as if my relationship, maybe this is just 'cause I'm getting older, my relationship to the subjective, intense emotional experience, has a little bit of objectivity, which is this is valuable. This is important. Don't push this down. Don't make it go away before it needs to. And that's part of acceptance of your emotions. And it might, maybe it's just another rationale for acceptance, right? Like, so we'll talk about this a lot more. We have an upcoming episode on presence and mindfulness and acceptance is a huge part of that. But I think one, you know, a lot of times acceptance is something like it's okay to be feeling this. It's natural, you know, my brain and body are doing what they need to do to deal with this situation. It's natural that I feel this way, but maybe actors who are pretty aware of this have another way to accept their emotions, which is this might be shitty right now. But I can use this in the future. Yeah. Or, you know what I mean? Or that there's a higher purpose to this. Which is perverse in some ways. It is a little bit. It's so useful. And you can imagine that being exaggerated and like, awaiting for God's kind of way, right? Like, if someone's just sobbing and being like, "Don't worry, I'll use this and I'll follow." And actors have this, like, actor speak, where they. They're, you know, good actors are very authentic real people who know how to connect to others usually and have empathy, but we also like to sort of as parodies of ourselves be over dramatic, right? Hello, Gutierrez. How are you? Well, and we're making fun of ourselves, but it also is also a way of sort of connecting to the other person. And you can imagine, again, that they're being. What you describe as being in this objective experience and having the objective, you know, perspective, to me, sounds extremely healthy. You can imagine, though, what if the objective voice says, like, lean into this, do more? Like, make this even. Oh, I'm sure some people do that. This will be more useful if you even. Yeah, I think deeper. To some extent, guilty of that. Yeah. I don't think I. When that happens, I tend to shush that voice, but I think that voice has come up, which is embarrassing. I think when I was younger, I used to lean into emotional experiences more, because it wasn't always like, "I'll use this for acting." But it just was pleasurable to me to feel extreme emotions. Like, I've never been like a risk-taker, daredevil-like type person, but just like when I started to feel sad, I let myself feel really sad. And I used to have like a spot in college where I would go to cry and feel sorry for myself. I'm thinking about. Yeah, I'm thinking about just all this beautiful marriage that we're talking about, which is a new idea for us in terms of how we talk about it. This marriage of sort of using your real episodic memory, using almost imagination to embellish or to add detail or to add useful detail to that memory, right? The circumstances, so those are two separate things. The circumstances that the text gives you, right, that the playwright has given you. Number three, and finally, what is actually happening in the rehearsal in real time and space or in the performance with you and your scene partner. And I'm just thinking last summer when I was performing, all of those things impacted me. It's not any one thing. So you're pulling useful information from all these things. I wanted to speak to one more thing that I made a note of, and this has happened in my acting classes. Sometimes as actors, it happens to me too. We struggle to connect to a certain moment or a certain aspect, a certain trace element of the character. I might be drawn to this character's sense of adventure, but then I think, oh my God, she's such a bitch to her best friend. Why would she behave this way, right? But I have had friends. I've had students in my class struggle to empathize fully to connect fully to character. In one example, I had a student playing Lewis in Angels in America. And he was struggling. He said, I've never-- I've never been in the situation. Lewis is partnered with prior, who has full blown aides, and Lewis is freaking out and wants to run away. And doesn't really know how to both take care of himself and take care of his partner, because scary things are happening. And my student said, I've never been in the situation where I'm in this very specific literal situation trying to take care of a partner who's dying, which is a great question. If you struggle with that, you're simply taking the moment to literally-- so this goes back to a fellow in Desdemona. We don't think you're ever in the situation. You just have to pan back and find a moment where you are afraid, you are frightened about what you might do. In the case of Lewis, I might just leave my partner. I might just abandon him. Or you're just frightened for someone. That is something we all have felt. So it's that idea I'm trying to think of a verb better than panning out. But the idea of generalizing or humanizing in a moment, taking it out of the literal world and into something that you as an actor can come to terms with. I think, again, if you think about it in the extreme, you can imagine actors really searching in their everyday life for these deep emotional experiences and that can turn really unhealthy. But I also think that if you are currently working on a character, and maybe this is part of what goes on in those soap opera characters, that if you're working on a character, you are more attuned to things that happen in your everyday life that you can see that. And so even though you are not a mean, violent person, you might just notice times in the day where you feel really angry, right? And you really want to shake somebody, even though you never, never would. And that you might have just allowed those to pass by you by before, but because you are searching through your life for these things. But it's not as though you're feeding anger, right? You're just taking a moment when you are sitting in traffic and the person next to you has been in the straight lane. And then it's said, suddenly, they're going to turn left and stall you there for three more cycles of the light. You're like, it's just a pound on the horn. It's a tool. So I mean, it's a tool that you're using to play the role better. I have one more thing I want to briefly talk about. Wonderful. I know about almost nothing about Buddhism, but I've been thinking about it a lot. And learning a little bit mostly through podcasts. And the little I know is this idea of non-attachment, which, as a very smart person, said to me, it's not really a realistic way to live your life. One wants to be a social people. I'm a social person. I want to have attachments and relationships with people and things and events. And also this idea of non-judgment, which is very useful. But going back to the attachment, in some ways, acting technique is the opposite of Buddhism. So if this aspect of Buddhism is in order to sort of live life with less stress, with less anxiety, with less just acceptance, I guess, this idea of disattaching or disentangling yourself from events and people is useful. But speaking very generally, acting is the opposite. You are finding ways for your character. You are attaching yourself. You are entangling yourself. You're marrying yourself to character in all these ways that we articulated. And the character, because it is drama, and there is conflict, and there are objectives and obstacles, is entangled with the other characters on stage, is entangled with the given circumstances. That those circumstances aren't just objective. They also are subjective. You have opinions about them. Totally. And I found that useful to think about. I think that's a really good way of saying it. And is there a word for somebody who's reached the highest stage of enlightenment in Buddhism? I know even less than Ann. Yeah, I'll track that down for you. But there's that idea of being fully enlightened, which is essentially impossible for basically everyone. But it occurs to me that if you think about all of the things that goes into good theater, that watching a character who achieves that would be supremely uninteresting. So boring. I imagine somebody who in every-- well, for two reasons, just one, there's no drama. There's no conflict. There's no obstacle. There's no obstacle. But also, it'd be really hard to tell the difference between that and that acting. Like someone comes in and they're like, sir, your wife has just died and so did the child, right? And he's just like, that's OK. So it would be a horrible scene. And it would be awful. So in some ways, maybe almost all characters and maybe almost all interesting characters are pretty unenlightened people because they do have all of these attachments. And that's what drives them maybe. Yeah. Yeah. That said, I do think there are certain moments where I don't think every single moment on stage needs to have an obstacle. There might be people who hear that and go, you're wrong. But I think there can be moments in the sense when one achieves. Maybe it's at the end of an objective when you achieve the objective. Or it's the end of a happy play where all the obstacles-- the play has had many obstacles. You as characters have had many obstacles. But you get to a particular moment where you go, you have the catharsis of the obstacles going away. Or maybe the good play is the person who's trying to achieve enlightenment, right? Like, maybe it's the struggle to get there. Yes. What makes the good play. And then at the end, they can. But yeah, just the whole way through somebody who's completely unruffled by anything, horrible theater, boring, boring. Have we said it? Everything we think we want to say? And more. Yeah. Up next is our interview with actor Gareth Sachs. Thanks for listening. Hello. We want to welcome Gareth Sachs to our podcast. Gareth is a Colorado native who is glad to have returned after many years acting, coaching, and teaching in New York City. During his 23 years there, Gareth worked extensively both on and off Broadway and regionally. He played Scar in the Broadway company of the Lion King for six years. Also on Broadway, he performed in Nikolai and the others at Lincoln Center, the homecoming, and heartbreak house. Off Broadway, he's performed with the Atlantic Theater Company, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the public, playwrights' horizons, and the mint theater. And regionally, he's performed with Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey, Berkshire Theater Festival, American Conservatory Theater, the Huntington, and here in Colorado with the Denver Center Theater Company and Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Gareth currently teaches in the Denver Center Education Department, and he recently taught from Montclair State University's BFA program in New Jersey. He's an MFA from NYU and also attended Colorado College. Welcome. Hello, hello. Hello, yay. Yay. All right. Question number one, substitution. When you hear the word substitution used as an acting tool, how do you define it? What does it mean to you? It's a good question. I was taught to use it primarily as an imaginative leaping off point, obviously, to if one is having trouble connecting viscerally to something one has to do, to try and find a corollary, an analog, if you will, in your life. But then as quickly as possible, to use that as a stepping stone to the imagination. And what tends to happen for me is I'll try and find an analog or a corollary and note what happens to me. You're gesturing to your body. And yes, I am. I'm rubbing my hands all over my body. Yes. So I will-- In an appropriate-- In an appropriate totally appropriate. Always appropriate. Yes. Not consensual. But to try and find where the feeling rests in my body, because I find that to be much more potent than mining for a psychological explanation or an articulated way in. So if I can find out what's happening and it's not a question of necessarily holding onto that, but like trying to breathe through and allow that to continue, while I try and make-- while I move towards the imaginative circumstances, the who, what, when, where, how of that specific moment, also then relating it to the partner. I mean, one of the things I was taught to do that I always found interesting, which is-- because we're always doing many things at once, right? I'm obviously not this. This is not happening. This is a fiction. I'm on stage with you, Caterina. I'm on stage with you, Ann. And so it's you. So making the bridge between, like, if I need to have a substitution for wanting to be madly in love, then finding where that sits in my life. And then while we're working together, looking for aspects that might key into that for me. Does that make sense? Yes. So the shape of a genetic perhaps, or things that are very specific to perhaps parts of that memory, or that place that I've used as a touchstone. Sure. Yeah? Yeah. And to see, oh, does that do that to me? OK, well, that's interesting. And then also not to be really rigorous about it, to really kind of follow the rabbit down the hole. That's the point that I feel like that's where it gets really interesting, where you go to this kind of liminal place. Because if you try and do your whole-- because I'm one of those guys that was terrible-- both my parents are academics, and I am not-- and tried to be. And was just miserable at it, because I've become rigid. And, you know, just officious and not terribly creative. So I would try and implement this really well, and nothing would happen. But if I would set up the situation whereby, OK, let's use that as an entrance, like a drink me bottom. Right? I'm going to get smaller now. And then, whoa, I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm going to try and be led by that. Yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about hacks and quick ways to snap into things. And I love this idea of identifying where in your body, in particular, I'm assuming emotional sort of response is, I think. A lot of times when we talk about the ways that our bodies enact emotion, scientists will talk about your entire body being a flood with cortisol, for example, and that having an impact all over your body. And so there's this sort of, you know, it's nice because there's this like whole systems, you know, whole body, like people will use phrases like, you know, loosely coherent, coordinated responses throughout your body. But I actually was just recently at a conference where someone was talking about this idea that emotions might actually live or at least activate particular parts of our body. And she actually took a set of pictures that I commonly use in studies that elicit negative emotions. And she just asked people, she gave them an outline of a human body and said, where on your body do you feel this emotion? And it was actually pretty consistent. Like what types of pictures? I mean, some things are easy, right? Like food pictures, people circle their stomachs like dirt. But there were some other really consistent things that people felt particular emotions in particular places, which is interesting. And there are therapeutic techniques where you can keep people into feelings of safety and relaxation by having them identify where in their body they feel it in really pleasant content moments. So like I feel very safe when the back of my neck and my shoulders, like I love hoodies. Hoodies make me feel like warm and protected and OK. And like when I get into my bed, I pull my covers up like open my head and like over my shoulders. And so like that to me cues feelings of safety. Right. So it's interesting that you talk about that. And then do you try to activate it through your body when you're using it to launch off from it? You're like, OK, this one's a bit of my stomach sort of thing. Do you sort of send energy there and try to warm that up a little bit? Or like what's your-- What I try to be very loose about it. Because that to me has also been the stomach point. Also, when you get so specific with your substitution, if it's a real life substitution and you're using it on stage, I run out of gas very quickly. Yeah, because listening to your, oh, go ahead. Because at one of you said this before, because you process it, I mean, if you're working with something that's real, and you're spending five or 10 or 20 minutes on stage with it eight times a week, then it will inevitably lose its potency unless you jump to something more imagined or find another equally powerful personal fact, right? Right, right. And so what I often try to do is find an abstract expression on it. Or that has been sometimes that's easier to do in terms of style, what you're playing, and you know-- Do you have an example of an abstract expression of-- I would say, I mean-- Like do you visualize an image? Is it literally a body position? Or what's happening with the hands? Like I find that if I, even while I'm working, and I think there are two things that you said that I really relate to, and it makes a great deal of sense to me, and I think you're always balancing this as an actor, which is like, OK, how do I get myself to an open place? How do I become the vessel? And then, how do I fill the vessel, right? And said that. Yeah, OK, no, I-- Well, this is a language we are using in multiple episodes. So yeah, just keep talking to people. Yeah, so I may be piggybacking off of ideas that you guys have already said, which I think is great. So that's what I tend to try and find gestures that are open to the situation and open to information. And often, for me, that's opening up of my neck in the chest area, often like a flexing, just a tiny flexing of the hands, like opening up wrists, because it feels vulnerable. He does. It feels open, and I'm usually, you know, most of the time, I'm organizing myself to be protected. But in that situation, I want to be alive to, you know, the imaginative exercise that I'm doing, but also to the feedback that I'm getting from my partner about what's happening. Because I am super guilty of muscling a personal memory to death. Yeah. And I know I'm like-- yeah, probably any actor is, can you give an example of successfully taking a personal fact and entering into the imagined? Is it too personal? No, because, well, I'm in our-- Or a hypothetical specific one. No, I'll protect myself while I tell you. You won't have an emotional breakdown. I'm not that kind of psychologist. So I'll take care of myself. Yeah, I was doing a play a couple of years ago with Ed Sharon. And yeah, no, Ed Sharon being Jane Alexander's husband, who unfortunately, he passed away in the last two years. But kind of a brilliant man. He directed her and James Earl Jones in the Great White Hole, but I mean, and so many things. And such a story, career, and a brilliant man. But also somebody who was very, I think, had done a great deal of Gestalt therapy and was a technically proficient guy, but also somebody who understood the liminal space that you have to be able to enter and to make things that are interesting and youthful. The story is essentially the story of Frieda Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence's widow and her then lover Lawrence has passed away. And this is on the eve of the war in the Great World War II in New Mexico. And her son from her former marriage, Monty Weekly, comes to visit the two of them in Taos, New Mexico. And an attempt to sort of bridge something with his mother after she left him when he was 12 with his siblings and his very English father. And so the play is about this sort of reckoning between loss and trying to reorganize a relationship. And so my parents were divorced when I was four. And I was asked to actually choose which parent, because this is what they did at the time. I wanted to live with, which, of course, is an impossible thing to do. And so I chose my mother. And so what I did not be overly specific about it was to mine that relationship in terms of exchanges that Monty and Frieda were having. And so Ed was beautiful about sort of guiding me to a safe place to sort of play that out. And see what would happen. And so I would use these sort of touch points with Jane. But also the quality of what was happening on the other side was so invested immediately on Jane's part. She'd already inhabited that character so much that it became very easy to leap to Monty and that relationship between the two. It's all over there. I mean, it's all contained in the other person, I think. I mean, this is how you avoid self generating things, generating emotion. I mean, then this is what we try to, I think, teach is to put everything over there. That's what the objective is. Like, how about this? And I'm physically pushing my hand, because that helps me. I think it needs to be kind of that visceral engagement. But then you have to see what happened. Did anything happen over there? Oh, that happened. Will that start something in me? And then you follow that through the through line of the architecture that you've been given by the writer. And sometimes the scenic constraints and the director. But that's-- And Jane is such a beautiful actress and had inhabited this character that I would say things to her and things would happen on her face. And her body and her demeanor and her response that we're so clear and we're so useful, because they sent-- it's like playing a great game of tennis or having a great volley. I don't know. I mean, maybe you are trying to win, but there's something really gorgeous about, wow. We're just going back and forth. Well, and I love the vision of your time out leaping from your experience into imagination. And I love the arc of that of a leap that lambs with someone else. And then they send one back to you. Yeah, and I think that that's what you mean. That's the to go back to what I was saying about the technique that I was taught at Michael Howard, which was to use the biographical information that's possibly the analog, but then to twin it with the person who's right there in front of you. If you need to do that physically or if there's a turn of phrase that somehow, oh, that's interesting. And different ways to hook into that energy so that it starts that circuit. I like the twinning. Yeah. One thing I'm realizing is how much no matter how good and right the textbook is, how much it falls short of actually having experience. Because I'm thinking, oh, yeah, I love how Uda Hagen talks about substitution. And yet it has rules to it that actually which are useful for a young student to learn or a beginning student to learn. And then you need to kind of own it and sort of not follow all the rules and have the experience and have the experiences you've had, which are, you know, with excellent actors to then allow you to do it successfully in your own way. Or to have it articulated to you in your training that these are parameters, right? These are useful parameters. These are tools. Yeah. Do they apply all the time? Maybe not. But you, that's the artful part of it, isn't it? I mean, or part of the artful part is, when do I need that tool? Oh, I don't need that. It's just potent in front of me right now. And so I don't need to use that. You mentioned Michael Howard. I was going to ask you, would you remember about your movement or physical training at NYU or Michael Howard? Almost without exception, I have to say. And I don't know if it's me. All of the movement stuff that I've responded to have been people who trained at Le Coch in France. And you guys are maybe familiar with that. But the Jacques Le Coch was a physical theater kind of genius, I believe. And he started this school, which was about basically looking at the history of European theater. And also theater archeology. But the first two years, I believe, or at least the first year, one doesn't speak. And you go through all of these physical events of storytelling, whether it be mask, clown, more abstract sort of traditions. They go through Comedia. And then they gradually work up to Comedia, which begins to be half-mask, so you start speaking. And you go from there. But so those, they do a lot with neutral mask, which I found to be extremely satisfying and fun. Because I like hiding. I like hiding and playing side. I think that's what I like when I see people acting. And I forget who they are. And I go into that story. I think that's for me kind of where I'm always trying to get to. I'm always following Shward. But I had a class again with Yoshii Ayaida, who worked for Peter Brook for many years. And he trained in No and Kabuki. And he told this story very briefly, because he doesn't talk very much. He just has you do stuff. And he says, no. No. And he never said yes, the entire work. And you're like, oh, yeah. I'm so-- Well, I'm such a baby. I need people to talk to him doing a good job. I think it's only because my experience with the little cop people who are also like-- No. Except they're the French now. So they're like, no, no, no, no. But his whole point is-- Well, they're pouring you wine. You're wine, I don't know. So they soften the blow, try to do it. They're very civilized about it. Whereas he's sort of cut and dried. No, that's not it. That's-- oh, that might-- no, that's not it. But his point was that when there's a scene in-- I believe Kabuki, where a young man has lost his love. And he's looking at the moon. And he gestures to the moon. And the whole potency of that scene and the goal is to make them see the moon. To forget, you are there. You're supposed to go away. And they're supposed to see the moon. And all the moon contains from that character's point of view, which I find-- I'm getting goosebumps talking about such a potent thing and such a high goal. But again, something that has so much space in it and room to fill, like, well, what is that? I mean, that's a kind of-- I find that to be-- even when I fail at it, that's a really fruitful place to be like, wow, what is that? What is that? How is that? And so again, to use what we were talking about in terms of substitution, that's a place for me to get stepstone into a kind of liminal place of work. What is that? For me, it would be like, well, where have I been, where that magic happened? And then to go from there and find physically. And then-- When I'm hearing-- and I don't quite know how to articulate this, but I'm going to rely on Cateri how-- you're giving yourself permission that the creative instrument isn't just kind of the inside of your body, which is limited, but it's this bubble, or it's the stage, or it's the stage in the house, that you're giving yourself permission, because that moon is outside of that character, to use your imagination to kind of fill up energetically. Yeah. Slash physically. But energetically, this story that really extends beyond this body. Yeah. It's interesting. I really appreciate that focus on sort of sharing in a-- was actually going to ask you when you are describing your substitution, too, is if you've ever had an experience where you are in a scene, probably in the same place you were talking about, where your character actually had a shared memory with another character, like you're both talking about something that happened in the past, because there's this immediate click in, if you've had a shared memory with someone, that's what inside jokes do. Or even Nostalgia clicks into everyone in this room, has heard this song, has seen these socks before, and everyone's like, ah, and there's something really satisfying about sharing-- I know both you and I are having our neurons are firing in a similar way right now. That's really satisfying, and I guess my intuition says that to sort of cultivate that. Again, you probably start with separate jumping off points, but you soon have to like-- you soon build something that you actually have experienced with that actor. Right. Right, like whether it's the previous time you did the scene-- Right. And I believe that's so useful and absolutely needs attention. And that's the bedrock, or that's the stepping stone, then that can get you to the next thing, because that's the reality. I mean, the other is imaginative and great, but also you are on stage with that person. And it's something is happening that person-- I mean, and it's so-- Another difference maybe between theater and film, too, is I always like every time I watch the behind the scenes making of any film, when people are like, oh, yeah, I just met so and so, and then we launched in right to the scene that day. I'm like, how the heck do you create that all of that with that person if you just shook hands with them like the day before? And sometimes people will strategically do that, right? So I'm obsessed with the West Wing. And there's several actors on the West Wing said they purposefully didn't go into the Oval Office set on the West Wing before they shot, because they wanted to feel intimidated. But because apparently that was an amazing set that was practically being in the Oval Office. So sometimes you can strategically be like, OK, if there's a status relationship between me and this performer that I wanted to actually maintain in the scene, but like having an intimate, I just couldn't imagine. Conversely, I think if you're in a show, maybe you had an experience like this, and somebody either subs out, or there's a replacement who comes in. And so you've been doing it with a different performer, and suddenly there's someone new there, and you have to kind of scramble to rebuild. Yeah. Or you just leave it in the liminal space. I mean, I had an experience that I don't-- not a lot of us get with Lion King, where it was playing this contiguously over six years or so, the same story, with a lot of the same people. But it's a long-running show, and it's a marathon, and you're doing it 365 days, however, I mean, 52 weeks a year, eight shows. And so people sub out all the time. And so what happens? I mean, because there's long-term connection, I think you build a placeholder for that. This is an entity, and whoever enters that, and that's actually a gorgeous thing in a long-running show, too, to be full of surprise again and to be-- And often that's when you wake up again, and you're like, oh, okay. But there's a twin. Let's do this. Oh, this is fun. But there's a twin. There's an imagined twin on stage that no matter which human being fills that, is alive for you. Yes. And then change has got to puppet there. So there's a physical and situation that is the same, no matter who's wearing the head. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes, that is absolutely true. So you can be attached, maybe it's behaving. But that's also something I think they taught very eloquently at Michael Howard, which is not to ever judge what's happening over there. Even if you may have some judgment that this person is not very good, well, that's not useful at all. Maybe it's more useful to be like, well, wow, that is odd. In the through line of that character is responding to you, like Bonsai, Bonsai doesn't sound like himself today. You're really having an off day, aren't you? Okay. I'm going to have to come down extra hard on you. You don't cry enough for you. No zebra for you, rather, you know, sound. But I mean, yeah, like, but to always to click back in to the other. Yeah. And use absolutely everything, don't say no. I mean, or say no in a way that augments. Yeah, that's yeah, yes, and I want to ask you about your physicality of scar. How did you hook in? I mean, I'm sure there are many, many ways. But how did he make sense to you physically, imaginatively? Uh-huh. I hadn't seen the cartoon. And I hadn't seen the show. I watched, I listened to Jeremy Irons. I watched the, the, um, that section of it. And I thought, it sounds like restoration phop to me. It sounds like, you know, like Simon Callow's master class on the restoration phop, like with the hanky and the point and literally being about posture. And so initially, my sense of it was that everything was chosen, the posture, the attack of what he says. And, and it was all meant to damage whoever's around to put somebody on edge to, uh, your physicality just totally shifted. Yeah, I did. I just sat up straight, which I never do. Um, uh, yeah. So the, and, and also like something about beginning to move around like that and having the cane and the self and poor, it made me feel self-important. And I thought, that seems right. Let's go with that and that's fun. That seems to have a lot of, uh, a lot of, uh, juice in it. Um, and so initially, I think that was my, I was like, oh, he's restoration phop. I'm never going to book this. So I'm just going to go in and do my Simon Callow restoration phop and have a ball and just be mean as I can be. Yeah. My best auditions are ones where I never thought I would get the part at my, you know, if you think about the, the sort of mind sets you go into it, in terms of like the emotion regulation, I said in my, my very strong mindset going into my most successful decisions had been, this is my only chance to be this character. I'm not going to be able to do it in the run. So I, so I get to fully do it, you know, and the ones where I'm like, oh, I'm sure I'll be in the running like, this is just to get me a call back. I'm never here. Yeah. Yeah. I totally know. I totally know. I totally know. Yeah. Yeah. And that, and so again, your point of focus is over there about doing that thing and having that rather than are they, am I doing it? Yes. Well, it did, well, I don't know if that resonated in the way I wanted it to. I don't know if I'm getting the call back now. You're not thinking about that because you're thinking about the joy of playing it. It's true. Did you have to? Here's my final question. I have many more, but I'll resist. Did you, you get the part by doing Simon Callow? Yes. And Julie came or actually was at the audition, which I, the call back, which I did not know, and she came up and she was like, okay, well, the, the, the cane is, the cane is wearing you. You're not using the cane. And then Scar is built on a snake and she proceeded because she's a LeCocke person at 17. She went to LeCocke anyway. So she can do all of the things that she often asks people to do. What do you mean by a car is built on a snake? Did she mean physically or did she mean? Yes. Like, like, conceptually. Like that. Oh, he's a new ass. Yeah. Oh, there's nothing. No lying. So this is my, this was my question. She was no liar. He's a snake. So he's never upright. So she was like, you're, you're upright and proud, but he's a snake. He's always angling. He's always moving. So she asked me. My question was, did you have to change what you were doing physically from the callback to actually playing Scar, which you did? Yes. But clearly she saw something in that callback, whether it was just making extremely strong specific choices. I think that might have felt like, okay, I'll, I'm going to hire this guy. They were not, you know, I think that they were, you know, they were, yeah, if they weren't correct in her mind or what she thought Scar is, they were at least taken from the stepping stone of the text and then extrapolated out from and, and then live through because I had that moment of like, this is the only time I'm going to get to do this. And why not? Let's play. And then that's the thing, the play. So, but then also with Scar, it becomes a media parent when she put the costume on because she's built it so that it, it's 75 pounds. There are the chaps are you wear a jumpsuit, which has two motors and either side of it because the mask sits on a huge head, like a World War One flying ace helmet and it has a boom on it and you have a controller on your finger that you control how the mask comes down and kicks out and then comes back up. So there are all of these technical limitations all of a sudden of like, this is what Scar is. Literally you can't move when you first get the costume like this is completely impossible. But then you're, but you're wearing like a corsets and, and then the chaps are made of leather and they go out at angles. So then you begin to take that information like how to build Scar from that. And those are like her DNA instructions, I think it's in the costume like, no, it doesn't do that. It does this. It does this. This is what it does. Yeah. And on purpose. Yeah. Ultimately once you get used to the costume you find a freedom, yeah, indeed, indeed. But that's, you know, that's another thing I felt like was beautiful at NYU and at Michael Howard is like, there isn't any freedom without structure. It's chaos. So one is always kind of teetering between chaos and organization and trying to go in and using these things as stepping stones as I keep saying, as, as, as points of reference so that you can judge where you are and what's happening and then move from there. But without those, it's just, yeah, so much fun. Thank you. Thank you. That was a lot of fun. Yay. Bye. Bye. Yay. And that's our episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you liked what you heard, please spread the word. As always, we have resources up on our website, www.theactorsmind.com. If you are like, what was the book, what was the article? That's where you can go and get a reference. We also do it just a little bit of social mediaing. 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