Coffee Shop Naturalism and the Avant-garde

I’m known at the BHP for having a stronger point of view than most on the issue of certain material that I feel reduces the chance of good training getting a bite into the actor. So I thought I’d finally write something about it, and hopefully by so doing, shorten a few of the talks I  have with the class after I court dirty looks by dismissing a scene with little critique. First off, here’s what I wrote about this issue for the FAQ section of the BHP website:

     How do I choose material for scenes?

The best training occurs on the best material. Boxers don’t spar with partners who are weaklings – they train with partners who challenge them. Musicians don’t train on easy music – they train on the best. Actors should seek out the best writing, writing that is interested in humanity, rather than in cleverness or glib emotion. Many actors think that because much of the writing for their contemporary auditions is subpar, they should train on subpar material, as if there is a specific, learnable way to pull off subpar material that will get you more jobs on TV. Don’t think this way.

Many actors are simply not knowledgeable about scripts from the theatre and film history available to them. This is a shame, and indicative of the deterioration in education and the work ethic of actors. Imagine the aspiring pianist who didn’t know the work of Chopin, the young writer who’d never read Tolstoy! And yet many young actors do not know their own history – the actors, directors and writers who have shaped everything we do today. The history of theatre and cinema is filled with challenging writing that is interested in human beings and real communication. This is what you should be interested in for your career, and so seek this material out, educate yourself while doing so, and turn down class requests to work on Elf and Wedding Crashers.

So let me dive in a bit more. Training an actor is a very tricky activity for many reasons, among the most important being that an actor is both the instrument and the musician, and you need a minimum of two actors working together to really assess either one’s ability. As the teacher, one has an infinite combination of potential issues to address with the instrument, the musician, and then the material and/or the actor’s approach to it. On the actor’s side, just getting to the moment of critique is more challenging than any other art form. As a pianist, I have two pianos staring at me in my living room, and one of them is digital and can be used late at night without disturbing anyone – it’s me versus the piano, it can happen any of the 24 hours in a day, and the practice and the progress on any piece can happen quickly and intensively with my work alone. With scene study training, you need to get at least one other actor in order to do any work at all, there’s no solo or digital option for work, you have to rehearse, and at the BHP we expect you to bring in a finished product, something you’ve sweated over and thought about. 

It’s best if all that effort went into material that helped us make you better, right? So follows is a list of the kind of scenes I feel are counter-productive, and a final note about The Grand Exception that gets you a pass on any of it: 

Coffee Shop Naturalism: Two people sitting in a coffee shop (or its outdoors variant, the park bench), chatting. Nothing much happens, little is revealed –  some story history or character biography, perhaps. Or maybe a weak romantic pass is made and deflected. No one gets particularly upset. No one gets particularly happy. One of the characters leaves, aaaaaaannnnnd scene. Just avoid all this stuff – if you’re at the level of work where you can believably listen and have a conversation, then these scenes do little to challenge you, and the material will often fray when you try to apply bigger choices to it. (Included in this genre is the famous DeNiro-Pacino scene from Heat. Zero happens in that scene – its purpose in life was to get those two actors acting together for the first time in history. I’ve seen it performed a dozen times in class and it never works.)

Avant-garde / Dreamworld: Study requires material that has rules, logic, discernable conversation, a sense that these characters inhabit a known world here on earth. So I’m not knocking avant-garde work and experimental theatre, etc. – but it just doesn’t make good training material. Ditto for its first cousin, the dream sequence. No good. I once went to a “piano recital” where the pianist had hung beer bottles from the strings with varying levels of liquid in each bottle, and he hit a felt mallet against the side of the piano while holding down certain keys, and there was some weird sonority that resonated through the beer bottles. Okay. I just don’t know what that had to do with a piano, and there was little pianistic skill involved – it was mostly a compositional exercise. If I brought this piece to my teacher for a piano lesson, I’d be dismissed with a grunt in about three seconds. 

Science Fiction / Action / Fantasy:  I love The Matrix as much as the next guy, but it’s no good for training. This Sci-Fi / Action / Fantasy combo has produced some massively popular entertainment, and it’s not as if there isn’t any good acting in some of these movies, but generally the world inhabited by these characters is one that needs huge production value, and it’s tough to extract scenes that have any meaning or excitement outside the context of the experience. 

Persona-Driven Glib Comedy: This goes to the mentions of Wedding Crashers and Elf on the FAQ. Again – there’s great cinema entertainment available in this genre, but they are generally highly reliant on the persona of a known comedic actor, rather than real acting. Some of these comedians are actually really talented actors (Steve Carrell comes to mind), but the persona driven glib comedy is generally incredibly stupid from a script standpoint, and absurd from a logic standpoint – and neither problem matters because it’s about the comedic persona coping through all the madness. Not good for training. 

Smoldering Chemistry Film Scenes:  The ultimate example of this is the pick-up scene from Body Heat. Never works. It always comes off as a very flat conversation about chimes. A lot of smoldering chemistry film scenes are just coffee shop naturalism that is followed by a sex scene. The pickup scene in Fatal Attraction is another. They are greatly  assisted in the originals by the presence of movie stars shot in closeup, sound design and scoring. Without all that, and in a class setting, we’re watching two actors doing coffee shop naturalism and thinking to ourselves about William Hurt throwing that chair through the window, or Douglas and Close in the elevator. Avoid, unless by Grand Exception below. 

High Concept Scripts: Amongst the most popular here are works by Charlie Kaufman and Christopher Nolan: Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, Memento, Inception, etc. As screenwriters go these guys are hugely imaginative, but I’ve never seen their work translate well to a scene study training environment. It’s possible – but a tough job for sure. 

If you’re thinking, Well, what’s left after what you listed above?, then I would submit that you’re operating from too narrow a frame of reference. It’s easy to note that all of the above are most prevalent in film scripts rather than stage plays, and a snob could easily just ban screenplays from acting training and they would have a point. But we’re in the 21st Century, the BHP is headquartered in LA, and many people enter acting with small and large screen aspirations and these dreams were often sparked in a movie theatre. There are countless terrific, actable screenplays that have real meat on their bones, so bring ‘em on. There are countless terrific, actable stage plays which, by their very theatrical DNA, avoid many of the pitfalls above. 

And here is the the Grand Exception that gets you a pass even on all of the above. (It’s an “exception” in terms of getting past my considerations on the material, but is certainly a “rule” of good acting in general):

Imagination. With some imagination, and its siblings creativity, passion, interest and originality, you can bring any scene to life in a vibrant, exciting way. Last year some students brought in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and killed it. They were fantastic, they had lighting design, sound design, they completely committed to the characters of this fantasy world, and we were all captivated by it. The only time I saw Body Heat work was when one of our teachers teamed up with a choreographer to create a very different and vastly more expressive experience from that depicted in the movie – and the actors responded beautifully. I’ve seen exciting and original adaptations of James Bond scenes, coffee shop naturalism scenes that have taken off and moved people, smoldering chemistry scenes that have burned hot. Milton himself assigned such scenes as Airplane! and 101 Dalmations (the Cruella part) to actors (so they would stop taking themselves so seriously), and they were hugely entertaining. But all of them involved a heavy dose of imagination, a boldness and originality that acts in direct opposition to the idea of acting training as a rote form of (non)artistic dictation: transcribe the film scene and act it essentially the same way those stars did. If we can derive from this discussion at least the idea that actors should stop taking dictation, and that their imaginations are a huge and often untapped force, then that alone would be worth it to me.