Characteristics of the Amateur Actor (written in 1938)
I stumbled upon an old article about amateur actors that can be applied to amateur game designers (I would classify myself as amateur) 70 years later. Being young and lacking in experience means that the art one creates is lacking in honesty. I can’t wait until game designers mature and begin to design/build games with the same emotional sophistication as award-winning plays + novels.
With these three possible methods in mind, let us turn to the amateur actor. Let us ask ourselves just what sort of material he is; of what he is capable and incapable; what he can be made to do.
The majority of amateur actors in the United States are young men and women of high-school and college age; the amateurs are made up largely of students. Their ages testify that they are likely to be immature mentally; their occupations as students, that they, perhaps, possess an intelligence above the average.
Indeed, upon examination, the amateur is found to possess a good mind and an amazing potpourri of information. He knows some history, literature, and science; perhaps a smattering of foreign language, though he is the exception if he can speak any language besides English. He reads magazines, current books, a few plays; he has picked up quite a bit of information and misinformation at the movies. His reasoning powers are not yet well developed; he has no philosophy of life that is his own (but he appropriates the latest philosophy he has heard or read for his immediate need, which is not great). His schooling has given him a fair power of concentration, an ability to listen and to under-stand what is said to him. And he has quick perception.
The amateur is weaker in imagination than in intelligence. Not that he possesses no imagination; he has one, but he is out of practice in using it. At a much younger age, his imagination provided him with many a grand adventure; but the public schools, which make a fetish of democracy, have geared his work for the majority, which means for the group below his capacity; and things other than the preservation and encouragement of the imagination are considered practical and important for the great lower groups. So he has taken on the habits of his companions and has used his imagination less and less until now he rarely exercises it at all.
He is still weaker in knowledge of and experience with the emotions. Of course, he is still young; he has, perhaps, lived a sheltered, uneventful life and has experienced no deep emotion. But the schools are partly to blame for this ignorance of emotional knowledge. The amateur has received no education in the emotions. Expression of feeling has been frowned upon by his teachers and laughed at by that “majority” among his companions of whom we have spoken. He has been permitted to experience sensations, shocks, thrills, but he knows little or nothing about the emotions of terror, pity, love—those emotions which he will be called upon to express on the stage. He is capable of understanding and feeling emotions, but he is without experience with them.
These observations constitute three general characteristics which our examination of a number of American amateurs (whose ages we have arbitrarily placed at eighteen or twenty) would be likely to reveal to us. Turning to the physical qualifications for acting, we would discover that our actors possess bodies that are well developed. Both the men and women have played strenuously as children and have continued to play in some form of athletics in school and college. Here and there one may be found who is awkward in the manipulation of his body, though, frequently, these young people handle their bodies reasonably well. They do not, however, use them with power or effete tiveness. Grace and rhythm of movement are usually lacking, and a strength and a sense of pride which give the body a theatrical effectiveness are unknown to most beginners.
The voices of our actors are found to be harsh and unpleasant, though there has been an improvement in vocal quality in recent years. Still, a full, resonant voice, which is a joy to hear, is seldom discovered. This matter of the cultivation of a good speaking voice has also been neglected in the schools. The actor, however, generally speaks the English language commendably, when we consider his training and his speech environment. Compared with the best standards, he speaks his language carelessly and incoherently; compared with the speech of the streets, he does remarkably well.
Perhaps, then, we are able to visualize this young actor sufficiently for a general characterization. He seems to be a keen, responsive, but immature, person whose imagination is dormant, whose emotional experiences and training have not been important; his body is adequately developed but untrained for acting; his speaking of his language is better than his vocal quality; and he does possess a capacity for accomplishment and development.
1 comment April 4th, 2009