You don't listen, and when you admit that, you're ahead of the game

Did you catch Kenny Leon's acceptance speech at the Tony Awards for directing "A Raisin in the Sun back in 2014?"  Even if you think you did, YouTube it and listen again.  I will love him forever for attributing the quality of the show to the cast going out every time and listening to each other.  "They LISTEN to each other!"  he repeated.

#omgtweetsniffleclaptext

You've at some point heard actors ponderously talk about how some actor or other is "generous and really listens."  But what is all this about listening?  What does listening matter if you know what your next line is anyway?  Don't you just make sure the other actor is done talking, then fill in the void with your line?  Or, if you're a real pro, you just slightly overlap the last word they say with your line?  You know, "picking up the cues?"

Umm.  No.

Listening versus Hearing - The Thrilla in Magilla, or something

Listening is not the same as hearing.  Unless you've been declared totally hearing impaired, you can hear.  And unlike seeing, tasting, touching, or to some extent, smelling, you can't pick and choose what you will hear.  If the sound is made close enough to you, you heard it.

So it makes perfect sense that your brain decides hundreds of times a day to ignore what you hear.  You'd lose your mind otherwise.  Unfortunately, though, when it's time to listen, you may find that you're far better at deleting and ignoring what you hear than you are at really taking it in.

Then there's the problem of choosing what you will admit you heard.  This is not unlike choosing what you will and will not see, which I discussed in an earlier, rambling post.  If you don't want to lose a friend, you may not hear the sarcasm in her voice, for example, and be utterly amazed that people in your life ask you why you deal with that condescending piece of  - BLEEP - .

Of all the five senses, the sense of hearing is probably the most fallible.  This is why comedy writers love teasing us about it, writing endless jokes with patterns like this:

NAG

 I want you to spend more time with my mother. She's good to us.  Good to you.

NAGEE

Yes, dear.

NAG

Give her a birthday card.  Invite her to have dinner with us.

NAGEE

Yes, dear.

NAG

  I'll make it easy for you.  

NAGEE

Yes, dear.

NAG

I've asked mother to move in with us.

NAGEE

Yes, dear.  (PAUSE)  WHAT?

The humor is based on what you might call "echo memory."  Seems our ears and brain echo what we've heard for a few seconds after the sound stops.  While the sound it is still clanging around in our heads, we can retrieve some of it - at least the last few words.  In the comic setup above, it's the Nag's failure to add anything else after the final "Yes, dear," that creates a silence in which the Nagee hears the echo of what went before.  By no means was he listening when she dropped the news that mom's going to be their new roommate.  He heard the echo of the words a moment later, then reacted.  This comic setup is older than the pyramids, but it will always get a laugh because people will always be caught hearing, but not listening worth a crap.

Then there's the tried-and-true "I refuse to listen to things I don't want to," comic bit.  It goes something like this:

ARCHIE

Edith, get me a beer, huh?  Make yourself useful.

EDITH

Oh, ARCHIE!!!  I'd be happy to!!!  (scampers happily to the kitchen)

Here, the words are heard and understood, but nothing of the tone is accepted by the listener. 
This comic pattern will be funny till the day they stop making people.  People's failure to listen fully is legendary and and nearly 100 percent reliable.

As an actor, though, if you don't actually listen during a performance, some day soon - tonight if you're in a show right now - you're going to do your canned, polished line reading and you're going to feel the audience stir ever so slightly.  A cough.  Maybe a cell phone screen comes on.  It's that moment when the audience remembers that they're watching a mere play.  You lost 'em.  Because the way you delivered your line did not take into account and actually respond to what was said to you and how it was said.  Best case, the audience laughs when the scene isn't funny.   But you can survive that.  Worst case is the audience thinks you're making a character choice, and they'll file it away with the expectation that all the loose ends will come together by the end of the play.  If the playwright didn't account for your failure to listen, nothing will seem resolved or sensible to the audience by the end of the play or movie.  Stay tuned for the bad reviews and the "Honey, don't you think it's time to get a real job?" coffee date with a loved one.


Why Can I Watch a 2 Hour Movie and Follow Every Word, but Hear Nothing Onstage?
or
Why It's Hard to Listen when You know You have to Respond 

One big reason you can listen well to a movie or play is that you don't have to participate or talk back.  You're not recalling a line and trying to figure out how best to say it to please the casting director sitting in the back row (within a single stride of the exit, usually.)  The mind can remain off self.  That's one thing.

On top of that, the action an audience member witnesses is far more limited than it is in the real life matrix where a typical morning moment might look like this: you're running late for work and scolding yourself in your head for it, while you're making small talk with a friend you bumped into at Starbucks while listening for your name at the pickup counter.  The CD that's playing in the background is the one your sister wants for her birthday and you're wondering if you should just buy it now and get it out of the way or come back during lunch.  Chances are you're hearing everything and listening to almost nothing.  Serious sound editing going on.  But a movie?  Ninety percent of the time, you're listening to two people talking in close up.  Period.

You have to train the listening muscle for it to work for the duration of a full scene, or one-person-show, or toothpaste commercial shoot. Listening does not come naturally - not in our culture, anyway. Then, once you've trained yourself to listen impeccably, you must allow yourself your real response to what you heard - AFTER you've heard it. Then you have to further train to respond using the line as your mode of expression. Then, while you're still feeling things, you gotta listen again, with no expectation that what you will hear next will be consistent with what just happened.

I'm going to get into all of this on this blog over time.  But for now, if you're in an acting class or in the classroom of life, just strive to listen.  That may sound corny, but do it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.  I'm sorry, no - I'd like to listen to what you have to say! 

Love and drama -

Jill


   

Listen, listen, listen!

So of course I watched the Tony Awards last night, which, in my opinion, still feels like the only awards show geared to entertaining an audience instead of just a parade of celebrities loving on themselves in public. 

The true standout moment for me was Kenny Leon's acceptance speech for "A Raisin in the Sun" in the Best Direction of a Play category.  Seemingly bent on getting every Meisner-based teacher and acting student in the land tweeting, texting, whooping, and weeping simultaneously, Mr. Leon attributed the success of the show to the cast going out every time and listening to one another.  "They LISTEN to each other!" he repeated.

Surely you've heard the "old generous actors who listen" chestnut on one award acceptance speech or another.  But like eating right and exercising, we've heard about it, we know we oughta do it, but how many of us really do it in our acting?  Or even know why we must?

I recently came across an advertisement for an acting book that talks about how your acting won't look real unless you look like you're reacting to something.  In the interest of full disclosure, I have not read the book, but is this what it's down to?  "Looking like" you're reacting to something? 

Sigh. 

I hope there is more to the theory than that, but on the other hand, someone chose to advertise the book that way, so that may well be the highlight.  Even more concerning to me than the premise were the reviews saying that this concept of reacting had opened their eyes to a new world of performance.

Sigh.

If having a perceptible reaction on stage is groundbreaking information, it tells me that the listening part of acting is still rarer than chocolate diamonds.  If you're listening the way a trained actor does (Meisner-based training offers the best ear-training available for actors, in my opinion), and you know how to leave yourself alone and express what's really going on, your reactions will be perceptible to the audience and to the other actor(s). 

If you think you listen well - or suspect that maybe you don't - take this little test to see where you stand:

1)  I'm often surprised by the way things come out of my fellow actors in scenework and/or in performance.    ____ Yes     ___ No

2)  I'm often surprised by the way things come out of me in scenework and/or in performance.
    ___  Yes    ____ No

3)  I have gotten legitimate feedback on one or more occasions that I was "great" when I thought I was barely doing anything externally.  ___ Yes  ____ No

4)  No matter what character I'm working on, I often find that my own emotional responses fit the scene well.  ____ Yes    _____ No

Okay, enough with the skewed questions.  You get the idea.  If you were saying No a bunch, or saying Yes when it wasn't true, chances are, you're not listening in your work.

Listening versus Hearing

One of the many things I love about Meisner training is that, through the repetition exercise, a teacher always knows when a student is listening and when they are merely hearing.  When one actors says, "No, I don't particularly care for that tone!"  and the other replies, "You don't like my tone," there's just no doubt about it.  The listening has broken down and the actor has to get back on quick or lose the audience for the remainder of the scene (or the entire show). 

It's so easy and intoxicating to get caught up in an emotional drift with another actor, and think that since you're both emoting, you're acting.  No.  You're emoting.  Because the moment will come when one guy says or does something just a little differently.  There'll be a touch of irony during in a tender exchange, a sarcastic twinge,  inadvertent humor, or even dash of resentment or ridicule.  If an actor-in-training misses that, it tells me as a teacher that he was not listening.

In the real world (my students know I call it the matrix, so I'll do the same here), there is entirely too much going on to take it all in fully, much less react to all of it.  You would lose your mind shortly after your morning coffee.  But in theater, the world exists in an extremely limited and controlled quantity.  Free from the extraneous noise of the matrix, the audience gets to relax and focus on every little thing that happens.  Emotional responses follow, we hope. 

But if an actor misses something - anything - that is said in that tiny little world, the audience knows it, because they do hear it.  So let's start our list of "Reasons to Listen When You Act:"


Reason #1  You must listen on stage so as to look like a fool in front of the audience.

Now let's get back to that burden of having to react.  You can't react truthfully to something you didn't listen to.  Notice I didn't say something you didn't hear.  Hearing is not going to get you far.  Unless you've been declared deaf, you can hear.  Big deal.  Hearing is not active.  Have you ever been in a room where an announcement was made that you knew didn't apply to you, then had a stranger walk up and ask you what the announcement was?  You have, I'll bet.  What did you do to retrieve the information? 

Echo memory, that's what.  Your brain seems to allow sound to echo around in it for a few seconds before it dies off and is forgotten.  So when you try and retrieve something you heard but didn't listen to, you usually can recall the last few second of what was said, like an echo.  This is why comic bits where one character launches on a minute-long tirade that doesn't perturb a non-listening bystander, then says one thing at the very end that doesn't fit, there's a pause (while the echo of the last words chime in the brain) and then the listener reacts.  You know the drill:

Nag:  "I just don't understand why you don't like my mother-in-law!  You never call her, you don't send her a card for her birthday or anything.  Well I'm tired of bothering you about it.  From now on, you don't have to call her.

Nagee:  Great.

Nag:  You don't have to send her a card any more.

Nagee:  Great.

Nag:  You don't have to go out of your way one bit ever again.

Nagee:  Great.

Nag:  Because mother is moving in with us.

Nagee:  Great.   (Pause)  WHAT?

Right?  This gag is older than the pyramids, but it will always work because people will always block one another out and hear rather than listen.

So make sure you listen when you act.  If you don't know exactly what all that entails, stay tuned.  But in the meantime, get in a good Meisner-based acting class.

Love and Drama -
Jill