I Believe
This About Acting
Continued / 4
BY
ANNE FIELDING
SIEGEL. I'll relieve you—it's not. Do you think
streets are boring?
FIELDING. Yes.
SIEGEL. And rooms, and scraps of paper, and
sweater threads?
Do you think the edge of this board is boring?
FIELDING. (pause) Now that I've looked at it, it
isn't boring.
SIEGEL. As soon as you see a thing as individual,
it's not boring.
The edge of this board has opposites, for one thing, and that makes it
interesting. What do you think should be between moments? . . .
And there was also this:
SIEGEL. Is a play all high points?
FIELDING. No.
SIEGEL. What's in between?
FIELDING. Homespun?
SIEGEL. Is a symphony all high points?
FIELDING. No.
SIEGEL. That's what Liberace gave you—only the
high points. Your
notion of drama is different from mine. Drama doesn't fight reality, it
shows what reality is.
For the first time I knew why I cared for acting, and I
was proud of
my choice.
In his 1951 lecture on acting, Siegel says:
This possibility of loving the world that we have through acting is
much worthy of study. . . . Since a human being is a compound of is and
might, a compound of what's before him and what can be imagined, in all
sincerity we have an element that is like acting. Everybody wants to be
himself, and that means being other things besides oneself.
A performance of recent times seen as extraordinary was Zero Mostel's
in
lonesco's Rhinoceros. Did he become other than himself!
Without
makeup or costume change, Mostel literally became a rhinoceros right
before
the eyes of the audience.
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