Neil Simon on the third act

The following is a link to an interview of Neil Simon speaking on the third act.

Mike Wood interviewed him on January 30, 1997.

If you take anything from short clip, I hope you recognize the amount of thinking that went into your lines! Some came easier than others, but each one had thought put into it. 

As we rehearse, try to remember this when you are struggling to understand why you are saying something at a particular time.

Thank you to Caleb for sending this link our way!

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4:55: And so I walked out dejected again realizing how difficult this playwrighting business is, cause you think you have it, and like quicksilver it's gone.

5:25: ...we put it in that night and we got huge laughs, even when the lines weren't that funny, cause the audience is now enjoying the sense of the comedy, the progression of the play, the characters coming into their own and learning something about theirselves...

On Neil Simon

Reading up on Neil Simon has given me insight not only into the man, but into the era of American Comedy that we're entering in performing this play. I hope you find these research notes as helpful as I do.

Simon took a job in the Warner Brothers Manhattan office mailroom in the 1950s. After several years in this position, he quit Warner Brothers to begin writing with his brother, Danny Simon, on a full-time basis. The brothers wrote radio and television scripts for shows including the Sid Caesar series Your Show of Shows. The writing staff of this series included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Carl Reiner.  -Biography.com 

Your Show of Shows, a groundbreaking variety show, congregated some of the brightest young comedic writers, many of whom would help define the genre in the coming decades. It appears that types of shows appear in each generation; In Living Color and Saturday Night Live's contributors had a similar effect on their media as well.

Though none of his plays can be considered strictly autobiographical, Neil Simon never hesitated to draw from his own life for writing material. Knowing this, I think it's important to know a bit about the man's life to provide a frame of reference. He witnessed the divorce of his parents as a child, then experienced it first-hand in 1983.

While not entirely autobiographical, Simon makes no secret about using personal experiences or those of his friends for material. Come Blow Your Horn was about two brothers who moved away home and shared a bachelor apartment (just as Simon and his brother did);Barefoot in the Park was the story of newlyweds adjusting to married life (reminiscent of his own marriage); and, of The Odd Couple Simon once commented, "[the story] happened to two guys I know-I couldn't write a play about Welsh miners." -Encyclopedia.com 

Sidebar: Thinking Like a Director

Below are some excerpts from Michael Bloom's "Thinking Like a Director" that I hope you will find valuable, as actors, or any other kind of theater-maker. 

-Michael

31: Interpretation rarely proceeds in an organized fashion.

32: Plays are webs of intentional behavior, action, the physical pursuit of a goal or desire, is the constant - and for most actors and directors, the clearest way into a text.


33: Action is most effectively understood and communicated as a transitive verb. Using intransitive verbs (Charcter x is angry about y) often promotes playing a condition or state of being instead of an action, and asking an actor to play a state of being more often than not produces generalized and artificial acting.

34: When you become specific about what a character wants in relation to another character [and look closely at what they are literally doing to get it], actable verbs emerge.

35: Determining exactly where and how a beat changes is a key matter of interpretation in a rehearsal process.

6: Determining a character's actions can be done only while simultaneously considering the given circumstances, which are often the catalysts that propel the character into action.

37: Less realistic plays, such as those of Shakespeare, Moliere, the Greeks, and many others, require actors and directors to invent given circumstances in addition to those mentioned in the text in order to connect and give context to the characters' actions.

(Think of the vibrant world - given circumstances - that Simon wrote into the The Odd Couple, a play in the style of realism.)

37: The motivation for a character's action is often found in the given circumstances.

40-41: An obstacle acts as a hard, resistant surface to the knife of action; it can brake, deter, or stimulate a character.

Obstacles can be posed internally by the character, or externally by other characters.

Sidebar: The Actor and the Target

I recently purchased "The Actor and the Target" by Declan Donnellan, I director I know little about but regard highly. Just wanted to share some excerpts from the introduction that hopefully you might find helpful.

-Michael

13: ...this is not a book about how to act; this is a book that may help when you feel blocked in your acting.

16: Rather than claim that ‘x’ is a more talented actor than ‘y’, it is more accurate to say that ‘x’ is less blocked than ‘y’.

17: When acting flows, it is alive, and so cannot be analysed; but problems in acting are connected to structure and control, and these can be isolated and disabled.

20:

1. All the actor’s research is part of the invisible work, while the performance is part of the visible work.

2. The audience must never see the invisible work.

3. The rehearsal comprises all the invisible work and passages of visible work.

4. The performance consists only of the visible work.

21: The actor needs to accept the senses’ limitations in order for the imagination to run free. The actor relies utterly on the senses; they are the first stage in our communication with the world. The imagination is the second.

21-22: The imagination is the capacity to make images... Only the imagination can interpret what our senses relay to our bodies. It is imagination that enables us to perceive. Effectively, nothing in the world exists for us until we perceive it... Without our ability to make images we would have no means of accessing the outside world. The senses crowd the brain with sensations, the imagination sweats both to organise these sensations as images and also to perceive meaning in these images. We forge the world within our heads, but what we perceive can never be the real world; it is always an imaginative re-creation.