Article
Role
Distance: On Stage and On the Merry-Go-Round
by
Robert Cohen
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall 2004
No issue in acting theory has been more discussed over the past
twenty-five centuries than whether an actor should simply manifest
his or her part through some sort of technical virtuosity, or
experience the role through a process of emotional self-transportation.
It is a dialectic Joseph Roach considers “the historic,
continuing, and apparently inexhaustible combat between technique
and inspiration in performance theory,” (25-26) and its
roots are indeed ancient. Plato, around 395 B.C., provides us
with a dialogue between Socrates and one Ion of Ephesus, a reciter
of rhapsodic poetry, in which the philosopher asks Ion if, while
publicly reciting his works, the performer is in his “right
mind,” or if his “soul” is rather transported,
“in ecstasy… among the persons or the places of
which you are speaking?” Ion answers that he is indeed
in a transported state, but then adds that he also looks down
from the stage at his spectators so as to “behold the
various emotions… stamped upon their countenances when
I am speaking” (Cole, 7-8). Swedish theorist Teddy Brunius
calls this “Ion’s hook” (15), suggesting that
the rhapsodist employed a double-consciousness, being ecstatic
and rational – and one might even say entrepreneurial
- at the same time. Martin Puchner locates this hook historically,
at the tipping point when the rhapsode “switches from
the third person to the first” and “rhapsodic diegesis
[narration, reportage] turns into the mimesis [imitation, embodiment]
performed by an actor” (22).
Beyond
these Attic sources, Ion’s hook is easy to trace through
oft-cited authors across the millennia – Horace and Quintilian
in the classical world, Denis Diderot’s “actor’s
paradox” in the Enlightenment, and virtually all present
day acting theorists. By the twentieth century, Ion’s
hook had re-emerged in the slightly altered form of the seemingly-polarized
theories put forward by the two towering director-theorists
of the age: Konstantin Stanislavsky in Russia and Bertolt Brecht
in Germany, with Stanislavsky famously promoting perezhivanie
(experiencing, or living the part) and Brecht counter-proposing
verfremdung (standing artfully distanced, estranged
or alienated from it). In the theatre world today, two full
generations after each man has died, actors and directors continue
to posit Ion’s dialectic as between modernist “Stanislavskian”
and “Brechtian” approaches.
This
dialectic, however, should not be limited merely to a consideration
of theatrical styles, for the distinction between experiencing
and estranging one’s “role” is a factor in
ordinary life-behavior as well as the theatre. Erving Goffman’s
notion of “role distance,” described in his 1961
essay under that title, defines a relationship between real-life
role experiencing and role estranging that has important implications
for acting. Goffman was not writing about theatre in this essay,
of course; he was employing a theatrical metaphor to describe
psychosocial behavior, just as he did in later books such as
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. But we can
usefully turn Goffman’s metaphor back upon its dramaturgical
source.
Role
distance is Goffman’s term for “actions which effectively
convey some disdainful detachment of the [real life]
performer from a role he is performing” (110, emphasis
and bracketed words added). And the author’s subsequent
discussion of this subject throws light upon the signifier (theatre)
as well as the signified (life). Goffman develops his idea after
observing children of various ages riding a merry-go-round.
Two year-olds, he discovers, cannot maintain sufficient “role
poise” to maintain physical, and hence emotional, security
under the multi-directional movement vectors the machine creates;
they therefore “find the prospect too much for them”
(106). Three and four year-olds, however, undertake the task
rapturously. “The task of riding a wooden horse is still
a challenge, but apparently a manageable one, inflating the
rider to his full extent with demonstrations of capacity.”
At three and four, “the rider throws himself into the
role in a serious way, playing it with verve and an admitted
engagement of all his faculties” (106). Goffman concludes
that for this age group “doing is being, and
what was designed as a ‘playing at’ is stamped with
serious realization” (106, emphasis added). This merger
of doing and being Goffman terms an “embracement”
of the performer’s “role.”
But
at age five, everything changes again. “To be a merry-go-round
horse rider is now apparently not enough, and this fact must
be demonstrated out of dutiful regard for one’s own
character” (107, emphasis added). By five, “irreverence
begins, and the child “leans back, stands on the saddle,
holds on to the horse’s wooden ear, and says by his actions:
‘Whatever I am, I’m not just someone who can barely
manage to stay on a wooden horse.’” The rider is
hence “apologizing,” not for “some minor untoward
event that has cropped up during the interaction, but the whole
role” (107). “Whether this skittish behavior is
intentional or unintentional, sincere or affected, correctly
appreciated by others present or not, it constitutes a wedge
between the individual and his role, between doing and being,”
Goffman concludes (107/8). This wedge is role distance.
Role distance expands from age five forward. By seven and eight,
Goffman finds, the child “not only disassociates himself
self-consciously from the kind of horseman a merry-go-round
allows him to be but also finds that many of the devices that
younger people use for this are now beneath him. He rides no-hands,
gleefully chooses a tiger or a frog for a steed, clasps hands
with a mounted friend across the aisle. He tests limits”
(108). By eleven and twelve the ride has become solely “a
lark, a situation for mockery” (109). Adult riders carry
role distance even further: “Riding close by their threatened
two-and-a-half year-old, [they] wear a face that carefully demonstrates
that they do not perceive the ride as an event in itself, their
only present interest being their child” (109). As does
the adult who runs the machine: “Not only does he show
the ride itself is not – as a ride – an event to
him, but he also gets off and on and around themoving platform
with a grace and ease that can only be displayed by safely taking
what for children and even adults would be chances” (109).
Goffman extends his notion beyond children and the merry-go-round,
describing role distance in adult performance, both professional
and social. The operating room surgeon sings obscene ditties
while wielding the scalpel so as to assure co-physicians and
staff that beneath his professional role rests an emotionally
stable human being. The Manhattan waitress smirks to show that
beneath her apron is “really” a yet-unsung poet
or stage performer. “Know that I am not who I
appear to be” is the message such “distancy”
(as Goffman sometimes calls it) telegraphs. Role distance may
also be employed to preempt criticism. The mayor tossing out
the first ball of the season does so in a deliberately cockeyed
fashion, hoping to sidetrack the crowd’s realization that
his fast ball isn’t what it used to be. The diffident
suitor seeking to impress his date at a French restaurant swirls
the sommelier’s wine sample with a mockingly supercilious
air, feigning disdain for a tasting ritual which makes him uncomfortable.
Such behaviors demonstrate the prevalence of role distance in
everyday lives: we do not wish to be seen either as locked into
- or as failing to live up to - our put-on adult roles.
It
is almost impossible to overstate the importance of Goffman’s
findings to the theorization, pedagogy and evaluation of acting.
If, as it is colloquially said, actors are basically children,
Goffman proves the point – at least for those in the Stanislavskian
model - going so far as to locate the precise age of such juvenility:
it is three to four years old, when a child fully embraces “play”
and melds “doing and being.” Goffman elaborates
the three year-old’s role embracement in terms that describe
the Stanislavskian dramatic ideal: “To embrace a role
is to disappear completely into the virtual self available in
the situation, to be fully seen in terms of the image, and to
confirm expressively one’s acceptance of it. To embrace
a role is to be embraced by it” (106). Goffman’s
three-year old merry-go-round rider thus provides not only a
perfect illustration of the Russian’s perezhivanie,
but of the of the celebrated American acting teacher Sanford
Meisner’s fundamental goal for the actor: “living
truthfully under imaginary circumstances” (Meisner, 16).
Conversely,
the role distance that Goffman discovers in the five year-old
succinctly describes the very verfremdung or estrangement
that Brecht sought in his epic theatre performances. If the
three year-old lives the role, the five year-old coolly presents
and critiques it. Such demonstrations of distancy, Goffman asserts,
“allow one to show that something of oneself lies
outside the constraints of the moment and outside the role”
(114, emphasis added). Brecht applied this notion deliberately,
asking his actors to “demonstrate” and “critique”
their roles rather than to incarnate or inflesh them. The “Brechtian
actor,” as John Willett describes, expresses a “socially
critical” view of his or her own performance, which “emphasizes
that it is his (actor’s) own account” of the character
performed (139).
Goffman’s
findings make clear that the difference between perezhivanie
and verfremdung is not merely a theatrical dialectic
but a direct parallel of a totally normal process in human maturation:
role distance and role embracement being equally real-world
behaviors of which Stanislavskian and Brechtian performance
models are their respective stage-world equivalents. Neither
acting model can then be absolutely prioritized as more “real”
or “authentic” than the other: the ideal Brechtian
actor, no less than her Stanislavskian counterpart, performs
a role authentically (i.e., in a true to life manner)
even when showing that, as Goffman asserts, “something
of [her actual] self lies outside…the moment and outside
the role.” A Brechtian actor is therefore “authentic,”
under proper circumstances, because estrangement itself
is authentic, and being “outside… the moment”
can be as true to life as being “in the moment.”
Understanding
the real-life aspects of these terms can both clarify and demystify
several important issues encountered in acting theory, acting
pedagogy and – most vexingly – in the rehearsal
room. These are often simply described in overripe moral terms,
such as breaches of an actor’s “honesty” or
“sincerity.” This, however, obscures the important
psychosociological – as well as aesthetic - distinctions
between embracement and estrangement in both role and actor.
In realistic plays, for example, role-distanced performance
is usually what acting teachers and directors call, simply,
“bad acting.” It certainly is bad acting in these
circumstances, of course, because outside of a theatre of deliberate
verfremdung such estrangement reveals an actor’s
inability (or refusal) to engage fully in “play”
– particularly the sort of play comparable to the “child’s
play” that lies at the heart of the “adult play”
of acting (in plays). But it is bad acting of a very special
case. We see it routinely in the high school rehearsal room,
for example, when teenagers erupt in giggles when asked to perform
as characters they see as noticeably unlike themselves –
as, for example, more sophisticated, brutal, or sentimental
as they would wish to appear to their classmates, or as having
a different gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation than their
own. Being asked to “put on” what they consider
affected postures, accents, mannerisms, or costumes may throw
them into awkwardly-suppressed embarrassment, which they seek
to cover by covertly critiquing the very behaviors they are
asked to embrace, thus showing off “cool” behaviors
distinct from the “hotter” ones they have been asked
to play. But even experienced actors may, for various reasons,
find themselves unable to fully participate in such dramatic
play, and become physically stiff and vocally monotonic when
asked to do so, thus undermining their own performances. Such
persons are not best described as simply “dishonest”
or “insincere.” Rather, they are holding on to Goffman’s
“dutiful regard for [their] own [real-life] character,”
and are, as it were, unconsciously signaling that they are not
really foppish or female or brutal or sentimental or
upper-class - or indeed anything other than their everyday selves.
Role embracement, after all, may carry with it the perceived
threat of identity effacement, as well as of accusations of
deceit and hypocrisy (a word derived from the Greek hypocrites
- or “actor”). Addressing this in the rehearsal
hall becomes problematical when treated simply as a moral failure
– an actor’s lack of honesty or sincerity - or as
an ontological breakdown, described as the actor’s inability
to “be real” (the popular actors’ term in
the 1950s), or to “commit to the role” (60s), to
“get in the here and now” (70s), to “be in
the moment” (80s), to “authentically experience
the part” (90s), or to “own the role” (00s).
Such critiques of performance portraying “the real”
against – by implication - “the false” both
misstate the technical distinction and overstate the moral or
ontological one. What is necessary, in such cases, is not for
the actor to progress into a generic and ill-defined world of
“reality” but to regress into the role embracement
of the three year-old. This is neither moral or ontological.
It is rather a matter of rediscovering the art of play within
the art of playing.
Since
it is “real,” role distance exists even in the realistic
theatre when a dramatic character exhibits it – as does,
for example, Reverend Tooker as described by Tennessee Williams
in this stage direction in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “Tooker
appears in the gallery doors, his head slightly, playfully,
fatuously cocked, with a practiced clergyman’s smile,
sincere as a birdcall blown on a hunter’s whistle.”
An actor playing Tooker in a production of this play –
whose central theme is ‘mendacity’ – is thereby
asked to act Reverend Tooker’s self-mocking distance from
the shows of piety his professional role demands. Similarly,
an actor playing the prince in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
might be expected to play his opening scene in a state of role
distance – distinguishing his being from his doing –
as he sarcastically mocks his official court-appointed role.
“Sullenness, muttering, irony, joking, and sarcasm may
all allow one to show that something of oneself lies outside
the constraints of the moment and outside the role within whose
jurisdiction the moment occurs,” Goffman observes (114),
in words that clearly may be applied to the Shakespeare’s
Danish Prince as well as Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and
disaffected teenage sons or daughters everywhere.
But it is with Brecht’s notion of verfremdungeffekt
that role distance takes, as it were, center stage, providing
an encompassing frame for the epic stage productions in which
the theorist/playwright/director asked the actor to distance
herself from her role in service to an “historicizing
theatre,” where “an actress must not make the sentence
her own affair, she must hand it over for criticism, she must
help us to understand its causes and protest” (97-98).
This places role distance directly in the actor’s hands
as actor, not as character, and not even as actor-on-behalf-of
character. In Brecht, the actor places his own person
into the staged proceedings in order to present “his own
(actor’s) account, view, version” (139) of the play’s
incidents and actions.
Indeed,
to Brecht, it was the audience that was to be the child.
And, as Brecht surprisingly posits, a child on a merry-go-round!
For
the spectator wants to be in possession of quite definite
sensations, just as a child does when it climbs on to one
of the horses on a roundabout: the sensation of pride that
it can ride, and has a horse; the pleasure of being carried,
and whirled past other children; the adventurous daydreams
in which it pursues others or is pursued, etc. In leading
the child to experience all this the degree to which its wooden
seat resembles a horse counts little, nor does it matter that
the ride is confined to a small circle. The one important
point for the spectators in these houses is that they should
be able to swap a contradictory world for a consistent one,
one that they scarcely know for one of which they can dream
(188).
Brecht, therefore, not only reverses the “ontological
age” of the Stanislavskian actor from child to adult,
he also reverses the audience’s ontological age from adult
to child. It’s a double-reversal.
But
if Brecht’s audience is composed of children, they are
“children of the scientific age” (204) and must
be addressed empirically, by “actor-scientists,”
skilled at “self-observation” and the “artistic
act of self-alienation” (93). The estranged acting that
Brecht desires is not simply “bad acting.” The Verfremdungseffekt,”
Brecht asserts, “can only be got by long training (98).
What can propel such training to a good start is the understanding
that estranged performance is not simply a variant acting technique,
but an outgrowth of the normal human phenomenon we have been
discussing. This requires relearning how to act as a teenager,
and how to present a role while also maintaining Goffman’s
“dutiful regard for one’s own character.”
The helpful aspect of Goffman’s teaching is that we already
know how to do this – we have been doing it since we were
five. The only trick is remembering how we did it,
and why, and how it felt.
It is also helpful, in this regard, to recognize that Goffman
did not limit himself to placing role embracement and role distance
simply as absolutely bi-polar performative behaviors but rather
as disparate points on a continuum of real-world self-identification,
on which we can find discrete gradations of role distance appearing
at age five, eight, eleven, and adult years. Brechtian on-stage
estrangement can likewise be incrementalized across a continuum
ranging from “short” to “long” distance.
The stage utterances of Shen Te in Brecht’s Good Person
of Szechuan, for example, range from conversational-like
prose dialogue, to singing, to poetic recitation, to audience
interaction, to direct address. Indeed, an actor playing Shen
Te will probably wish to differentiate points on the role distance
continuum even within one-on-one dialogue scenes with other
characters: in the direction of role embracement in scenes with
Yang Sun, her lover, and towards role estrangement in her more
political dialogues with the capitalist Shu Fu, in which the
actor playing Shen Te, in Brechtian fashion, would retain that
“something of oneself” that Goffman sees as crucial
to real-world distance and Brecht sees as a need to “protest”
her role and “hand it over for criticism” (per above),
thus conveying Brecht’s – and the actor’s
– own political commentary and perspective.
Brecht did not invent role estrangement, of course. Nor did
Ion. We can see it throughout Aristophanes, the world’s
first postmodern playwright, whose characters frequently (if
not always) stand aside from their pretended real-life counterparts
to create a theatricalized reality that doubles the phenomenological
one - through exaggerated masks and phalloi, asides and pratfalls,
and particularly in the mocking, metatheatrical parabasis
(author’s address, though probably played by an actor)
with its audience-enchanting self-ridicule. Role distancing
– specifically by mocking one’s theatrical and hence
fictive identity - is also implicit when dramatic characters
self-reference their “actoriality” in any theatrical
era, as they do, for example, in Shakespeare (“If this
were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable
fiction,” says Fabian in Twelfth Night), Shaw
(“Sooner than that, I would stoop to the lowest depths
of my profession… and be an actress,” says Lina
in Misalliance) and Beckett (“I’m warming
up for my last soliloquy,” says Hamm in Endgame).
So, for an actor seeking work in the Western dramatic repertory,
mastering role distance is as essential as mastering role embracement.
Taking
control of what is essentially a natural process, however, is
no simple task; one doesn’t easily reverse (or accelerate)
one’s lifelong psychobiological process of maturation.
Developing the acting skills needed to move freely along the
role embracement/distance continuum requires, at minimum, an
understanding of the conditions of its emergence in everyday
life, where it is not merely a theatrical technique but a survival
tool. For the five year-old, role distance establishes (and
signals) independence and maturity, distinguishing today’s
child from yesterday’s infant and offering the emerging
youngster acceptance in his or her simultaneously emerging peer
society. Goffman’s findings confirm the obvious: the five
year-old seeks to leave childish innocence – and more
importantly the impression of childish innocence –
behind. Children therefore adore birthdays and similar rites
of passage that mark seemingly-irreversible advances in power,
dignity and prestige. A drive to maturity makes pre-teens want
to smoke, drink, curse and dress/undress sexily, all in efforts
to distance themselves from the babies they once were and compete
in the group they wish to join. “You’re so immature!”
is an insult of the highest order in a pre-teen society. Role
distancing surfaces as a disdain for one’s infancy and
testifies to an advancing social position and an adult (or neo-adult)
authority. No wonder it is psychologically problematical for
actors to reverse this maturation process when asked to embrace
roles in a childlike “play” environment, when they
have been struggling so hard to live such roles in
an adult, existential world. The process of human maturation
process is virtually an etiology of “bad acting”
disease, at least as viewed in its Stanislavskian model, and
curing this disease is a tall order.
How
does the actor give up this socially-desirable estrangement
in order to fully embrace, in the Stanislavskian sense, a purely
fictive stage role? And, conversely, how does a Brechtian actor
present that “something of oneself” while simultaneously
engaging in simulations of human conversation that even in Brecht’s
plays must be at least credible enough, on a human level, to
generate dramatic engagement and momentum to climax? A pedagogy
of childlike role embracement has been integrated into actor
training since at least the 1950s with the employment of actual
children’s games (e.g. “Come Over Red Rover”)
into the beginning acting curriculum and rehearsal hall; this
movement, once ridiculed in both academic and professional quarters,
gained both academic legitimacy and international currency with
the studies and practices of Viola Spolin and her followers,
including both teachers and directors, who have invented specific
“theatre games” and playful improvisations to suffuse
the notion of child’s play into adult playing. Other pedagogical
techniques include the “Round Robin” classroom acting
exercise, where multiple (but differing) scenes are performed
simultaneously by an entire acting group, several times in immediate
succession in a single room, thus creating a “playground
atmosphere” in which, after conquering an inevitable initial
level of distraction, actors can more fully embrace their “in
play” actions without the greater distraction of an “audience”
to whom they feel a need to indicate their real-life (adult)
persona.
And
the “long training” that Brecht considered necessary
to properly perform the verfremdungeffekt is best achieved
by a full consideration of the root causes of role distance,
thereby permitting the actor to develop this capability through
disciplined intentionality rather than falling back on simply
the “bad acting” caused by ontological insecurity.
A starting exercise for exploring role distance in life is simply
to go back to Goffman’s first observation, and ride, with
some friends, on the local merry-go-round, running the age gamut
from three to thirteen and thereby spiraling from embracement
to estrangement on a whirling carousel.
Addressing both the high potential and the crucial problems
of both employing and reducing role distance in acting performances
requires addressing complex and largely disguised theoretical
issues of social, cultural, and age-related identity. But the
understanding that follows has the opportunity of delivering,
in addition to a theoretical extrapolation of Ion’s hook,
extremely useful tools for making sound dramaturgical distinctions
and uncovering root causes of fundamental acting problems at
clear-headed (and refreshingly non-moralistic and non-psychiatric)
levels.
1 Diderot’s Paradox du Comédien
was written in 1773, though not published until 1830.
2
In practice, of course, the two directors were neither single-minded
in their views, nor as adversely-oriented as this distillation
of their theories would suggest.
3-Published in Goffman, Encounters. Except where noted, all
page references in this essay are to this book.
4 As by director Alfred Hitchcock’s remark that “All
actors are children” (New York Times, April 11, 1999)
and actor Paul Newman’s “The best actors are children,
so to that extent that you can sustain and maintain that childlike
part of your personality is probably the best part of acting”
(darkhorizons.com interview, July 1, 2002).
5 “I don’t believe you!” Stanislavsky would
reportedly thuner to his actors from the back of the rehearsal
hall, reducing them to tears.
6 Attacks on actors throughout history for being professional
liars, hypocrites and monsters is fully explored in Barish,
Jonas, The Antitheatrical Prejudice.
7 Likewise the title character of this play alternates displaying
an “image of her playing boys’ games as a child”
with one that “giggles with a hand fluttering at her throat
and her breast and her long throat arched,” then “pretends
not to understand, cocks her head and raises her brows as if
the pantomimic performance was completely mystifying to her,”
then one that, looking in the mirror, “answers herself
in a different voice which is high, thin, mocking: ‘I
am Maggie the Cat!’” The self-mocking, self-theatricalizing
roles are all distancing strategies to cover “Maggie’s”
unwillingness to embrace her wifely ‘role’ as “Margaret”
in this classic drama of American realism.
8 Not to mention in Pirandello, Genet, or Ionesco. In grosser
form, role distance was acutely evidenced in American television
shows during the so-called “golden age of live television”
by celebrity-performers such as Dean Martin, Carol Burnett and
Milton Berle, who, during televised skits, would openly break
character and collapse into fits of (largely fake) hysterical
laughter, as if to demonstrate their intellectual superiority
to the puerile dramatic material they were delivering.11 10
And the Eastern as well. In kabuki, audience members encourage
their favorite actors in a response called kakegoe, shouting
the actor’s yago (“shop name”) in appreciation
for his execution of a classic piece of stage business.
9 See Spolin, Viola, Improvisation for the Theatre, 1963 and
1985 respectively.
10 Actors in this exercise are asked to accept the fiction (even
where improbable) that scenes going on around them are simply
other people living their lives, and that the fact that one
is having a conversation with another character doesn’t
mean that life elsewhere has come to a dead halt, as is the
fiction of the theatre.
