Another Sample of MSK’s Insight on her Award Day

 

Every truly great actor whom I know personally possesses something that all of the just-almost-great actors whom I personally know utterly lack.  (I must tread carefully now.)  Actors like Marya Sea Kaminski and William Salyers, with whom I inevitably compare her, nurse a kernel of contempt for the charms of their craft.  Or is it contempt?  Disdain? Skepticism may be kinder, if not more accurate.  They quietly eschew that most of loathsome habit of actors, self-back-patting.

SELF-BACK-PATTING ACTOR: “How many people do you know who can do what I do on stage?”

EVERYONE ELSE: “Well… not many, but perhaps that’s a blessing?

Great actors do not celebrate themselves.  Great actors, perhaps to a fault, don’t celebrate much at all in the theatre (unless, of course, the character they are playing is celebrating).  They are almost always too busy, too focused, keeping their heads down and digging deeper.   They understand that the show is not them, but that, counter-intuitively, they are in fact the show.  And thus people keep coming back to see them, or not them, per se, but them breathing, them giggling, them preening prancing prattling, sloppily kissing, them dying and killing, them living.  Or put another way, them [anything but acting].

 

One of the reasons Marya is such a pleasure to work with is that she quietly leans her brain more deeply into the art than most of her colleagues.  Evidence, is it, you need?  This from her current Stranger feature explaining why she was given this year’s Genius Award for Theatre.

…that's the fear that people have been talking about with the Method since the beginning," she says. "I can think about my dog getting hit and get teary—until the day thinking about my dog getting hit doesn't get me teary anymore. And then I've failed in two ways: I've failed to bring an honest emotion to the stage and I've numbed myself to that personal experience."

Simply. . .

Briliant.

That's Marya.

Comments

[Josh Parks]

Good. I never connected with method stuff. Messes me up when I try in fact. To this day. What has worked for me has always seemed analogous to music. You connect with producing the sound (i.e., speaking the words), inform that actual moment and connect with that. You would never tell a musician to conjure up a memory to bring emotion to a piece he or she is playing now. Would you? It makes no sense to me. If the words and the other actors and the world of the play aren't making you feel what you need to feel then something is wrong isn't it?

[William Salyers]

You're kind, Paul. I can't pretend to have achieved the heights you and Ms.Kaminski have scaled; I'm no Genius.

[Paul Mullin]

Josh, I still have to write my essay about actors who insist on "feeling it" whether or not the audience does.

Mr. Salyers, I couldn't agree less. When it comes to "contempt, disdain and skepticism" you are a genius without compare.