“Forming a Practice of Hope” is a monthly guide that will be published throughout the 2025 Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church. It is designed to spark a personal spiritual practice that is flexible and doable and is meant to be a road map that examines dynamics of the creative life and spiritual life. Read the other monthly guides here.
If answering the question “What do I want?” gets the actor to name the objective, then answering the question What do I do to get what I want?” gives the action. Hebrews 11 begins “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” We can think of what we hope for as the objective and faith as what empowers us to make it a reality, to put it into action.
The fun part for the actor or for any creative person can be trying out a hundred different possibilities and then deciding what best suits the moment.
Some actions are deliberate and conscious, some are immediate reflex responses to the want or the need, and a person may not even realize what they are doing until they have already engaged in the action. What all actions have in common is they are focused, in one manner or another, of achieving the objective. The fun part for the actor or for any creative person can be trying out a hundred different possibilities and then deciding what best suits the moment.
Eventually the objective and the action will work together in what Konstantin Stanislavski — a Russian actor, director and producer known known for developing the theory of acting called the Stanislavski system — calls the “score” of a role: the symphony of wants and actions that play the character each night in performance. It’s important to notice the things that allow us to try different actions and also the things that cut off action or make us feel stuck.
Recognize that doing something intentional is always stepping forward in hope.
In rehearsal, try to maximize free access to the want, and let the action follow from the impulse. Like the score of a piece of music, where different phrases and movements have different durations and colors, so the score of a role will have actions of different lengths and tactics. Dramatic action is engaging for an audience when a character is totally committed to finding the right action to achieve the objective. An actor doing this is going through different actions to get closest to the desired effect . Each moment eventually has to be crafted for performance. Too many actions can confuse the throughline of actions, and too few can make the action stall.
In rehearsal, we generate as many as possible, making sure that we remain flexible enough to let go of any actions that really interfere with the scene rather than supporting it. When does an action change? When something else is needed. This usually shows itself in two ways: 1) When it is clear that the current action is not getting you what you want, or 2) When you have achieved the objective and a new objective takes its place. A good director will be on the lookout for the shifts that make the scene most engaging and will accompany the actor in the investigation of many possible actions.
When does an action change? When something else is needed.
Often a young artist will get in the way by judging. A course of action is suggested or tried out, and the investigation is stopped too soon with a comment like “this character would never do that.” Leave decisions like that for later, and accept the sad truth that in face of some of our most immediate and most pressing wants there is very little that a human being will NOT do. The dark comedy “Burn After Reading” seems to be a veritable study in rash actions that destroy lives, all spurred by one character’s obsessive want for cosmetic surgery.
Try a variety of actions for the same end. Have fun and have courage as you explore and leave the sorting out for later. Recognize that doing something intentional is always stepping forward in hope.
Life story:
The Jesuit Media Lab holds an annual summit, a yearly meeting of artists, writers and creative practitioners, who use some aspect of Ignatian spirituality as a guide in their creative work. I was inspired by the number of ways in which the idea of action and committing to intentional action were explored and reinforced.
One of my colleagues, Steve Givens, reminded me about a wonderful documentary about the folk singer Harry Chapin. Its title was one of Chapin’s best known sayings: “When in Doubt Do Something.” Another colleague, John Dougherty, while riffing on the steps of “Lectio Divina” and applying it to a spiritually reflective look at film, stated that after the four steps of this practice are completed, there is still a final step “action.”
Even in our daily work together, each day included some component of action in our work. In looking back on all the concrete examples of actions we embarked on together and in noticing the fruit that these actions produced, I found myself trusting in action’s ability to spark hope in any practice.
Work Story:
I’ve had the great privilege to work for several years on “Fragments of a Greek Trilogy.” The original production was developed by director Andrei Serban, composer Elizabeth Swados and the actors of the Great Jones Repertory of La MaMa. It was the hope of Ellen Stewart, the founder of La MaMa to create a new kind of theatrical experience that was not dependent on words to tell the story. Ellen’s vision was to have a kind of theatre where people from all over the world could stand side by side and experience the story in a shared way.
To do this, they began with ancient languages that no one spoke, and eventually for “The Trojan Women,” Elizabeth composed a language based on the sounds of many different languages. By removing a cognitive understanding of words, the process made the actors work on conveying the essential action of each scene in other ways.
The language of the play was the language of actions, and the words became music that underscored and supported each action. It didn’t matter to the audience that they did not understand the meaning of the words, the actions were enough to engage them, and to tell the story in a way that was clear … at least enough for The New York Times to say “no words were needed.”
When we performed in Korea, a man who saw the show recognized a group of us on the street the next day. He spoke no English and we spoke no Korean. He came over to us very excitedly and said the name of the show pointing to us as if to confirm that we were the same people he had seen the night before, and we nodded yes. Then he conveyed his experience to us without a shared spoken language. He pointed to himself, placed his hand over his heart and fluttered it, and then brought his hands to his face and traced several lines from his eyes down his cheeks. We understood each other quite well.
Further investigation:
Stanislavski lays out the process of establishing the “score” according to objectives and actions in his book “Creating a Role.” It outlines his process for analysis, emotional experience and physical embodiment of the action of a play. It’s a foundational work for understanding this kind of work with objectives and actions.
Suggestions:
- Go to a public place, bus, train or anywhere that you might be able to watch a conversation as it unfolds. See if you can see the different actions from moment to moment, the way they are laid out in the story above. Distinguish between the objective (what they want) and the various actions (what are they doing to get what they want).
- Select a page at random from your favorite novel or piece of literature and make a list of all of the active verbs used on one page. Look at the list in the sequence as you have written it down and see if you can imagine an objective or an aim for all of those actions or for any cluster of three or four actions.
- Go back to a role that you have done before, a script from a show you’ve done or a monologue you’ve prepared. See if you can keep the objectives that you decided on and try to pick a different set of actions that still aim at the same objective.
- Before you go to sleep, see if you can go over the day in your mind and list 10 significant actions you did that day. Keep a new list each day for several days and then see how the lists compare and contrast.
- Read prayerfully through Hebrews 11 and contemplate how the faith of each person named empowered them for actions that created hope for others.
- Recall a moment when you were at your best and a different moment when you were at your worst. Try to remember things that you did in these moments and then compare the actions.
- Listen to a symphony and imagine the music having an action. As the music changes from movement to movement or from phrase to phrase, name the action of each new section.
- Other suggestions: Watch a movie in another language without subtitles and see how much you can understand from the actions; repeat some of the suggestions for the previous section on objectives, this time noticing instead the actions people use to achieve their objectives.