"She simply didn’t act. Or so it appeared. She wasn’t an actress; she was a tired, silly, irritating, touching, fraught, aging woman with no self-awareness, no censor for her ceaseless flow of words, no sense of the effect she was having on her children—or the audience. It was as if you were listening in on the stream of her consciousness. Her self-pitying yet valiant voice, reflecting both the desperation of her situation and the faded remnants of her Southern-belle charm, was maddening, yet somehow endearing. You wanted to hug her, to swat her, to run from her—in other words, you reacted to her just the way her son, Tom, did.
The crucial thing was the absolute naturalism: her acting wasn’t “realistic”—that is, like real life. It was real life. The production was in some ways stagey, but there wasn’t a touch of staginess about her. She knew exactly what she was doing, though; she just didn’t want you to know what she was doing. What she deplored, she once wrote, was when “you can see the acting.”
This is from an article by Robert Gottlieb about the original production of "The Glass Menagerie" which featured the great American actress, Laurette Taylor, as Amanda. When students ask me how they can improve, I think I need to ask them, "Where can you go from here?" For some of us, it is the mechanics -- you need to speak slowly and clearly and think about projecting your voice throughout the theatre. But the beauty of being an artist is that you can always strive to reach further, to understand more clearly, to find the joy in what we do, to push ourselves to dig deeper and to "hold the glass to nature". What great opportunities we have when we walk on stage!
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