Richard Maxwell Project

I know I’m not alone when I say I found Mondays lesson hard (well, at least I sincerely hope I‘m not). But reading the comments below from Naomi, Soph and Simon has helped quite a bit in my understanding of what other angles we can try coming from in order to achieve this “style” of “acting”.

Even so, this is still my problem; these air quotes I find myself having to use to correctly describe what we are trying to do. I find Richard Maxwell’s plays interesting and funny yet I cannot get to grips with his (what I find) contradictory “directing style”.

My major problem comes from some things Richard Maxwell has said in comparison with what we have learnt and seen so far of the NYC players performances.He says:

My feeling is it’s already real because you’re doing it. It’s not another reality that you’re trying to create. You’re seeing what happens in the moment, which is, for me, the highest reality.

The reason I’m finding this a difficult statement to get my head around is because when I talk, when I’m “doing something real”, I’m pretty sure I don’t sound monotone, that I use emotion in my voice and as far as I can remember I move quite a bit too. To me, this style he is going for isn’t “real”. I do understand he wants to take away “the performance” actors instinctively try to create in trying to sound like real people, but surely stripping away emotion is in no way reality and definitely does not make the actors sound like real people...

This is where I can’t wait till we can see a performance of the NYC players in action so we can hopefully get the hang of this technique ourselves. I hope the confusion will lift and we will be able to see the reality that was in the words all along and not in what we try to “act”.

Heather D