Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda

when you know what it is to be alive.
    Whenever they ask me to talk to young people who are learning about the theater, I go, hoping to find the words that explain what makes this happen to me. I’m hoping, of course, that it might happen to them, too.
    I don’t try to teach them acting. I’m not so sure I
can
teach. Once, when I was doing a play in London, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art asked me to come and talk to their kids. The night before, I went to sleep thinking of what I’d say. As usual, I wanted to tell them something they’d remember forever. And when I sat down in front of them, I said, “I’m going to tell you something you’ll never forget. It’s an acronym: A. C. T.” And then for an hour I spelled out what each of those letters meant. The only problem is that I haven’t any idea now what I told them. As a memory aid, it seems to have been a disaster. “A” might have stood for dramatic action, and I think “C” was concentration, but what could “T” have been? “Try Not to Forget Your Lines”? I don’t think I’m a teacher.
    But I do like to infect people with enthusiasm. I’m avid about being avid.
    So in 1998, during the run of
Art,
when Victor and Fred and I were having this extraordinary experience of utter and total connection, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts asked me to talk to their graduating class, I went.
    The academy had a special place in my heart, but not because I ever went there.

    Forty years ago when I was starting out as an actor, I wanted to enroll at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts as a student, but I couldn’t afford the tuition. I couldn’t really afford the bus fare to get down there. I also had the misguided idea that if I trained as an actor, the training would somehow rob me of my natural genius. So as a result, I was self-taught, and it took an extra ten or twenty years to get rid of some of the bad habits and pretentious mannerisms I had, many of which came from my natural genius.

    I didn’t want to swamp them all at once with talk of ecstasy, so I noodled for a while on the edges.

    I think I would offer just one or two little suggestions. One has to do with energy. Laurence Olivier said that the actor’s job is to supply the audience with energy—and some people think he might have been overly generous in that area, sometimes giving us more than our money’s worth. But energy is a fact of nature. Nothing takes place without energy. On the stage, just as in the rest of nature, there’s no chemistry without energy. But, as in science, it has to be appropriate and sufficient. It has to be genuine, truthful. The energy some actors avoid is the fake, actorish energy of a century ago. But it’s not necessary for us to mute our energy. Muted energy comes off as a form of stage fright, and it often
is.
Instead of muting it, we need to tune it to the right frequency.
    We ought to avoid underacting with the same determination with which we avoid overacting. It’s just as boring. In fact, the greatest pleasure onstage comes from being able to drop acting altogether and just zero in on the other person and on what you want from them and, given everything your character is capable of, get it in the best way you can.

    Then I got a little closer to the real thrill of the thing.

    People have been analyzing acting for at least a couple of centuries now and sometimes arguing about the best way to do it. The debate is often divided between a view of acting as an internal process and an external one. But I don’t know if the good actors I’ve worked with are that much different from one another. One way or another, we all seem to get transformed by our imaginations. When we’re cooking, something happens deep in our brains that affects us profoundly. Sometimes it happens as a result of studying the psychology of the character, and sometimes it’s just putting on the clothes. Suddenly, there’s a glorious moment where acting falls away and