The Actor and the Play: What is your Job?

Now and then I would tell my friends that I might become a writer. And sometimes someone would reply: "What do you have to say?"

I had nothing to say; it was just something I could do sitting down [Mee contracted polio at the age of 14]. It wasn't until years later I realized that writing is not about saying something, it is about discovering something.
(Charles Mee, A Nearly Normal Life, brackets and italics mine)

Mee isn't alone in gaining such insight about the nature of his work. Consider another highly creative endeavor: science. What does a scientist do?

The significance and joy in my science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, 'So that's how God did it.' My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan.
(Henry "Fritz" Schaefer, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia).

and

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
(Sir William Bragg).

If you were to come to Dr. Schaefer, as a potential student, and say I'm interested in learning how to interpret data from the energetics and spectroscopy of condensed matter using wave-function-based methods, he would probably "get" what you meant by "interpret," but he would probably correct you by saying that what you really want to do is discover new patterns and relationship in the data, discover how they might help answer the major field questions of the day, because that's exactly and precisely what you would be doing.

Least you think science is just about discovering facts -- think about that second quote above. When you were a young child, you looked up, and saw, day after day, the sun and stars rise in the east and set in the west. That was an observable fact.

And you probably thought -- wow, the sun and stars are moving around us in a big circle! Later, you would learn to think about that observation, that "fact," in a different way -- in a way that is more in alignment with the true nature of, as Dr. Schaefer puts it, "God's Plan." That is the point of science. Formally, this is exactly what Copernicus did: combining mathematics, physics, and cosmology into a new discovery of how the heavens move as they do.

And the job of an actor is -- probably non-intuitively -- much like that of the scientist:

Polanyi was a well–known physical chemist in England who later became even better known as a philosopher. In The Way of Discovery, he makes the point that scientists are not robots, mechanically filling up notebooks with data and coming to inevitable conclusions. To put it another way, science is not just an exercise in advanced logical positivism.

Rather, Polanyi argues, there is much of the artist in the good scientist, and he or she approaches the laboratory with a wealth of presuppositions and intuitions about how things should be.

I can confirm Polanyi's thesis with an example from my own research. In 1978, one of the most distinguished organic chemists in the world suggested that it was just a matter of time before someone would make the cyclopropyne molecule. Since cyclopropyne would contain a carbon–carbon triple bond in a three–membered ring, my own chemical intuition was very skeptical about such a suggestion. Guided by this presupposition, we were able to demonstrate that cyclopropyne does not involve a triple bond.
(Henry "Fritz" Schaefer).

The scientists' job is to discover what is OUT THERE. And what is OUT THERE is independent and separate from us -- it isn't what we want it to be, hope it to be, wish it to be, "think" it to be. It is what it is.

A play is The Universe, and your JOB is to discover what IT is. It's NOT subjective. It's NOT arbitrary.

Our job is not to get in the way of the playwright's words. We're in big trouble when you hear actors talk about themselves as 'artists.' We're more like priestesses and priests. We take the word from the playwright to the populace. If you don't get in the way too much, the audience will understand exactly what the playwright wants them to know. If you start bringing your own life into it -- saying, "Oh, my God, if I dug deeply enough, I can remember a time when I was so hurt...blah, blah, blah.' That's fine. Write your own play. (Zoë Caldwell, I Will Be Cleopatra: An Actress's Journey)

I've posted a lot about how to go about discovering what IS there on the page: You can read one of this blogs most popular posts on the subject here:

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