Suit the Action to the Word: Acting and Preaching
What is the process by which a preacher’s encounter with God’s Word makes its way to our minds and hearts? The editors of this magazine have suggested that insights to this question may be found in the art of acting, and that’s where I come in. I am a Presbyterian elder, but when I was asked to preach a summer substitute sermon years ago — the first of hundreds of sermons — it was not because I was a minister, which I am not, or even because I was particularly theologically gifted, which I also am not.
No, the reason I was invited to preach was that I had experience in the theater as a playwright, director, pro¬ducer, technician, acting teacher, and, yes, actor. So the Rev. Ed Bockstiegel hoped I could be counted on not to bore the members of the congregation out of their minds. Clearly, as he saw it, a background in theater offers some advantages for a preacher.
Acting is what is often referred to as a “portable skill;” that is, the lessons of the craft are readily applied to other fields. An actor learns to deliver a performance on a deadline; the show, as we all know, must go on; and a preacher must deliver a sermon when it is due. An actor also learns to project, to use varying speeds of delivery, and to make eye contact (although usually not with the audience). How useful these traits can be to the preacher tackling the scripture readings! An actor learns to sense when an audience is restive; St. Paul, definitely not an actor, had some trouble on that account. (Acts 20:7–12)
Also, an actor learns to memorize lines, and a preacher would be well advised to know a sermon well enough not to read all of it. I heard Norman Vincent Peale in the pulpit many times in the 1970s, and resolved that if I ever had the opportunity to preach, I would imi¬tate his practice of speaking without using any written text at all. Because of my acting experience, I found this approach to be second nature.
But beyond these fairly self-evident techniques, act¬ing provides a unique perspective on preaching. There are many theories and styles of acting, of course. When I use the word, I refer to the mainstream body of tech¬nique first set down by Constantin Stanislavski, and later amplified in the United States and elsewhere by many other great teachers.
Acting has always been a controversial subject for the church. Some actors (the word is used today to refer to both women and men, incidentally) have been accepted by the church, as for example Shakespeare, who was so important to his parish that it actually buried him inside the sanctuary, rather than outside in the graveyard. Many other actors, though, have been treated more like Moliere, who despite the rigorously moral nature of his plays, was denied church burial altogether.
Some of the church’s negative attitude toward actors may be attributed to its suspicion of their reputedly las¬civious lifestyle, although in my experience people in theater have no worse morals than, say, members of Congress, and may in fact have better. But the church, which has its own problems with clerical lifestyles, may consider acting suspect also because what actors basical¬ly do is to pretend — that is, to fake or to lie for a living, something the church would hardly be likely to endorse. Is what actors do basically dishonest?
We might start by noting that the field of acting is full of paradoxes; this fact in itself might make a straight-thinking ecclesiastic suspicious. For example, many peo¬ple in theater, and the arts in general, are devoutly reli¬gious; also, many are extremely superstitious — and sometimes the same people are both. But the major par¬adox in acting, and the place where performance and preaching touch hands, is that an actor pretends to be someone else; and yet an actor also deals with truth, because an actor’s material is human behavior.
We might say that a preacher does not pretend to be someone else, but we know that that statement is not always true. I suspect that all of us who preach have at one time or other given in to the temptation of shifting into delivery styles that did not necessarily reflect how we felt at the moment, but that we knew would be effective with the congregations we were addressing. Any reason¬ably competent preacher knows how to get a congrega¬tion on its feet. If not, we can study the folks we see on TV and copy their more effective techniques. And, of course, we may have fallen once or more into the trap of preaching what we simply did not believe at the moment.
Any competent acting teacher will warn students that “working for an emotion,” that is, faking through a scene, is wrong, not necessarily in a moral sense, but because it leads to clichés, and gets in the way of genuine experience. When we read a script, for example, we see the places where characters get excited, and it seems sim¬ple to portray that excitement.. In fact, that is an extremely difficult thing to do, which is why truly good actors are rare. If actors try to “fake emotion,” they will end up with shouting, with forced tears, with clichés, and with dishonesty in the way they represent human beings.
Many people think that what I have just described is exactly what acting is — “pretending to be someone else.” But for either a preacher or an actor, to pretend not to be yourself is a terribly dangerous thing. For an actor, it leads to stereotyped performances. For preachers, it leads to the same, plus the knowledge that the sermon is fundamentally dishonest, a condition that over time can corrode the spirit.
Acting, properly understood, offers an alternative to the disastrous practice of faking. The basic question an actor asks is, “What would I do — under the circum¬stances of the play?” The question is not merely, “What would I do.” After all, audiences do not pay theater prices to see me; they can drop by my house to do that. Nor is the question merely, “What are the circumstances of the play?” This question by itself, as noted above, leads to faking.
Instead. an actor asks, “What do I do to respond to the circumstances of the play?” Likewise, the preacher asks, “What do I do to respond to the demands of the Word?” For both the actor and the preacher, the Word comes first — in the beginning, quite literally, is the Word. The actor’s impulse to grab the script, shake it, and squeeze the meaning out of it must be resisted, and so must the preacher’s impulse to make the text say what the preacher wants it to say. Instead, both the actor and the preacher must listen to the text, an activity that may require patience and time.
Ideally, an actor will never make any decisions about how to “act” a character. Instead, the actor will spend hours being exposed to what the text says, letting it move into the mind, allowing it to suggest possibilities and approaches, permitting it to lead. (A recent textbook on acting is titled Let The Role Act You.) An essential element in this process is relaxation; tension is always the enemy of good acting. A relaxed mind is an open mind, and an open mind will be able to hear what the play is “trying to say.” Meditation and prayer are often employed for this purpose by both actors and preachers.
The more an actor listens to a play and responds to it, the less he or she will need to make deliberate deci¬sions about what to do. The insights the play provides, added to the actor’s personal experience (what else is there for the actor to draw on?), tell the actor how to behave. The more the actor listens, without forcing con¬clusions, the better the results. The implications for preachers should be obvious.
Another essential technique an actor learns is to lis¬ten to other people, and to respond to them. This wis¬dom has always been embodied in the saying, “Acting is reacting,” and it is the primary focus of many acting tech¬niques, perhaps most notably that of the late Sanford Meisner. “Solo acting” is practically an oxymoron. Even in a soliloquy or monologue, an actor is always speaking to someone, even if that someone is invisible, and even if that someone is God or one’s inner self. And, of course, a good actor is always aware, somewhere in the back of the mind, of the response not only the character being spoken to, but also of the actual theater audience.
And a preacher, heaven help us, is always speaking to real people. An actor learns that responses may be, and frequently are, non-verbal. As preachers we must learn that, too. A congregation may or may not shout its responses, but it is always listening to us, thinking with us, challenging us, demanding more of us — unless, finding communication impossible, it finally shuts us out. I particularly recommend the study of acting to preachers as a way of developing listening skills. Our congregations deserve it.
Acting also teaches sympathy for others — or per¬haps “understanding” is a better word. In any case, an actor learns not to judge a character. One cannot play a “bad person” by thinking of that person as “bad.” Instead, one must delve into circumstances and motiva¬tion, and understand what makes people become what they are. Actors come to understand this intuitively, while we preachers may be a little more inclined to get up on our moral high horses. Jesus continually warns against this tendency. He particularly warns religious leaders, although he does not specifically recommend acting lessons as a remedy. But an actor does learn to “judge not.” (Perhaps that is why the church has always been suspicious of actors!)
Finally, although acting is an intellectual exercise, it is more than that. What an actor understands must be turned into action — we are after all talking about act¬ors. An insight that does not lead to behavior is not worth the time spent on it, and an actor knows that the results will not always be perfect the first time; that is what rehearsals are for. Long bouts of trial and error, for¬tified by continual listening to the text and the other per¬formers, may be required in order for the correct results finally to emerge.
We preachers, too, are committed not only to talk but also to action; the words we preach must lead some¬where. Jesus tells his followers over and over again that faith must be transformed into behavior. Or as Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “Suit the action to the Word” [capital mine]. As a churchgoer who undoubted¬ly heard plenty of sermons, Shakespeare would know.
