another eye opens

ACTING

I think the problem for a lot of stage acting is that it’s so often concerned with the actor’s desire to make sure that he or she is connecting with the audience. So, there’s always this little thing, this patronizing thing, that they are always one little second ahead of the audience telling them what they should feel and what is coming next. I don’t want performers to be responsible for this. This should be the responsibility of the piece as whole, it’s not down to individual performers.

So the ego of the performer has to push to the back?

In some ways, in other ways it’s pure narcissism. you have to have a certain kind of narcissism because you have to trust that the audience will watch whatever you do. A lot of actors have egoism, but they don’t have this kind of narcissism. Maybe the egoism comes from film, where the actors always want to make sure that they are doing something important — this is so different from the narcissist, who simply doesn’t care.

— Elizabeth LeCompte, interviewed by Andrew Quick in The Wooster Group Work Book