Survival Tactics

UNTIL AGE 10, the only place Andy Robinson could find release from a “constant, constricting tension” was at the movies. There he spent hours and hours sitting in the dark in front of the huge flickering screen. “It was the only place I felt safe,” he admits.

In Stepping into the Light: Sources of an Actor’s Craft, Robinson, acclaimed actor, director, and professor of Theatre Practice at the University of Southern California, describes a difficult childhood, which culminated in his father’s death during World War II and his mother’s subsequent descent into alcohol abuse. It was in the many war films of the era that Robinson found solace, not only through particular stories of courage and spirit, but, he would eventually understand, as a way to define both his own tactics for survival and the basis of what it means for an actor to create a character.

That said, the character that most affected him, perhaps — and one of the most interesting relationships explored in Stepping into the Light — is between the author and his late, less-than-perfect mother, who shares the dedication of Robinson’s debut with his wife, Irene. Robinson offers a vivid portrait of Agnes Robinson, whose face he compares physically to the fine marbled countenance of a Greek goddess. Her serene beauty was transformed, however, by her mood swings; as a pudgy, attention-starved kid, Robinson would dance and cavort “like a spastic cartoon” for anyone who’d watch, causing Agnes to lash out at him for showing off.

And yet. Though her rage continued to haunt him long after he grew up, Agnes’s admonishments against Robinson’s public antics only made him more determined to find other audiences. Early on, he began to create basic stereotypical characters — a monster, a soldier, a drunk — and to put them in simple situations based on films or sketch comedies he’d seen performed on early television by masters such as Ernie Kovacs and Jackie Gleason. “To this day,” he writes, “I remember the stunned looks of people as I let loose a babbling, gesticulating collection of characters I either made up or pulled from movies or the streets.”

These were, of course, the deeply rooted percolations that led Robinson to become an actor — albeit one with a slightly criminal history. Beginning with playing serious hooky from school, he eventually started breaking into garages and warehouses. At some point his vandalizing turned into shoplifting, and then, with an equally misguided young friend, into boosting a car. Neither boy knew how to start much less drive it, however: they played around with the gearshift until the car rolled down the hill and crashed into another. After a few more similar brushes with the law, and compounded by his mother’s behavior — she herself was arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct — the teenage Robinson was sent to an “industrial boarding school for boys from broken homes.”

In college in the 1950s, at the University of New Hampshire and at New York University, he suffered even more terrifying isolation. Eventually, though, Robinson left America for London, where he studied and worked (he was a student at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, or LAMDA), playing the starving-artist game we all seem to embrace at some point in our careers. Once back in Manhattan to pursue his calling — in the formative days of legendary underground alternative theaters — Robinson continued to be more interested in chronicling, through his art, who we are as a species, than in aiming for a house in Malibu, say. Honing our craft, he strongly reminds us, is the only true quest, even if the effort probably isn’t going to result in anything that could rewrite or redefine history. Even more disheartening, it’s “not going to assuage the pain.”

For himself, it was at LAMDA that Robinson began the revelatory process of stripping away self-doubt and reconciling the various — and sometimes conflicting — techniques he had absorbed since childhood. But however long and diligently any of us who act or direct work to hone our theatrical craft, in the end what we finally glean from our training and experience, is that our process is necessarily totally unique to each and every one of us. This is one of the clearest lessons to be learned from Robinson’s life story.

And another: The true power of language, Robinson tells us, when crafted to create the world of a play, is revealed and communicated into action through actorly intuition. As David Mamet once advised, “When in doubt, just say the words.” Robinson obviously concurs. “Words are actions,” he writes. “They can caress or kill.” However, he continues, “they can’t do this by themselves.” He strongly believes that the playwright’s lines won’t achieve the desired effect unless their potency is developed from deep in the core of the performer’s body. “If we believe that the imagination is fed by our senses,” he rhetorically asks, “what happens to our physical movement when words become as much of a sensory experience as a touch or a scent, and their deep meanings activate memory and desire?” An actor’s process, he explains, can enhance or destroy the “true meaning and intent of any physical event.” That’s what rehearsal is for, to explore these sorts of divergent outcomes, and the reason why so many great actors stay in class or toil in small and often unpaid productions is to keep their instruments in tune. This is also the reason why so many film actors, as their stars rise, appear to forget how to act.

What’s interesting about Stepping into the Light is how Robinson is able to seamlessly intertwine his own sometimes heartbreaking early life in small-town New England, with his feast-or-famine years in London and New York and the most difficult challenge of all — to forge a career and a life in Hollywood. But though it’s clear that the author intends to enlighten his readers about the link between the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as contributing to the development of the artist as well as the human being, Stepping into the Light sometimes frustratingly feels like two different books: one chronicling the events that influenced Robinson’s personal choices; the other expounding on how those same events inform his acting and teaching techniques. Though intrinsically linked, the two angles never quite mesh with total success.

That criticism aside, Andy Robinson’s book offers inspiration to young performers; even perhaps validation of their decision to chase windmills on a daily basis. It is also a welcome reminder to those less successful actors that talent is a gift in itself, and that to toil in the arts, however rigorous and rocky the endeavor, is its own kind of honor. As unusual as Robinson’s trajectory has been, it will surely not feel unfamiliar to any artist who cares more about communicating what it’s like to be a human on this risky planet, than gearing everything toward the trappings of fortune and fame. And Robinson, who clearly believes the actor’s greatest assets are his individuality and imagination, gives all of us permission, no matter our reason for absorbing even a small portion of his passion and wisdom, to begin to channel our most unsettling memories and to transform those experiences into art.

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Travis Michael Holder served as Theatre Editor for Entertainment Today for 23 years and has written about arts in Los Angeles for nearly 30 years.