Theater Versus Cinema

I just accidentally stumbled across a dress rehearsal for Cats. That’s the prompting for this post.

As an aside, Cats is a very interesting case study in how bad writing can appeal to certain performance factions. The play is based off of a collection of poems, there’s basically no plot, it was originally intended to convey a sense of whimsy that people who don’t understand their cats think that those pets have, and as a result the entire play is character development, which means that actors love it (because they get to work really hard on their characters), and it’s a complete pain to sit through (because nothing happens and you’re constantly struggling to remember every cat, and none of them are plot-relevant cause there ain’t no plot). Plus, one of the cats in the play is just absurdly horny (in about the most repulsive way possible, sex is great but this cat has all the charm of Louis CK plus one potted plant), and that’s his entire character, and he gets a decent amount of screen time. So imagine being stuck in a dark smelly theater room watching a bunch of furries hump each other. That’s Cats.

But there’s a deeper lesson to be learned here.

Ancient Rome

Actors and actresses in Ancient Rome were generally considered to have about the same social status as prostitutes. Cicero, an Ancient Roman lawyer, actually once made an argument that a particular case of rape wasn’t serious enough to be tried, by virtue of the victim being an actress. Actors, actresses, and prostitutes were often lumped into the same category as gladiators, and as a group these people suffered infamia: not mere infamy as we know it today, but a deep-seated societal disrespect, a total disgracing that came with a removal of legal rights (in Rome, this meant no suffrage, no right to sue or bring cases to court, and those same courts were allowed to have you flogged as punishment for crimes others accused you of) and widespread discrimination. Think American racial segregation or something similar. All this because you like getting on a stage and pretending to be a cat. Furthermore, a lot of the participants in all three of these professions were bona fide slaves. They actually had no rights at all, and were forced to act, or fight, or fornicate.

Contrast that with today, where actors and actresses make up a sizable proportion of America’s population of celebrities. People aspire to act, and will willingly take massive risks and make big sacrifices to get a chance at a part, people will actually offer their body to someone like Harvey Weinstein, all so that they can do the same job that Ancient Roman slaves had to be sold into. And it’s always just been standing on a stage (or in front of a camera) delivering lines. The profession has changed slightly, but the attitude of society towards it has completely flipped. Why?

And more importantly, why is the old Roman attitude starting to come back?

It’s Coming Back

If you’ve been talking to the average person in the world as of late, you’ll note that the opinion people generally have of celebrities these days is much lower than it was even a decade ago. Part of the reason people are starting to think of celebrities more and more in the same vein as prostitutes these days is because of all the sex scandals. #MeToo was very bad for the industry as a whole. But if you explore logic behind why the Romans thought the way they did, you start to uncover a fundamental distinction between Theater and Cinema, which allows the former to be elevated even as the latter is looked down upon. This difference isn’t necessarily a difference in kind, as there are plenty of movies that have awkward, forced performances, and plenty of amazing stageplays. It’s more a difference in potential.

When you get down to brass tacks, Cinema offers a massively superior (yes I’m biased, I don’t care, you know I’m right) set of methods to convey information than a stage, and this is relevant to both the general ability of a narrative work to tell a story, and the individual performances of the actors. This, plus the distance from the actual actors that cinema affords an audience, allowed for the social impression of them to change.

In short: the ability to change the perspective the audience has on a scene, while that scene is playing out, offers such a massive advantage over a fixed perspective (such as a stage), that the performances actors give can be much more nuanced and realistic. Stage actors love Cats because in terms of characterization, Cats is actually the best that a stageplay can do.

Acting in Cinema vs Theater

I’m not even gonna try to start talking about how narration/continuity techniques change with the jump from theater to cinema, I’m just going to focus on the acting. To start with, watch this video from the Demo Reel Deity, which gives a brief hint of what we’re going to be talking about here at the end, and is also just really useful information for anyone who wants to say lines in front of a (physically present or otherwise) audience.

Those last two points are what I care about here, they’re the artsy ones. Stage performances seem more natural and free at first, but they come at the cost of requiring big movements, simple blocking, grand gestures, gratuitous monologues, and projected voices. This substantially limits your expressive abilities and emotional range as an actor. Even if you’re mic’d, it’s going to be difficult to cry silently on a stage without looking like a child. It’s difficult to express silent rage on a stage, you need to compensate with aggressive body language. In front of a camera, all you need is the proper look.

It’s difficult to express a lot of emotions when you need hundreds or thousands of people to see them all at the same time, from only one side of your body. When you only need one person to see, and that person is actually a small box about 2 cubic feet in volume, and can be moved to anywhere around you with the proper equipment, acting in a natural way is much more effective. This, in turn, allows performances to be much more nuanced, and those nuanced performances eventually make the characters themselves much more nuanced than can be accomplished in the Cats stageplay.

You can’t show complex, fast paced, nuanced character interactions on a stage. In theater, you either have everyone yelling at once (show disagreement), everyone singing the same song (show agreement or just look cool), or characters exchanging lines, back and forth. Even something as simple as cutting someone off mid-word becomes difficult and dangerous to act out on a stage, because of the risk that the audience only hears part of the line, or a minor miscalculation on the part of one of the actors causes significant confusion. But with the complete audio control you have when making a film, that same simple, realistic act, of one person cutting another person off in a heated conversation, becomes trivially easy to recreate.

In fact, just to really drive all of these points home, I’m going to show a completely normal, no-sfx scene from a movie that would be totally impossible to recreate (without massive revisions to the script) in theater: it’s the partner’s meeting from Margin Call.

If you think about the mechanics of this scene, you realize the number of things that happen that can’t be replicated on a stage far exceed the number that can. In fact, by and large, any large meeting scene is difficult to show realistically on a stage. Characters cut each other off. Characters try and control their reactions, instead of showing them or monologizing about them. Characters interact in complex ways (like when Jeremy Irons/John Tuld covers for the partners’ lack of understanding by pretending that he’s actually the stupid one, or when the risk managers respond to Tuld’s request for options with silence). Small twitches make big differences, little microexpressions and character nuances change everything about a scene and the relationships between the actors. Without closeups, none of this is possible.

At the end of the scene, Tuld (who has been displaying his dominance left and right throughout the scene) puts the bow on this performance by quietly, calmly, and confidently instructing his bodyguard to find someone who all the other main characters have been struggling to find over the entire course up to this film up to this point… within the next couple hours. And it works. The bodyguard says it will be done, and Tuld moves on. On camera, that’s impressive. On stage, it’s inaudible.

This potential goes beyond simple single-person or group performances, and has a bunch of second-order effects. Being able to focus the audience on the subtle reactions of one character while another character speaks is massive. Completely impossible on a stage: outside massive, attention grabbing behaviors and judicious use of stage lights, the audience gets to decide where they look. If I’m directing a film, I get to decide where the audience looks. I have full control to show your performance in your best light, and to shape it in the most realistic way.

To Conclude (For Now)

Stage characters aren’t characters, they’re caricatures. Cinema characters are characters. Cinema acting is very different, fundamentally different, from theater acting. That’s not to say a good stage actor won’t be a good screen actor, but you should absolutely expect an adjustment period.

Now is this the reason why actors in the past were considered equivalent to prostitutes and are today considered celebrities? No. That’s cultural. The Romans loved war, and considered the idea of performing a role to try and impart an emotion onto someone else to be much less honorable than imparting a sword into their abdomen and taking their children as slaves. We just live in a much more passive culture.

To some degree, yes, the entertainment industries, both then and now, were and are legitimately degenerate. Sex sells, sometimes it gets you roles. At the end of the day, there’s always going to be guys that go to a show because a lead actress is hot, and a girls that watch a movie because Channing Tatum is in it. And because these industries are dependent on the customers to exist, there’s always going to be some degree of pandering to those desires.

Stepping aside from sin, however, there’s a real potential for high art in cinema, that’s lacking in theater. There just is. If you like acting, if your reason for being in this industry is to explore your potential as an actor or actress, then cinema is the way to go. Switching from theater to cinema, your range instantly expands. The variety of performances you can give increases massively.

There’s a lot more that goes into this. The differences, both in terms of acting and storytelling, are massive, and we’re just scratching the surface with this little article. If you really want to understand everything, you need coaches, you need to study film and stage critiques (esp. David Bordwell), and you need to train, a lot, and eventually you just have to get in there and act. Good luck!