ACTING

  
"It is the investigation," [Faye Dunaway] tells us, early in Looking for Gatsby, "that I love." And later she says, "I wanted to analyze the character and the action, but in a jazz fusion sort of way." She understands that the moment when an actress decides that the words and thoughts she is expressing are hers is the moment when she must rewrite them and rethink them to keep the audience from leaving the theater of the mind -- the moment when she must ask herself the four actor's questions (Who am I? Where do I come from? What do I want? Where am I going?) and come up with an answer instead of an argument or an alibi.

-- James McCourt

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I always took refuge in Chris [Durang]'s plays. I remember when we did Titanic in which I played this little girl who keeps a hedgehog and a couple of hamsters in her vagina. Now I never think with Chris's plays, and I've always felt lucky that I didn't have to break down the character and analyze the motivations. I never know what my motivation is from one day to the next, so why should my character?

I remember sitting on the table in a little pleated skirt, putting my legs up to feed the hamsters lettuce. I never had any trouble with the scene until this very good teacher of mine who was originally from the Actors Studio came to see the preview and said, "I didn't really feel that the hamsters were in there. I think you should try to feel them moving around when they eat the lettuce," and I thought, "Yes, of course. I have not been really feeling those hamsters." I had always gotten a huge laugh with that scene, but the next night, I was feeling those hamsters, feeding and feeling them, feeding and feeling them, and I didn't get a single laugh. Everyone was thinking "Yuck!" because I was playing it too real. The point of the scene is how ridiculous it is that I am feeding them at the dinner table in a very matter-of-fact, rather ladylike way.

-- Sigourney Weaver, interviewed in The New Theater Review