Ernest Thompson's On Golden Pond opens with one side of a phone conversation. Norman Thayer, Jr., a retired English professor whose mind seems to be going, is calling the operator to check that the phone in their summer cottage on the pond is working. The audience is privy only to his side of the conversation. ”Who's this?" he asks when he hears a voice after he has been momentarily distracted by a photo on the mantel. "The operator! What do you want?" he replies to the unheard voice on the other end of the line, and the conversation goes on for a page and a half in the script.

And while the audience never hears a word of what the operator says, or indeed what any of the other voices say in the two other phone calls that take place in the course of the play, it is interesting that in the revised edition of the script, Thompson has written complete dialogue for both sides of the conversation, dialogue which presumably will be heard only in the mind of the actors on the stage. In an introductory note, Thompson explains that when the play was revived on Broadway, James Earl Jones, who was playing Norman, was the first actor who ever asked him what was being said on the other end of the phone. "So I wrote it for him," Thompson says. "Use it if you like," he went on; "don't use it, if you don't want it.

Jones' request is indicative of what they call in the "acting business" his process. There is a good deal of acting theory that suggests that what goes on internally in the actor's mind and imagination has a direct effect on what goes on externally out on the stage. What the actor is thinking affects what the audience is seeing. A term often used to describe this phenomenon is sub-texting.

I remember some years ago rehearsing an original one-act play about a married couple on their way to the emergency room because the husband was suffering from chest pain which may or may not have been a heart attack. Early on in the rehearsal process the director had us, as our characters, verbalize aloud what we were thinking in between our lines of dialogue. "Sub-text," she would demand as we spoke our lines. "Keep sub-texting." And later in the process, when we were no longer verbalizing our thoughts, she would still keep encouraging us: "Sub-text."

This was only one of the many exercises directors and actors use to create the internal foundation for performance. Directors are fond of telling actors, especially student actors, to move from one place to another on stage, and then asking them to come up with some motive for the movement. "And don't tell me, because I told you to," they like to add. There needs to be a reason for the move, and that reason needs to be in the actor's mind, even if nowhere else.

Article Author: Jack Goodstein

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