How Do I Become an Actor?: How do you make yourself cry?

Here are my best thoughts on crying. If you are having a difficult time crying in a performance, then the problem is with your acting technique, not your crying technique. Which is why you are having such a hard time fixing it. You are trying to correct the wrong thing.

Don't try to develop some mechanical technique to make yourself cry. Your character, in the context of the play, isn't using some technique to make himself cry. The conflict or release of conflict within the character, intentions, etc. is making the character cry. If you focus your attention on a mechanical technique, or focus on some imagined, out-of-script sad event, then you are no longer focused on your character. Your mind is not on the character and the circumstances. Your mind is now on the actor trying to cry. Not the character, thinking, remembering, desiring, reacting, feeling the urge to cry, resisting the urge to cry.

Focus on your character and in playing the moment believably. Focus on the through-line, subtext, intentions, timing and all that other acting stuff (see the FREE Acting Lessons on the AWOL homepage .) If you did your job well, the tears will be there when they are supposed to be there. Why? Because if it is believable that the character should cry, and if you are fully absorbed in playing the character, then you will cry.

What if you are not fully absorbed in playing the character? The stage is not so predictable performance after performance. For camera work, take after take. What if the tears don't come? If you are doing your acting job well, then don't sweat the tears. Heck, most members of the audience will swear you actually cried even though you did not. Why? because your belief in the character becomes their reality. That's the magic of acting.

For camera work, if all acting efforts fail, the closeness of a shot and the level of "realism" required might indicate other measures be taken. The director simply shoots the scene without your tears, cuts, places some fake tears on your face and shoots the scene again but from another perspective, then edits the two shots together melding the moment just before you were supposed to cry with the moment you began"crying"with the fake tears in place - to make it appear as if you cried real tears. The different perspectives cover for the fakery - just like it does with the other thousands of edits which make up a film. You can cheat a lot in camera work.

How did acting (or theatre) begin?

Acting originated on Pelican island, which is an island in the middle of the Missouri river, north of St. Louis. It began there in the year 5003 BC.

Of course there was no written record of what play these first thespians produced, but the recent discovery of ancient drawings on the basement walls of Rudolph J. Penderbottom's quaint little Victorian home in Cahokia seems to indicate the first play (a musical) was a clever cross between Gilligans island and Promethius Bound. Odd as it may seem, this combination proved highly successful and toured up and down the Missouri river, playing to appreciative Native-American audiences. Eventually, the little troup hit the big-time, playing all the villages along the shores of the mighty Mississippi.

The theatre was built upon several, tethered rafts made of bulrushes and river mud. Torches were used for lighting the acting area. Lights were dimmed by various stage hands (raft hands as they were known back then) standing in front of the torches, thus blocking the full intensity of the lights at the appropriate moment. There is no record of what the raft hands were paid, but it is a good bet that union rules would have required extra allowance be paid for working with fire.

The play lasted three and one half days without intermissions. Audiences back then apparently had a lot more stamina then today's pampered play goers. Unfortunately, a mishap initiated by a disgruntled raft hand resulted in the entire production going up in flames somewhere between Hannible and the Lock and Dam near Saverton. The troup was devastated by the financial loss as insurance had not yet been conceived.

Times being as they were, it was impossible to find a financial backer willing to assume the risk. After several unsuccessful attempts to mount lesser productions on neighboring Cora island, the group disbanded. Acting fell into a deep, deep slumber. Upon the charred remains of the bulrush rafts, acting drifted down the Mississippi and out into the uncharted Gulf.

When acting awoke, it found itself in ancient Greece. But that's another chapter in AWOL's Condensed History of Acting.

There's no business like show business.