Rip Torn -
As Charlie Laughton said, "you play a tragedy like a comedy and you play a comedy like a tradedy." With a funny role, if you don't play it for real, you are not going to get your laugh. If you keep saying, "Ha, ha, ha, isn't this funny?," you can be sure that it won't be. And in the same way, if you present a drama with an "isn't-this-sad" attitude, it won't attract anyone's sympathy. The art of a good performance is in combining them both.....Say you're playing a character, a kind of down-in-the-mouth, sad person. To make an effective portrayal, you're going to have to find the places where he's not like that, you're going to have to dig for those moments when the character feels joy. Even the great clowns, like Emmett Kelly, realized that principle. A lot of them had a tear painted on their cheeks. The things that were tragic to the clowns were the things which were funny to the rest of us............It's as Bernard Shaw said, "I tell the truth and people laugh."
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Real art is anything that puts a crack in all that garbage and cuts through to reality....... The ancient Greeks knew it: they knew that what is put on stage is wht we are afraid to talk about. Good drama engages us and our emotions, and seeing those fearful emotions acted out purges us of our own. We come out of those experiences as better human beings. Good plays are therapeutic.
