Challenging Actor's Neutrality

Throughout my 4-year BFA training we continuously circled back to the idea of “neutral” – neutral bodies, neutral voices, neutral faces. To me, neutrality felt less like a list of “do this” and more like a list of “don’t do that.”; Don’t slouch forward, don’t shuffle your feet, don’t lisp your S’s, don’t hold tension in your face.

I wholeheartedly agree with many of these “don’ts”. After all, our training was designed to help us be a blank canvas with which to project a character. Maybe you, the actor, slouches all the time and sways back and forth with a furrowed brow when they’re concentrating, but does the character? Without first practicing neutrality and fostering an awareness of the self it would be exceedingly difficult to make nuanced and informed character choices and you’ll end up playing every character as simply an extended version of your own physicality and even personality.

As my education progressed, however, I began to notice which classmates seemed to be excelling at neutrality and which were struggling. My gay classmate who fought for years to freely establish a queer identity without persecution was constantly pushed to achieve “neutral masculinity”, whatever that means. My lisping classmate whose lisp was mostly the result of their dental alignment was struggling, even through extra voice coaching. And me, the disabled classmate with a joint disorder who could never tuck my pelvis quite enough or walk with enough ease. All of us were fighting uncontrollable personal traits in pursuit of neutral.

But what is neutral, anyways? How do we know it when we see it? Why do we even want it?

As I said before, the concept of neutrality isn’t difficult to make an argument for. Actors want to be as variable as possible in their roles in order to broaden their casting prospects. I can even understand it from an audience’s perspective; it’s pretty safe to say that audiences want to see someone that they can project themselves onto, and imagine themselves in the same scenario and what they would do. It’s the very crux of storytelling, imagining walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

The problem, however, is twofold: Firstly, the idea of making all actors “neutral” is a losing battle and only looks good on paper. Where do we draw the line? We demand unique and deeply human performances, yet we continue to churn out graduates who have been systematically stripped of all individuality and turned into Yes, And robots who can’t even remember who they are or why they wanted to do this in the first place.

Sorry, too dark?

Personally, I find some over-reaching efforts to demand neutrality in performers to be incredibly hypocritical. I spent years being berated for how I move as a disabled artist and was denied opportunities because of it, yet an able-bodied actor who has “achieved” neutrality simply by virtue of not being disabled receives acclaim for performing the very disability that keeps me out of the room? I’m not buying it, and, increasingly so, neither are audiences.

Not only that, but when the powers-that-be sat down to establish neutral they inevitably set about weaving discrimination into the very fabric of actor training and, therefore, the very fabric of American theatre. When the idea of neutral behavior shifts into real-world bodies, we find ourselves addressing every factor that would make it absolutely impossible for a given person to achieve that neutrality and therefore every flavor of discrimination you can think of. Can’t afford braces to conform your speech? Classism. Can’t master an American accent because English isn’t your first language? Xenophobia. Can’t magically turn into a white person? Racism.

Homophobia. Fatphobia. Ableism. Transphobia. Anything that is a part of who a person is that they couldn’t change even if they wanted to. Even if they manage to get a foot in the door we beat them down and pigeonhole them into compliance, and then turn around and wonder why casting diverse and accurate characters is so difficult. We haven’t exactly rolled out the welcome mat.

Secondly, audience desires have significantly shifted as time has gone on. Maybe there was a time in the post-war days when everyone just wanted something pretty to look at after the horrors of war, but those days are over. Are we really going to keep reducing artists down to their baseline attraction value at the expense of authentic storytelling? I think young audiences are very clearly looking for something entirely different from their grandparents were. They embrace each other in their individuality and imperfection, and they want to see that represented onstage, not an artificially perfect version of humanity.

The simple answer to neutrality feels very obvious: human beings are all different. How can there be a standard for neutrality when we come in all shapes, sizes, and builds? And furthermore, why do we think our audience members aren’t also all different? Why are we asking them to envision themselves as the same tall, skinny, white, probably blonde, artists?

I mean, it obviously isn’t a new and remarkable statement to point out that theater is seriously lacking in diversity across the board. But maybe we should be looking beyond our casting room tables and see what’s going on a little farther up the pipeline. Are our training programs enrolling students outside of their anglo-centric standards of neutrality? Are we running off otherwise talented and powerful performers with unreasonable and unattainable demands?

All of this said I hope I’m not misconstrued in my argument here. I absolutely think we need to continue to train actors to be aware of their bodies and habits to give them the tools to make strong choices. I know I’m not the only one who feels the need to remind all the straight guys that putting your hands into your pockets is not a strong character choice. But it should be exactly that – a choice. There’s a difference between choosing how forcefully a character delivers their lines, which is trainable and achievable, and choosing how thin the character is, which is unchangeable and unreasonable.

As for me, I’d rather move forward with a different take on body neutrality – my view on my own body is neutral. It is not too much of anything, nor is it not enough. It simply is.