Is Acting Lying?

I have always enjoyed a good debate and one that rears its head frequently is the philosophical question: Is Acting Lying?

I have always found myself on the "Yes, yes it is" side of the debate. Why? Well, for one thing, I have always maintained the reason I was a decent actor is I was a decent liar. I was an only child and therefore had no siblings to shift blame upon. If I didn't want to admit guilt for some occurrence: how the lamp got broken, how the hole got in the garage door etc... I created a story to diminish the truth. And while spinning my yarn I had to sustain a poker face. I could not smirk or divert my eyes, in essence, I had to create a character to pull off this nonsense I was spewing. I was acting. 

When I tried out for Dramatics class in High School and received my first small role, it became quite clear to me that the easiest way to do this part was to pull out the old poker face I used back when I was 6 years old and spew the nonsense written in the script. But in this world. the world of theatre it was called, "playing a character" and "speaking lines" - I was acting. 

It wasn't until College that the acting/lying debate first came up. You see, in College, you tend to get a tad more philosophical than you were in High School and of course you meet people who take their art very seriously. In High School, most kids get into theatre for fun or what they think will be an easy A - it is by no means a serious career calling. If you continue the theatre curriculum into college, the percentage of people taking it seriously goes up sharply. And it is here with the sharply serious you encounter the sharply serious debates. 

I constructed my first debate at a cast party with a theatre major. I relayed the story about being an only child and drawing the lying/acting conclusion and this was met with heated resistance. "No! Acting is about creating Truth! Truth on the stage! How dare you call it lying!"  At some point, I ran and got a dictionary to provide exhibit A for my testimony: 

LIE:  intransitive verb 1: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive 2: to create a false or misleading impression

There! I said. When we are on a stage, our goal or intent is to convince the audience of something that is NOT true. If we are doing Ibsen you are NOT Hedda Gabler, if we are doing Death Of A Salesman, I am NOT actually Willy Loman. But my intent is to deceive! By definition, by acting my goal is to create a false of misleading impression that I am Loman. Ergo I am lying! 

"But!" the serious artist said, "You have to create the truth in order for the audience to believe it. You have to believe it and that is acting!" 

"But!" I said, "Inherently I don't believe it. I know that I am creating a fictional portrayal. I know deep down that the words I am speaking on the stage are not my own words. They are not my thoughts and motivations. They were written on a page in a script by someone else. And as far as we know, Arthur Miller wasn't Willy Loman either. The character and plot came from his own imagination, so in a sense, again by definition, he was lying as well!" 

Well, this went back and forth for hours and neither one of us convinced the other. I think what shut up both up was a third person who jumped in with a story they read (it may have been from An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski or another of his books) but the story concerns an actress who had to play an emotional scene on stage where her character receives news that her father died in accident. After the scene, Tortsov, the director, tells the actress that he didn't believe the emotion she portrayed in the scene. The actress breaks down and says actually, just before the performance, in real life she learned her own father had been killed in a very similar accident. The emotion she brought to the character was indeed real and in fact truthful. The director says that's great. You knew that truth, but you didn't convince any of us of that truth. 


In the years that followed, as I grew as an actor with various groups and roles, and conversations with other actors, I have found everyone has their own truth about what "acting" is by definition to themselves. I haven't found that one is any truer than another and that's all right. Whatever your own truth is that allows you to create is exactly what you need. Acting can be some glorious self-journey of inner discovery whereby you create truth on stage, or it can be nothing more than a childlike game of playing house or lying to your mom about how the dog ended up with a GI Joe strapped to its back, the point is to be decent at acting you need conviction. And wherever you can muster that ability up, use it.