The only meaningful measure of pain is Intensity. It increases or decreases (and not always by the rules we might imagine to be in place, whether in ourselves or others) depending on several factors: the seriousness of the wound, the duration of the event, and the attitude and proximity of the afflicted to said event.

I’ve always maintained in my classes that the acceptance and integration of pain is what gives an actor credibility on a stage or in front of a camera. The weight of his presence for an audience is determined by how he carries loss. Actors who hide behind “the character” invariably withhold their own experience from us (as well as themselves), and then they “act” to cover up the hole left by the hidden information.

Exercise: Rank the following 10 events in order from least to most painful. (If they involve relationships with which you have not had first hand experience, use empathy to fill in the blanks.)

1.  Accidentally getting your foot caught in a wood-chipper that has no OFF switch.

2.  Getting diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer (when you’ve never smoked).

3.  Watching your son slip into heroin addition, then detox, relapse, detox, relapse.

4.  NOT getting the new recurring role on CSI Miami you have had 4 callbacks for.

5.  Watching your daughter battle anorexia with psychotherapy and drugs, but not eat any food.

6.  Watching your parent retreat deeper and deeper into full-blown dementia.

7.  Finding out in the 6^th month that the baby you are carrying has Down’s Syndrome.

8.  Watching the slaughter of thousands in Darfur on a closed-circuit BBC news feed.

9.  Having your 7 year-old kidnapped from a friend’s backyard birthday party.

10. Getting thrown from a horse and being left completely, permanently paralyzed (after having played Superman in the movies).

Not easy is it? It’s tough to measure and especially to compare pain. Actors are (supposed to be) people who enjoy feeling others’ pain. If you’re playing any character in Milk other than Harvey, eventually comes the scene where this transformational figure is gunned down in cold blood, and you have to deal with the loss. Lay people mainly worship actors for their willingness to live out a painful imaginary circumstance as if it were reality. As “regular” humans, they know they could never do it, so actors seem more than human to them, almost super-human. (And if they happen to be beautiful too, so much the better.)

Here are some genius dramatic performances (in no particular order) where the acceptance, exploration, and handling of pain and loss is at the core of the quality of the work:

 1.  Meryl Streep, A Cry in the Dark, Sophie’s Choice, Silkwood, Kramer Vs. Kramer

2.  Robert DeNiro, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter

3.  Martin Landau, Ed Wood, Crimes and Misdemeanors

4.  Geraldine Page, Interiors, The Trip to Bountiful, Sweet Bird of Youth

5.  Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain

6.  Kim Stanley, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, The Goddess

7.  Vanessa Redgrave, Julia, Playing for Time, The Devils

8.  Jack Nicholson, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Five Easy Pieces

9.  Faye Dunaway, Chinatown, Bonnie and Clyde

10.  Gregory Peck, To Kill A Mockingbird

11.  Marlon Brando, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront

12.  Anna Magnani, The Rose Tattoo

13.  Paul Newman, Hud, The Verdict

14. Gena Rowlands, A Woman Under the Influence, Another Woman, An Early Frost

15.  Hillary Swank, Boys Don’t Cry

16.  Helen Mirren, The Queen, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The Passion of Ayn Rand

17.  Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal, Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Brown

18.  Chris Cooper, Adaptation, Capote

19.  Lillian Gish, The Wind, The Scarlett Letter, Orphans of the Storm

20.  Holly Hunter, The Piano, Thirteen 

I spoke with a hospice doctor several months ago on the phone (I never met the man) about my neck and back pain, and told him that it’s really beginning to get to me in a big way, especially since I have always seen myself as someone who can bear quite a bit of pain. I told him about breaking my hip in the early 90s and some other assorted physical circumstances where doctors seemed surprised and impressed by how much pain I was able to bear.

He surprised me by explaining that most people think what I thought, that certain people have high thresholds for pain and others have low ones, and then he went on to explain that statistics show that in the overwhelming majority of folks, the more pain they have had over time, the less they can seem to tolerate. He also went on to say that there seemed to be little difference in this reaching of critical mass between physical and emotional pain, and he asked me about what kind of emotional losses I had had in my life. I told him about the death of 3 of my 4 loves: Scott, Mark, Bob, and also of my mom and dad, etc. He got a bit quieter and his voice took on a gentleness it hadn’t had previously.

Then we talked about long-term pain management (a.k.a. palliative care) and he explained that American doctors are absolutely clueless on the subject, as they are trained only in the handling of acute pain (a.k.a. short-term), but not long term pain. It was a very enlightening conversation with an expert in a field which was completely unbeknownst to me heretofore. I came away feeling less like a pussy, which was a good thing. I may be a homo, but I’m still a man, and no man wants to feel like a pussy.

Back to the actor. If you can’t or won’t feel your own pain, then you can’t or won’t feel anyone else’s either. Nowhere is the line between the actor and the character finer than when dealing with loss.

In the great ancient Greek plays, the actor’s greatest challenge is often to portray the courageous handling of staggering, predestined loss. Oedipus realizes, in the climactic moment of the greatest of Sophocles’ dramas, that he was born to fuck his mother and to slay his father, both of which he has already done. Not really a happy moment for the poor guy. He lets out an animal wail of desperation that better raise the hairs on the back of the necks of the folks in the farthest, cheapest seats or the whole enterprise turns into a silly, melodramatic mess.

If you’re playing Oedipus, just try to fake that moment. You’ll sound like a huge, pathetic pussy.