Full-Face Masks

Abstract

Full-face masking fulfills a fundamental goal of high-level acting: the comprehensive inhabitation of an “other.” This involves much more than just walking in someone else’s shoes. In addition to that new walk, you experience profound emotional and psychological change. You think foreign thoughts, speak strange languages, and remember alternate histories. Your body is shaped by divergent energies. Thus, you become more than just an actor wearing a mask—you become someone else, experiencing that otherness in the marrow of your bones.

A characterization is the mask which hides the actor-individual. Protected by it he can lay bare his soul down to the last intimate detail.

—Stanislayski, Building a Character