I hadn’t seen Emily for some years; she is a successful, highly skilled actress, although she hasn’t done much recently, due to pressing personal commitments. In NYC, to work on a film for a few days, she came by and knocked on my door – to my great delight. She was one of the ‘easiest’ people I’ve had to teach. She seemed to accept that acting is a holistic process, and neither tried to push ahead nor lagged behind, and her steady progress reflected this sanguine attitude. She was as patient as she needed to be!
She auditioned steadily, but did her homework faithfully for class, while trying to get a job. This went on for quite sometime, well over a year, without her booking anything, and then she started landing roles for high profile projects with stars. But she always had trouble with auditions – even back at the beginning when she was doing so well. They freaked her out– they still do – and over the years has proved a big impediment to her career.
Why is this happening to someone so accomplished? Either it’s a deep psychological reason, which is beyond my provenance, or it’s a fault in her technique. Probably the two are merged in some diabolical fashion. But she gave me a clue, mentioning that she fares better when she can latch on to a deep sensory connection than when called upon to audition for a middle-of-the-road character. It seems, according to her, that she shies away from an in-depth analysis of ‘subtext,’ which gives specificity and texture to lighter characters and makes them interesting. But when confronted with a very emotional part, once she locates the character’s center in herself, the technical details come easily. (Most of us would give our right arm to be able to do that! But the fact is that often audition material is subtle, requiring the kind of skill that allows the character’s deeper needs to shine through a filter of misleading possibilities.) Emily is very smart and capable of learning skills, so I’m making an educated guess that Emily’s problem doesn’t lie with acting at all. It points to the possibility of self-sabotage for deep personal reasons. This raises the further question; is Emily perhaps not really an actress? Or does she just need to keep on digging? It is one she is asking herself right now…
The on-going struggles of Emily fit right into the way we approach the New Year. Even if we think New Year’s resolutions are a lot of hooey – I raise my hand – well, doesn’t it force us just a little bit to think how nice it would be if… ? Who wouldn’t like an excuse to turn over a sprig of holly, so to speak? Last night I went to a New Year related party, and I managed to entangle myself in a heated argument with an actress I’d never met before. She had some odd ideas about acting, to which I paid little attention, much too involved in my euphoric reaction to an excellent glass of Prosecco. But then we got onto the subject of weight loss – near and dear to my heart for reasons not germane to this blog. In any case, I became incensed when she categorically dismissed the possibility that a box full of powdered food measured out for a month could possibly deter an over-eater from returning after the month had ended to their former over-enthusiastic intake of calories. Voice raised and gesticulating with my glass, I, for my part, insisted that weight loss has nothing to do with food and everything to do with why the person overindulges in it. “For God’s sake,” I ranted, “alcoholics can’t have any alcohol at all, so does that mean that if they go to AA for a month, they’ll just start guzzling again when it’s over?”
We would like to think that someone could give us a blueprint to follow and - poof! - the one pattern that makes us feel horrible, and we all have at least one, will vanish. Obviously, that doesn’t work most of the time. However, please excuse me for preaching for a moment, but I have discovered from personal experience something that makes my horrible pattern of endless dawdling slightly less intransigent for me – less impenetrably, relentlessly resistant to change.
Fooling myself.
In other words, letting the ‘fool’ in myself – as in Shakespeare’s fools, there’s a subject for a blog - have its say. Like most of us, I’m two characters, at least. I’m “the one who wants to do it and feels that she can” and I’m “the brat.” Like most “brats” she won’t do anything she’s supposed to unless I can ‘fool’ her into thinking it’s her own idea.
I know I’m on to something here but we’ll have to wait until the next blog to find out what it is…
By the way, in parting, the actress and I pecked each other on the cheek, and I apologized. You can’t go away mad from your first party of the New Year.
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