When my son was a teenager, he joined my acting class. At the time, I didn’t have a class specifically for kids, so he mixed in with the adults. He made one extremely lucrative commercial and signed with a good manager. He seemed to understand the work; I helped him with auditions for films and tv, which became scarcer and scarcer as her failed to book anything significant. He was not bothered by this, as his high school was very demanding and he had other interests - friends, girls, sports. He wrote an interesting play, in which he played the lead and for which I hired a professional director. I wrote a play with a part for him and we put it on. This was the period in which personal computers were in their infancy, and he recompensed me for classes by designing and printing flyers, programs and brochures. In his final year of high school, he dropped out of my classes altogether to perform interesting plays like Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, Gogol’s The Inspector General - in which he played the inspector, and in college he directed T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. And that was it, case closed; he majored in philosophy, bummed around for a few years, and then took up an academic career.
I consider this a perfect trajectory for someone who’s not a born actor, but whose life is enriched by a youthful excursion into the exploration of acting. Did I want my son to be an actor? Well, it would have been nice if it had worked out that way, but I definitely was not tied to it. Unfortunately, I was about to encounter a much less felicitous experience, when I overreached myself in trying to produce an original play with a group of elementary and middle-school age thespians.
I was planning to start a new acting class for kids in the fall of 2001. My program had been going for a little over a year, and I honestly wasn’t very pleased with it. The children were of various ages, which was a bit difficult and some were only there because their parents pushed them. But the worst problem was popularity vs. unpopularity; there were two ‘glamour girls,’ who were the social arbiters, and had it in for a slightly younger girl… I’d been scratching my head trying to figure out what to do about all this. Then, a day or two before the first meeting of this class, the unthinkable happened – 9/11. I postponed the start date for a couple of weeks, while trying to figure out if there was a way I could use the training to help them deal with the horror was tearing all our lives apart. I came up with something and called it The Kids’ Happy/Sad Show.
To our first meeting, I brought a paper bag filled with small, innocuous things like a paper clip, wallet, woman’s brooch, nail, hinge, pen, etc. and I asked the kids to close their eyes and take out one of the objects. I told them they all attended a very special school, ‘The School of the Future’ – it turns out there’s a NY Public School actually called that, which I didn’t realize at the time.
Then I explained that each object was an ‘artifact’ they had been allowed to remove from Ground Zero. We spent several weeks improvising dialogue around these objects – I worked with each of them individually and we met once a week to devise group scenes. In the end, I divided the group so that some of them created ‘sad’ monologues around their objects – they were ‘sad’ by the nature of the event on which their stories were based. Others devised scenarios from ‘happier’ – albeit emotionally complex situations - in their lives. I wrote some songs and set them to music, and invented an ‘assistant-director’ part for a fifteen-year-old girl, who wanted to participate in the class.
In my naiveté, I thought this play would be a cathartic, creatively stimulating, exercise. The kids were initially involved and interested, but as we began to rehearse more seriously, it became obvious that they regarded this as ‘play time’ not ‘acting time.’ Most of them, who had any acting background at all, got it from modeling or commercials, and in the end, I realized that the children’s efforts were stuck between ‘stage mothers’ and parents for whom this was only an ‘outlet’ for their child. Neither group understood the kind of support their children needed to participate in a decently rehearsed show.
Two days before we were scheduled to go up, the father of the fifteen-year-old, ‘assistant-director’ – who appeared in every scene and was the glue for the entire show - withdrew her. I decided, against all my principles, to cancel the show, but the parents, finally, threw in all their support, begging me to find a way to go on. Fortunately, I had an excellent eighteen-year old girl in my adult class, who was a very quick study. She took over the part and by the second performance was able to go on without the book! But I had learned my lesson. From then on, I have worked with kids mainly one-on-one or in very small groups.
Next time, I’ll discuss what I’ve discovered about teaching acting to kids; what works and what doesn’t…
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