It’s so satisfying when I can talk to parents without fearing
they will misinterpret my observations! I don’t have the training of a
therapist, and can be clumsy just when I should be clever - especially when I’m
annoyed! But often my interactions with
parents have been really good. Bonnie’s mom, for example, was very receptive
and the work progressed, not into an acting career but a better understanding
of art and lif . But Bonnie didn’t have really
bad problems; her life was fairly serene – although she might disagree with me
on that!
Acting teachers hear important confessions and we have to
use our judgment when we should or should not pass along information to
parents. Is a kid exaggerating or are they really in trouble? In my experience, young people feel that a
private acting class is a place where they can let their hair down and exaggerate
if they feel like it – after all we’re working on drama! Sometimes, although
rarely, a student asks me to intervene with their parents on matters that have
no direct bearing on acting. However,
the issues have a de facto relationship to acting – since acting requires an
understanding of behavior and how we feel about things.
Take the case of Peter, who started working with me when he
was fifteen. By the age of sixteen, tension between him and his mother had
turned into all-out battles for control in almost every area of his life. His
father was around and definitely involved, but the sparks flew on the maternal
side. When I met Peter, he had already shot a couple of dramatic scenes in
major films and was under contract with a well-known manager. My job,
ostensibly, was to get him to the next level, so he could book speaking roles
on a regular basis. The boy seemed to have potential; when he read scenes, he
grasped the point quickly and put in some effort. He was called back several
times for an interesting film role; it entailed playing the part of a famous
actor when he was a child. He got the part, but when I watched the finished
product, his acting didn’t ‘pop.’ He
just wasn’t interested enough to put in the work – tall and rangy, his heart
belonged to baseball.
For a while he remained attached to our classes; we worked
on scenes and monologues about family conflict, but honestly most of the time
he talked about his mother and when it got so bad she locked him out of the
house he ended up persuading me to talk to her!
At first, I resisted, but in the end she and I had several good
conversations, and I think just the fact that we were able to communicate
helped him to relax his demands and do a few more chores around the house,
which in turn caused her to give him a little more freedom. During that time,
he had also shared stories about another family member who caused a lot of
trouble for everyone; it was the sort of thing he couldn’t talk about with most
people, and he got it off his chest. Eventually, the lessons petered out, but
later, when I was ill, he called me to wish me well. I believe that the acting lessons helped him
to have a sense of humor about the whole thing and work through a bad patch of
adolescence – we spent a lot of time on Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. It
helped that his mother was a fundamentally reasonable woman who always had her
son’s best interests at heart.
Twelve year-old Jack faced a very different situation; a kid
with a gift for singing, who was enrolled in an outstanding middle school and
should have been getting good parts in their lavishly produced musicals. But Jack had ingrained problems; he was
overweight and lacked confidence, and the parts kept going to the more outgoing
kids. His dad had studied with me some years before, and thought acting lessons
might help his son gain some confidence. Jack was intelligent, already in
therapy, and threw himself into some very complex material, including Athol
Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys,
even mastering the South African accent. It seemed that he was beginning to
understand more about his life, but then marital difficulties erupted between
his parents. There were fights about everything, even who was supposed to pick
him up after class, and Jack became too upset to benefit from our slow, concentrated
work. I invited his father to come to class and do a scene with him, but the
boy shut down like a deer in the headlights. I lost track of him and have often
wondered what happened. Nice kid. Hopefully, he got a chance to show off his
musical talents
My final example is an unusual case; an agent sent me a
teenage girl, Anya, who had emigrated five years before with her parents from
Ukraine. She came for acting lessons, but most of the time I was coaching her
for a variety of film and television scripts. Her work was colorless because
she always played the words, never the subtext, and was incapable of embodying
her characters. In life, Anya showed feeling, mostly anger - but at least that
would have been a start! Knowing that the best way to connect in acting is
through awareness of one’s relationship to family, I kept trying to get her to
relate her audition material to her own life. She was more resistant than any
other young actor I’ve coached. When someone fights getting into their own
story that much, it’s always based in fear.
Finally I managed to discover what I had begun to suspect,
that on one side, her mother’s I think, she was Jewish. During Anya’s
childhood, living in the USSR would have been difficult. Her parents were
Russian Orthodox and they had kept her mother’s Jewish blood secret from their
daughter when they lived in Ukraine. Anya remained in the dark for several years
after she came here until an aunt had finally told her. When I told Anya that
she needed to look into this part of her life, she was enraged. “I’m not
Jewish, I just have Jewish blood. And she refused to accept that being in any
way connected to ‘Jewishness’ was of any importance to her life or her art.
It seemed to me that she had ‘caught’ the fearful situation
that her parents had endured in their former home, in the way that one
‘catches’ a disease. And this fear appeared to seal her off from herself. She
resisted me with such anger that I had to back off. Her acting didn’t improve, the auditions
dried up and she left. No question of therapy here; her fear was so strong that
it dominated common sense. Or was Anya
actually protecting her parents’ position; keeping her mother’s ‘secret’ secret
even from herself.
No comments:
Post a Comment