Wednesday, May 16, 2012

BLOG #38: While working on Berniece from August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Daenya has a revelation…



(Please refer to Blog# 37) Daenya in the early days of her acting studies had difficulty identifying with Berniece’s refusal either to sing and accompany herself on her piano or to get rid of the piano altogether.  There’s a stubborn rage and intractable grief  in the character that the actress couldn’t locate in herself. In spite of her own hardships, at least the ones of which she was conscious at that time, Daenya copes with life  through cheerfulness and  generosity toward others. We put in many long hours of hard work with relaxation, meditation and sensory exercises. Confrontational Meisner exercises between her and the actor playing Avery helped her understand the dynamics of the conflict in their relationship, but she never got below the surface of the character’s ‘Big Problem.’
One day I asked Daenya when and how her family had reached the shores of America.  She told me that when she was a child her mother had left Jamaica to stay with relatives in the States, working in child care and later as a nurse’s aid in hospitals and for private individuals. Daenya explained that she had been very close to her grandmother, her mother’s mother, who had taken over when her mother left Although the closeness wasn’t there with her mother – whom she had rejoined in America at the age of eleven and who had passed away recently, it was apparent from Daenya’s manner and the look in her eyes how much love and admiration she had felt for her.  It seemed to me that the distance she had put between herself and her mother might be a way to avoid confused and painful feelings.  
And then I remembered a story Daenya had told shortly after we started working together. I always ask questions about an actor’s background. Usually, right at the start something is mentioned that tells me the ‘defining incident or relationship,’ the one that will come up again when the time is ready for that all-important ‘break-through into oneself.’ I also call it the ‘negative pole’ or the thing that each of us is trying to get away from as we aim for the ‘positive pole’ - our objective in life. These ‘poles’ are complicated; they need to be re-examined again and again and then coordinated with other aspects of the training as it goes along, but the more precise we make them, the easier it is for an actor to get his ‘foot in the door’ of any character he’s required to play.  
So I reminded Daenya, “Do you remember telling me about your cousin, the one who used to baby sit you, the one who was killed?” Daenya was surprised that I remembered; she had actually forgotten having told me, since it was something she rarely talked about. Now that I knew Daenya better I could pry a little. “Is there anything more about that time you can remember?” Daenya didn’t say anything for a moment; I could see from her expression that she was feeling and thinking simultaneously – a state difficult to achieve and a necessity for actors.    Finally, she said, “There was talk about a possible rape, that maybe the police had covered it up. Of course, nothing was ever proved and the case was closed. That’s the way things are down there.” I was sorry to bring it up, because I knew how agonizing it was for her, but acting takes one into some very unpleasant places one needs to explore and then ‘catalogue’ as sensory objects.  
I asked Daenya to close her eyes, breathe and ask herself, ‘What do I remember from that period?’ I cautioned her not to try for any particular type of memory but to go with the first thing that came into her mind. Immediately, she thought of her mother, seeing her from the back in their kitchen preparing dinner. After concentrating on this image for a few moments, Daenya became very emotional.  I urged her to speak through her tears, not wait until she had mastery over herself – akin to the process of using the muscles of a knee on which an operation has just been performed. She managed to do it. “I am just realizing now that I was always very mad at my mother for going away. I think I really hated her for that.”
You’d think this would be the end of the story, but for Daenya, the actress, it was just starting to unravel. I think it was shortly after that she left class for a while. It was a very shocking for her to realize that she was angry at her mother, not just detached from her.
Next week we’ll continue this analysis of Daenya’s discoveries about acting while working on Berniece from August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson

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