Can anyone, at any age, who is primarily focused on the
negative action of ‘avoiding criticism’ rather than the positive act of ‘doing
something for its own sake’ be able to act? That’s a big question, but I do
know that poor, terrified Chantal, whom I’ve mentioned before that there was no
way for the characters she was supposed to be working on to breathe, to live.
And the heartbreaker was that this intelligent, diligent, tender young person,
who was endeavoring to do everything perfectly, knew she was failing. There
wasn’t anything I could do because her mother had indoctrinated her with the
idea that auditions – and probably everything else in life - were win/lose,
pass/fail situations. And it made no difference that I did everything I could
to help and encourage a radical change in this point of view; it was lodged in Chantal’s
psyche, as if had passed into her through her mother’s milk.
If there is something really wrong, usually the lessons stop
of their own accord because the boy or girl loses interest in the classes. They
don’t do their homework or find it interesting to relate our conversations to
the scenes and monologues we are working on.
For example, Simon, who was one of the saddest cases I’ve ever run
across. He was already experiencing behavioral problems, having been expelled from
a couple of middle schools, when his mother died very suddenly of a heart
attack. It’s possible that he felt his behavior had lead to her death, although
he never said so. He was a freshman in high school and had already been
suspended at least once. I never found out what he had done to create so much
trouble. His father was an executive in
the fashion industry and often traveled on business to the Far East. Simon was
tall, full grown already, good looking, charming and very manipulative.
I think he was sent to me because an agent had seen him and
suggested that he take some classes to see if he had talent. We did absolutely
no acting work at all; each of the four or five times I saw him, whenever I
would try to interest him in the script, he would interrogate me aggressively
about the acting business and then suddenly drop the façade and become a real
fourteen-year-old, mourning the fact that he was all alone in the apartment for
two weeks. He disappeared for a while,
and then his father called several times trying to set up appointments which
never came to fruition. I wanted to talk to the father about his son’s difficulties,
but I knew the schools had already made an effort to persuade him, and I could
hear in the father’s voice that he would have crossed me off his list if I had
tried to say anything. My hope was that I could keep the boy coming for a while
and maybe get close enough to suggest therapy directly to him. One late night,
a few months after our last appointment, I received an anonymous, incoherent
phone call from someone who was high on alcohol or drugs – it sounded like
Simon’s voice, but I couldn’t be sure. I felt terrible for the boy but there
was nothing I could do…
Simon was an extreme case, but there have been other less
unhappy, albeit problematical situations where choices had to be made about how
far to go in trying to help a student.
It took me a long time to figure out the line between an acting teacher
and a therapist. So many stories involving incest, drugs, alcoholism, anorexia,
prostitution, even questionable deaths, from both kids and adults with
difficult lives, who were trying to figure themselves out through acting.
There are several factors here that have to be seriously
considered. Does the student have a genuine interest in acting? Is their
personal agenda so heavy that it precludes acting at this point in their
lives? Should I speak to the parents or,
in some cases, the manager/agent?
Next time, I will give further examples of young
people who can benefit from acting training, those who can’t – at least not in
my class – and/or those who need therapy…
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