(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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