BLOG #39: Daenya begins to transform a ‘breakthrough’ into ‘methodology’ through Berniece’s character in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson…

(Please refer to blogs #37 & #38)  It took Daenya a year to return to class after the revelation that her whole adult life she had used distancing to cover the anger she felt at the age of seven, when her mother left Jamaica to work in the States.  When we connect the ‘feeling of anger’ to its true source – not just the things that make us angry every day, while we leave the underlying reasons unexplored – our whole equilibrium is affected. How we see the world changes, and we often need time to adjust.

I was surprised to see Daenya again; you never know which students will have either the stamina or the real desire to act after they have a big break-through like this. Daenya’s stamina and desire are joined at the hip. Along with an ‘artist’s intelligence’ (a particular combination of IQ and EQ, a subject which I will soon tackle in this blog) are the biggest part of what people call ‘talent’ – plus hard work, of course!

At first, Daenya tackled another monologue, from Poof by Lynn Nottage, before finally returning to Berniece. In fact, she wasn’t sure she would ever go back to it. I did not offer an opinion, because I don’t push in a situation where there is so much pain. It was soon obvious to Daenya, however, that the lighter tone of Poof – a play about a woman who causes her husband to crumble into dust by standing up to him - did not exempt her from getting in touch with her own feelings about the darker subtext, which in one way or another underlies most ‘serious comedy.’  Daenya eventually came back to Berniece all on her own, and it was then that she made the connection which finally opened up the deeper part of her early experience vis-à-vis her mother; the area that needed to be explored to provide a permanent matrix for her acting.

Intuition is an important tool for an acting teacher, so one day at the very end of a lesson when Daenya was about to take her daughter on a two-week vacation to Jamaica, I instinctively found myself asking  – “Why do you think your mother decided to go to America when she did?”  Daenya looked as puzzled as if I had asked her a question about higher mathematics. Before she could shut down completely, I added, “I know it was to make money for the family, but why then, specifically? Do you think it was after the murder of your young cousin?” 

When she and her daughter returned from their vacation, where Daenya was able to re-establish relationships with relatives and see for herself the beauty of the island - as well as the aspects of the culture that made it impossible for her to even consider living there again. She had found the kind of ‘meaningful connection’ that carries over to all characters from all societies and walks of life.

She had understood that her mother had not ‘abandoned’ her; instead, she had spent four lonely years – how difficult it must have been for her to leave her two daughters, especially little Daenya, and husband behind – while she established a beachhead in America. In fact, her mother was a hero, who had done all this so that the same terrible fate that had befallen her poor little cousin would never happen to Daenya, who was the same age.  And somehow, Daenya found the strength to accept the fact that her mother had died without a reconciliation having taken place between them. This was the hardest part, but it connected her forever to the ‘abyss of losses’ that Berniece carried around within her. Although Daenya did not have a direct parallel to the slavery background of the African American experience, now she could personally relate to the situation of ever-present danger from crime, the shame felt by citizens who are not protected by laws. She had finally felt her own close relationship to Berniece’s ‘abyss’ from the one that lay beneath her own childhood back in her home country.

We were all set to process that information into acting when life suddenly threw Daenya another curveball. The dentist she was working for could no longer maintain his office and had to join a clinic. He managed to salvage her job by bringing her along with him, but now she was always on-call – even on Sundays. I also began teaching seminars, and was unavailable one Sunday each month. We were both under pressure; Daenya started sending texts to cancel the day of class. It was too frustrating, and I gave her an ultimatum.   No more canceled appointments on Sundays without prior notice. But somehow the ultimatum didn’t stick.  Art trumps convenience in my life, and we found a compromise solution so Daenya could continue.

Have a wonderful Memorial Day!  Outing the Actor will return the following week. 

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…

BLOG #37: Why Acting is so Bloody Hard… Daenya tackles Berniece from August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.

So much has already been said on this subject, why am I sinking my teeth into it? Well, because I’m obstinate and once something comes to mind I think needs writing about, my fangs start rattling like Hannibal Lechter’s…

You need strength to write about acting; it’s an EQ, IQ sort of subject. You have to lay yourself bare to the deep angst that lies at the base of every actors’ psyche while simultaneously giving swift, pithy, precise mental punches for your words to be of any use.   If you say one thing, then you immediately have to say the opposite mirroring the crazy imbalance of human nature, while trying to make sense.

Today, I was working with Daenya, an actress of a certain age, who is still very beautiful. Originally from Jamaica, she arrived in America when she was eleven. For the past twenty years she has worked as a dental technician. Her husband left her ten years ago and, as a pedicab driver, has never been in a position to pay alimony or child support for their daughter, who is now fourteen. Daenya’s been taking classes with me for almost five years. She loves acting – learning about the artistic process itself, although she is often invaded by despair since there is no room in her life for auditioning let alone appearing in a showcase or even shooting a student film.

The Big Depression that began in 2008 – sorry, I refuse to call this catastrophic diminution of wages and quality of life a mere ‘Recession’ - has made Daenya’s already difficult life incrementally worse. Her problem is not principally financial, although that is certainly a factor, and she is not particularly oppressed at work. One of the signs of a ‘true actor’ – or perhaps any artist - is the need for a holistic life – one in which the pieces fit together. The parts of Daenya’s life have started pulling away from each other, leaving gaps that only the firmest resolve can bridge.

Daenya is aware of other people – she cares for the dentist she works for. His business dropped off significantly when the actors who formed most of his clientele were impacted by the downturn in the economy. Gone are the days when he was making thousands of dollars a day improving the smiles of thespians. Daenya is grateful that she alone retained her job, although it means she is run off her feet six days a week. The train she takes into the City from Queens for her Sunday acting lessons is often out-of-service and her husband can no longer take their daughter for a couple of hours because all the former office workers are now moonlighting as pedicab drivers, and Sundays are the only day anyone can make money, etc., etc!  Daenya has gone from disadvantaged person (sub-standard education and accented speech) with a dream to oppressed person, refusing to give up.

From time to time Daenya has given up her lessons for a few months , but she always returns. Considering her life difficulties, I neither encourage nor discourage her continued participation, but I am very happy when she returns and deeply moved by the continual progress of her acting in spite of everything. At her lesson this week we were attempting to put together elements of Berniece’s monologue from August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. Daenya has been working at solving its problems, on and off, ever since she started studying with me.  In group class, she tackled the scene where the preacher, Avery, who is in love with Berniece, is trying to get her to play her piano and sing again. During the last couple of years when she’s had time only for private classes, Daenya has returned again and again to Berneice’s monologue from that scene. 

It can be hard for non-native black actors to identify with the deep wound that still festers from the time of slavery in America.  Obviously, African Caribbeans have had similar experiences with matters of race and color, but it hasn’t been ground into their bodies and minds – and August Wilson would certainly say souls - by a white majority for an extended period. Racial prejudice still exists in this country and was up front and central pretty much into the 1980’s.  (I don’t mean to say that there haven’t been deep and very painful issues of race in the Caribbean – it’s just different. I’m not an authority and I don’t know enough of the history for an authoritative discussion.  All I can say is that as an acting teacher, I observe a greater ‘rage connected to race’ in African Americans than African Caribbean’s.)

In my next entry, I’ll explain how Daenya eventually found the roots of the character within herself and was able to think and feel her way into the character of Berniece… 

Blog #36: Why acting for kids isn’t a substitute for therapy. When acting class can help and when it can’t…

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.

BLOG #35: Yes, acting training can be therapeutic – but never a replacement for therapy…

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…

BLOG #34: At the Signature Theatre, Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque. Great acting pulls us into a cancer story…

Whenever an Albee play is on, I try to get there. Only once was I really disappointed, when I went to see The Play about the Baby. It might have been a case of both miss-casting and miss-directing.  When it comes around again, I’ll give it another try. 

My reaction to the current production of The Lady from Dubuque, at the handsome new Signature Theatre complex, was laughter and then tears and more tears, still mixed with laughter.  Both Ben Brantley’s review in The New York Times and John Lahr’s in The New Yorker were favorable – very unusual since the two publications seem to make a point of disagreeing on most theatre!  In this case I may have a leg-up in appreciating the extraordinary acumen of Albee’s response to the situation of the play; i.e. a woman dying of cancer and the reaction of her friends and family. I am, myself, a cancer survivor, so obviously I didn’t die of it, but my mother and paternal grandmother did. OK, what does all this have to do with acting?  

The mind plays tricks on us, and actors must discover and nurture, not only an understanding of these subterfuges, but a mastery over the use of them for the sake of characters, who are facing immensely painful situations like madness and deathly illness.  Initially, it is only natural that people who are learning to act repress their feelings. Usually, that’s the end of acting for them but the select few, like the ones in this performance of Albee’s play put themselves far beyond the call of duty to drag us laughing and sobbing into the epicenter of the cancer world.

By the way, why do we talk about cancer survivors – I’ve never heard of ‘heart attack’ or ‘cirrhosis of the liver’ survivors? Cancer isn’t a disease –it’s not an infection or a malfunction. I see it more like a vicious, deviant element in a society - in this case the body - that has to be destroyed by a bloody revolution. In many cases like mine, radical cutting is required, followed by a poisoning of the entire bodily system through chemo and radiation. Even in the mildest cases, receiving a diagnosis that there is any cancer present in one’s body makes the ‘idea’ of death a ‘reality.’ Cancer is a clever ‘evil’ that possesses the body in all sorts of ways. Not just physically, but mentally it overcomes us with terror. It is so frightening that in former times, people were shunned when they had it – one could not speak of the ‘unmentionable illness!’

There are many plays about cancer, and it’s metastasizing all over the place on popular TV programs.   Usually, it is soft-pedaled or treated as a back drop for other drama, because the reality is excruciating and people don’t want to watch its true horrors unfold. It’s too scary! Often we assume we know about cancer because we’ve read a few articles or know people who know people who’ve had it. We like to leave it at that. So why is this revival of a full-blown cancer play getting such critical acclaim and packing them in?  

Albee has achieved the near-impossible in brilliantly constructing a ‘comic tragedy,’ and this aspect has been covered in the aforementioned reviews, which are available online. But I would like to go deeper into the actors’ contribution, which of course would not have been possible unless the director, David Esbjornson, had not found a subtext that is utterly in concert with Albee’s intentions. However, each actor must embody the specific pain or reaction to impending death they are facing and draw not only on technique but deal with the humanity that drips from every line. Each one makes us believe that the absurd behavior we are watching is something that could actually happen or we would not laugh and cry, sometimes literally at the same moment.  

While the protagonist is howling with pain, a guest is berating her for not being a good hostess! Of course, it’s a metaphor, as is the presence of death embodied by a handsome, white-haired ‘mother’ embracing her child isn’t likely to become an actuality. But those ‘metaphors’ happen psychologically. They do. Believe me, they do!  Sometimes, the difficulty of the situation brings out the best in people. When my grandmother was dying horribly from cancer, my father dropped everything to envelop her in kindness. In my own experience of the illness, certainly there was much kindness, but often the expectations others had of me – even the ones I had of myself - when I was undergoing chemotherapy were ridiculous.

The actors in The Lady from Dubuque are emotional acrobats. They are a bit like clowns, who are basically very sad losers, but make us laugh with their antics.  Maybe no one, certainly not all, in the cast are ‘cancer survivors’ nor have they necessarily been exposed to the illness through a loved one.  But they enter that dreadful world through personal identification with the character’s experience and make it palatable to us by ‘playing’ the humor.  They have worked very hard to reach this level of skill – and they are very brave to put themselves through ‘their own painful reality’ in order to bring the ‘reality of the play’ to their audience. They certainly make it look like the Devil’s work. It’s hard to believe that God could be involved in this awful business…

BLOG #33: Hey, kid, express yourself! No reprisals in acting class… Some hits and some misses.

When kids take an acting class they dream of being Dakota Fanning or Justin Beiber – and it can happen - but usually, if they are lucky, they end up being… well, a more authentic version of themselves. (‘Authentic,’ in this sense, means that kids become capable of allowing their own instincts and beliefs to guide their behavior instead of unconsciously pursuing approval or just trying to get attention.) I’d like to say a bit more about this and give examples. Adult actors may see elements of their own development from past to present in some of these reflections and stories.

We know that the arts, in general, give a boost to life skills by involving young people in areas they have not previously explored and in so doing capturing their interest and giving them impetus to overcome fears and frustrations. But where does acting, in particular, fit into this scenario?

Well, it affords kids the opportunity to experience and express with their own bodies and voices, all kinds of situations that confuse, cause pain or seem just plain boring.  Less visceral ways of trying to deal with all this negative stuff often shuts them down. But acting class is a place where they are encouraged to openly show shyness, fear of peer rejection, anger, sadness in the face of loss, etc. It’s not ‘real life’ so they can allow their feelings to emerge without fear of actually hurting or provoking real anger. Behaving in an ‘unacceptable manner’ is the heart and soul of theatre games; shouting, tears, deeply involving and enlightening discussions, laughter - all come out of this work. But it’s important that there should be no fear of a negative response or reprisal.  If their efforts are genuinely respected, they are more likely to slowly shift from ‘How am I doing?’ to ‘I’m really interested in what I’m doing and I want to get your response.’

The teacher must always provide a safe environment; by showing disapproval or disappointment over ‘failed’ attempts or, on the other hand, effusive praise for work with which the student himself/herself is dissatisfied, bewilders, angers and shuts kids down – I think that’s true across the board, but it’s fatal with young people.  All expression should be acknowledged as genuine in some way; most children (some adults, as well) do not know the difference between trying to act and ‘acting out.’ At the same time the teacher accepts the effort of the young student, the problems must be recognized and a path toward solving them clearly laid out.

Obviously, violence has to be prevented, but that has never come up in any of my classes with children. Usually when allowed self-expression, kids don’t go out of control unless the class is too big and there are negative undercurrents between children that the teacher is missing. Probably, this is why I prefer to work with kids one-on-one or in very small groups.

I mention again the importance of parents who have a strong impact on the success or failure of acting training for their kids. Here is an example of how a parent/child relationship made things difficult. This is a scenario I find particularly upsetting: a mother, who depends on income from a cute, pretty/handsome, intelligent, willing child who hasn’t the least genuine interest in or talent for acting, or even the kind of personality that makes modeling an easy fit. 

One such case was exquisite Chantal, clothed in pastel frills, her diminutive head arrayed in perfect dreads, ornamented with jeweled barrettes and shiny beads. Whenever her attractive mother, baby attached to hip – clearly no father in the picture - hovered at the beginning or end of class, Chantal’s worried eyes glued themselves to her mother’s every move. I could feel the girl flinching at her mother’s barrage of questions about managers and agents, while she shoved a new batch of professional photos into my hand, ostensibly asking for my opinion, but actually requiring my adulation and approval of decisions she had already made. During coaching sessions for auditions – the mother managed to shoehorn her into every project going for a kid of her type and age – with her lines perfectly memorized and thought out, this sad, tense little girl thwarted all my attempts to open up the possibility of a fresh, spontaneous approach to the material.  When I lost track of her after a couple of years she was still supporting the family through low level modeling jobs and the occasional non-speaking part on commercials.

Next week is Easter. For those who celebrate the holiday, enjoy your roasted lamb or vegan feast!  I will return the following week to talk about my reaction to The Signature Theatre’s extraordinary production of The Lady from Dubuque. After that, more about acting training for kids, how it can be therapeutic but never a replacement for actual therapy…