t’s his look about to cry that makes me want to feel everything about him, including the thin flannel robe he’s wearing. It’s not just that I want to hug him, or touch him, but I get this sudden rush of wanting to draw up against every part of his body, to feel it to its last sandy grain. I am going to make it better, I am going to sculpt him out of this.

I realize I’d be nestling him as though he were an infant. He senses my urge to embrace him, he’s sensitive enough, but hates me for it. Such coddling reminds him of mothers. So he doesn’t look at me as he washes out a cup, starts a flame under the kettle and puts a jar of Nescafé on the counter.

A few minutes ago I kneeled to see his eyes (he was sitting on the couch): “Do you have any coffee?” I did want some, and it was what I thought of at the moment to get us involved with each other again. I’m having a lot of trouble extending this part; at the rate we’ve been going I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to create much more script. Oh, but that fear is persistently there; even when I’m faced with a more verbal and articulate character I feel tension in that responsibility to keep the lines developing between us. I guess I’d label it the pit in the creative process.

This minute he’s saying, “I guess I’ll have some too, it’ll be good for my head.” He makes a vinegary face.

He bought a cheap bottle of wine last night for our evening of romance. It had been the cause for his telling me that high sugar contents did bad things to him as a child, like make him hyperactive. “And then what happened?” I asked; he laughed. “Are you asking me about my childhood? I had a terrible childhood. Women used to love hearing about it, they’d ask and ask, never get enough...”

He’d made that face and gotten out of bed. I’d noticed that face in acting class; I thought it particularly ugly.

I’m doing the best I can, not having much to go on here. The Director almost always has us play it this way. Each time our class meets he surprises us with variations of style, or method, to train us with the same basic idea: ‘feel your part’. He thinks the element of surprise is the most effective approach to uninhibit us and get our guts out onto the stage. It’s sort of a Stanislavsky technique, but I’m never prepared for what the Director has planned.

It’s very unnerving. But I respect and admire the Director very much. He’s been foremost in this school for a very long time and it’s his innovations that make him well-known and controversial. I feel very fortunate to be under his tutelage; though a great deal of it is lawless, his form invites ingenuity. He demands extreme submission to one’s emotions, which is a threat to any performer’s sanity (identity), but I’m willing if it’ll make me the best actress I can be. I have a lot of faith in the Director.

He usually has us do part improvisation, part reading from a script. In the present instance he’s provided brief character sketches as introduction. I have a packet of material for this project, and there are interludes that are opportune for leafing through the packet. At least that’s what I automatically (frantically) do during pauses—the more background I can accumulate, the more easily I perform. The Director chooses where we start; according to the packet we are not at the beginning of this play. It is irrelevant to us because we, the actress and the actor, are the really the creators of the proceeding drama.

Now I take a navy ceramic mug from the cupboard. I ask, “Do you like this one?”

“No.”

There’s a larger one, up-side down with a rainbow on it, near the other. “You like this one,” I prompt, despite my knowing he will growl at my air of being able to predict things. He thinks that air’s show-offy, impertinent. It also suggests mothers.

I check with the Director. My answer is a warm feeling; that, I know from experience, generally means I’m touching truth. But my mother isn’t knowing. (Often I have to give up what I know from personal experience, exchange it for collective mythology, or habits, and research through that compilation so I’m able to explain a character’s motives. Once I’ve clarified motive, I can keep giving it.)

There isn’t enough water for two in the kettle, so he pours what there is equally into the cups and fills them to the brim with hot tap water. “I burned myself this way many times,” he says.

It’s just morning dew wet in his eyes. It’s people with straight brown hair and dark eyes whose eyes glisten without crying. And newborn babies. It might just be the biological clock. If last night hadn’t been so sour, all wouldn’t rest upon this hour. The morning could uncover us.

I need so much to feel I like him for this to work. I want to guide it to a happy end.

He stirs dried milk in the coffee. Walking stiff as a bellboy he brings us to the living room.

He turns on music, the singer/composer (a glance at the packet reveals) I told him last night I liked. So he’s doing me a kindness. Jagger is not acting very conversational so I take it as a cue that we’re ready for some script. At any rate, it’s a chance for me to look for some. I find directions: read to yourself (introspect) from the second to the third page; it’s the part in parentheses.

(She would like to say, “I listened to this all the time when I had a crush on you,” although the picture she has in mind is laughable now.

(She thinks of how she was, fifteen in a yellow bikini that summer, seeing him at morning assembly, and wanting him for his eyes, these eyes. He fit the song perfectly. He would have lots to say about living that hurt him, and beauty, love and innocence. This is what his silence, as constant as any part of his body, made her think. Lulled by the hot morning sun, she watched him through half-shut eyes, hoped he’d sense her squinting at him.)

I think I had a Platonic ideal of the essences of our poetic spirits joining on clear sky, full trees and ocean, one summer afternoon. He was thin and tall, had brown hair even with his chin. I thought he would look best on a sail-boat.

I hand him the rainbow mug from the table he’s set it on. “No,” he says. “I decided this one for you.”

There are some times when nothing goes right; and there are times when a pattern emerges, and if you follow it, rather than the logic you’re accustomed to, you’re better at guessing the move which will lead you to right, rather than wrong. Or you can obstinately refuse, stubbornly adhere to the familiar logic and keep failing. It was too boring to discuss. “Oh,” I say, and give him the other mug.

He sits back on the couch, in a cut-up sort of way. The pieces of his body fit too loosely on him. One reason I’m not leaving yet is I’m still thinking we’re so much alike. (The Director included this in bold in the character’s sketch: DON’T FORGET. It’s the potential bond between us.) But it isn’t my body that doesn’t fit; it’s something more abstract. Feeling separate keeps me here.

The girl in the yellow bikini never would’ve thought it could be like this. I realize life is much more dull and empty than she could think. The brown in his eyes is runny and flashy; they focus to the window. They promise emotions he won’t yield.

“You look nice in the morning,” I say, a mix of child and adult in my voice, on my face.

He sees mother again. “Gee.” He contorts in mock embarrassment, looks up at the ceiling.

“Your eyes all wide and bright,” intoning as if I’m reciting the tale of the owl and the pussy-cat.

I hadn’t planned this; I’m mortified. Jagger, who smirks at most of my attempts to charm him, laughs full blast. It’s when I reflect now that I get the insight that Jagger’s imagining me to be like a mother. I know this with certainty; why else do I suddenly find myself talking like my seductive mother?

For the moment I feel more settled and less anxious to please both of us. I want to see if I can manipulate him more by playing the mother; though it sickens me to try this. I take him across his shoulders, firm and matronly I feel my underarm muscle. The first time this morning he touches me; the tip of his head nuzzles the bone that is my shoulder. I identify with the coffee-cup he sets to wait on his lap.

 

he Director steps on stage now.

Okay, Ana, Kevin, I want to try something different. Forget the pace we usually go at; play it slow. Sink deeply into your characters. Do their relationship the way we do sense immersion to warm up. Think of the coffee-cup exercise: hear the liquid swash in the cup, smell the steam, grip the cool porcelain. Get belly on the ground of an experience; there you perceive details you need to re-piece when dramatizing.

How do Robin and Jagger get together? I don’t want you to think or plan, just do it. Draw from past experience, each other, what you respond to as you shape. From guidelines, sketches, pieces in your packets.

Emphasize development. Be super-natural. You’re lighting on implicit material, what’s usually unobserved onstage. You’re working from a reversal standpoint.

You’re good at what you do, but there’s some fear stiffening you both; so let’s try this out. It’s just an experiment. What I really want you to get from this are insights that can help you in future roles. You’re working towards being able to improvise and investigate human nature at the same time. We wouldn’t be here now if we weren’t trying to get away from the idea of predetermined acting. You want an audience to forget you are acting; from their point of view you have nothing of your own.

One thing extra: don’t get tense at this. It’s time you took a step back. I think you both tend towards being what I call “masochistic performers,” and a relaxed exercise may help you become less sensitive to your audience. You’re ready professionally, I think, to stop trying to impress anybody. Seriously, let’s start.

 

evin puts his arm on my shoulder and walks me with him. “I think he feels bad for the last times I was up. Once he had such a bad cold and he couldn’t see anything through his Kleenex. He had to excuse himself the second time—said he had a ‘family crisis’ to deal with. After that, I don’t remember what, just I never sense he gives a goddamn.”

“I think he does. Of course I don’t know what experience you’ve had with him, but he’s really helped me a lot–”

“Yes, I know, he’s really a good guy. I was just kidding. I guess I just never felt he liked me,” he says. His eyes are very vulnerable.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I like shyness but I hate it used tactically. I can’t tell. I haven’t been close to him enough. I don’t know what he’d like my eyes to answer—a reassurance or a reprimand—and I’m not sure which I’d like to give. There is also something joking in the way he does it, perhaps slightly mocking.

Maybe I’m being coy too. I’m scared, I mean, I don’t particularly want to handle the coming scenes the way the Director’s set us up. I’m not exactly the most elegant woman in town and I know I’m going to be clumsy. I get this small feeling of attachment to him; he touches me. “Do you respect him?” I ask.

“I don’t really know. Whenever I’m with him he doesn’t talk much. In class when he has his spurts I think everyone’s intimidated by him. I think there should be more class discussion.”

“Well, he is kind of shy, and maybe since you’re kind of shy—right?”

“Right.”

“Well, maybe it’s hard sometimes for two shy men to talk to each other.”

“That could be it.” Brings his arm down. “Thank you.”

“Sure. I’m really nervous.”

He sits.

“Are you?”

“No,” he says, and starts sorting the contents of his packet on the table before him. Crossing hands on his lap, he studies.

 

Background #1

Dear Robin,

It’s the heart in this work I like the most, its basic honesty. Pieces of myself wend their way through this work. Some of the truths Ophelia reveals I can relate to, because I’m kind of shy in some of the ways she is. These are things I don’t generally express in my own plays because I’m afraid to be so honest. So Ophelia is very much a three-dimensional character whose struggle I feel empathy with.

How about a movie? Jagger

 

Dear Jagger,

A basically bold and honest approach to a critique. I like the heart too—

Which movie? When? Robin

 

e calls me before there are days enough for my letter to reach him. “You’re a hard woman to reach.”

“Oh yeah?” I answer, enjoying the impression. “My line’s been busy tonight.”

“Well, did you get a chance to look at the comments from the class yet?”

“Yes,” adding nothing.

“I want to apologize for mine. I don’t know why I wrote what I did. It was stupid, I should have analyzed your play more carefully. I didn’t have the time. I have a tendency to over-dramatize. I think it’s the playwright in me.”

I hear him through maybe his first two phrases. I’m getting a sinking feeling but I think he’s just being insecure. I cut in at the first break. “Don’t be sorry, I thought your comment was great. I even wrote you a letter back today, so that’s why I didn’t say anything I didn’t want to tell you but now you’re calling so I guess I may as well tell you.”

“Oh yeah? What did you write in the letter?”

“Well, I don’t want to tell you exactly because you’re still going to get it. I thought it was witty, but now the wit will be lost, but, well, it wasn’t anything big really, forget it.”

I think I’m not very convincing when I’m trying to be aloof; my way is usually to contradict myself to save any complete thought from being expressed. I end up not making sense. I’m sorry if my listener feels a personal inadequacy because he understands nothing. I’m over-analytical. I get that way when I’m most excited. I try to understand everything. Here, I’m afraid that he didn’t really mean to ask me to go to a movie, that either he’s changed his mind or else it was a kind of joke, like why not make a movie out of your play?

The impression I’ve had of him until the letter was that he could be mean and sarcastic—bitter. Maybe I’m just mirroring his own confusion, insecurity, contradiction; I adapt very often like a cold-blooded animal, my temperature changing to match my environments. I would continue, but he interrupts.

“So do you want to go to a movie?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let’s see. I’m calling you from a friend’s house, he’s a filmmaker, he’s got all the directories, wait a second, let me ask him where they are, hold on a second, okay?”

“Okay. I don’t have a Village Voice or Arts and Leisure this week.”

“I bet you’re too busy for things like that. Busy woman.” I smile. It’s not an image I’ve had of myself, but not one to dissuade.

“Jimmy!” I hear him call, then scrape, scrape. “Sorry, I seem to be losing the phone.”

“Don’t do that.” My mood’s happy.

“Why?”

“Because I’m on the other end.”

“Oh. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to lose you.” His saying this makes me feel he isn’t wishy-washy.

We decide which, where and when. After, he says, “Uhm, I’m getting all tangled up here, let me start over. Let’s see, they’re in the same class together and sometimes she talks and sometimes he talks and sometimes he looks at her and she looks back at him, I don’t know what I’m saying, sometimes I just talk and don’t make any sense. I should just shutup.”

“Very interesting story.” The fall-back on third person appeals to me.

“Uhm, I’ve never gone out with a playwright before.”

“Neither have I.”

A beep at the line. “Someone’s trying to get through, uhm, hold on–” He returns. “It’s long-distance, I have to get off, but well, would you like me to call you back later to continue this conversation or do you want to go to sleep now?”

I think he says it the way a waiter asks do you want anything when they’re bringing out the mops. It is gentlemanly of him; unnecessary, I think. “I’m going to sleep now.”

“I look forward to seeing you on Sunday.”

 

he reason I came to study with the Director was that I had become too intellectual while performing. What I mean is I no longer hand instinct in my roles. This was all right when trying out for commercials, but for serious drama and improvs I was getting to be a lost cause. I was ready to drop out of the business altogether.

I had become enmeshed in trying to please my audience; a typical development, I think, for anyone whose work, the culmination of it, happens in front of the eyes of others. For instance, if I’d read, “Rudolf is embarrassed now,” I’d depict on my body and face the picture I thought the audience had of that emotion.

Where I first learned, in Canada, my directors would tell me to do something but wouldn’t tell me how. Here the Director might suggest I imagine being intruded upon in the shower. “Anything to lift the emotion from your experience of it. Rudolf might be embarrassed in Manufacturers Hanover Trust. There may be no obvious connection between your mental picture and what the literal performance is about. But you end up possessing affect.”

I can tell now I act best when I completely forget my audience.

I am trying to act more bravely. The reason I chose to be an actress was to be emotional; I must secrete feelings to be a vital performer. Be more like I was when young. I begin to realize a heart’s truth must substantiate an emotional communication; otherwise the Director will dismiss me: “Your performance is hollow and meaningless.”

The idea that acting is faking has hurt my idealism and performance energy for many years. I used to think that the best actors and actresses proved feelings, that if they didn’t, many of us would go crazy. They take down the wall between what’s private and public. Maybe it’s just my particular opinion.

In any event, I’d go crazy if I didn’t try somehow to blend the personal and the impersonal, the private and public; like mind and body; I’m an actress to do it.

Perhaps it’s Robin’s influence that started this confiding monologue. It’s not a complete digression, because I can imagine myself one of the characters she writes about.

 

e meet at the movie, but it isn’t the right one. I mean, we were planning to see Fellini’s masterpiece, but when I get there (before him) it’s not what’s playing.

I tell him when he gets here, before which I’m thinking I remember him saying the names of two cinemas, maybe I’m at the wrong one. Although I remember distinctly we agreed on the LaGuardia. Well, maybe he’s at the other one and I should try to find it. But then he might get here and not find me. Besides, if he is at the other one he’d figure I’m here and come looking for me. The worst is he could be thinking the way I am, and stay put. We’ll end up laughing on the phone tonight, because it’s five more minutes before the movie, wherever it’s playing, is scheduled to start.

As we walk to hunt for a newsstand, I tell him I concluded that if I was in the wrong place I was sure he’d come to tell me.

“I’m not so sure,” he says, or, “Were you so sure?” It’s something with “sure”. His words don’t reach far enough for me to hear him. I get annoyed with this private speaking, but I don’t prod him; I’m just getting to know him. It’s uncharacteristic of me not to try and yank something that’s half-hidden. I think I’ve learned to respect secrecy more, for my own sake.

“What a coincidence,” I say maybe five times after I realize who he is, was. It’s when he mentions Alice Springs in Maine where he grew up that I remember. I want to burst out with: “You’re someone I had the wildest crush on!” I tell the street and the sidewalk but I don’t tell him. I want to, but I think not telling him will stop me from running wild. Now, Robin, I think, you don’t know if fate has you in for a good lesson or a bad one. “I was there one summer.”

It makes me laugh, soundlessly, a turn up and down, a sensation I keep when I think of it after. Here I’ve made my taste for his eyes known to my friends (“they’re so beautiful, so sensitive”), and there was the past when they evoked the same feeling. They take me father back in the past than anything has in a long time—part of me is the same as then.

Jagger follows me across the street to the newsstand, though I’m in no shape to be the driver. Aimlessness in front of someone else makes me feel stupid. I find “cinemas,” lose them. Jagger finally plunges in to help. The colors from neon signs streak together and shoot off.

“I don’t think we were there at the same time,” he says, struggling with the Post.

“I think we were. I remember a Jagger.”

He suggests Lolita. We head to see it but a re-check in the paper shows he misread the date. I also see Fellini’s movie playing at the twin theatre of the one we met in front of. It’s too late for it though. “Let’s try Seventh Seal,” I say.

“Sure. I haven’t heard much about it.” He bobs, mini-steps to the subway. I stride.

“So when did you start writing plays?” he asks. “Were you one of those early beginners?”

“Yeah.” I stub my toe in a sidewalk crack.

“I thought so.”

“What about you?”

“I’m a late, slow one,” he says. I notice his hands are shaped like junior mitts. “I wish I started earlier.”

“It’s not something to wish, I don’t think.”

“Why not? Oh, I guess if you spend your time writing you miss out on other things.”

“Well, why would you be writing? I remember one of the first things I wrote was a response to a poem I read in a magazine. The poem was called ‘Self Pity,’ and it got me mad because the moral was the usual, it’s a bad thing. So I wrote something back, called it ‘Self Pity’ and, yeah, it showed it to be a bad thing, but I also glorified it at the end.” I look out the train-window at the moving black.

When we’re out from underground he says, “I only write surreal stuff—I think someone has to be a total narcissist to write just surreal.”

I think. “Guess so.”

His foot stamps the curb. “No you’re not supposed to say that. I didn’t mean that,” to his collar. This time it takes a few minutes to play back the sounds he made, to recognize the words.

Nothing more eventful happens this evening.

 

’ve never partnered up with Kevin before. I wonder what his background is. He looks agitated. He’s hunting for something, and for a second pauses to hunt it on me. I shrug, don’t have it.

“What are you looking for?”

He closes the air around us, preparing to tell me a secret. “I think his approach is so distorted,” he says.

He shows me different faces and attitudes he can make.

“I can do yellow. Warm, flowing, then I feel a twitch somewhere, in back of my head, that’s my subconscious saying ‘cowardice’.

“Or blue—peace; or green, sharp, colder, lively; or red, lust.

“Or I can become glass, a feather, any animal only I’m scared of being a fish; or a sound.”

“That’s very imaginative,” I say. “What’s it got to do with anything?”

“Guess.”

“Can you be nice, too?”

“I’m very nice, warm, gentle, friendly; do you think I’m like the character I’m playing?”

“The thought did cross my mind.”

“Did you ever do Grotowski method?” he asks.

“No. I do mostly natural spirit acting.”

“In Chicago I was part of the Muse Collective. We did combined methods—Grotowski, est, psychodrama and Method. I was sick of all the cerebral stuff I was doing before. With the Muse, the energy inside me roared up. It was great.”

“So you’ve been working in schools for a while.”

“Oh, yes, longer than you. I could tell you a lot of stuff you didn’t know, I bet. Like how we had to feel our age, our bodily sensations, and work back from there, getting younger, until finally we were in the womb and from there we conceived our character. Then we did a life map, charting images for the character’s unconscious. We built them at a subconscious level. Do you know about the hunting game?”

“No.”

“Someone has a cow-bell or whistle, and that person is ‘it.’ Everyone runs away from ‘it,’ like we’re playing tag. If ‘it’ touches you and rings, you’re out. The hunted experience their characters’ primal fear. And the hunter is his primal aggressions, hates, lusts. Being the hunter is the most exciting; it involves you on so many levels.”

“Sounds interesting,” I say.

“ It really empties out your body, lets out chaotic emotions and goofy feelings to surround you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“My time is almost finished at this school. Do you think I’m good?”

“Yeah, but I wish you’d put more into the character you’re doing, make him more related.”

“Related? I don’t even know what that means. Okay, I’ll try and be related. Have you acted anywhere major professionally?”

“No,” I say. “Have you?”

“Once I acted on the same stage as Johnny Depp.”

“Wow.”

“It’s nothing, once it’s over, you’re back where you began. I go to a lot of auditions during the week, it’s really tough, they always want the big names. I really want to be onstage now. Do you think you’ll stay here for long?”

“I hope so, I want to learn everything I can. I want to be a great actress.”

 

[MORE]

© 2005 Shira Dentz - Contributor's Bio

[index] [archive] [spotlight] [guidelines] [editor] [subscribe]