In college,
I studied how to be an Actor: classes, workshops, long nights and short
rehearsal processes. Method and anti-method methods. Types and being the wrong
type. I became well-acquainted with my Actor Anxiety and started wondering if
that’s the fuel that Real Actors use to get jobs and make a name for
themselves. Moving to New York to pound pavement didn’t sound inspiring; it
sounded awful. “This can’t be what it means to be an Actor! It simply can’t!” I
thought. Something wasn’t quite right.
And so I
took a few years’ hiatus from the stage to go to grad school to get a Master of
Education. (I remained active on the edges of the theater world by teaching
kids’ acting classes and performing improv comedy. It was like washing my hands
of the theater, but not using soap!) This spring, after a peculiarly refreshing
semester teaching Shakespeare to young people, something mysteriously changed
in me and I felt it was the time to be an Actor again. It was time to begin
again, to begin in the middle, to get dirt under my fingernails.
A dear
friend and colleague of mine, Tonya Lynn, told me about the Unrehearsed
Shakespeare Project. She had performed with USP several times and spoke so
highly of the project, the people involved, and of how much fun it was. My
Actor Interest was piqued.
At my
audition for USP, I read a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and chased Adam
Rutledge around a gymnasium, using my Actor Legs to jump over a table for added
effect. Fun stuff! At the weekend-long cue-script technique workshop, I took
notes and devoured as much of the technique as my hungry Actor Mind could
stomach. Inspiring! At my one-on-one text session with our director, Elizabeth
Ruelas, I examined the lines my characters speak with my Actor Eyes and used my
Actor Fine Motor Skills to take notes in the margins. Scholarly! “I’ve still got
it!” I thought. “Everything in my Actor Toolbox is still working! No rust
here!”
But is that
really it? Is that really what I’ve been feeling: the rust being shaken off the
tried and tested Actor Tools?
Over the
last few weeks, as I’ve worked on building my cue-script scroll and creating a
costume plot to track my quick changes, I’ve found myself reflecting upon the
previous version of my Actor Self, the version whose batteries were charged by
anxiety and competition and whose actions consisted mainly of blindly grappling
in the dark for false inspiration and lofty standards. I realized: None of that
old Actor Self is actually present in this project. Every person who I have met
in USP is not an Actor. They act, yes, but they also collaborate, and create,
and imagine, and try, and fail, and work, and play. (Some of them even live and
work in New York!) They have no fear, and they are free -- freer than I thought
possible in the theater.
I think the
thing that changed in me during my hiatus from being an Actor was the lens
through which I viewed theater. I used to view theater in the way it had been
described to me so often during my training: a beast lurking in the dark corner
waiting for an Actor to try to dance with it as it reveled in the atmospheric tension
that came from not knowing if the Actor is fearful or fearless. However, over
the last few years of not being an Actor, but rather a teacher, I have observed
how young people interact with that beast in the corner. They don’t fear how
the beast will react to them being in the same room. Instead, they march right
up to the beast, plant their feet, and start pulling its fur. They make theater
whatever they want it to be; they explore theater not as Actors, but as
artists. They turn the beast into clay and mold it, shape it, manipulate and
own it as something unique and fun. Kids have fun with theater, because they
don’t know or care otherwise.
When
describing the Unrehearsed Shakespeare Project to colleagues or friends, their
faces would turn a grayish shade and exclaim how terrifying this project
sounds. Politely, I would casually agree with their sentiment, but truthfully I
never felt that fear. In fact, I have been embracing and even welcoming the
challenge.
And so now,
at the beginning of this project, I have abandoned my Actor Self because she is
not needed here. Now I am not a Thing to be defined, because that’s limiting. I
prefer to be a theater artist -- lowercase, unassuming, malleable, artist.
-Alisa
Cullison, The Unrehearsed Shakespeare Project