Acting

During the last few years I have taken some acting classes at a local studio. It was partly to help me with my screenwriting and partly because I have enjoyed acting at earlier times in my life.

So I took a basic sequence of three courses that ended in a scene study course where we got to put on the scenes we had worked on in class. The teacher asked us in the first session or so what kind of character we would like to play. My response was pretty quick. I wanted to play a "bad guy," someone like the Roy Cohn character in "Angels in America." Well, when she handed out the scenes we would work on I was Roy Cohn. The scene was when we first begin to see that he is really sick and it is between him and the young Mormon lawyer. Roy is in bathrobe and slippers and cursing up a storm at his "dumb Mormon hick" young friend. It's the first part of the meltdown.

I was partnered with a young guy who worked at Microsoft. He had lots of energy and was very excited about the idea of acting. He'd even been cast in a small production locally that a friend of mine directed. Raj (not his real name) was apparently a little difficult to direct according to my friend. And when we worked together he always kept changing the blocking and positioning himself differently than what I expected.

A couple of things about acting. First of all it is not "pretending," it is acting or doing or being. It is about interacting and reacting. The simplest scene has been described to me as two people trying to get past each other to the exit on the other side of the room and at the same time trying to prevent the other from doing it. In my earlier basic scene study class I had been given the assignment to be a security guard in a museum at closing time trying to evict a student desperately studying a painting for her final paper due the next day. You get the idea. Real conflict, conflicting objectives. When actors are working on something like this, they work off of each other.

My partner and I worked assiduously to prep the scene. In our final class before performance we were all running our scenes for our teacher. When it was our turn we started out fine and at some point I ended up at a desk downstage right, and my dumb hick Mormon friend decides to wander way upstage just before I have a really critical line to deliver to him. If I do it, he has positioned himself so that I have to turn my back to the audience. I look at my teacher and say "I can't..." And she says to deliver the line to him and give it to the audience anyway. So I did. Face forward without turning at all, but with every thought I could muster, I shot the words at Raj standing ten feet behind me.

One of my classmates said later that she didn't think that could be done. The teacher had a few words for my acting partner before the performance next time and he went back to our original blocking.

I learned a couple of things. One was precisely what "upstaging" means. It's a quite literal term. But second that you don't have to let it happen and you don't have to confront it. You just have to find the way to work in that moment that gets the job done.