Ego

The actor ego is a very fragile thing. As I'm sure you know, I spent a week or two there thinking I was pretty damn good. As of last night, I'd say about 90% of that feeling has left me.

I'm not saying I doubt my abilities. Not at all. I'm still good at this and I still work really hard and I'm clever so I can figure things out. But one has to wonder sometimes...

We're working on a new scene in class and I met with my scene partners (there are three of us in the scene this time) and we talked about things and one of the main things I need in the scene is a defined relationship with the man, who plays my sister's husband. It's pretty obvious in the text that my character is in love with him and has been for some time and while we were talking, the other woman in the scene suggested that perhaps he and I had slept together at some point and that her character either knew it or was suspicious. And I said no. Because I had thought about it and I know that for me, I feel more sexual tension when I haven't slept with someone. In my own mind, I equate physical intimacy with a separation, largely because the majority of the men I have been intimate with disappear shortly thereafter. And I'm not even talking about sex - a couple have ditched me after an intense make-out session. So because of my own fucked-up-ed-ness about relationships, I thought it would fuel me more as an actor if my brother-in-law and I as characters had not slept together.

And I got my ass handed to me.

I feel like I need to apologize to the other woman I'm working with because I should have listened to her suggestion from the beginning. And I should have listened to the man in the scene because I think he was initially leaning towards us having slept together, too. So I apologize to the both of you that I let my ego get in the way of making the riskier choice.

Because as it turns out, the teacher had us get up into environment. Well, she had me and the guy get up into environment, anyway. The scene is weird - he talks with her for a while (six or seven pages), then I enter and she leaves and I talk to him for a while (six or seven pages), and then she comes back and the three of us are on stage for three pages before our scene ends. So the first half of the scene was the two of them reading at the table. And then I fucked up my entrance and the teacher coached me through it. And then my sister left the scene and they chatted about the work that was just done at the table and the teacher said to get rid of the table because she wanted the two of us up in environment, which was then thrown out the window when we said we hadn't slept together.

And I'm still kicking myself because it is the riskier, scarier choice to say yes, we had slept together. That should be one of those automatic things, like when you're developing a character and you ask yourself if you love the other person in the scene with you, you answer "Yes" because that connects you to them. "Yes and" instead of "No but." You don't have to be intimately in love with them, seeking marriage and a life together, but if you choose to love that person, you are invested in them on some level and therefore, you are invested in the scene. So the answer to the question, "Have you two slept together?" when it is not answered in the script should always be "Yes." Because that is the scarier choice. It should be an automatic that I should have learned back in Tech 1.

And now I'm "shoulding" myself. Man, I'm having a bad morning.

So the teacher had us do the first dozen lines of our part of the scene a couple of times - once as if we hadn't slept together, once as if we slept together last night, and once as if we slept together five years ago - and the differences were remarkable. The difference in how I felt about him, and about my sister, and about myself, and about my relationship with him, and my relationship with my sister and it became glaringly obvious to me (which it probably already was to everyone else in the room) that yes, these characters have slept together at some point. It makes the dialogue make more sense and brings so much more life into the scene.

And my point with this whole entry is, that while I've been on my little ego trip, I seem to have forgotten some very important fundamentals.

Yes, I found them again. And yes, I am the sort of actor who will try different things and who is open to being proven wrong. And I don't know - maybe it was like a therapy session where I had to get there myself instead of having someone tell it to me. But it's frustrating. And it's frustrating, in part, because this is the teacher who I auditioned for and I haven't found out yet if I was cast or not, but I know some people know if they've been cast, so I also felt last night like this was another callback for me. Like she maybe had some doubts about what I would be like to work with so she really wanted to work with me to see if I could handle her show and I don't feel like I did very well. I missed the most obvious, most basic of choices. I felt like I was called out for not having done my homework. I did homework. Just the wrong assignment. But also, this is class. I should not be putting the pressure of trying to win a role in a completely unrelated play on my classroom discovery. This was essentially a first read - a first real read where all of us had read the script, knew (at least sort of) who our characters were. This was exactly the time to fuck up and try different things. This was "play space" and I turned it into "pressure of performance" space and I fell flat on my face doing so.

Fuck.

So I'm frustrated today. I know I can do this. I just need the opportunity to do it and if I continue to perform at this level (even though I know I am capable of performing at that level), I will not get the opportunity. I need to step up my game. Or something.

"Yes, and..."