ACTING /IS/

I can feel my presence leave the body when I play the characters I’m afraid of, even funny ones—such as Satan and Rosencrantz from two of my favorite plays, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. I was selecting contemporary monologues that do not naturally align with me.

There is a wall.

Against that wall, I began choosing monologues based on a false self.

Eventually, I asked myself why I insisted on pursuing such monologues in the first place. Why do I perceive this vulgar, intellectual demeanor as representative of myself?

I was choosing these characters because I was afraid of exhibiting those parts of myself. Somewhere deep down, I had internalized the belief that I was bad. I concluded that I ought to play such parts out in the theater—to make extra sure of the fact that they don’t appear in me elsewhere.

This paranoia does not permit the natural playing of Satan. For one, Satan does not spend his time worrying about virtue. His circumstances contain nuances that would require serious training for me to convincingly inhabit him within my own skin.

When I shed this false construct of myself, I revealed the tenderness, compassion, and love that most people already see in me. They had been there all long, but I was unable to access them for myself—not without the validation of an interaction, however momentary that dipole-dipole interaction was.

I could see these qualities manifested in my work and the way I saw the world, but they were less available in my own psyche, in my own presence. I was only privy to them in the aftermath. They occupied my blind spot. I could see them only recursively in the rearview mirror, if I sped up or slowed down. Even then, it felt as though my reflection was racing me toward an accident, forcing us to collide, fight, exchange Geico insurance information, and get the authorities involved. I stayed in my own lane and kept my eyes on the road ahead to avoid collision.

When I felt compassion toward myself, I would reverse its polarity. Anger lay on the surface, with something else underneath entirely. Above that, there was an artificial layer of self-doubt: a sheer veil that was thickening with every vow.

This realization helped me bounce back as a swimmer does at the end of the lane: using the force of the wall to change direction and reacquaint myself with the part of the pool where there is fluidity and movement.

I had climbed out of the water, ready to reconstruct the pool I was swimming in—to expand and transform its shape in the middle of an audition rehearsal. Instead, I was advised to save that for first year of drama school and to instead focus, for now, on the pool that is.

Resilience is a specificity. It is a change in direction and magnitude, and the way we inhabit that change.

I am so eager to apply and one day attend drama school! It is remarkable that my choice of monologues created a ripple effect extending so far outward that it allowed me to interact and follow it all the way out to its boundaries. The challenges I encounter even while preparing for auditions spark so much excitement that it takes me days to ground and process what I have discovered within myself.

Splish, splash.