Last December, I decided to finally muster up the courage to enroll in an acting class. I’d wanted to learn acting for a long time. My directing professor, Barnet Kellman, encouraged us to take acting classes to learn how to direct actors. When a month opened up free of schedule, I jumped on the acting class as a life line to inject some weekly structure in my schedule. The class, and all that I learned, came to mean much more to me than that.
Actors have many superpowers that I deeply admire, chief of which is the power to put you at ease. When I stand in the company of an actor(s) who have this superpower, I relax a bit. Maybe it’s because they make me feel seen. Maybe it’s their body language — maybe actors are more comfortable in their skins than us. Whatever it is, this is probably one of the things I admire and want to emulate the most.
I also wanted to learn how to confidently speak in public, as actors seem to be able to do. I noticed this in my peers in film school who have an acting background. They’re not afraid to stand in the light and to tell a story. I really wanted to develop this muscle.
I was so privileged to have an unscheduled block of time during the past three months to try my hand in acting. Now that time is coming to an end, I’m more than a bit sad. I really love being with actors — they are very special and I feel seen among them. I will miss them a lot.
Learning the art of acting taught me how difficult this art form is. I will hopefully never again take good acting or actors for granted. It takes so much practice to learn the lines until it becomes muscle memory. I’m still recovering from the six minute scene that I bombed last Saturday. I thought I knew the lines until I stood up on that stage, and then BAM — strong start, then lines left my brain. It was very embarrassing but also so humbling in a freeing way. It taught me that you have to earn the stage, the spotlight. It has to be the most important thing until the minute I get up on the stage. I regret my cavalier attitude to performance.
Acting also taught me what a playable scene is, and how to write one. Knowing what the character wants in the scene helps make it playable. So does conflict. Pauses are hard. Quiet scenes are hard, at least for an unsophisticated actor like me. Playable scene also has beautiful dialogue that has really clear subtext. I’ll never forget that scene from Sideways where the two characters are talking about wine, but they’re really talking about themselves. Acting taught me how to write dialogue — repetition of words, antithesis, rhythm… good dialogue is musical, so much more musical than writers realize. Good dialogue sings. It truly sings. Greta Gerwig writes singing dialogue. Alexander Payne. Emerald Fennell. Michaela Cole. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Damn, all of them except Alexander Payne are actors. See what I mean about actors having superpowers? One of them is that they’re great writers.
Prior to acting, I thought a screenplay is a visual medium with lots of action lines and some dialogue sprinkled in. Nope. It’s as auditory a medium as it is visual.
Part of me really wants to continue the class, but I know it won’t be fair to the fellow actors, my new manager, my new job, and ultimately to myself. Spreading thin doesn’t do anyone any good. So for now, I’m bidding acting class adieu. Yes, I’ll always remain an amateur in acting in true sense of that word, as its root word means to love. And I think I’m okay with that. But I’ll always appreciate it for what it taught me. It taught me the value of its art form, how to respect its traditions and the people who carry it forward, how to fail, how to be kind to others (actors are so good at this!), and how to write scenes that have, at the very least, germ of truthfulness in them.
