A Life in the Theater, Part the first

When I was in college, I had a roommate who happened to be a theatre major.  I would go to his school productions and marvel at the girls who were in the theatre department, so I decided to take an acting class.  Ostensibly it was to meet girls, but because I was then trying my hand at screenplay writing, the reasoning I gave publically was to better understand the people who would eventually be saying my words.

The acting class was taught by a young guy who had once been a protégé of Lee Strasburg.  So it was method, method and nothing much else.  You did the chair exercise, sense memory stuff, and if you were “lucky” you could graduate to the “Room exercise”.

In this class you either had to do a monologue (I picked something from “The Knack”) or a scene.  As luck would have it, a dance major asked me (I lacked the courage to ask her or anyone else to be my scene partner) if I wanted to do a scene with her.  I was reading the collected works of Neil Simon Volume 2 and suggested a scene from “The Prisoner of Second Avenue”, ignoring the part where the character was a middle-aged man and I was a mere lad of 20.  To my clueless sensibilities, it just seemed like a funny scene to do.

After memorizing and rehearsing, it was finally the day of the scene.  Another student did a monologue before us and he was eviscerated.  The instructor could find nothing positive to say and just ripped the poor guy to shreds.  For the instructor, this was the rule rather than the exception.  Our turn came and it thankfully went better that expected.  The instructor “loved” what we did, gave us a few suggestions and had us re-do it.  Afterwards we were held up as examples of what you could accomplish if you showed up to class and worked hard.

Being the incredibly insecure person that I was, this was heady stuff and  I took this to heart, as I did any amount of praise, and plunged head first into acting. Here was my calling and for better or worse, I was on the road to a life in theatre; a road which would eventually lead me to New York City and a slew of misadventures.  But first I felt that I actually have some experience acting.  More on this in a future blog.