An excerpt from a stream of thoughts
acting class, dreams, improv, feelings in search of an author
Paradoxically, I’m also reminded of a quote from an acting teacher of mine in college who I did not like at all. He wrote on my end-of-semester report card a message that superseded the memory of his yearlong subpar class. What he said was this:
“Emma must do one of two things for her acting. She will have to either claim her life experiences as emotionally valid OR she will have to go out and get life experiences that she can claim: as emotionally valid.”
I was 20 when he wrote this and I’ve thought about it probably two thousand times in the two decades that have followed.
Most of what you do as an American teenager is deny your emotional experiences. Impulse control is the bedrock of the successful high school experience. You have to do homework instead of screaming like a banshee and humping a friend, for example.
This memorable quote is exactly the advice that can only come from an acting class in that it’s grating. Invasive. Irritating like sandpaper to the soul. It’s also kind of inane and nonsensical with a syllogistic bent to it. It’s also brilliant, life-affirming, and potentially game-changing, if only you can figure out what it means.
One of my favorite movie moments of all time comes in the long forgotten film, Hamlet 2, when Steve Coogan, who plays a marooned Arizona high school acting teacher who is undergoing fertility treatment for his ailing balls (separate story line!) answers his eager student with sympathetic gravitas, intoning, “Yes, it is stupid. But it’s also: Theatre.”
My teacher’s advice serves too in writing. In deciding to write. In deciding to speak up. In doing anything with agency. Having an opinion. Believing yourself long enough to ship a new word pile from your mind, to your larynx, to the ether of competing ideas that fog up the firmament of thought we slog through all day.
She must either claim her experience as valid or go get some new experience she feels is worthy enough to claim.
It’s a taunt. It’s an invitation. It’s the riddle between me and the brass ring.
It’s a funny thing to say to a 20 year old. When you are 55 or so. It’s also the only thing to say to a 20 year old in an acting class who is not doing well in that acting class, who has just gotten off being a teenager, still numb from the deafening thrill of the ride.
I didn’t even like his class. And I can’t believe he wrote it in the third person like that. As if I wasn’t the one who would read it.
And this memory, this plague of a memory that still goads me, returns again this morning for the 2001st time, with coffee because….. Why?
I dreamt of buses. City buses with open tops careening and spilling out people in a crash. I was right there on the corner where it happened. I saw the moment they, their faces, went from people riding a bus to people in crisis. I followed the paramedics. I stood and watched as gore ensued. A team of capable people helped. I had no idea what to do. I thought… Should I get paper towels? Napkins, maybe?
I decided I was in the way so I left and ran into another bystander who had witnessed the same catastrophe. I was shaken and thought in the dream, “I will never be able to unsee this. I will watch bodies fall from this bus for the rest of my life.” The bystander man said he had seen the crash, too, and — didn’t think it was so bad.
The same little seeping death added another penny to my jar.
I’ll find a different emotional experience then. Grief won’t do. Terror isn’t warranted. Anger is alien. Those ones can’t be valid.
So I woke up twenty years later with the same end-of-semester report card.
She will have to do one of two things: Claim her emotional experiences as valid or go get new ones she feels are worthy enough to claim.
Ideally both, right? Since this is… an advanced degree now.
In an improv class a few years after college, a different teacher, a far better one in my opinion, side coached two actors as the class watched them, muddling and suffering, through a stilted and cringey improvised scene of their own making.
This improv teacher yelled from the sidelines:
“If you don’t like the scene you’re in, change it!”
The actors buckled. A pause. A neural interruption like a momentary loss of power.
Then one actor, on a new breath, picked a flower, offered it to the other. A plot shift ensued: agreement, harmony. Change. I watched her liberate herself by honoring a fresh impulse before she could deny it.
Gorgeous essay. I hate that I too remember unhelpful feedback from university instructors I didn't even like, long after they have any impact on me.
(one of the design teachers accused me of being angry all the time and letting this color my feedback, when what I actually was was deeply depressed and realizing I was on the wrong path. but that's a story for another therapy session)
I like the pivot at the end very much.
Bravo, Emma!!!! So love this for so many reasons. The third person cracks me up, too, and I wonder if perhaps he “knew” you would think of his words forever. ;)