scarlettina | Acting class showcase and thoughts thereupon

Last night was my acting class showcase. After ten weeks of classes (more-or-less documented here), it was time for each student in the class to get up in front of an invited audience and perform a monologue.

The space was the cabaret at Northwest Actors Studio. I got to the studio about 45 minutes before we were to start preparing, mainly because I was too anxious at the office to concentrate on much of anything and so left a bit early. I hadn't been up to the cabaret and wanted to see where we'd be performing. It's a very large informal room furnished with couches and easy chairs rather than theater-style seating. The stage is a raised black platform backed with a thick gray curtain. I walked the stage several times back and forth, practiced my monologue by myself and found that actually doing it on the stage was disconcerting, even though I had my piece down cold.

The other students started arriving around 6 PM. By 6:30, our instructor started our preparatory work, running us through a bunch of exercises intended to loosen us up, give us a little more access to the emotions we needed for the performance and to get comfortable in the space: a guided meditation, a personal inventory, and then a bunch of sort of emotional work-outs. We'd done this sort of thing before in class, but never at quite this intensity. By the time she herded us all into the green room, we were a little ragged. I got into the clothes I'd chosen (a black sweater with a short, hot pink skirt, black stockings and heels) and then put on my make-up.

For the showcase itself, we were seated in the front row. I noticed a couple of people I knew in the audience. Our instructor gave a talk about what we'd done over the course of the class, then introduced the first of the students. I was the fourth to perform. I got up and as I introduced myself, I was struck by the one thing I really didn't remember about being on stage: you really can't see the audience beyond the stage lights. It's actually a little unnerving: you're standing in bright, bright light and out there in the darkness all these people you can't see are watching you. It was also, in a way, a gift, because I didn't feel nervous. I must have been, because I flubbed a line that I've never missed before and tried to cover it as best I could. My most gratifying moment was that I got the laugh I was looking for at one point; that's when I knew I was doing something right.

It all seemed to go much quicker than I expected, and then I was sitting again.

Later, after the program was over, it turned out that 6 people had been able to come, including

varina8,

ladyjestocost and

bedii. Our instructor told me that I'd done well: "a nice job" were the words she used.

ironymaiden arrived after it was all over, but joined us to tromp over to Dilettante Chocolates for dessert. The gang all said I did well; I was pleased about that and, generally speaking, feel pretty good about how I did in the end.

Now the questions are: how did I feel about the experience over all and what, if anything, do I do next? I can answer the first question only partly. I'm still deciding about the second question.

When I signed up for the acting class, I had several purposes in mind. One was to distance myself a little bit from writing, because I felt as though there was a lot of stuff attached to my writing that I needed a hiatus from; the class was a good distraction. So many of my friends are writers; acting felt like something that was more mine than writing is. I was intimidating myself by doing the one thing none of us should ever do to ourselves— comparing myself to people far more accomplished than I—and it was beginning to get in the way. I also wanted to explore the passion I had for performance that I gave up early on and see how I felt about it now, especially when lined up against writing. Lastly, I wanted to do something not connected to any other part of my life for a while. Naturally that came with its own challenges, but they were different than those I'd been dealing with.

Absent frustrations I had with some of the other students, I feel pretty good about the work I did in the class. It proved to me that I had at least some of the chops necessary to continue with this pursuit if I chose to follow it seriously. It also proved to me that I have difficulty with splitting my attention this way, between the acting and writing. I have some thinking to do and choices to make. I still don't know what I'm going to do with any of this. I'm hoping to give at least part of the long weekend over to thinking about what comes next and what I do with whatever it is I've learned from these last ten weeks. When ... well, if ... I know what I've come up with, I'll let ya'll in on it.