I’ll never forget the moment. Twenty-five years ago Master-teacher Joanne Baron told our class, “The thing that brings you into acting is that which you must overcome to be able to act.” Silence filled the room. Something profound had been said. What did it mean? All of us began to ask ourselves the same question, “What brought us into acting?” Escape, entertainment, fame, attention? Or was there something more? As usual I suspected there was something more. The ancients had told us this for centuries. Behind every dark cloud is a smiling Providence. Underneath every trouble lies an invisible net. She was leading us to something deeper. What she had said was meant to trouble us. And it did.
“The thing that brings you into acting is that which you must overcome to be able to act.” Art was different than I had imagined. Much different. So I began to think. What brought me into acting? The question seemed too hard. The answers were uneasy to face. Starving for attention as a boy I had fed on acting. Drama filled me. That is normal, isn’t it? To quote Lawrence Olivier’s secret motivation for the stage, he said, “Look at me, look at me, look at me.” His incentive was clear. To be seen or not to be seen, that was his question. To be recognized as interesting seemed fair. To be thought of as special seemed right. So, in what way was that something to overcome? The question remained. How can I conquer that? It is too deep. It is too much of who I am. Where it begins and I end is impossible to discern. They are linked together in my soul. The two had become one. How could I ever cut this mighty cord without cutting myself?
Years ago there was a movie called “The Abyss.” Its theme revolved around a group of futuristic underwater explorers and the mysteries they encountered. In one scene the characters came to a crossroads. The pressure of the deepest sea had become too severe for them to bear. The water’s force threatened to literally squeeze them like a vice. They would die in the oceans’ abyss unless they acted quickly. The vacuum in their lungs would have to be filled with something thicker than air or they would implode. They decided to replace their need for air with liquid oxygen. The premise was science-fiction to be sure. But the way the actors lived through the imaginary circumstance was moving beyond words. To survive they would have to do something that was in direct opposition to every instinct they possessed. They would have to fill their lungs with fluid or else be crushed. They would have to drown to survive. The very thing that gave them life would have to be overcome to live. The paradox was clear and profound.
“The thing that brings you into acting is that which you must overcome to be able to act.” How can we define this thing? What exactly are we speaking of? The thing that brings you into acting is need. It aches. It is raw. It is emotion. It is subterranean. It is the raging river that runs through you. It is the unceasing belief that your life can have transcendent meaning regardless of evidence to the contrary. It’s what drives you. And yet, it takes many forms. It can be proving your father wrong. It can be feeling homesick for a place that you’ve never seen. It can be wanting love for who you are, for who you could be, for who you want to be. These, and countless others, are the reasons we act. Over time we might learn to sophisticate them, make them wear fancy suits and sound less common, but there they are none the less.
Then the trouble begins. The hands that guide us to the stage inevitably have no power to open the curtain. Though they recognize the theatre as a garden they have no seed to sow. The thing that brings us into acting is always separate from acting itself. In fact that which brings us into acting has very little to do with acting at all. Acting becomes a channel through which our aches can flow. Drama is the costume it wears. Dialogue is the Morris code it utters. But the longing is not the same thing as the form it takes. It merely uses the craft to express itself. Ah, there’s the rub! The very thing that moves us to act is separate from our ability to act. But it never feels that way.
We believe that the desire for acting is acting. We believe our motives are our mandate. We want to act therefore we believe we can. We escape into acting to experience love and then strangle the audience with our neediness. We long to produce laughter in others while hiding sorrow from ourselves. We survive the poverty of a small town but neglect the chip perched squarely upon our shoulders. We run towards freedom thinking no one can hear our clanging chains. We rarely stop and realize that our longings are no substitute for our labors. Dreams are not enough. We must be taught to overcome. We must forget ourselves to find ourselves. We must place our attention outside of our needs to have them fulfilled. That is why they can be overcome. That is why they must be overcome.
Acting requires courage. Drama demands strength. Growth insists on pain. Childhood fantasies fade away. Maturity knocks. We slowly learn that we must face our fears or lose our dreams. This transition longs to take place from the beginning. The exchange is inevitable. The stage we long to perform upon must become a platform for change. It is the magnet that lures us. It is also the fire that refines us. The want of center stage must eventually invite us to the microscope. The desire for the spotlight must do more than help others see us. It must help us see us.
This is the paradox of overcoming.
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