Tomorrow is our first open dress rehearsal for Island Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. The audience: middle schoolers.
I recently found this excerpt of an interview with an actor (whose name I cannot for the life of me remember!!) that I had copied down when I was about 12 or 13. I did remember to include its title:
"Taming the Demon"
"Basically, what you're doing out there is you. When it comes down to it, what the people want to see, what they want to see, is not a role or a character or a piece of work. What they want to see is you: your breath, your laughter, your violence, your pain, all of it. What you have to ask yourself is, where am I in all of this and, how am I going to communicate that? That's when you begin to notice that you flinch, that you duck and pull away from those parts of yourself that you are unwilling to have other people see. But that's where the gray is, where your talent is, where the life resides. You have to keep going back there, trust that the terrible has already happened, that you've survived and you're okay, exactly the way you are. You have to walk toward the demons, not run away from them. And you'll find that if you put out your hand, not as a fist, but palm up, you'll go right through them like tissue paper. That's when you can be in the moment, any moment. That's acting."
