Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me while I explore the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: The epic highs and lows of high school theatre and how a deep dive into acting training changed my perspective on real life.
I don’t think that I’ve talked about theatre much on the podcast before. On a surface level, that’s surprising, because I’ve devoted a lot of time and energy into theatre during my life and the only obvious reason that I haven’t done much with it recently is because of COVID. But despite that surface-level dedication to acting, I’ve actually had somewhat of a love-hate relationship with theatre. I’ll explain why more later on, but I need to get some positive vibes together pretty soon because I have to give a presentation about theatre to some kids later this week, and I want to sound like I love it completely. So, cue the happy memories.
When asked when I first started acting, I often phrase my answer as “I did my first play when I was eleven.” This is not an entirely true answer, but it’s close enough. I went to theatre-related summer camps from when I was five to when I was twelve, but I did them because summer camp is fun, not because I was in love with acting. So the first time I started acting outside of a camp was this little community theatre performance of Seussical, The Musical when I was eleven. It’s basically a mashup of Dr. Seuss stories centered around Horton Hears a Who. Fun stuff. I cannot for the life of me remember why I auditioned for it. I’d never done a play before, didn’t have any friends auditioning, hardly knew anybody. The director was a teacher at my elementary school, but he wasn’t ever my teacher, so I really have no idea what possessed me to walk into a giant room full of people I had never met and sing a song in my eleven-year old voice to audition for this play. Child me had more confidence than a fratboy. And from that confidence came a surprisingly easy group of friends. There were several kids my age who were already friends and had known each other their whole lives, and all it took was for me to be in a few scenes with them and I slipped right in. Not only did I fit in, but I was cool. I was tall for my age, I could sing, I caught on to simple choreography easily, and I was the kind of polite rule follower that made adults like me but didn’t make my peers think I was lame.
I loved it. Of course I did! It was fun! It was low pressure! I had a great time! It was an exceptional first foray into theatre. Then, when I got into middle school, I naturally showed interest in my middle school’s drama club. That fall, they were planning on sending a few middle school students over to the high school to audition for their performance of A Christmas Carol, since you could always use more children in a performance of A Christmas Carol. It was terrifying to be a sixth grader surrounded by a cast of 30 high school students, but honestly, they took such good care of us. It was incredibly sweet. I appreciate them, all of them, for making that entire experience so incredibly positive for me. I returned to middle school drama club with the confidence that I already had some experience, already had some friends, and was ready for whatever came next.
I won’t bore you with tales of middle school theatre because… you know, middle school. Looking back, it was cute at best and incredibly cringe-worthy at worst. When I was living it, though, it didn’t feel like either of those things. We were ambitious, so it was stressful. We worked hard, so it was rewarding. We goofed off and tried new things, so it was fun. Perhaps most importantly, theatre became a built-in friend group for a lot of us. Sort of in the way that sports or band is a built-in friend group. The community is built by proximity, yes, but also because when one person is supported and gets better at what they do, everybody benefits. So everybody supports and teaches and practices with each other, and we formed bonds through that. In middle school especially, social development and social relationships are so, so important. And because my first two experiences with theatre were so overwhelmingly positive, middle school theatre could be focused on social development for me without worry over feeling like I was good enough or I fit in, because I already knew that I was and I did.
Ooh, things are too positive now, I can feel it. Something ominous has to happen, or else this story would have no drama. So! It’s the spring of my eighth grade year. I’m fourteen. Right? I was fourteen in the spring of eighth grade… yes! Yes, I did my math right. So I’m fourteen, and I get an email from an acting coach who I had taken a class with once. She’s a great actress, used to work for Hollywood, still does TV stuff, she’s objectively a cool person. Except her beginning acting class really stressed me out and made me anxious, because sometime between starting middle school and nearing the end of eighth grade, I became less confident and more self-conscious. I think that’s what middle school does to you. Regardless, I received this email and was prepared to say “no, I’m actually not going to take another of your classes because it made me sad.” But! That is not, in fact, what the email was asking. The email was inviting me to be a guest actor for her Master Acting Class, a group of older, well-trained high school actors who needed more people for their play that semester. Why she chose me, I will never, ever know. Regardless, I said yes. This experience was not as overwhelmingly positive as previous ones, but it did give me another view into a more professional theater. I learned a lot, and worked hard, and got a lot better, and I joined this Master Acting Class the following fall.
It was… awkward. I was extremely self-conscious. The other people in the class had a strange, unspoken language of survival that I swiftly learned, but never entirely felt comfortable in. This sounds dramatic but I swear it’s not. I worked hard to elevate my largely untrained acting to their level, but I was too self-conscious to really make any breakthroughs that year. By the end of the show, I was so immensely stressed out that I took the next entire year off that class. I did both school theatre and community theatre during that time, just trying to figure out where I fit, but my odd mix of experiences actually prevented me from feeling truly at home in any of them. So… that was fun.
To embrace my newfound lack of ability to fit in, I decided to lean into it and step into the world of directing. I was already interested in it, since I always had a bunch of big ideas that I could never implement as just one actor, but I felt like it suited me even more now that I didn’t really feel comfortable in any group of actors. My first actual foray into directing was this spooky little anti-war drama from the 1930s called Bury the Dead. It’s very weird and very political – not your obvious choice for a high school play, but hey, the theatre teacher was an ask-for-forgiveness-not-permission kind of guy, so he tossed us the scripts and we ran with it. I made breakthroughs in my directing and in my acting during that play, which gave me the energy and confidence I needed to give that Master Acting Class one more shot.
It went mostly fine. I was much more confident than I used to be. The director only made me cry during rehearsal once because for some reason I was completely incapable of walking into the scene the way she wanted me to and I had to do it like thirty times before she let me stop because I was crying. I’m not bitter about it. Nope no sir. I’m joking, the rest of it was generally fun and positive. I had exactly one acting breakthrough that my director applauded me greatly for, and one acting breakthrough that made my director think I was in love with a castmate, which was not the intended effect but I’ll take what I can get. At the end of the show, I evaluated my experience and my options and decided that no, I wasn’t going to be coming back, but I did have a nice time. It didn’t help that I was solo directing for the first time for a different show, so there were some days near the end when I spent 5 hours at rehearsal for one and then drove to the other to spend 5 or 6 more hours working on the other. It was exhausting. I wrote my college essay about that time in my life, I think.
Honestly, it was bold of me to write a college essay about an intensely stressful experience that ended in me discovering that I needed to learn when to set boundaries for myself and stop doing everything all at once. Learning to quit more often is not typically the angle you want to push when applying for college. Worked out for me, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Write your college essay about something… I don’t know, better than that.
Oh… somewhere in there I assistant directed a musical for a local community theater. I forget when that was. I have no concept of the passage of time. That was fun. I was definitely not old enough to be in any kind of a position of power but according to them I was incredibly helpful because they have asked me to do it several times since. I was going to stage manage for them in 2020 but because of 2020… you know. That one was good and fun. No problems there that I remember.
So what did I learn from all this? Well, a lot of these lessons aren’t necessarily limited to theatre. They’re lessons I could’ve learned in any social activity related to teamwork and skill-building. Specific to acting, I learned to look at different strategies and techniques. A lot of the stuff that I got taught early on proved to be harmful to my mental health. The master teachers who talk about sense memory and creating real emotions to feel onstage so that all of your acting is actually real… their techniques make for great acting and miserable actors. I got some of the best performances of my life out of those techniques, but several of them also sent my mental health spiralling into confusion. I was unable to separate myself and my emotions from the emotions of the character because the entire technique is focused on making your emotions and the character’s emotions identical to each other. So I learned to not get too caught up in thinking that one way is the only way.
I also learned to think swiftly on my feet. Like, really swiftly. I will never forget – I hope I haven’t told this story on the podcast before – I’ll never forget the opening night of a play I was in freshman year where the entire point of the first scene was that I picked up a gun hidden on set and shot my husband with it. Fake gun! Fake gun. Bright neon green Nerf gun that made us laugh so much that we had to rehearse those scenes over and over so we didn’t laugh about this neon green Nerf gun in the middle of our very serious scenes. And on opening night, I walk out onto the stage, saying my lines, acting very much like I was totally not plotting my husband’s murder or anything. I did a great job. I thought to myself, “hmm, I guess I’ll meander over to where I need to pick up the Nerf gun, totally cool and nonchalant, not plotting anything.” But then I glanced down to where the Nerf gun was supposed to be, and it wasn’t there. My body switched into autopilot and my brain started searching for any possible location that it could be. Another actor told me later that he saw the exact moment that I realized the prop was not where it belonged because I went entirely rigid and then started looking a lot more panicked. It suited the character, which was lucky for me. Surprisingly, my mental dialogue was a lot less panicked than you would expect, because I was mostly resigned to my fate that this was going to be unusual. There were only two places the Nerf gun could be, other than where it was supposed to be, obviously. It could be lost backstage, never to be seen again, and I would have to go full finger-gun and just hope everyone else rolled with it. Or, it could be across the stage from where I was supposed to be, in a drawer that was supposed to be secret. I had no way of communicating this change in plans to the guy I was in the scene with, so I just hoped he would figure it out. As naturally as I could, I made my way over to the drawer. There was no reason for my character to go over there, it was entirely unjustified movement. But I had to. When I had gotten over there, I realized that I had no way of checking to see if the Nerf gun was in the drawer before the exact moment when I needed it, so I was putting all my eggs in one basket and was ready to pull a finger-gun out of the drawer if I had to. I locked eyes with my scene partner, who had figured it out by this point, and he dropped the cue line. I pulled the drawer open, and there it was! I breathed such a huge sigh of relief and continued the scene like normal. The only downside was that the very next line was him saying “Character name! Where did you get that gun??” as if he hadn’t literally just watched me pull it out of the drawer. All things considered, it was a near miss with disaster that we played off pretty well. But! If I hadn’t been able to think on my feet and continue saying my lines and acting all at the same time, I would never have found that prop. A valuable lesson. There’s a master teacher named Sanford Meisner whose whole technique is based on listening and reacting and having conversations in the moment and being able to think on your feet so that everything is more authentic, and my theatre friends have a fake award that we often give out after rehearsals called the “Meisner Prizener,” awarded to someone who covered a mistake or thought on their feet or fixed something in character. That day, I would have won the Meisner Prizener. And honestly, at this point, that’s the only acting award I’ll ever need.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. You can follow this podcast to make sure you never miss an episode, and you can follow me on Twitter @FastFactsPod for podcast news, life updates, and extended thoughts from past or future episodes. This is Callie, signing off.
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