Acting Class

About a month ago I signed up for an acting class at a local theater, and three weeks ago I went to the first class.

That was the week of the Great Flu, and maybe it was fitting, because I exercised my acting talent (such as it is) to its fullest that evening as I pretended to my utmost that I felt fine and hadn’t spent almost the entire day in bed. Actually, I pretended so hard that at the end of the class I really did feel better—though if we’d gone beyond an hour, I might’ve passed out from the effort.

This intense concentration only enhanced the strangeness of the experience, however. The class started on center stage, directly beneath a crowded grid of stage lights. Among the typical spotlight-type fixtures were scattered a few very different ones—chandeliers and smaller lamps crammed in, ready to descend during the next night’s play. I arrived first but was soon joined by a classmate, a perky lady who was perfectly fit, dressed, and styled. Ready to be the town’s newest starlet. “Hi, I’m Anne!” she said as she sat in the row of prepared seats. “I’m so excited for this class! Aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. (Thinking: “I can’t feel my nose and I think I may have rubbed it off. Can you tell me if it’s still there? Oh wait, there it goes again. Never mind.”)

As the rest of the class filtered in, I could tell we had several things in common. We were all women, young and full of jittery excitement about this foray into theater. Many of us were working full-time and looking for something exciting to do (cube-dwellers by day, prima donnas by night!), and almost everyone had the same background in theater: we had always wanted to do it but didn’t have time going through school. The one guy in our class of nine arrived a little after class started. He looked eighteen or nineteen and was rather shy, especially in a room full of watchful women.

Our teacher, Paige, came in bouncing off the walls and stayed that way. She spent a couple minutes getting to know our names, got them mostly right, and then introduced herself and moved on with gusto.

The first order of business was a tour of the theater, and we followed Paige’s enthusiasm all around the building, which turned out to be full of poster-decked hallways, crammed rooms, and shadowy stairwells. We went from the attic’s mirrored dressing rooms to the main floor’s stage, surrounded by dark stairs and hidden wings, and then to the basement’s maze of prop rooms, wardrobe rooms, and rehearsal hall. Every time I thought we’d come to the last room, Paige would lead us on through another door we hadn’t noticed before, into another room filled with wonders. Every wall seemed to have a different mural, and the green room smelled of turpenoid and oil paint. There were racks and racks of costumes – 20s flappers to wizard robes to victorian bustles – smelling of dust and makeup, an entire wall of shoes, a small closet filled with wigs sitting on white styrofoam heads, miscellaneous furniture across each floor, and every random prop possible, from tiny glass perfume bottles to paintings to baseball bats to enchanted roses under glass domes (“Guess what play we used that in!” Paige howled). I wasn’t sure whether it was my flu or the eclectic bizarreness of this amazing world I’d just landed in, or both, but the tour left me dizzy. Nothing we passed was organized or new and perfect; everything slightly off-kilter, bunched and stacked haphazardly, held together with twine and labeled with tape and sharpies. But there was such an air of possibility hovering over everything. With just a little magic, these scuffed slippers could grace a ballroom’s floor, and that table and chair could be a cozy room in a house with only imaginary walls—part of something important happening to living, feeling characters. All the costumes and props seemed to be breathing their dreams into the air, waiting, just waiting, to be carried onto the stage and made new again; waiting for their turn in the most real game of pretend.

This was a very different sensation than the one that I feel when I sit at the computer each day and sift out errors and inefficiencies in language and code. In a theater’s basement there are no global style standards, no strict scripting logic. The contrast was exhilarating.

We were all hooked after the tour; we put up with additional weirdness without complaint. For the rest of the time we learned a warm-up chant (almost as strange-sounding as vocal performance majors’ warmups) and played some quick-thinking improv games. But Paige could have done anything with us, we were there to stay—at least until 6:30, when real life intervened and we all reluctantly returned to our cars.

I walked to mine singing quietly to myself, feeling very tired (and congested) but happy. I wondered why exactly I was so happy, when I had started out feeling excited but skeptical. I had found the world of theater a strange one that night, but perhaps that was only because it was strange for me to realize that there are adults who spend their lives working at my favorite childhood pastime. Must all childhood pastimes be shoved aside after graduation? As much as it is hidden behind constructs of career and professionalism and money, I say imagination is still a valid part of life—and I aim to enjoy this new outlet.

Of course, as with everything, balance is key, and I have a very tenacious grip on reality that won’t permit me to become a flaming thespian, but I have to admit . . . I like it. I like it a lot.