Stephen Wangh

The first acting class I ever taught was to a group of teenagers in Brooklyn during the fall of 1969. These were kids who had watched the plays that our street theater company, The New York Free Theater, had performed in Park Slope the previous summer. Our shows were musicals about racism and drugs and money, shows that we hoped would inspire our audiences to challenge the powers that be and change the world. Instead, what we found was that those teenagers who came back day after day to see what we were doing were more interested in learning how to make theater than in how to overthrow the state. So we decided to teach them to make their own plays.

I was 25 and fresh out of graduate school. I had never taught acting or playmaking before, but I figured I could remember the exercises my teachers had taught. I’d directed shows, and as a kid I’d always enjoyed telling my younger brothers how to perform. What did I have to lose? It turned out that what I had to lose was my innocence about teaching.

The students were wonderful: enthusiastic, eager to learn, and willing to do any exercise I proposed. Their enthusiasm for the work helped me overcome my doubts, so, on the long Wednesday evening subway rides to Brooklyn, I cobbled together a few acting exercises I remembered from my own training and hoped that they would lead us somewhere. But then one Wednesday, I discovered that teaching might require something more than that. I had decided to teach a developmental exercise I’d learned in an acting class several years before. I vaguely remembered that we’d begun lying on the floor and slowly grown from small seeds into giant trees. I decided to alter the exercise a little and have these young actors grow from birth into human beings. After our warm-up tag game, I had the class lie down on the floor, and I talked them through a relaxation and then into some guided imagery: “Imagine that when you open your eyes, you’ve just been born, and you are seeing the world for the first time.” I spoke in a soft voice, gently urging them to discover sight and movement as if they were infants. Soon they were all crawling around the floor of the church basement like ten-month-old babies. To my delight, the exercise was working! They looked like they were having great fun, babbling and cooing as if they didn’t speak a word. When I suggested they try crying or laughing, they did it. If I asked them to notice the other babies, they did that too. My God, I thought, these kids would do anything I asked. Cool. But after a few minutes, I realized I had no idea where to take this exercise. Should we develop characters? What characters? We didn’t have any text. What was this exercise about anyway? I realized I didn’t know. My teenage charges were happily crawling around, trusting that their teacher knew what the hell he was doing. But in fact, I had no idea what to do next, so I decided to just drop the exercise and move on to some fun theater games.

“Good,” I said to the babbling babies, “that was fine, but now we’e going to let that go. Everybody stand up!”

The kids looked around a bit, but they all kept crawling.

“Okay,” I said, “that’s over, now. We’re going to go on to another exercise.” More crawling. The girl I liked was staring up at me from the floor as if she was lost. None of them seemed to understand me, or was it that they didn’t know how to stand?

It began to dawn on me that somehow these teenagers had become hypnotized by my voice. But now, when I tried snapping my fingers, clapping my hands, or calling their names, nothing seemed to work. I had become a Sorcerer’s Apprentice with no idea how to end the spell. In desperation, I resumed the calm, soft voice I’d used at the start of the exercise.

“Okay, you’re getting tired of crawling now. Lie down; it’s time to go to bed. You’re very tired. Close your eyes. Good. That’s good. Now when you wake up, you’ll all be back here in the church basement. And you’ll be your real ages again, okay?” I kept my voice soothing, but inside my head, my mind was racing. What could I do? Whom could I call? What would I say to the police?

Thankfully, my calming words worked, more or less. After a few minutes, the kids sat up and were able to talk, though they still looked a little dazed. But I, myself, was more than a little shaken. I let the kids talk for a while about the exercise— long enough to satisfy myself that they had, indeed recovered. In fact, they all seemed to have had a good time “playing at” being babies, so I brought the class to a quick fi nish, and sent the kids home, hoping they would remember where they lived. What the hell had happened? What had I done? And why hadn’t anyone told me that teaching could go wrong like this?

It was only many years later that I realized I’d managed to founder upon two of the great hazards of teaching: the mysteries of Transference and the dangers of oblivious Power. And the reason no one had told me was … I’d never asked.

But whom should I have asked? No teacher in any class I’d taken had ever spoken in class about how to teach. Grade school teachers had to study education courses, but in the arts it was assumed that if you have learned a technique, you can teach it. In later years, when I applied for a job teaching acting, no one ever asked me if I’d studied teaching. If they had, I would have had to tell them that I had learned how to teach the same way the sister in the old joke learns how to swim:

“Hey buddy, how do you teach a girl how to swim?”
“Oh, teaching a girl to swim is a delicate thing, man. You have to gently put your arm around her waist and hold her hand. Then you…”
“It’s my sister.”
“Oh. You throw her off the end of the dock.”

Ein shalem mi lev shavur. (There is nothing as whole as a broken heart.)
                        Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, Poland (1787 - 1859)

In Tennessee Williams’ play, Camino Real, the un-heroic hero, Kilroy, falls in love with Esmeralda, a beautiful young Mexican woman who, in addition to her earthly charms, possesses the magical ability to renew her virginity at every full moon.  She is, of course, irresistible.  What could be more wonderful than the ability to encounter every love—or any other pleasure—as if for the first time?   Wonderful…and impossible.

And yet that is exactly what a performer must do, night after night: She must begin every performance—the first steps of each dance, the first notes of each concerto or the first scene of each play—unburdened by her knowledge of how the music climaxes or where the story leads.  If Juliet were to “know” what happens at the end of the story, she might think twice before falling in love with Romeo.  But of course, the actress playing Juliet does know.  After all, she has rehearsed the tomb scene many times.    

In my acting teaching, I often remind students that an actor is constantly falling in love—with her scene partner, with her lines, with a production—and then having to let that love go.  In fact, each time one breaks eye contact there is a twinge of sorrow to be felt.  One might even say that to stay fully alive in performance is to experience a tiny taste of death over and over.  The trick is not to shy away from that pain nor to steel oneself against falling in love again the next night. 

The Sufis call this ability to stay open in spite of our sorrows, “Living with a Broken Heart.” It is a capacity we all possess.  Once upon a time, each of us was a child who could laugh and run, and fall, and cry, and then pick himself up from the fall and laugh and start into running and laughing again.  And many of us have been lovers who fall in love, and lose that love, and then—after a period of mourning, perhaps—allow ourselves to fall in love all over again …just as the actress playing Juliet must do, night after night.

And now, as teachers, our job includes the ability to endure our students’ resistances, their anger, their despair, and their momentary love, without becoming hardened or protecting ourselves from the pain or the rejection we may face again later.  We must allow our hearts bleed for a moment, and then, like Esmeralda, we must open ourselves to the next Student from Hell—or Heaven—with an undiminished capacity for understanding, equanimity and love.