Did you ever have the acting teacher who kept poking until you cried?

Somewhere at the Bogfart’s School of Acting Teacher Witchcraft and Gizzardry, there’s a class:

“How to Make Your Pupils Weep So You Can Validate Your Ego and Tell Yourself You Facilitated a Breakthrough.”

Listed as FORCEDSOB 2937-AB in the catalog.

There’s a lie behind this manipulative pursuit, and that porky is this:

If you really feel it, the audience will, too/love you/think you’re great, and you’ll be a real actor.

I mean, maybe.

But storytelling via pretending to be someone else has more nuance than that.

And please review your own history as an audience member. Survey the times you witnessed an actor really feeling things. What was that like for you?

The most generous thought I may have in such a situation is to say, “Wow, they’re really feeling things.”

Yeah, nobody cares.

On the flip of this, have you ever performed a thing of any kind, felt a little struggle bus about it, experienced frustration, and got mad that things didn’t go according to your plan — only to hear feedback later that what you did really moved them?

That’s happened to me several times, and the fact that my own experience of the event was such a poor barometer really frustrated me.

I was frustrated because my MO was jacked; I was trying to engineer maximum audience adoration rather than do satisfying work and tell an honest, excellent story.

And people can smell that shipoopie.

If you’re singing “Still Hurting” from The Last Five Years, and you’re all “Better act brokenhearted now,” you’re about to be a caricature of Sadness from Inside Out, only not endearing.

And here’s a big reason for that.

Emotion is a result of a whole cascade of thoughts, hormonal interactions, and decisions. It’s not the present tense EVENT.

When you focus on portraying a feeling, you’re way behind the actual narrative.

It’s the same as singers being told to “get it forward.” Resonance, like emotions is a result, and if you try to make it the target, you’re a nanosecond behind what’s really happening. I’ll have to write about that.

This is what I mean.

I’m writing this to you. It’s 5:57am, and I’m in the FLOW.

I hear, “DADDDDYYYY! I NEEEEED YOOOOOUUUU!” above me where the boys’ bedroom is, Jude’s daily rooster call.

I feel

  • jarred from my focused state.
  • sweet in my heart because he’s cute as all get out.
  • annoyed that I have to stop work because every morning I think I can complete something before they wake up, and every morning I’m wrong.

I walk upstairs to their bedroom and feel

  • Grateful for their sweet selves.
  • Deeply entertained by whatever Jude’s hide-under-the-covers surprise morning greeting will be. (Today it was his signature ba-da-bing ba-da-boom. It’s hilarious.)
  • anxious that I won’t be able to get my checks checked on my checklist this morning.
  • guilty that I care so much about my checklist.
  • anxious again that I’m not investing enough quality time with them and forebodingly sad imagining the day when they’re older and won’t be so eager to play knights with plastic swords with Daddy.

And that’s just the top layer.

This is why when Melissa asks me, “What are you thinking about?” I’m like, you mean now or 3 seconds ago?

The point is — I don’t even KNOW what feelings are going to pulse through me. I do things. I have thoughts about them. I tell stories to myself about what’s happening, and boom, emotions.

If I train myself to open my heart and do this while being watched by a room full of folks, somehow that becomes an artful and healing thing. How terrific.

But if I’m like, “Okay, time to act nurturing and agitated at once,” I’m already outside myself trying to shellack an emotional quality on my body, and there’s no way I can be inside the story or behind my own eyeballs.

So remember — emotions will always come. That’s what they do.

Just get clear on who’s who and what’s what. Play pretend, have fun, and be surprised by what happens.

It works, I promise. No demonstrative crying required.