"I don't like what [acting] brings to the surface in my personality: the self-centeredness, the childish vanity, the infantilism. That's what an actor has to have." So said the late, influential acting teacher Sandy Meisner, as quoted in Sanford Meisner on Acting by Meisner and Dennis Longwell.
I can relate.
I gave up acting (and acting, for me, was like a dream come true) partly because, like Meisner, I felt it was consistently activating negative personality traits. As time went by, I found I didn't want just good reviews, I wanted four-star raves. I didn't want to be told I was good, I wanted to be told I was Meryl Streep. For every part I didn't get, even if I didn't want it, I could've used a megadose of Prozac. In short, I was insatiable.
But is Meisner right in saying it has to be this way?
Bay Area therapist and director (and former actor) Armand Volkas, who teaches drama therapy at the California Institute of Integral Studies, wasn't surprised when I quoted Meisner to him. He compared actors to children who adapt their personality to please their parents and thus develop a false self.
"That's an oversimplified explanation," he said, "but I do think a lot of actors go into the business to try to get unconscious needs met. That's where it becomes dysfunctional. When you put up with rejection and humiliation, and when approval is based on the whims of a casting director or a director, and you aren't centered or grounded in your real self, that's when you lose your equilibrium."
My acting teacher, Jean Shelton, once told us that after some soul searching, she realized that the reason she'd become an actor in the first place was to win her father's approval. She advised us all to think about why we wanted to act. If you believe that self-knowledge-discovering your unconscious needs-is power, Shelton's advice makes sense.
The Pull of POV
"Acting is a very self-absorbing career," Los Angeles actor-turned-playwright Laurel Ollstein responded when I e-mailed her Meisner's quotation. "I never noticed it so much until I began to write and watch actors go through the process in my plays. It's incredible to listen to actors after a reading. They truly see the play only from their own character's POV."
She conceded that this is not only necessary for the actor, it's also useful to the writer. But she noticed that when she went back to acting, those same self-centered feelings materialized. Actors are, at least temporarily, children-so if they happen to have a spouse and actual child, as Ollstein does, it can be difficult. She recently appeared in a play with her daughter and found it hard to split her focus, "being Mom and wanting to be the actor." She said she doesn't find that split with writing.
Amy Hill, a Los Angeles stage and TV actor who creates funny and honest solo shows based on her personal experiences, sees what Meisner called "infantilism" in a positive light. To her, it can mean open, curious, listening, in touch with your feelings. "The benefit of age is being able to channel those qualities," she said. "As a child, it comes out in whatever way it does: screaming, peeing on the carpet. I feel as though the older I get and the more comfortable I am in my own skin, the better actor I've become. Not that I'm self-centered, but I've given myself permission to be more self-aware."
Hill would probably be the last person to say that she herself doesn't occasionally teeter on the brink of neuroticism. "One of the banes of existence for an actor of color is the perception that we're all extras," she said. "When I tell people on the street that I'm an actor, they say, 'Oh? Do you have lines?' We go to the set and they say, 'The extras parking is over there,' and I'm like, 'I'm in the cast! I'm one of the stars!' And you wonder, Is this an ego thing coming up? You start getting more sensitive about all kinds of weird stuff."
She added, "I think many actors, despite the common perception, go into acting not for the fame but because it fulfills their creative need to express themselves. And then when people start telling you you're brilliant, you start judging yourself based on what other people say. You have to not base your sense of worth on that, or on whether you're currently working, or doing a good or a stupid project, stage or film, or whatever."
Hill recommended psychotherapy if you're feeling at the mercy of emotional ups and downs, a survival mechanism that has worked well for her. The other key is to have an outside life. "The people I know whose lives are entirely involved with acting and theatre are crazy," she said.
Theatre as Healer
Paige Pengra, who worked in film, TV, and theatre in Los Angeles for 10 years, was on the brink of being one of those "crazy" actors. "The business of acting really exacerbated all of my fears and insecurities," she told me. "I resented that I was at the beck and call of whoever wanted to see me. I felt powerless. I was also extraordinarily body-conscious.
"I was watching everybody's neurosis come out," she went on. "It was sad and hilarious. I saw how people deal with authority, I watched people become other people's mothers and fathers-the egomaniacal, narcissistic directors who are willing to abuse whoever to get what they want onstage. It can be a terrible experience."
In college, acting had been a great source of joy for her, even a spiritual experience. But in Los Angeles, when she and a group of women colleagues met for weekly lunches, they griped about their latest awful audition, how short the director wanted their skirts to be, how much money they were pouring into their careers. "We didn't have anybody who could facilitate a process where we could empower ourselves," she said.
But during a long run at the Matrix Theatre, she had an eye-opening positive experience: "I was coming out of a bad relationship and I was playing a character who was jilted, set up, and framed. I was able to go almost melodramatic Greek tragedy in this farce, and it was a faster healing process for me."
Intrigued by a vision of theatre's therapeutic potential, she headed to Dell'Arte's drama therapy workshop in Northern California. Now she's finishing a Master's degree in therapy in San Francisco (her thesis is called "Person and Persona: negotiating balance in a professional actor's life through the use of drama therapy") and plans to return to Los Angeles to create support groups for actors who are "lost in the turbulent lifestyle." She said, "I don't think I'll go back to acting the way that it was."
Me neither. For what it's worth, and at the risk of appearing, well, self-centered by using myself as an example, I'll add that, like Laurel Ollstein, I feel less like a needy child when I'm writing than I ever did when I was acting.
Have we decided whether actors are inevitably self-centered and infantile, as Meisner apparently believed, or whether such traits are only manifested in some unstable types who maybe need a good therapist? Of course we haven't. Oh well. Time for graham crackers and milk, everybody. BSW