2005-12-05 - 7:48 a.m.

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Dear Madrigle -

To answer your question, yes, sometimes people are admitted to acting programs who prove later to have had little or no talent. Yes, I think - or some one else thinks - "what were we thinking?" This is evidenced by Michael R, the Head of Performance, calling back the girl whom he later said made no impression on him. How to respond when you admit someone into the program? Some programs have what is usually called "cuts," a brutal practice no matter how gently administered. But the student is served no more than the program when that student is allowed to continue pouring time, effort, dreams, and no small amount of money into an education that is likely never to make him or her an actor.

And before I go on: it's all arbitrary, and obviously mistakes are made. Huge mistakes. This very program cut someone a couple years ago who's on a tv show now. (Juilliard cut Wes Bentley only a year or two before "American Beauty.") Gerry Freedman always says at North Carolina School of the Arts (where mandatory cuts happen at the end of the 2nd year, a practice the students refer to as "sophomore slaughter") that "if we decide not to allow you to continue here, it doesn't necessarily mean you're not an actor. It does mean we don't think you're growing as an actor in our program here."

Which is, yes, a little disingenuous. But not entirely.

The ironic thing is that most of the time four minutes is about three minutes and forty seconds more than you need. There's a New York casting director I've worked with, one of the big guns, who says "all we need is to see that you can walk, talk, and make a choice." Very, very rarely does talent - ooh, there it is, I used that word; I knew I'd get to it sooner or later - appear three minutes, or two and a half minutes, or one minute and forty-five seconds, into a four-minute audition.

And the reason this is all weighing so heavily on me is that my own assessment of how common or how rare talent is has been changing rather dramatically this semester.

You see, I've done so much working teaching and directing high school students and/or in community theatre. And one of my especial gifts seems to be getting strong work out of amateur actors. So I'd come to have what some would call a rather wishy-washy, warm-and-fuzzy, and very generalized feeling that lots and lots of folks can do this with enough support, guidance, nurturing, training, whatever.

But this semester I've come to think that talent - that (to say the least) elusive, ineffable, indescribable thing - is a lot rarer than I'd previously assumed.

You have talent, M. You do. I can see it in the images on your diary. I can feel it and hear it in the way you talk about your work. And before you dismiss that as over-generous, let me tell you a little story: I was in Chicago back in '97, auditioning for grad schools, and I met a girl named Saren along with several other students who were also auditioning. The group of us walked back and forth between the hotel and the auditions together, went shopping together, ate a few meals together, commiserated about nerves and what pieces we were doing and where we'd done our earlier training and so on. Most of the members of that group did not pass the preliminary auditions; i.e., they were not passed on the finals during which they'd actually be seen by the reps from schools. This made us all even more nervous (Saren and I hadn't had our prelim auditions yet; we were scheduled later in the week). Well, Saren was also auditioning for Juilliard, and I told her just before she went in, "Don't worry, you're going to have a callback, I know it."

She did. And when I reminded her that I'd "known" this, she said I was just being encouraging and couldn't possibly have been so sure. Yes, I told her, I was, and then I said, "Ask yourself this, Saren: when you heard that X, Y, and Z were not passed on, were you surprised?" This really stopped her in her proverbial tracks, because she hadn't been surprised. Well, I said, didn't you know, instinctively, from the way people talked about their work, whether or not they might be the Real Thing? I told her I'd known from how she talked, the things she said, that she was an actor.

Four years later I was in As You Like It with her at Utah Shakes.

How do you define talent as a painter, M? There are parallels to the question in theatre: a visual artist needs more than one aspect of what we call talent, too: to begin with, there has to be that untaught and unteachable natural gift for rendering believably on paper or in three dimensions a realistic-looking representation of a recognizable subject. I can draw a room that looks like the room I'm drawing; with somewhat less-reliable success I can draw a face that looks like the person. Then again a painter has to have that sense for light, and for what it does, and how it behaves. I don't have that. And I certainly don't have any freedom of expression visually; I can only try to reproduce with no real expressivity. I know all this because as a kid I studied art. I was good, actually, in some ways; you might even say I had "talent." But I only had a little. An actor is built of many things - a vocal instrument, a physical instrument, a psychic talent that I might describe as "the desire and the potential ability to speak an author's text as his or her own believably, along with the ability to allow himself or herself to have the character's experience and then manifest it in a theatrically compelling way." Some actors have some of the factors in this equation but not others.

Most ineffable of all is the ability to seem effortless, to live the character's life without seeming to be acting. And herein lies the rub: everyone thinks he knows what acting is, or should be, and partly because of the culture of celebrity worship that obtains in our culture, almost everyone thinks he wants to be an actor. And - even worse - almost everyone seems to come into an audition with what can only be described as an idea of acting, an idea of what acting is supposed to be. Rather than allow themselves to have a character's experience and trust us to see it, they show us what they think we're supposed to see. This, in the trade, is called "indicating," and it's about as damning a thing as you can say about an actor. Anyway, my point is this: once in a while, under the "idea" of acting is a real actor. He or she has just never been taught what not to do. So our job is to look under the bad high school training (or lack thereof) and see if this kid can actually Just Talk - just say the words simply, honestly, believably. Can connect, as we say, to the text.

That kid whom Deb had deliver his piece to me: that was very much connected. And I could see in his eyes that what he was describing had really happened to him. How did he do that?

Any kid you accept, really, is a chance you're taking. That in response to training he or she will free the voice and body from habitual physical tension, will learn to have both voice and body respond spontaneously to impulse. That he or she will develop the skills to analyze text and make it specific, personal, and active on stage. That he or she can just let himself or herself go there: go to a place of vulnerability or fear or rage or joy or ecstasy or passion, and do it in front of others, without guarding or armoring. It is very hard.

It has been in watching the freshmen in Deb's BFA Voice I class and - especially - in comparing them to the BA kids in my own voice class that I've begun to narrow my feelings about the relative ubiquity or rarity of talent. Most folks just don't got it.

It's hard. Rejecting a child who wants this so badly. It's very hard. But part of talent, of course, is trusting to your instincts, and that's what we tried to do as a faculty the other day. Of the students we've invited, some won't come. And of the students we've invited who matriculate, probably some won't finish. And of the students who finish, many won't make their living as actors, not long-term. Far fewer than half of the graduates of any one division at Juilliard make their living in the arts. And that's all okay, really. There's a young woman here now who has somehow been allowed to pass all the way into her senior year despite serious reservations on the faculty's part, and it becomes clearer and clearer (and clearer, and clearer) every day that she is not, never has been, never will be an actor. She tries and tries, but she drives us crazy, because she won't really do what we ask and we simply never believe a single word out of her mouth. It's all an idea of acting. The department has certainly not served this young woman by bringing her so far. As I said, it's hard.

Surely I've said enough to answer your question? Surely I've said more, perhaps, than you ever wanted to hear.

But thanks for asking. I'd wanted to write more about Saturday than I had, and you gave me the impetus I needed to bring my welter of thoughts and feelings into a more concrete form. I'd love to hear your own thoughts on some of this.

Love, flood

P.S.: I pluck my nostril hair, too, despite my own very low pain threshold, but I leave my eyebrows alone.

P.P.S.: Except for those single hairs that seem, suddenly and of their own will, to grow really, really long. Which (a) is gross, and (b, even worse) makes me look like my father.

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