Acting Class

Last year, I took my first acting class at Hedgerow. 

The previous December, I was thinking to myself: I enjoyed acting.  Maybe I wanted to do more than just a Christmas show?  My kids were in a Gilbert & Sullivan show.  Affiliated with this group was a Shakespeare group.  Cool, I said: I will audition for that!  And . . . I didn’t get a part. 

To be blunt, I’m not likely to audition again for this group.  The woman that called to say I didn’t get a part remarked that it was because I didn’t have my monologue memorized.  I could see that . . . except that the monologue was completely optional.  During the main part of the audition, I was called up a grand total of once to read.  Everyone else – EVERYONE else – was called up two or three times.  That means the decision had already been made.  Was I SO terrible during my one reading (so much worse than anyone else) that I didn’t warrant a second reading?  Anyway, this counts as a “bad experience with that group” (which is not the same as “this group didn’t give me a part”), so I’m not likely to give them another chance. 

That experience led me to a question: was I, in fact, any good?  The past five years, I was the “Narrator of choice” by a local theatre group, but narrating is not the same thing as acting.  Not long before, a friend had pointed me to Hedgerow Theatre, so I checked their web page.  Ah hah!  An acting class!  This sounded like exactly what I needed!

The acting class cost $250 and would take up my Monday evenings.  Normally, I would say “no”.  I could always come up with another use for $250.  And could I really commit to that schedule?  For a nice change, I said “Screw it!  I want to do this . . . for myself!”  In the next ten weeks of this class, I discovered something: maybe I was actually good at this!

In my first class, I had a major role in Neil Simon’s “Rumors”.  The teacher also introduced me to a play called “Equus”, and I had the chance to get on stage and perform the closing monologue from that play.  When I took a second class, I performed in “Laramie Project”.  I had several parts in that, and wound up with some of the greatest monologues.  I played an emergency room doctor talking about treating both the victim and his murderer.  I played a man watching the homecoming parade and describing seeing something that touched him to his soul.  I played Matthew Shepard’s father, standing in front of the court and pleading that the murderer of his son not get the death penalty.  I am taking a third class now, and I have managed to play a scene from “Angels in America”, and I have performed an amazing monologue from Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker”. 

By the way, during all of these, I repeatedly was turned down from parts all over the place.  The parts I would get weren’t all that major.  At these classes, I’m learning tons about acting, but I am also getting a chance to act.  Perhaps this makes the $250 fee a “vanity fee” -- I’ll pay the money and I’ll perform whatever I want – but I count on the teacher being honest with us about how we are doing.  The simple fact is this: I look too ethnic.  No one will cast me as Aston in “The Caretaker”, yet I have performed my monologue twice.  I’ve thought about how he is feeling, about why he is telling his story.  I sat and pondered how Prior, in “Angels in America”, felt when Louis told him he was leaving . . . and then I performed it and I screamed for him to get out.  Without these classes, I wouldn’t have the chance to play these parts.

$250 isn’t that bad, by the way.  Some theatre companies are free (Barnstormers hasn’t asked me for any money; when I performed in two Hedgerow productions, no one asked me for money).  Some ask for a membership (two Gilbert & Sullivan groups work that way).  Some, however, don’t have much money in the bank and must spend a great deal of time fundraising.  Last summer, I performed in “Godspell” with such a group, and that easily cost me in the vicinity of $200, if not more.