The diligent student in me couldn’t help responding, “But what’s the point of all the time I’ve spent and work I’ve done if you’re not supposed to see any of it?” I just want to see you responding to what’s happening right now.” She continued, “I know that you know every single thing going on in every dynamic happening in this play, but I don’t want to see that. Then in graduate school, during a scene I was doing, a teacher said to me, “Stop showing me your homework.” I looked at her blankly. There was discipline and study involved in bringing a role to life.
This was the work I was encouraged to do by teachers and that I understood every great actor did. I read other plays by the same author, researched the time period and setting of the play, and spent lots of time figuring out a likely history for my character that would inform why she behaved as she did in each scene.
When I became an actor, I applied similar study habits to the work of understanding a play and a role. I remember that I was always relieved when math tests required us to show our work in the margins because even if I ended up with the wrong answer, I could get partial credit for understanding most of the process of how to get there. Math was a hard subject for me, so I took summer classes to try to coax my brain into grasping all those black-and-white formulas and processes. I did my homework on time, studied zealously for tests, and actually read everything I was assigned to read.
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