Do What You Feel Strongly About

Before I ever started my undergraduate degree I watched Father Guido Sarducci’s fabulous send-up on college education. It was a four minute pitch for something he was calling the Five Minute University.  The premise? For twenty dollars he would teach you everything you would remember five years after college was over. A line or two of a foreign language. A broad stroke theological premise (“God is everywhere”). Buy low, sell high.  Like that.  So very funny then and with my education well behind me I can absolutely say to this very day, so very true.  (My foreign language was Greek.  Καλημέρα!) 

But having said that I can also see that in it’s own way, those things you actually do walk away with and that stay front and center in your memory, are often crucial elements that are absolutely fundamental to the way you live the rest of your life. 

One of the first examples that hops out at me is something I learned from one of my favorite University professors, Barbara Reid.  She was not only my acting professor but my Advisor in the BFA Acting Program. To this day I marvel at how essential she was to shaping both my understanding of myself in the arts but also in teaching me how to respect the art in myself. A Yale grad, she was a rigorous disciplinarian but it never came at the cost of losing the singularity of your own voice as an individual artist. She taught me how to honor both the structure and the passion of character process.  

One spring afternoon in her Problems in Professional Acting Class we were all asking how to come up with just the right monologue for a given audition.  She had already laid out the basic time-honored considerations of “doing something age appropriate” and “within your type range”.  But this was a question about how to find a monologue that would help an actor really stand out in a huge cattle call.  Her answer? “Do something you feel strongly about”.  It was so simple and so powerful. It was a statement that helped me to truly understand how crucial it is to honor and preserve your individual point of view. And as always, this was easier said then done, because it first demands that you know what it is you feel strongly about.

Through the years I have learned that everyone has a doppelgänger. Casting Directors openly pander for particular types to show up at auditions. No surprises. It’s a visual industry.  But the only thing you have as an artist that separates you from someone else that may look (or even sound) just like you...is you.  The way you perceive the world.  The singularity of your point of view is precious. Cashing it in or compromising it in order to fit into someone else’s mold of who they want you to be is like dipping your fingertips in acid.  

That’s not to say we don’t grow and expand and change our ideas and understandings of the world. I’m saying that what is most essential about who you are on a soulish level is priceless.  And well worth guarding.  In a “have gun will travel” industry, being a good guardian over that still small voice...or that big garrulous one... requires unexpected sacrifice. There is a kind of emotional muscularity that is required to stay true to a moral imperative.

We live in a pluralistic society. I think that’s a healthy thing. In order for the many voices to co-exist there needs to be a level of tolerance for people who do not share your point of view.

Tolerance and acceptance are widely misunderstood as being the same thing. Not whatsoever. If you demand that I accept your point of view, even if it violates my conscience, then you are intolerant. However much you may think that you have the moral high ground, such a demand, in and of itself, constitutes a violation of someone else conscience and is an act of intolerance. I think it is possible to openly disagree with someones ideas of the world while still respecting their right to follow what they feel strongly about. Tolerance is not easy. But in a pluralistic society, it is absolutely necessary to create a place where people can respectfully share these different ideas and maybe reach across the aisle and try to work in accord towards the things we do agree on.  

You may have to say no to a part in order to honor your inner voice. If you’ve ever had to do it, you know how hard it is. It requires some inner steel. People may misunderstand you and even throw some shade, but in the end it will strengthen your resolve and you’ll have a clearer idea about where you begin and end and the vitality of doing what you feel strongly about.