Hiding your work.
I studied acting in college. Actually, that doesn’t sound right. I went to school for acting. I make furniture now, which is a fundamentally different endeavor (other than the bleak personal economic outlooks that come with both), and not often have I been struck by any great parallels between the two crafts. As I was chiseling joinery today for a console table, endeavoring to make tight fitting mortise-and-tenons inside a three-way miter, I became a little bit pouty. I realized that when the table is together no one will ever see what I have spent the last two days toiling over. When people see this table I deserve some praise and astonishment, dammit! Look at these joints! Look at them! People should be amazed human hands can do such a thing. And then I thought of Tom Isbell. Tom Isbell is a great acting teacher I was too proud to trust. He would tell me what he saw from me or didn’t see and I would reflexively defend myself as if I were being attacked and think to myself that he just didn’t get what I was doing. He got what I was doing better than I did, that is for sure.
Incredibly important to Tom was that an actor hide their work. Maybe you spent weeks journaling from your character’s point of view about how the family piano was your only sanctuary, your only refuge from a debilitating family dynamic of petty revenge and bitter envy. That does not make it okay to caress the piano every time you walk onstage. That journaling you did was to inform your performance by giving you the confidence born from knowing who that character is through and through. Maybe it changes the way you move around the stage because your character is more comfortable near the piano, and sitting on the piano bench is where your character sits when they finally defend themselves. The audience is not going to get your piano fixation if you shove it in their face and, if they are too aware of it, it will only distract from the story being told. Unless the play is called Piano Sanctum. Which it is not, because I wrote that play and no one wanted to put it on. But if you have done the work and it allows you to create a true human being, they will sense the truth and power behind your performance. They don’t need to know why.
I guess people just need my table to stand up and keep their McCain-Palin commemorative plates from crashing to the floor. They need to sense that it is strong and trustworthy. They don’t need to know why.
P.S. I never had a problem with showing my work as an actor. That would have required work in the first place.
