It may sound like I have a lot of eggs in many baskets, but in reality, my interests could not be more related!
For my undergrad, I had such an explosive experience studying Psychology and Theatre. Not to mention, I also started my journey in therapy simultaneously. Everything around me was centered around the experience of being human: learning about Pavlov’s dog in my psych classes, empathizing with the villain in order to play them truthfully in the theatre, and empathizing with MYSELF in counseling, to name a few. It was the greatest combination and amounted to an incredible amount of self-exploration. I could not be more grateful for how I chose to spend my time in college.
I noticed overlap every day between these three facets of my life: First, I would understand pragmatically the psychological systems that were motivating my characters’ choices:
- “That character has been rewarded in the past for this behavior so, of course, they’re going to continue it.”
- “The child in this story has an anxious attachment so it makes sense that she is pining for approval.”
- “This character is suffering from serious addiction and even though he wants to stop, that’s very difficult to achieve when the cues in his environment haven’t changed and he continues to have a neurological reaction to those cues.”
But this approach to theatre does not work in isolation! Understanding the why is excellent research, but it doesn’t necessarily allow you to embody a character.
So then my thinking shifts to a concept that was repeated both in therapy and my acting training that allowed me to release the analytical approach: Very rarely is there a cut and dry “right” or “wrong,” there is just doing, being, and living based on learned behavior, environment, and motivation. Regardless of attributed moral value, people continue to behave in sometimes questionable ways. We are not robots. There is no “if behavior is ‘wrong,’ then do not do it.” (There’s a little programming reference from that one robotics class I took to fulfill a math credit).
Knowing that an action is problematic or otherwise harmful, does not automatically transfer over into the ending of the behavior. Our brains don’t typically think “this is right or wrong,” in fact, they don’t really think at all when it comes to ingrained behavior–they just react and continue to do what they know will fulfill our needs.
Accepting myself for my own messy human experience allowed me “to go there” within characters. If you cannot forgive your character, you cannot play them truthfully! If you play villain, that is, if you play “I, the actor, knows this behavior is wrong” you ruin it for the audience. They don’t want your judgment, they want to experience the story of people living in full mess; BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THE AUDIENCE DOES EVERY DAY! THAT is one of the reasons people come to the theatre: to see and be seen.
Instead of playing the villain, you understand the villain is human and behaving, in their mind, in the best way they know how in order to achieve their needs. Psychology gave me a basis of knowledge, but therapy and my acting training allowed me to forgive myself and my characters for being humans.*
“Okay, Andrea, where the heck is the comedy? I thought you were a Comedian!” I’m getting to that part!
So! At the same time as I’m having this really expansive understanding of myself and others, I was also starting my first years as an open-mic comedian! A series of dominoes that had been triggering each other since the day of my birth finally tipped over the comedy domino in my third year at school. On one side of the performance and humanity coin, I had theatre and on the other side, I had comedy. Both require so much authenticity, groundedness, and understanding of self and others (What’s that you say? That this is the whole point of the idea of “comedy/tragedy” and I am not the first person to realize they are two sides of the same coin? Preposterous!)
Comedy was an amazing discovery for me. I could write, direct, cast, and perform all by myself;
I didn’t need anybody except the audience. And I was making people laugh! Oh my GOD do I love nothing more than the dopamine rush that happens when a joke lands. And again, I was finding that all of my interests were coinciding on the stage:
- best practices of stage performance
- self-expression & vulnerability
- understanding which experiences are going to land because they are universally relatable
- and, like most comedians, over the years I have learned what material belongs on stage and what truly does belong in therapy! Ha!
But the process of learning that was exactly an application of everything I was discussing above:
Allow myself to live fully on stage as a human, take big swings and make very embarrassing mistakes. Then get off the stage and dissect why it did or didn’t work and apply that learning to my next performance. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Here I am, five years later, still doing stand-up, 3 years after graduating with my degree. And now I’ve put it all together in my career as a Voice Actor. Everything I’ve learned as a performer and emotional creature comes into play with VO. The only difference is now I have to have BIG, REAL EMOTIONS in a tiny booth without costume, setting, or other actors to inspire me. I have to make characters jump off the page, while making sure my audio levels are correct. I have to be authentic while minimizing the amount of mouth-clicks and making sure I stay close enough to the mic.
And, boy, do I love it! The entire reason I got into acting in the first place was because I wanted to be just like Robin Williams in the opening scene of Mrs. Doubtfire when he improvises the voice for a cigarette-smoking bird! And now I’m a super energized, zany Comedian and Voice Actor! Achievement unlocked in the eyes of little baby Andrea.
Whatever kind of performer I am, have been, and will become, my time in college will always be my strong foundation. I will always call upon the very human experience I had tearing through my understanding of self and others.
There is no performance without humanity– Stand-Up Comedy, Straight Theatre, Voice Acting, or otherwise.
So, moral of the story in my eyes: let go of judgment of yourself. Please, for the love of God, Andrea, let go of judgment of yourself. Honest performance cannot exist simultaneously with judgment. And living your life with freedom and joy can’t either.
Now off to try my hand in improv classes! Toodaloo!
*I feel strongly that this line of thinking be used to allow ourselves and our characters to live freely and outside of the prison of self-judgment. While 90% of the time this thinking can also be used in view of other people, I do not promote applying this to unsafe people “because they are human.” If a person’s behavior is not safe or otherwise makes you uncomfortable, remove yourself. Save the grace for yourself, your closest loved ones, and your characters.