PERFORMANCE: The Actors' Roundtable: "Live the Blues to Sing the Blues"

Each week, Paden Fallis poses one question to a group of professional working actors from a variety of backgrounds. Our goal is not to demystify the work of the actor or explore their careers, but to dig a bit deeper into their artistic working process. ACTOR’S ROUNDTABLE: “LIVE THE BLUES TO SING THE BLUES” I’m going to give you two quotes here. I take these two quotes to heart as I think about the work that I do and the life that I lead. They might be mutually exclusive…or maybe not. All the same, I’d love your take on what they mean to the work that you do, the life that you lead, and if one speaks to you more than the other. “To sing the blues, you must live the blues.”  “Be boring in your life, so you can be restless in your work.”  Go… - Paden Fallis, Performing Arts Contributing Editor

PAGE CLEMENTS These two quotes speak loudly to me! I have certainly discovered and rediscovered that audiences not only love hearing a story, but feeling a part of it. Our job as actors is to knock down walls and share everything within us, especially when we are self-conscious about exposing the darker or scarier side of ourselves. When I am more expressive with my voice, text, and body, the emotional truth of what the writer wants expressed becomes more present and consequently more fully received by the audience. Therefore, I am always telling my students (and myself) that to be the type of actor and storyteller you want to be requires risking everything. I think my life outside of my career is happily mundane, comparatively speaking, so creating a heightened restlessness onstage is a blissful change of pace. I was in a play several years ago that required I share very hurtful and self-incriminating thoughts. The role was a tortured one and it was incredibly demanding to bring the truth of that to the audience every day. I found that the only way to really honor the text and character was to not only “speak” the blues, which we can all do to a certain extent, but share the darker part of my heart. This wasn’t easy, to say the least, but I found it to serve the play as a whole and move the story along much better. Reliving or experiencing the “blues” on a consistent basis may be extremely challenging and tough on the psyche, but going out on stage and doing the alternative isn’t honoring the job.

NELSON LEE “To sing the blues, you must live the blues.” This sentiment is definitely close to my heart as an actor, but even more so as a person navigating the world. I have always tried to live by a code that sought out experience. And while there are times when sucking out the marrow has its consequences, it always provides an insight into the emotion felt, the flavor tasted, the sparkle touched. All of these little milestones help to enrich our lives, and as actors, inform our work. The more we live in life, the easier it is to assume the “lives” of those we live in acting. This is not to disparage the weight and importance of the imagination. Is it a necessity to experience something in order to replicate it? Definitely not. But it will undoubtedly be harder. “Be boring in your life, so you can be restless in your work.”  And isn’t that what we all signed up for in acting? Hard work, that is, not a boring life. From this quote, I take from it not a call for valuing work above life, but rather to live life valuing your work. While a level of obsession in our work ethic as actors is healthy, if not necessary, allowing it to eclipse our lives is not. I think it all comes down to balance. What I’ve learned over the years is how important the downtime of being an actor is. During my frequent and quite often lengthy terms of unemployment, it’s been very easy sometimes to get lost in a maelstrom of indulgence, pity, and anger. But in doing so I was dulling the tool and the spark I need to be employed again. Instead, these are the moments when we have to diligently seek out new experiences, new tools, new sparks. So when the job does come, we can obsessively use these in our work.

ERIKA ROSE I may never have the experience of giving birth or raising a child. I will probably never do heroine. I mean, Mom, I’ll never do heroine. I’ll never know what it’s like to be Secretary of State. I won’t know what it feels like to win an Olympic medal. I hope I never know what it’s like to lose a child, but that doesn’t mean I can’t play a character who does. I don’t think we have to have our character’s experiences in order to ‘live their blues,’ as it were. We all know suffering and joy and everything else we don’t know, our imagination and research can take care of. You know, even if you’ve had your character’s particular experience, I don’t think that’s enough to play your character. They deserve more than just our experience. They deserve our imagination and our intellect as well. Our experience has the potential to get in the way. I’m not playing me on stage or my experiences. Yes, we are using ourselves, but, if my experiences are all I can see, I’ve defined my character beyond alteration in a way. They’re stuck in my meaningful, but small experience. The possibility of our imagination transporting us to something off the page and outside of ourselves is slim when our own “blues” is all we use. …live the blues and be boring. What about living the joy and exploring the world? Both of these quotes are about how your life should be about acting or how the sorrows in your life can affect your acting. What about your life? Just that on its own, what about that? I want to experience this world and this life not because of how it will influence my craft, but because I want to experience it. I climbed a volcano called Mt. Villarica in Chile. It was 3 hours up. It was icy and cold. I didn’t think I could do it. I was the slowest person on the hike. I was miserable. But the view of the Andes was unlike anything I’d ever seen. That was in month two of our five-month South America trip. We just went. We didn’t go because of what it would do for our craft. My husband and I went because it was our lives. That’s what we wanted for our lives. I actually did that in my lifetime. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything except my life. I want to do more of that.

THOMAS WARD To sing the blues, you must live the blues… I suffered for years with an inferiority complex that because my life—my childhood, my upbringing—was free of too much pain and suffering, I feared that meant that I was not qualified to be an artist. My parents stayed married. I was loved. I was never hungry or without a warm bed. So where do I get off writing about suffering and conflict? As I’ve gotten older I’ve put a lot of that nonsense to rest. But still, sometimes that nagging doubt creeps in. So I end up writing about it. Or I end up drawn to characters and plays where self-destruction is explored. I have a self-destructive streak in me. It manifests itself in my work in a variety of ways. I use the characters I play as ways to purge myself of my uglier character defects: selfishness, pride, ego, etc. I love how selfish I can be on stage. What do I want? How do I get it? How do I manipulate those around me to get what I want? On stage I get to indulge in my gross and selfish humanity. I don’t think you have to have experienced what your character has experienced to play your character effectively. But I do think you have to be excited, scared, turned on by it somehow. It should be dangerous. How willing am I to let the audience see all of me? If the answer is “not very” then what the hell’s the point? Be boring in your life… This speaks again to why I write and act. It’s fantasy. I am incredibly thankful for my “boring” life. It primes me to jump into my work head first and completely because I crave the excitement and the fantasy of it. Whether I’m playing a frustrated suburban dad or a cold-blooded assassin, I can find a way to relate. The character I’m playing is never “unlike” me. Never. If the character is from a different background and life experience then I have to find a way to relate, and often that way in is by being so fascinated by a life that I can’t fathom living. But wouldn’t it be nice, if not for a little while…

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Page Clements has been a professional actress, vocal instructor, and private coach in NYC for over 20 years. Currently an instructor of voice, dialects, and Shakespeare at the T. Schreiber Studio & Theatre in New York, she has just completed an instructional video for actors and public speakers to be released later this year. She has appeared in over 50 productions throughout the country, received the Favorite Vocal Coach and Dialect Coach Awards from Backstage in 2009, and is a member of Actors Equity Association. Nelson Lee left his native Canada for New York to pursue training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Since then, he has appeared in various television series, including Blade: The Series, Virtuality, Oz, Covert Affairs, Hawaii Five-O, and the Law & Order franchise. Recently, he took to the stage for the world premiere of Zayd Dorn’s play, Outside People, at the Vineyard Theater in New York, and the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) production of Maple and Vine in San Francisco. He currently resides in Los Angeles. Erika Rose is a Helen Hayes Award-winning actress living New York City. Regionally, she’s best known from her eight years of work on Washington, D.C. stages. Thomas Ward is an actor and playwright based in Minneapolis. He appeared in the Off-Broadway premiere of Craig Wright’s The Unseen at the Cherry Lane Theatre. He has performed regionally with Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Georgia Shakespeare, WaterTower Theatre (Dallas), and the ZACH Scott Theatre (Austin), among others. He was previously profiled by stated.

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