Sometimes as actors we come across a character that shares commonalities with us on a personal level. We relate to the character on the page, resonate with their hopes and dreams and their problems of existing in their world.

In a scene I’m rehearsing, I play a rejected writer whose career is not moving forward and who is sick of taking handouts from her parents and her financially successful boyfriend. She and her “failed” actress roommate decide to team up and operate a phone sex line: I do the writing and my actress roommate makes the calls.

Before we move forward I must say that I have not operated a phone sex line, nor do I have any intention of doing so. I do, however, know what it’s like to be a writer. There are, let’s say, emotional difficulties that ensue on creative endeavors, and the stress of making a stable go of it in the world. So in preparation, I open myself to the possibility that given a dire financial situation, this option may perhaps prove viable for me. Perhaps. And here is why. . .

What acting has taught me more so than anything else, is that we as humans are capable of anything.

When I was younger I held the world at an arms length and was able to stand back with a certain degree of judgment as I claimed that, “I would never do that.” Now, I find that sentence doesn’t leave my mouth, because when faced with the same circumstances and the same reality of a particular person/character, I often wonder, “What would I be capable of?”

It’s easy to judge based on a different vantage point, to say what we would or would not do and hold ourselves as though we have some level of separation, a supposed “betterness” than the “other.” But what if we put on another’s shoes, peeled away all the things that make us “us” and instead cloaked ourselves in the world of the “other.” What would that be like? I wonder what it would be like to see the world through an addicts eyes, to hear the thoughts of someone who has been abused, to grow up in the poverty cycle and have that effect every aspect of your world.

I am by nature a kind person. The only creatures I kill without mercy are cockroaches. I’ve spent a half an hour stalking a beetle in the house so I could place it outside to keep it from staving to death. Yet a few months ago I watched an episode of a tv show that made me realize I was capable of a rage that could kill someone with the same shrug as clicking off the overhead light.

Acting has taught me that even the most horrific acts are justified by the person committing them. How does one commit the Holocaust, allow their participation it it? And yet people did. In acting there are all kinds of gray areas. Why? Because acting imitates life and life itself is full of gray areas, full of chaos. Today, right now, I would not think to start up a phone sex line, but when faced with another world, another past, another future, another present reality, the odds might not be in my favor.

Yes, given the right circumstances, I truly believe that we as humans are capable of anything.

And that is why my critique that night is so interesting. My teacher says, “I wonder what it would be like to become invisible.” To become swallowed up in the stories you write, that element of loosing myself completely in the story to where it becomes more and more real and the actual world begins to slips away. He is not the first one to use those magical words, for I discovered them a number of years ago . . .

I wonder what would happen if . . .

And then let your mind spin . . .

In chaos.

And in that chaos, is where we find the pieces of ourselves.

We can discover all the paths that we have never taken, all the pasts that never were, all the futures’ that remain yet to be unraveled. We discover that we have a lot more in common with strangers than we thought, that at our deepest levels we crave the same things, long for the same things, desire for the same things. That at the core level we are comprised of the same inertia that propels us through our own lives. We all want similar things. Perhaps it’s the paths we traverse to get there that shape our differences.

I know what it’s like to disappear into a story, into the words that drift along the page, into worlds of my own creation. And tomorrow as I drift into myself for scene prep, I will remember the ebb and flow of the ocean. Just as I drift into myself so shall I expand outwards like the sea, crashing into other worlds, knowing what it’s like to be me and wondering what it’s like to be them, to be the “other.”

And when I do this I find I am more compassionate, not only to others I meet, but to myself as well.

With Love,

Z :)