How Actors Use Their Personal Lives to Solve Professional Problems

When I started the drama school’s fifth semester, I didn’t get along with our director. He wanted, anyway, that I use my “affective memory” — so far, so good — but through his techniques, which involved “writing a letter to someone who caused me a great trauma,” reading it to the class and other similar theatrical games. I was not too fond of his techniques and direction choices either, and we were always in conflict.

Also, I was looking forward to the fifth semester because we would retake body classes. My body is a little rigid; I have the sway of a Queen’s Guard soldier; I knew how essential body classes would be to me. At Célia Helena, we had body classes in the first and second semesters, not in the third and fourth, and again in the fifth and sixth semesters. I was excited!

My director decided which plays we would show to the public at the end of the semester, and mine was a play by Eugene O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms. In it, I would be a young man who falls in love with his stepmother, also young, married to his father out of self-interest. He impregnates his stepmother, who, in a moment of despair, has an abortion. In one of the scenes, she told my character what she had done, and I had to react “with a guttural cry, full of pain.”

And how to make this cry exciting? How to despair the audience with this cry? THAT WAS MY HUGE PROBLEM.

Back to body classes. In the first and second semesters, we had an excellent…