Actor: A Novel in Three Parts

The audition space Daryn directed me into wasn't so much a warm-up room as a glorified coat check. Three walls—left, center, right with the door behind me—painted a bright, paper white. Blinding. I remember holding up my hand when I first entered in an attempt to block its violent glare. No windows, a lunchbox-sized air conditioner jutting from the ceiling, all while stirring the smell of dried lint, feet, and a desperation to be discovered.

Then came the sounds. Those dreadful but familiar sounds of actors going through their...vocal warm-ups.

From every pocket of this cramped combine, wild, manic bursts of laughter and shrieks in scale were being born. Some were bubbly, others were shaking baritones and mouth-bubbling their lips. They threw their bodies and limbs around as if tossed from the top of a building in varied syncopation...something I had seen, observed, and participated in over the years at the conservatory in an attempt to break the physical shackles of society's restrictions. Professors and teachers of this method believed this would set them free on stage. In many cases, they were right. But still, the lack of shame and embarrassment always made it unbearable.

Despite making us look and sound like electroshock patients, these trials were designed to loosen up the body to "free the natural voice" before performance. Professors and vocal coaches from all over the world, in every weird corner of some far off theatre conservatory or scammy training ground, put us in the throes of "vibration and resonance" — something they loved to preach. "Fall in love and become re-acquainted with your breath," they told us. Most of the time, they'd be staring blankly at me, deep, dead-eyed, and vacant, immediately triggered the moment I resisted them...frustrated I wouldn't drink the Kool-Aid they had conjured up in the 60's and 70's high on acid, British voice pedagogy, and mid‑20th‑century acting and movement practices.

Standing there, literally pressed up against the door of the audition room, I recalled the clunky, awkward, and violent "waking up" of my dead lips and tight tongue. I suddenly had flashbacks of the first time I sucked in my diaphragm so tight I thought I was going to pass out and die. I remembered once being surrounded by a gang of groaning and moaning actors while on my back, rolling around like a baby as if they were trying to summon some ancient pagan God. I reminisced about the eventual unification that—through every humiliating vocal exercise—did in fact bring me closer to myself and to acting. I'm not denying that it didn't work. It did. I admit it. One day, after many torturous weeks, months, years...my body finally broke down and reconfigured into a more open, willing, and vulnerable expressive tool, reconnected with my breath, my body, my voice, only to become the vessel and receiver of my character.

That was the price I had to pay—we all had to pay—to dabble in the ways of God and Mother Nature.