Performance Anxiety
A funny thing happened on my way to becoming a journalist: I was on my way to becoming an actor.
In the '80s, in that next-step drift between college graduation and the real world, I -- along with a good twenty percent of the population of Los Angeles, at least -- decided I might have what it takes to be in movies, or theater, or radio. Or maybe industrial commercials. I didn't have a clear idea of what I would actually do with acting, which should have been my first clue that it wasn't really my calling. But I had always been curious about it, drawn to its power to make people pay attention for hours at a time to actors on stage or in front of a camera. Acting had the power to make people listen to me in real time, to seriously consider what I was saying, to reckon with who I was -- to pay attention.
This was crucial. I was most interested not in becoming rich and famous (though I certainly wasn't opposed to that) but in becoming visible. I wanted to be seen, and heard. I wanted to matter. Acting seemed a more visceral and direct route to these goals than writing, which I liked too, but it was too solitary. The chances of being seen as a writer were doubtful. Acting had far more, immediately available opportunities for validation: a modest role in even the smallest local play would bring you recognition and applause, night after night, for the length of the show's run. As far as the kind of self-affirmation I was looking for, acting offered a much better deal than writing. Too, I thought, writing was for depressives and overly sensitive or sheltered types, and at 23 I preferred to think of myself as 'out there.' On the verge. I just needed something to finally bring out my inner extrovert.
In 1985 I started in the M.F.A. theater arts program at UCLA, and immediately ran into a buzz saw named Delia Salvi. She was our first-year acting teacher in the two-year degree program. Delia was unsparing, piercing, sharp in every sense of the word. She was an impeccable dresser -- skirts, heels, coordinated scarves -- with a head of chaotic, curly hair and an angular face that a friend of mine in the program described as something Modigliani might have painted. Delia saw acting as a craft, a vocation that demanded hard work, not as a sop for insecure people with delusions of validation. She didn't talk so much as bark commands. Among her better known directives were, "Get off the stage!" and best-known of all, "Relax!" She tended to bellow that word as we were doing scenes or exercises, which invariably made us more tense and less convinced that we belonged in the program, and in her presence, at all. J.K. Simmons in "Whiplash" had nothing on Delia.
Being merciless was part of her acting philosophy. She was a follower of Method, which meant she believed that actors couldn't grow until they stripped away the layers of emotional varnish we all built up as adults. You had to get down to your real feelings, the source material of your authentic self. She was probably right, but at the time I was hardly in a position to appreciate that. I was somewhat desperately looking to be told that I was good, or at least okay. I was at UCLA still struggling to belong not simply to acting or to any vocation, but to society at large. Though I had a few accoutrements of belonging -- a bachelor's degree, a shared apartment on the westside -- I felt like an outsider, a black person with accoutrements floating along, or atop, a white world that tolerated me fine but didn't seem to need me. At the heart of my quest for validation and affirmation was that need to be needed.
Delia could not give that to me, or to anybody (I realized later that she was a working actor herself who felt overlooked by the industry; we shared a few of the same demons). That was not her job, literally. In that year I felt more terrified and confused than at any other time in my life. One day I was so undone by Delia's withering critique of my attempt at a Method exercise called moment-to-moment, I took the wrong bus home and didn't realize it for miles. I was crushed, more crushed because I couldn't say so aloud. I thought that Delia had confirmed what I had most feared: that I couldn't tap into an authentic self and therefore I couldn't be an actor. Worse, I couldn't really be myself. Whether it was because I didn't have the fortitude to strip away my particular emotional protections, or because I simply refused to break down in front of a group of strangers, especially white folks, didn't matter. The point is that I could not accomplish at UCLA what I was supposed to. I couldn't get an 'A,' the star on my paper that I had gotten in high school, and a few times as an undergrad.
I got the degree. In the end Delia, who died last week, inadvertently taught me much. She taught me that acting is not a linear course of study, nor is it a purely instinctual endeavor that anybody can do when they get up in the morning -- Delia hated that idea. Acting is a process. However you approach it, it requires concentration and risk and endless dedication. It also takes a certain temperament and resolve -- maybe a kind of madness -- that I liked to believe I had, but knew by the end of my two years that I didn't. I was better suited to writing after all, though another thing that I learned is that writing and acting are much more creatively connected than I first assumed. One thing hardly contradicts the other.
Delia would disapprove of me confessing this, but often I wake up in the morning and think that I can just get up and act. Thirty years later I still think I can still be discovered, set the world on fire, have it see me. Call it Hollywood optimism. Delia had to harbor some of that, or she wouldn't have been in the business at all.
