Dispatches from the field: Act I, scene 3
I’m in my Freshman year of college — 2018. A beautiful early September day in Boston, Massachusetts. The leaves are just beginning to turn, the air is crisp but still smells like it was touched by the summer sun. I walk to my 11 AM acting class in bliss. But once that door in the studio closes behind me, I feel the spell begin to break. As someone with little formal acting training, walking into an acting class at my dream school provokes me into fight or flight mode. As my teacher walks through the door, I feel myself don my armor, bracing myself against whatever he is going to throw at us on Day 3.
My teacher, clad in athletic cargo pants and his signature zip-up sweater, waves the class over, telling us to form a circle. Us twelve 17 to 22 year olds stand there, shoulders tense, hands clasped in front of us, awaiting what we expect to be a day of conservatory-degree hazing.
Doug proudly announces that it is Failure Day — his favorite day of the year. He demonstrates, telling us that once he has spoken, we will applaud and stomp and whoop like hooligans until he’s had his due. We agree. He walks into the middle of the circle and proudly declares: “I failed.” We meet him with the instructed degree of celebration. Once he has reveled, he removes himself from the center and says: “Who’s next?” One by one, every member of my cohort steps into the circle, makes eye contact with everyone around them, and beams, proudly boasting “I failed!” With every passing student, we all grow more victorious. When we are finished, we are all breathing heavy, smiling, and, admittedly, sweaty.
Doug explains that he never wants us to demonize — or worse — avoid failure. Failure is growth. One failure is the birth of our next great discovery. His studio was to be a space of fearlessness and bravery in the face of missing the mark, or not meeting our or others’ expectations.
From that class on, there is a palpable spirit of ballsiness in the room. We make choices that work miserably for one purpose, that then open our minds to a new one. We throw our crap at the wall and see what sticks with irreverence, curiosity, and delight. We grow into performers with conviction, who speak from their gut and lean into the absurdity of rolling with whatever comes next.
I leave that year making a promise to myself to not let any one “loss” in a performance setting make or break my self-worth as a performer. Because, really, what am I losing? I try something on, I learn, I grow, I am propelled forward.
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But as they say, the cobbler’s children have no shoes. Sometimes, it is hard to make the things that we know in our professional lives transferable to our day to day, after-hours.
March, 2023. Today, I had a day. It felt like one thing after the next — solid, promising things — were falling apart, slipping through my fingers. The reasons why had nothing to do with me. But for someone who falls into the trap of perfectionism, when things pan out differently than expected, those changes sting like failure.
My mom sent me a video. It was a pep talk given by Kara Lawson — a Duke University basketball coach — to her team before they watched a playback of a practice they’d had. She said “Don’t give me the power to affect your self-esteem or who you are as a person… don’t ever give someone externally the power to touch you in that way — ’cause that’s all internal.” My funk began to lift. I realized, four years later, one of the largest points of Doug’s exercise. Failure is the choice you make to give circumstances out of your control the power to dictate your intrinsic value. On Day 3, Doug wasn’t just saying that it was great to fail — he was relinquishing the power we had silently given him to dictate our talent and our deservedness to be at that school. He was helping us reclaim the self-worth that we had so eagerly and mindlessly given away.
I’ve come to realize that the subconscious terror of failure boils down to a fear of rejection, in life and on stage. This has unwittingly driven me to try to be the perfect actor for every role and the perfect person for every, well, person. Acing life is impossible the way that acing an audition scene is. The choices I make can’t be for everyone. If they were, I wouldn’t be much of anyone. I might as well do my thing with conviction and audacity, and with each bold choice I make, the right doors, or even righter windows, will open.
