Playing Scared Read Online Free PDF Page B

consumer.” The approval of that audience hada direct impact on the performer’s very employment and economic success.
    These changes further coincided with a new paradigm of acting then coming to prominence and making unprecedented demands on performers. The Stanislavski system, developed in the late nineteenth century by the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski, required that actors go deep into their own psyches for “emotion memory,” to make their most intimate experiences the basis of their performances. “It is not just the actor’s professional credibility or employment prospects that are at stake when he or she steps on stage,” writes Ridout, “it is his or her self: a negative response from an audience is no longer just a comment on professional accomplishment, it has become a judgement upon the inner self. This judgement is exercised in darkness. The actor under scrutiny is initially blinded by the light, and even when this effect fades as the eyes adjust, the auditorium presents an undifferentiated darkness.” 10
    Stanislavski chronicled his own stage fright in An Actor Prepares , a barely fictionalized account of his younger self—the aspiring actor Kostya, who one day steps to the front of the stage and peers out into “the awful hole” as he performs the role of Othello (the same role, incidentally, that precipitated Olivier’s stage fright). 11 It is only a rehearsal, but his terror grows, so that by the time of performance, “the fear and attraction of the public seemed stronger than ever” and Kostya is paralyzed. His voice makes high-pitched sounds, his hands have turned to stone, and he can barely breathe. He feels severed from the world. And then, as he gasps the famousline “Blood, Iago, blood!” a murmur runs through the audience, signaling some deep-seated recognition. Somehow, the feelings of terror and rage against his own helplessness—and his stage fright—have created something real. Ridout suggests the “awful hole” could serve as a stand-in for Kostya’s very soul. It could also symbolize the vagina, he adds, then immediately cautions the reader not to put too much stock in this Freudian suggestion. “It would be wrong to suggest that every, or indeed, any actor experiencing stage fright is reliving some infant anxiety about origins, membranes and fluids.” Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
    The act of getting up onstage is, by its nature, an aggressive act: “Look at me! Listen to me!” the performer demands, whether it’s to speak, act, play music, preach or argue before a court of law. When the performance is deemed a failure, the audience may consider itself entitled to lash back—Hiss! Boo! Splat go the tomatoes. The actor or musician must wrest control of the crowd, like a lion tamer whipping the beast into submission. Stephen Aaron, a New York psychologist, actor, and director, writes about this mutual antagonism in Stage Fright: Its Role in Acting : “The audience remains the bad presence in the house—the uninvited—threatening to persecute the actor by humiliation, ridicule, starvation, and indifference until the actor has made contact with them, until the stage and the house are merged.” 12 Aaron duly notes that performance is an aggressive/erotic endeavor, never more apparent than in the confrontational language unique to backstage theater: “Knock ’em dead,” “Fuck ’em,” “Lay ’em in the aisles.” Olivier used to stand behind the curtain, muttering“You bastards” at his audience. Blythe Danner buoyed her spirits with the battle cry “Go out there and maim them.”
    As a child actor on the New York stage, Eric Brown knew nothing of such one-way confrontations; he exhibited a panache that made older actors envious. He began his career at four, blowing bubbles through a straw in a Listerine commercial. When he was twelve, he played Pippin in the musical’s national touring cast. At thirteen, he made his Broadway debut