Last night I went to see the play “Master Class” by Terrence McNally and starring Gina Chiarelli as Maria Callas. It was absolutely incredible, and I want to take this opportunity to really reflect on what I learned.

I am currently reading Respect for Acting by Uta Hagen, and in the first chapter of this book Uta outlines the ingredients which she believes make up that oh so strange concept of talent.

According to Uta, talent is an amalgam of

• high sensitivity;
• easy vulnerability;
• high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching smelling, tasting);
• a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality;
• the desire to communicate one’s own experience and sensations,
• to make one’s self heard and seen.

Gina Chiarelli is a very talented actress. I’ve been to so many plays where it is evident that each actor is waiting for their turn to speak, and when they finish speaking they cease to really live. You consistently see the actor creeping in and out of their performance, and analyzing how they’re doing as they’re doing it. I’m guilty of this. In my third year of university I had the opportunity to play the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi in the play Life Without Instruction by Sally Clarke. Looking back on the experience, I am embarrassed at how shallow my research into this character was. On stage, I played an idea of Artemisia. I hit all the right beats, and did what was expected, but that’s just the thing: I did what the text told me to do and didn’t bring any of me into the role. As I was being tortured in the trial scene I screamed out in a way that I imagined some vague person would scream out, but I didn’t put any serious thought into how Artemisia would react to torture. Looking back now, I think that she would have worked extremely hard to not react at all, and to not give her prosecutor the satisfaction of hearing her scream for mercy. In the scene where I detail the specifics of the rape to my father’s lawyer, I ashamedly remember my objective as being “to shock the audience.” I tell you all of this because since that time I feel that I have come a long way as an actress, but after seeing Gina’s performance last night – I realize that I still have a LONG way to go.

As Maria Callas, there was never a moment when she was done being. From the perspective of the observer, Gina breathed, spoke, listened, reacted, thought, and behaved always as Maria Callas. You simply could not identify the performance. It was seamless – devoid of any of those distracting lose threads which threaten to pull the audience out of so many performances. You see these loose threads all the time: the release of tension through the foot or fingers, the self-conscious or conceited smirk when real tears or real anger is born out of the performance, or the line stumble when the actor has fallen into the trap of repeating memorized words instead of living moment to moment and thought to thought. Although the role required Gina to speak nearly non-stop for a full 2 hours, I not once experienced the dis-ease of watching an actor struggling to remember their next line. One idea flowed into the next in such an organic way that you forgot that these words did not originate from the actor’s mouth, but from a page in a play written by a person (Terrence McNally) that the actress had likely never met. Gina’s  eyes were constantly engaged, drawing the audience into her world. When she spoke of something tangible, she saw it. Her eyes were filled with a reality that must have taken weeks upon weeks to create with such detail. I left the theatre in a state of elation. Fully inspired by the performances (the voices of the three opera singers,Shannon Chan-Kent, Melanie Krueger, and Frederik Robert, pianist Angus Kellet, and comic relief Felix LeBlanc included) I had just witnessed.
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When you discover your passion, start by observing the best in that field and learn as much as you can from them. If you’re an actress, like myself, watch movies, television, and plays with an eye for the extraordinary. I would like to finish this post with the following quote from “Respect for Acting:

WE MUST OVERCOME THE NOTION THAT WE MUST BE REGULAR. IT ROBS YOU OF THE CHANCE TO BE EXTRAORDINARY.

In Vancouver? Check out Master Class on the Granville Island Stage until October 27, 2012.