It is not brave to perform. It is selfish and cowardly and harmful. It is to hide in plain sight and allow all your problems to be someone else’s responsibility while you run as hard and as fast as you can away from them.
You should not be proud of your negligence; you should not be proud to find real life so difficult that you have to find a way to escape it, while millions of people power through every day. You should be ashamed of your gluttony for attention, of your addiction to eyes seeing you in a perfect perception, while the backstage is cluttered with insecurity and mental instability.
When you begin acting you find comfort in its escape, in its metaphorical and physical curtain to hide behind. However, when you live life jumping from one character to the next, the lines of what is real and what is not become hazy. This can lead to great acting, but can also lead you to questioning your own state of self, wondering if you really are a good person or just in character as one.
You start to use theatre as a crutch; you become so self-aggrandizing that anyone who dares to criticize you is simply ignorant towards the intricacy of your role. You start to think of yourself as life’s “lead,” and everyone else as merely side characters that you can use and treat in whatever way you think will be the most entertaining to the audience. This enlarged state of ego can be so damaging to your life and career. The only way to overcome this is to realize your own original sin of entertainment, and to deconstruct the purpose of telling these stories in the first place. For without perspective you are nothing, without sincerity you become worthless, without heart you are empty. No one has ever succeeded in theatre by being truly self-oriented. The most important aspect of storytelling is empathy.
Theatre is not intricate lying, but telling the story of your character as truthfully as possible. You must be able to understand their motives by discovering the path they ventured to get to where they are now.
As a high schooler, I am constantly changing my views, passions and morals because I’m still learning how to perceive the world. I completely lost myself in freshman year. I had just moved away from all of my friends and girlfriend at the time. I was starting a new school where I knew no one. I was struggling with my sexuality and how it would make others perceive me. High school forces you into these new experiences that depend on you to make huge decisions, and while in theatre, you can flub a line and do it right the next night, in life you have stick to whatever motivation you chose. Life’s finality is horrifying yet beautiful; there is no basic arc that you can visualize and deconstruct. Life is short and spontaneous and difficult. The freedom is crushing, any mistake that you make is your own fault: no author to blame, no composer to accuse, no director to hide behind. It’s just you.
And so, what is truly brave, is to act. To act is to accept all of your mistakes and horrors and adopt new ones. To act is to delve into the mind of the villain and see their heartbeat just like everyone else. To act is to find the darkest corner of what you don’t want to think about and spend all your time there. To act is to have a lifetime of love and loss, pain and bliss, life and death, all in two acts. Life has no intermission; you must accept your story for how it is written, put your entire heart into your performance until that final blackout and hope to God you hear applause when you reach the curtain call.
– By Connor Lewis