Recently I had the dubious pleasure of seeing my high school on the stage. I saw the musical Fame, which is based on the 1980 movie about New York City’s High School of Performing Arts, my alma mater. Like the movie and its so-so television off-shoot, the musical fails to do justice to the absurdities of a school whose purpose is to turn teenagers by the thousands into show-business professionals.
If you’re a 14-year-old wannabe artist, of course, nothing seems more righteous than that a city school should cater to your creative needs. You are very special, after all. You’ve got talent. As a 14-year-old wannabe actor, I was special, all right.
I’d gone to a Catholic high school in Queens for a year before transferring to the drama department at Performing Arts. I made the move in order to study theater, but also to fulfill a pagan wish.
I wanted to turn my sweet life upside down. Deny the altar boy I had been. Forget that I had ever played soccer, let alone been the captain of a team. If I hadn’t already started doubting God, I might have asked Him to bless me with some dark elan and make me a happy deviant, a changeling, grotesque yet somehow wonderful, if only in the eyes of the other changelings. My new high school seemed to be the place for me.
In the drama department, we were told that actors must know themselves well before embarking on a lifetime of assuming other identities. And to achieve this knowledge, we spent a lot of time exploring our inner selves. According to the tenets of Method acting, we were taught to keep mental files of strong emotions we had experienced and to use them in conjuring up emotions on stage.
To practice reliving our emotional pasts, we were required to recall, in front of the class, the most “authentic” episodes of our lives. The unstated rule was that painful memories were best. In the movie Fame, the class clown reveals the trials he endured growing up without a father. He weeps before his classmates and so grows close to them. We did quite a lot of that.
One boy, I remember, gave a slow and detailed account of the morning he woke up and found his mother dead. By the time he got to the point in the story where he was frantically searching for a mirror to see whether his mother was still breathing, the whole class was in tears. Our acting curriculum was such that he was able to recycle this material in several exercises. (Two years ago, he sent me a zine where he was publishing a serialized version.)
My own revelations fell short of that heady standard. My first time up, I recounted an argument I’d had at my old school: A janitor told me I wasn’t allowed to enter the building through a certain door, so I let him know how unbelievably stupid he was; when he threatened to step outside and throw me into the traffic, I high-tailed it out of there. I felt the story captured my (cowardly and condescending) attitude toward the adult world, but my acting teacher deemed it insufficiently authentic.
One teacher we had was a Performing Arts grad brought back to teach some classes about life out in the real theater. She was so enthusiastic about getting students to open up that it was virtually all she had us do for a whole semester. I don’t remember learning much about the biz, but we played many versions of a game in which students asked each other “what if” questions designed to elicit soul-baring or sexually embarrassing answers.
One time, when I was in the hot seat, it was the teacher herself who took the lead. What if I’d had dinner with her at her house on Cape Cod and then — just when I was leaving for the airport in Boston to meet my girlfriend — she’d tried to seduce me? What would I do? The nudging continued. What — with soft music playing, and a good meal in my stomach, and the ocean lapping against the edge of her backyard — would I do?
I didn’t hesitate: I told her I’d go straight to the airport. But apparently not all my classmates were so out of step with her. During our senior year, she and one of them became the proud parents of twins.
Somehow in the confessional culture of Performing Arts, I never quite captured that dark elan I had aspired to. My efforts, in truth, were half-hearted. I didn’t really buy Method acting and never could sustain friendships with those who did.
Besides, even as I harbored my pagan longings, I was absorbing an antidote. In my last months of high school, I had roles in two productions. Working hard turned out to be more liberating than telling family secrets and using art as a pretext for exhibitionism. It also taught me that I didn’t much like the backstage world, so after graduation, I went off to college in Ohio, and I haven’t studied acting since.
DAVID SKINNER
