An Unforgettable Lesson in What it Means to Be Human

Oct 7, 2009

by Tim

— The Human Element is Everything, Sheila Taught Us —

black_man In college I had a drama instructor named Sheila Weber, who was a remarkable teacher and an extraordinary person.

On the first day of her three-part, one-year drama course, she said she was going to reveal the essence of acting, and that we were not going to understand it.

She also told us that, if we stuck with the class, around the fourth month or so we would begin to understand what she was about to tell us. And if we stayed the entire year, we would fully grasp the essence of acting. Here’s what she said:

The essence of acting is playing the human element.

Sure enough, we were baffled.

And sure enough, three or four months later, we started to understand what Sheila had been talking about that first day of class.

We learned, for example, that to play an old person you don’t focus on perfecting a limp or shaky hands or jowl stuttering. Instead, you concentrate on understanding and experiencing love of family, memories, nostalgia, regret, hopes and fears for the future — things common to all people, not just old people.

We learned that when playing a king (as I did for a scene from “Ondine”) you don’t focus on “kingliness” or a “royal” demeanor Ondine (whatever that is). Instead, you concentrate on finding and expressing in the king a core human element common to everyone. In this particular scene, the king wanted to make friends with Ondine. The scene, in essence, was about a person trying to make a friend. Even kings get lonely, I discovered.

And we came to understand that the doctor didn’t perform the abortion because of prurient interest in his patient, he did it because he wanted to help her. And we saw that Biff lit the cigarette, not because he was tough or cool, but because he couldn’t handle acknowledging his father’s failing life.

So, slowly, we learned to discern the human element in a scene, which was the hardest thing of all, at least for me. Once you did that, and understood your character’s goal, you knew what to do, what to “play.”

Then it became a matter of “reliving the scene.” In short, an actor relives, or re-experiences, in real time, the sequence of events in a scene. The mark of a professional, Sheila said, is the ability to repeat this on command.

I don’t know if any of my classmates went on to do much in the dramatic arts. I sure didn’t.

But I was surely touched by a great teacher, who taught an unforgettable lesson in what it means to be human.