Yesterday I had another late-night rehearsal for class with my scene partner. (By this point in the semester evening rehearsal spaces are frustratingly hard to come by.) In last week’s class we realized — or rather, told1 — that the way we’d staged the whole middle section of the scene just wasn’t working, so we had a bunch of technical stuff to do to fix it.

To make things more interesting, my scene partner had just gotten home from vacation that morning at 2:30am, and we were missing about half the furniture we need (we weren’t fast enough). Oh, and I was feeling extremely tired, grouchy, and probably had a cold coming on.

So after a bit of messing around with furniture placement (ultimately leaving everything basically back where it started) we dove into the middle section and just tried to see where it went. When we hit the first big moment, it was so much stronger than it ever had been before…. a small, silent suspension of everything except these two people we had become, and their connection. And when the next moment came, I had everything I needed already inside me, and the words were right there, and what had been for me an amusing-but-passionless line came out as — in fact, could not come out as anything but — a heart-rending declaration of love and hope and sadness and understanding. The character’s words were my words. And that fed the next moment, and so on.

Goosebumps. No audience, no applause. Just an amazing moment.

And that is why I keep doing this crazy thing we call acting.

  1. In our defense, we realized it too. [↩]