Theatre is Hard–But That’s Good (by Sarosh Parvez)

You know, one important thing that I’ve definitely learned during high school is that I shouldn’t underestimate a single thing, because if I do, I’ll set myself up for failure. I learned this lesson the year all of this started for me: freshman year, 2019. Math was always easy for me in elementary and middle school (I swear this article is about theater and not the quadratic formula), and I’d always do well on Math tests without having to study for them. Since elementary and middle school math was that easy for me, I’d figured that high school Math would be pretty easy as well. It wasn’t, and it still isn’t. The Math class I’d taken freshman year was Algebra 2, and oh boy, let’s just say I didn’t start off that strong during my first year of high school. When we were learning the first unit of Algebra 2, I thought that it was just a review of this specific concept that I had already learned from Algebra 1, but with a bit of new things about those concepts. I breezed through the quizzes, and I showed up to the classroom on the day of my first unit test, thinking that this was just like all of the other tests that I’ve ever had to do in math: easy. I didn’t study for that test, and that messed me up big time. I ended up gloriously failing that test, and having to do a retake for it. I had underestimated how hard that test was going to be, and that ended up causing my grade to suffer. 

That day, I learned the lesson that I’m telling you about today. But there’s one specific class that you need to apply this lesson to, and that’s anything to do with theater. You may think “Wow, theater must be so easy, I guess I’ll pick that class for an easy A!” Don’t ever say that about any of the classes that you take in high school, but don’t say that especially in this case. I myself already understood that before I ever stepped in the Black Box on the first day of school, but it’s something that you should all keep in mind. If you’re not convinced by my 100% always perfect advice, here’s why theater is hard, but also why that’s a good thing. 

One aspect of theater is that you have to make sure that you’re staying as true as possible to the character that you portray. When you’re performing, don’t just perform by doing all of the necessary things like body language, movement, and range of voice in a way that you come off as yourself doing all of these things. You need to do all of that, but as your character, otherwise the audience will believe that it’s just you on the stage talking. And just to be clear, props and costumes and other practical things like those won’t help you in any way if you use those items as yourself and not the character. All of this can be quite difficult, as you have to take the essentials of performing into account while transforming into potentially a completely different person than you. It takes a while to get to the point where you start truly becoming your character. I know this for a fact because of the countless amount of times that I practiced trying to be this specific character for a monologue I had to perform. But all of that can give you motivation. Motivation to do better than before, and motivation to become that other person. And feel free to experiment on that. But uh, if you’re trying to go for Hollywood, don’t experiment with becoming a character you’re performing too much, otherwise you might do what Jared Leto did during Suicide Squad’s production and send dead rats to co-stars as the Joker.   

This leads me to my next point about why theater is hard and good at the same time: it makes you think outside of the box. You’ll need to have a bit of nuance within your performance, and while again, that takes time, the payoff of having an insightful and captivating performance should be worth it. You have to not only think about what you (actually your character, not you!) are saying and how you’ll say it, but also what part of the stage you should go to at specific points of the dialogue, what emotions you have to express at certain parts of the scene, or the way that you’re physically expressing your character through the use of your body. You can consider some of these points through annotating the scripts. While all of this could be hard for you to process and think about, theater and performing push your creative boundaries, and get you to be more experimental with things.  

The final point I want to make is that theater also helps you deal with failure. I stayed up until three in the morning practicing for a monologue that I needed to perform in class, just so that I could become the character I wanted effectively, so that I could feel and sound like what that character could be like if they were real. Unfortunately, some things didn’t go too well the day I had to perform the monologue in front of my classmates and my teacher, Jonathan. While I did alright with my body language and moved to the parts of the stage where I wanted to for the most part, as Jonathan himself put it, my voice ended up sounding like Ms. Piggy from The Muppets. I was initially frustrated at the fact that I had messed up, but after talking to Jonathan about my performance, I realized that it’s okay to mess up, especially in theater, as long as I learn from those mistakes. And I was at least trying to figure out how to feel and sound like that character, and despite messing up the “sound” part, I know that I can improve on this with my next performances. Dealing with failure is often one of the hardest things that anyone can endure, but we all learn to live with it and move on. Theater is just one of those things that gives you the strength to keep moving forward, so don’t underestimate its power, but try to understand the power that it can give you.