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I was painfully shy as a child and young adult, but I never had stage fright, since the person on the stage was not me....
When at the age of 15 or 16 I developed an interest in acting, my parents allowed me to study with the actors of the Washington Theatre Club in Washington, D.C. This was magnanimous of my father, since he believed (or claimed to believe) to his dying day that all actors are prostitutes....
At the WTC I studied improvisation, scene preparation and performance, fencing (which I soon quit because I was afraid of being poked, since my eyes were so weak -- I had not yet read J. D. Salinger's "Seymour: An Introduction," or I might have realized that I did not need to look so hard), dance (oh, if I had only had then what I have since gained by taking so many aptitude tests: a sense of spatial relationships!) and something else which is hard to name and even harder, it seems, for most people to accept is true....
Most actors study something called sense memory. This means reproducing in ourselves an emotion we once felt by remembering whatever produced that emotion in us. This sounds difficult; it is....
Acting is physical. I know I already said that, or at least that emotion is physical but I mean something different this time....
Although my father maintained that all actors were prostitutes, he still came to see every play I did in school (he couldn't come to the ones in L.A.) Perhaps he trusted me more than he trusted other actors, although I, like they, shamelessly gave away my emotions, bared them for all to see....
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