It was once remarked to me that in training to become an actor you will have no life. Or rather your life will be consumed with acting. I’m in my second week of 5 days a week classes, while working full-time, with rehearsal practices on Saturdays and Sundays, so I’m basically in acting 7 days a week, and I’m asserting the truth of that remark. I’m not in a conservatory training program, as cool as that would be, so it’s not a full time 8-10 hour day of acting but it gets pretty close. It’s basically a part-time job of 20-30 hours all on the side.
Yet those are the hours solely dedicated to acting, as I said before, my life has become consumed with acting. My time at work is consumed with acting. Whether it be looking at a potential audition piece or going over a monologue or reading a play on a break, acting breathes its way into every moment. It’s always on the mind, it’s always with you. Even when I go out to Chipotle to get some much needed fuel the eye is observing people, watching their behavior; everyone becomes a character study.
Breakthroughs don’t just happen in class or in rehearsals. Suddenly an epiphany comes while you are alone sitting on the toilet, that’s where most of mine happen anyway, and you are thrust forward with excitement to get up and play, hopefully wiping first. In all of this I have not grown tired of acting or even close to burnt out. Instead the opposite is happening, my appetite and hunger for this craft continually grows to new bounds.
I’ve been plotting a character timeline for Shakespeare, rehearsing monologues for class and auditions, going to auditions (which is a whole other story), writing my own work, rehearsing scenes, and reading for new monologues. I get home late at night and fall asleep to Stanislavski. I awake early, bleary eyed and zombie in to work, and come alive again at night with whatever class is scheduled that day. It’s fantastic. Some say I’m crazy. Some say I’m going to get burnt out. Some say I need to rest or take a vacation.
I say, bring on more. I’ve been less involved in other things and walked away from them, or been severely burnt out on them. They were not for me, my life was just fine going on without them. Acting though, I cannot do without. It’s not something one can understand unless they share the passion, or they have passion for something else in a similar vein. Acting isn’t a hobby. I’m convinced it cannot function as a craft one just dabbles in. Acting is an art that consumes your entire being and your entire life. If you are not prepared for that, if you do not wish for that, then the craft is not for you.
I don’t mean that anyone who isn’t a working professional or doing acting as their primary focus is a hobbyist. I firmly believe you can be doing community theatre and hole in the wall productions while maintaining a paying day job and still be in this craft. There are many cases, I believe, where the craft of acting burns brighter in those unknown side actors than those that we watch on the big screens. It’s an art, a craft, and it demands the full passion and embodiment of every soul that wishes to enter into its domain.