Ten Life Lessons Learned from Acting

Tony Mowatt (guest artist) as Lumiere; yours

truly as Maurice in Beauty and the Beast.

I haven’t written for a while because I’ve been busy with rehearsals for our university production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast musical. I’m playing Maurice, Belle’s father, aka “crazy old Maurice” and a “harmless crackpot.” It’s a fun role to play—I feel pretty comfortable in Maurice’s skin. He’s an oddball, a genius, and a loving father. A good guy.

The trick to getting into any character is to understand how that person thinks. Most bad guys don’t think they’re bad guys—they think they’re right and everyone else is wrong. I tried to remember that when I played Mr. Gilmer in To Kill a Mockingbird, the racist lawyer who prosecutes Tom Robinson; and Arthur Compeyson, the escaped convict who is bent on revenge on his fellow former convict, Magwitch, in Great Expectations.

I got to be in two fight scenes as Compeyson, and, in preparing for those, I understood for the first time why they call it “fight choreography.” Every move was perfectly planned. We practiced the fights over and over, slowly and then more rapidly, in order to get everything right, make them look real, and avoid getting hurt.

Still, no matter how much you plan, things can go wrong. On opening night of Great Expectations, during the second fight, I was to reach over Magwitch’s shoulder from behind and choke him around the neck. I reached around him, but suddenly my arm wouldn’t move any farther. One of my cuff buttons had gotten caught on part of his costume, and I couldn’t get it loose! Thankfully, Nate Young (a good guy, and my acting partner on several occasions) grabbed it and yanked it up around his own neck! I doubt that anyone in the audience noticed, but after we left the stage, he said, “What happened!? You didn’t choke me! I had to grab your arm and choke myself!” I laughed and told him what had happened. No one could have anticipated the event, and there was nothing to do but keep going with the scene.

Life Lesson #1: No matter what goes wrong, stay in character and keep going!

Masks On, Masks Off

I once heard Hugh Laurie interviewed on Public Radio. An accomplished singer and actor (Jeeves and Wooster, House, A Bit of Fry and Laurie), he said, “Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.” Wow. That really stuck with me because I think it’s exactly right. When we listen to a song, we relate to the singer because she is opening up and telling us things about her heart that we wouldn’t otherwise know. No mask—we are hearing her inner thoughts. When we watch a play, we see lots of people pretending to be other people—people wearing masks, so to speak. They are playing people we can love or hate or root for or feel compassion for, but we know, and the actors know, that those people may have nothing in common with the actors’ own personalities or experiences. Nevertheless, the audience responds because we all recognize universal experiences and emotions that touch us all—even though the actors are wearing those invisible masks.

Life Lesson #2: You build a bond with others when you share real emotions with them.

Why Am I Doing This???

An inevitable part of preparing for every production are those horribly uncomfortable moments I must live through in which I torment myself by asking, “What if I get out there and forget my lines!? What if I miss an entrance? What if my pants fall off!? Why am I putting myself under all this stress . . . and not even getting paid for it!?”

But that’s what rehearsals are for. We are to the point with Beauty and the Beast where during rehearsals we are running the production straight through with the lights and sound and costumes and orchestra, no stopping no matter what happens, just like a real performance. If you get at least two or three of those kinds of rehearsals under your belt, you say, “Yeah, I’m ready! Let’s GO!”

Life Lesson #3: Don’t borrow trouble ahead of time. If that thing that you’re worried about happens, you’ll be ready.

Yours truly as the Duke of Burgundy, King Lear,
1980. After the humiliations of this production, I
vowed never to go on stage again, and I kept that
promise for twenty-five years.

“Toto, We’re Not in High School Anymore!”

Other than the stress and nerves, acting in a production is just so much fun . . . most of the time. I knew that when I got to college, I wanted to act in stage productions. My freshman year I was cast as the Duke of Burgundy in King Lear. It was a small part, about five lines, I think, and I thought it was going to be easy: memorize the lines, go out there and say them in the first scene, then sit in the green room till I came out for bows.

The director of the production saw it differently. He had me do research on the Province of Burgundy and report back to him. He kept pushing and pushing me to be a better actor, meeting with me individually to work on those five lines. Obviously, this wasn’t high school anymore; it was college, and this was Shakespeare. He really shattered my naïve assumptions.

Life Lesson #4: The problem with naïve assumptions is that you don’t realize you’re naïve and you don’t realize you have assumptions. So when someone points them out, take the information as humbly as you can and try to grow—even though it hurts.

More about the King and the Duke

I remember saying one of my lines during a rehearsal and walking in front of Lear’s throne as I had done before, but I didn’t know that stage crew had added a step to the throne. I tripped over it and fell down. Everyone laughed at me. Except the director. He just said flatly, “That will be there during performances.”

But the most humiliating thing that happened was when I “corrected” Dr. Bob.

If you’re not familiar with Bob Jones University, let me quickly explain a couple of things. “Dr. Bob” in my era was Dr. Bob Jones Jr., a highly accomplished Shakespearian actor and an expert on the arts. Although I am sure he did not see himself this way, others viewed him with fear and trembling, as you do with anyone who seemingly wields ultimate power.

We had blocked my one scene a certain way during a rehearsal. When we came back the next time, Dr. Bob, who had the title role, said we had done it another way—that Burgundy was to approach the throne at a time different from what the director had told me the previous evening. Naïve eighteen-year-old that I was, I spoke up and said, “Oh, uh, I don’t think that’s what we did. I think I was supposed to step up after” some other line.

Before we ran the scene again, the director had everyone go to positions for starting the scene, but he called me to the center of the stage all alone. He stood quite close to me and said in a quiet but threatening voice, “I don’t ever want to hear you correct Dr. Bob again!”

It was unquestionably one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. I hadn’t meant to “correct Dr. Bob”! I was just trying to do what I had been told to do. And although the rest of the cast couldn’t hear what the director said, I know they all knew I was in trouble. It was awful. I truly wanted to disappear and never, ever come back.

Later that evening I had a minute to talk to Dr. Bob backstage. “Dr. Bob, I wanted to apologize for what I said earlier.”

He looked at me, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Well, when I corrected you. When I told you we weren’t supposed to come up when you had said, but we were to do it at a different time. I didn’t want you to think I was being disrespectful.”

“Oh, that was fine!” he said. “We’re all learning at this stage, we’re all working together and fixing things.”

In other words, “You were right about the scene, and I was wrong, and it was appropriate for you to speak up.”

Wow. Wow.

I couldn’t help thinking at that moment (and many times since) how gracious Dr. Bob was and what a mean-spirited little bully the director was.

Life Lesson #5: Graciousness, good; bullying, bad.

“More Character!”

Baptista and his daughters, Bianca and Katherina, The Taming of the Shrew, 2014. Theirs was a dysfunctional family.

That wasn’t the last time I was in a production and wanted to quit. I had a different director when I played Baptista, the father of “the shrew,” in Taming of the Shrew. Night after night, I would get just a few words into my longest speech, and the director, sitting in the dark in the middle of the house, would holler, “More character!”

Now. Not only was he interrupting a speech that I was nervous about anyway (because of its length), he was undercutting me as an actor because every time I started the speech, I knew he was going to yell, “More character!” So instead of adding character, the bottom fell out of my performance, and I would limp through the speech as best as I could, feeling completely defeated. Because when he yelled, “More character!,” what I heard was, “You’re a lousy actor!”

In case you ever have an opportunity to direct a production, let me give you some advice.

1. Don’t interrupt your actors during rehearsals unless absolutely necessary. Wait till afterwards and talk to them or give them a note. Being interrupted throws the actor, confuses him, and eventually makes him mad. (The third time he yelled that at me, I came this close to walking off the stage and quitting the production. Instead, I waited till I calmed down and sent him an email asking him to please let me get through that speech without interruption. If I could get through the speech just one time, then I would have the confidence to give him “more character.”)
2. Give your actors specific advice on how to improve. Yelling “More character!” is lazy directing. It means “You’re not a very good actor, and I’m announcing it to everyone, and you’d better fix it.” A good director will privately say, “I need you to make bigger gestures. And I want your voice to be louder, kind of braggy, kind of full of yourself. Here, let’s practice a few times till you get it right. I know you can do this!”
3. If you want a good performance, never, ever undercut an actor’s self-confidence! When an actor walks out on that stage in front of two thousand people, wearing a silly wig and a funny shirt and breeches with leggings and makeup on his face and has to make lines written in the 1600s clear to a twenty-first-century audience, he absolutely must have self-confidence! Self-confidence is the only thing of his own that an actor brings to the stage. If he has no self-confidence, he has nothing.

Anyway, after that experience I vowed never to work with that director, widely lauded in our circles though he may be, again. He’s asked me to be in other productions since then, but I’ve begged off. Because I have character—more character than he’s aware of.

Life Lesson #6: No matter what discouragements you face, if you have a goal that means a lot to you, keep going. Don’t quit. Don’t quit. Do not quit.

Camaraderie

First-class passengers from Titanic, the Musical (2019). That’s me on the far left as John Jacob Astor IV and my (pregnant) second wife. Oh, what a lot of fun we all had carrying on backstage before the curtain went up! Sixth from the right is Nathan Young again, and on the far right is Tony Mowatt again.

Any time you can be in any performing group—a band, an orchestra, a local play—the relationships you form with the companions you spend so many hours with are the greatest benefits of the experience. You are all working together to make something bigger than the sum of its parts, something that will make the audience laugh and cry and cheer—something that might make them believe in magic. And you’ve all had to work together to make it happen. The electricity builds and builds, and the friendships get better and better, right up to opening night, when you’re standing backstage waiting for the overture to start and you all look at each other and pump your fists and say, “We got this! Let’s do this!”

Wedding scene from Our Town. That’s me on the right, Doc Gibbs, father of the groom.

And then you watch one of your friends confidently walk onto the stage, and as she comes into the light, she’s no longer your friend. Suddenly she’s an angry shrew who makes the audience laugh and laugh. Or she’s a young daughter who has passed away—she’s now in the graveyard, and she learns about life and death as she speaks to her fellow citizens of the cemetery—and the audience weeps. Or he’s a wicked, hunch-backed king, bent on supreme power at any cost—even murder—and the audience is filled with hatred for him, waiting, hoping he’ll get what he deserves. (Hint: He does.)

Life Lesson #7: Shared experiences, even tough experiences, build a warm bond between you and those you share the experiences with.

Living and Dying

Our fantastic set for Titanic, the Musical (2019).

Twice I have played characters who died—Compeyson (Great Expectations) and John Jacob Astor IV in Titanic: The Musical. Coincidentally, both died by drowning! Astor’s death is not shown, but after getting his wife safely on a lifeboat, he goes down with the ship (which is historically true). Compeyson ends up in a fistfight with Magwitch out on a pier, and he falls into the water and is never seen again.

That was an interesting scene to block. The fight director, a young guy, probably thirty years old at the most, said, “You’re going to go down on your back right at the edge of the pier. Then he’s going to grab your foot and flip you into a backwards somersault, and you will fall off the pier head-first backwards, landing on your hands and knees. Then you crawl under the pier to hide till it’s pulled offstage.”

Flip me off the pier backwards, with my feet in the air and my head landing on some insufficient padding!? And then I crawl into a dark little claustrophobic hole and lie there gasping for air in my heavy coat while I wait for the scene to conclude? I’m sixty years old! Are you crazy!?

Fight director: “It will look really cool, though.”

Me: “OK. I’ll do it.”

Life Lesson #8: You can do many things you don’t think you can do. But you might end up with a headache afterwards.

A Little about Ego

Actors are generally known for being pretty egocentric. But you can’t be too egotistical and still be a decent actor. Because there’s always a director (or assistant director, AD) telling you exactly what you’re doing wrong. They generally do this in stage productions through a dreaded process called “Notes.”

“OK, that was a good rehearsal! We’ll wrap it up for tonight, but before you go, see the AD for your Notes!”

Arrrrgghh. It’s not enough that costume/makeup call was at 5:30 and it’s now nearly 11:00 and I’m exhausted, and I still have to get my wig off, mic off, costume changed, and remove my makeup . . . before all of that, I have to be deflated by hearing everything I goofed up on too.

Don’t get me wrong, these are things you need to hear, but they can still be pretty defeating.

• “Come downstage of Braden when you run into the tavern. This is the second note I’ve given you about this.” [OK. Who’s Braden?]
•  “You said, ‘I need a place to stay,’ but the line is, “I need a place to stay for the night.” [My bad. Don’t you think the audience could figure that out?]
•  “Come farther downstage when you say, ‘I’ll go back and get her out myself!’” [You told me that last time! I thought I did it right tonight!]
•  “Stay on stage right when you say, ‘Hello? Hello!’” [You do realize that last night you told me to stay on stage left during that line, don’t you?]
•  “You need to show more emotion in scene 17b.” [Sure, no problem. Uh, which scene is 17b?]

Life Lesson #9: If someone in authority wants to give you painful advice, take it as humbly as you can and try to improve.

Frightening and Favorite Scenes

Flying around fifteen feet above the stage on that crazy painter’s plank for the opening of The Tempest. My character, Gonzalo, is the dapper old fellow dressed in white. (2010)

I need to wrap up this ramble. I’ll just take a minute more to talk about some of my most memorable scenes and why I’ve found them to be that way.

The most terrifying scene I’ve ever been in was in The Tempest back in 2010. I played Gonzalo, a wise old counselor. Because Prospero is a sorcerer, the director used all kinds of theatrical illusions to make the story work.

The Tempest starts off with a shipwreck, and this complex scene has been handled different ways by various directors. I once saw a production in which the ship actually sank on stage—quite an impressive feat! In ours, though, characters on the ship were on a long painter’s plank suspended from cables. It swung back and forth as we stood on it, unharnessed, holding on to ropes and shouting our lines.

When the ship “sank” at the end of the scene, the plank didn’t sink—instead it was rapidly drawn up into the rafters, behind the proscenium—out of sight of the audience. The act drop (main curtain) would close, we would be lowered back down, and then would step off, thanking the Lord we hadn’t fallen from thirty feet in the air! When I stepped off that plank after the last performance, I thought, “Well, at least I didn’t die during this production!”

My favorite scenes, as I look back, tend to be the quiet scenes—not the big musical numbers or moments of high drama—but quiet moments that connect with a theatergoer’s heart.

In Our Town Doc Gibbs has to rebuke his son for irresponsibility. In the production I was in we played the scene quite simply, sitting at a table on an otherwise bare stage. And Doc wisely and gently leads his son to understand how his thoughtlessness has hurt his mother.

Well, George, while I was in my office today I heard a funny sound . . . and what do you think it was? It was your mother chopping wood. There you see your mother—getting up early; cooking meals all day long; washing and ironing;—and still she has to go out in the back yard and chop wood. I suppose she just got tired of asking you. She just gave up and decided it was easier to do it herself. And you eat her meals, and put on the clothes she keeps nice for you, and you run off and play baseball,—like she’s some hired girl we keep around the house but that we don’t like very much. Well, I knew all I had to do was call your attention to it. . . . George, I’ve decided to raise your spending money twenty-five cents a week. Not, of course, for chopping wood for your mother, because that’s a present you give her, but because you’re getting older—and I imagine there are lots of things you must find to do with it.

Nathan Young (on the left) played my son in Ruthie,
a retelling of the Old Testament story of Ruth, set during
World War II.

In the play Ruthie, which moves the Old Testament story of Ruth to the World War II era, I played Boaz, who, unlike the biblical account, marries Naomi (instead of Ruth). In my favorite scene Boaz and Naomi have spent the day together picnicking. To this point they’ve just been two middle-aged people whose children are interested in each other. But after the picnic they come back to Naomi’s house. Boaz sits in the rocking chair; Naomi sits on the couch. And they just talk quietly, sort of aimlessly, about their lives and their concerns. In between quiet conversation, Naomi knits and Boaz puts his head back and rocks. Nothing romantic is said. No physical gestures or glances indicate a change in the relationship. But for the first time the audience begins to think, “Hey . . . you know, they’d make a real nice couple. . . !” All this from a beautifully written, quiet moment.

And toward the end of the play the audience reacts with surprise and enthusiasm when someone says, “Here come the newlyweds!” And, instead of Ruthie and her beau entering the scene, in run Boaz and Naomi. And the audience reacts with pleased laughter, thinking, “Yep, I knew it!”

I played this scene with a very sweet person and a gifted actress named Kim Bierman. We also acted together in To Kill a Mockingbird. Though Kim and I were near the same age, she’s already gone. One evening she was at home with her mother and said something about getting up to get some coffee. She fell to the floor and passed away immediately. It was very sad, one of those times when you keep saying, “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe Kim is gone.”

The other night someone asked me, “What’s your favorite scene in Beauty and the Beast?” And I said it was the scene, not in the movie, where Belle sings “A Change in Me.” It’s just Belle and her dad, Maurice, on stage together, and she sings a beautiful song about what she’s learned since being with the Beast—she had been so unhappy in the village, and then she was unhappy in the Beast’s castle. But things have changed, and now she realizes “that good can come from bad.” “That may not make me wise,” she sings, “but, oh, it makes me glad.” She has left her childhood behind and has learned to be happy where she is. What a great lesson that is to learn!

And as a father myself, I sit and listen to her and sometimes well up because I think, “She’s grown up—my little girl has grown up—and, oh, I’m so proud of her!”

Life Lesson #10: When you learn that good can come from bad, and when you learn to be happy where you are rather than where you wish you were, you will be wiser and happier and more mature.

Now—go break a leg!

Copyright 2023 by Steven Nyle Skaggs.

As a Scottish dancer in the opera Lucia de Lammermoor, 1981. When my mom saw this picture, she burst out laughing and said, “Oh, you look like a girl!” (Thanks, Mom!) On a related note, in order to avoid having to do makeup on all the men’s bare legs, we all wore pantyhose. As we danced around in our kilts on stage above the orchestra pit, the director said that several ladies in the orchestra requested that the young men wear shorts under our kilts. To which I mentally replied, “Well, if they were really young ladies, they wouldn’t be looking up!”

Seated, second from right, that’s me as Lord Stanley in Richard III (2012). Stanley was an interesting character to play. He survived Richard’s murderous reign by feigning loyalty to the king but betraying him on the battlefield (and there’s a possibility that the real Stanley was my ancestor!). This production ended with King Richard dying in a swordfight during a thunderstorm—with actual water falling from the proscenium onto the stage floor!

Taming of the Shrew, 2014. The director set the action in the Wild, Wild West, and it worked perfectly!

Whoa! I almost got murdered in my sleep in The Tempest! (2010)

Nate Young as Magwitch chokes Compeyson (me) with a chain in a fight we spent hours choreographing (Great Expectations, 2019). Nate and I have worked together in a number of shows. He’s a very talented young actor who, the last I knew, went to Edinburgh, Scotland, for more theatrical training.