Dear Theater Major,
I know what my friends and family think of you. They think you aren’t serious enough, that you’ll leave me poor and unhappy. But they don’t know you like I do. They don’t understand that you’ve taught me not only how to be a better performer, but a better human being.
They think that you don’t challenge me enough. But they’ve never been through an acting class so emotionally draining I spend the rest of the day with my heart on my sleeve. They’ve never stayed up all night running lines. They don’t know the joy you bring me. To perform a long and arduous dissection of a script, finding bits and pieces of your character’s soul, and than finding the holes in your own soul that these pieces may fill up is one of the most satisfying things a person can do.
Theater major, you are the hardest thing I have ever embarked on. To be an actor is to lose the very things that make me who I am, my mannerisms, my stride, my voice. To act successfully I must put great amounts of thought into these usually thoughtless actions. An actor must give himself completely to his audience, he must stand in front of their skeptical eyes and attempt to convince them that he is not the insecure student, no, he is a lonely old man with a weakness for the devil's brew or perhaps a brokenhearted lover who's just found his fiancee lying in her tomb. And all the time the actor must stick to his lie, must convince them to the end, and if done correctly, perhaps the audience will be so enraptured by this lie, that just for a moment, they'll forget their own woes and sorrows and lose themselves in the story.
To watch a play and to be in a play offer the same relief: escape from reality. Those who are dissatisfied with reality create their own. Certainly this is a beautiful thing. A necessary thing for humans. The unscripted nature of life is simply something actors cannot accept, so they lose themselves in scripts, in characters, in new worlds outside the ordinary. This is why I love you, my sweet major.
Every class we are taught a little bit more about the art of unsticking ourselves from the things that make you, you and being able to swap out other peoples characteristics. Constantly, an actor must chase down the world's most elusive prey: emotions. For an actor does not simply have to display anger, but instead we must feel it, and feel it as our character would, whether that means shouting at the top of our lungs or simply gritting our teeth in a cold fury
You teach me every day about people. Theater itself is about the on-going plight of humanity, the pain and the joy that it is to be alive is displayed on the stage daily. To be even a little part of that is magical.
So thank you, acting major, thank you for teaching me how to be honest again. Thank you for teaching me how to feel again. Thank you for teaching me a compassion so deep that I can cry when pretending to be inside the tragedy of a fictional person. Thank you for letting me be me.
My friends and family can keep their science and their business majors, you make me happy. I love you.
With love,
A Theater Major
