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Chapter 1: Why Perform?

It has been said by Marlon Brando’s friends and family that the first time he ever performed, he pretended to be the pigs and cows that populated his family farm to get his alcoholic mother’s attention. The list of classical actors with despair-laden childhoods goes on: Humphrey Bogart’s penny-hoarding parents never kissed the boy; Ingrid Bergman grew up motherless and was shuttled from home to home, all the time refusing to take off her mother’s clothes; Katharine Hepburn found her beloved older brother hanged and celebrated his birthday as her own for years. These traumatic losses might lead one to believe that the actor’s abilities formed as an adaptation to compensate for a narcissistic vulnerability, that the desire for attention and validation (Kohutian mirroring) becomes satisfied by the applause that one receives. But my sense is that the motivation to act consists of more than being applauded for balancing a ball on one’s nose for treats. It is the longing to transform the self that plays the central role. It is my intention in this bibliography to uncover what self-psychology can tell us about the art of acting, specifically. (Although related, the arts of acting, directing, designing, and appreciating the theater are driven by distinct psychological impulses; directing and designing are much more like the visual arts than acting, which exists in the body and its reference to itself.) My question is why, exactly, the creative nature of an individual turns to acting as the artistic outlet. My claim is that acting, in particular, allows young actors to identify with another, missing part of themselves. As someone with an impulse to perform and knowing my own history quite well, I first explore my own childhood. As a child I lived in my head; I read and I played. Most of my fantasies revolved around victimhood. My favorite book was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith (2006). I wished the life that Frankie lived was mine, from the days that she sold tin cans for pennies with her kid brother until she was a secretary in a law firm in pencil skirts. In one common recess game, Ferocious Doggy, the title character did everything in his power to hunt the poor, helpless little kittens, played by me and a dear friend. The dog occasionally got close, and he would put us in jail (a grate in the asphalt) to eat later, but we were freed by a benevolent recurring character, the sometimes absent but always heroic father of the two kittens. If memory serves me, we played this game every day for an entire year. It was only in our maturity that we stopped. Halfway through third grade, we came to a consensus that although our game, Ferocious Doggy, had been fun, we were running out of storylines, and the “repetition compulsion” had just gotten boring. I did not take the fall from make-believe easily. Even from my early adolescence I have fond memories of pretending my chores were tasks set to me by a mean stepmother. It was even earlier that I began lying through my teeth at every opportunity: not only to get out of stuff, but also to avoid being myself in tiny ways. I said I had seen movies I had never seen, and I denied knowing a thing about my favorite films. I told everyone my parents were getting divorced, and then the next week that they were madly back in love. After an invitation to a Seder dinner at my friend Emma’s, I pretended to be Jewish. At times, these characters were simple wish-fulfillment: I wanted to be something or have something, and so I pretended that I did. Lies were easy, commonplace, and benign. At the height of my lying, I told more falsehoods in a single day than I did truths. For a long time, when I spoke about myself honestly, my voice shook and my eyes filled with tears. The reality of my life did not matter, only the capacity to dream up new realities and portray them convincingly. These