I sit near the front of the theatre, watching as the credits of the fourth film of the night finish and the screen fades to black. With every film we’ve seen, my nerves have increased. I’ve felt my anxiety about this night, Showcase night, building for weeks now. My short film, Violet, was created as my final project for the Canadian Film Centre CBC Actors’ Conservatory. Every actor resident made a short film, called a “close up”, around a character of their own creation, and the comedy writers created short teasers for their comedy pilots. Showcase night was the night all of our work was presented on the big screen to a two-storey cinema filled with friends, family, and industry professionals.
“I wonder whose is next?” my friend whispers from the darkness beside me.
I hear a familiar sound, like voices through a wall, and I whisper back, “Mine.”
With a crash, the screen lights up with my face. I watch Violet as though for the first time. As it plays, I find myself shaking uncontrollably. It’s just a tremble at first, but soon I’m quaking from somewhere in my gut as the film approaches its climax. This is new. I’ve watched my own acting in a crowded theatre before, and I’ve never felt as exposed as I do in this moment. I’m a live wire, raw and vulnerable. The rows upon rows of people behind me are silent, and I’m pulled into the film as well, absorbed except for the awareness of my shaking, until an unexpected shock of gasps from the audience pulls me out of the film long enough to think, “Well that’s the best reaction I could’ve hoped for.”
When it’s over, the friends sitting within arm’s length congratulate me, and my shaking subsides as the next short film begins. And at the end of the night, when the lights come on and my actor friends disperse to find their people, I run to the bathroom to hide.
The bathroom is maybe the worst place I could have chosen. Everyone goes to the bathroom after the show. It’s a non-gendered bathroom, too, so I really mean everyone. I don’t even make it to a stall before I’m stopped for congratulations. Regardless of the location and being neck-deep in my own anxiety, I welcome the metaphorical flowers. I’m proud of my work, despite my feelings on Violet flip-flopping over the last few weeks. Eventually, I escape the bathroom and spend the next hour at the venue, mingling in the crowd, finding my friends and congratulating them on the stellar work they did.
While the other actors and I had discussed our ideas and progression throughout the process, it was the first time we saw each other’s ideas realized. Seeing how my fellow actors turned those ideas into magic only reminded me of how much I’ve learned from them, how in awe I am of them, and how much I love them. I try to convey all of this in the few lines of congratulations I manage to exchange when I see any of them, before the current of people pulls us apart and we lose sight of each other again.
Congratulations come from all sides. As people congratulate me, I wonder how many of them actually liked my piece. One person whose work I’ve admired relays to me how they connected to Violet, and they outline exactly what I had hoped to get across. I hang on to that. Another person asks questions that make it clear they didn’t understand it. I explain as best I can, and they listen. I appreciate that, whether or not they’re still confused by the end of our conversation.
We head to a pub where the party continues with a crowd that is now mostly friends. I sit with a friend from Calgary and eat a burger, suddenly ravenous now that the nerves that had staved off my appetite for the better part of the day are gone. I get a hug or two from people I don’t know and would rather not be hugging, and more from people I’m getting to know and am happy to be hugging. I meet someone hoping to get into the next round of CFC Actors and wish them luck. I spend these hours enjoying the company I’m with, and I get home at four in the morning.
Over the next few days, my worries and doubts about Violet begin to creep back into my head. My actor close up was supposed to showcase my range and skill as an actor. I don’t think Violet succeeded in that regard. When I wrote it, I did not think about how I was going to best show myself off. Perhaps I should have come up with a more exciting character in a scene where I could scream or sob or rant. This was my chance to show how great of an actor I am, and I wasted it on this quiet, still girl, this shrinking Violet who is hardly a character at all, I realized. No wonder I’d felt so exposed when Violet was played, compared to all the other times I’ve seen myself acting on the big screen. I did not hide behind a character with Violet. Any judgments about her were judgements about me. Her flaws were my flaws, her problems were once mine and so were her reactions to them. How stupid, I thought, to have had all the resources I’d had, only to go in front of the camera and be, of all things, myself.
Tangent: I recently got a library card and started listening to audiobooks. I’ve finished two: Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, and Viola Davis’s Finding Me. I recommend both, and started listening to them because A) they have both experienced the art and industry of acting and B) they narrate their own books, which I think brings their stories to life in a personal way. I was halfway through Viola Davis’s book when the Showcase happened, and this is notable because that’s around the point where Viola Davis began acting as a young adult. It was the point of her story which most closely resembled where I was in my own story. There were a lot of lines that I connected with, but a particular passage seemed to speak right to me, then and there. It starts out:
“I also created a one-woman show that I performed for years. It had seventeen different characters. Every character from Seely in the Color Purple, to Pilot in Tony Morrison’s Song of Solomon, to Saint Joan. I even performed an improvisation piece where I created a comic piece based on words the audience just spontaneously threw at me. The one-woman show was my senior thesis project, and the purpose was to show that I had range, that I could transform just like my white counterparts.”
-Viola Davis, Finding Me
As I listened to this, I thought: Damn. What a powerhouse. Seventeen different characters in one show? Now that’s range! That’s skill! That’s talent!
Viola Davis continued.
“At the time, I felt it was a show that was a true coming-out event. But in hindsight, the objective of it was fucked up. How do you create a show to prove you’re worthy? There’s a bartering desperation factor attached to that. Let me prove to you that I have talent, instead of just being.”
– Viola Davis, Finding Me
Ah. There it is. I’d been walking my dog and stopped dead in my tracks when I heard this.
Viola Davis was right. Wishing I’d made something with bigger, flashier, more impressive acting was fucked up. Somewhere along this journey, I started believing I had to prove myself. Prove I was worthy of this conservatory, prove I deserved my place here, and prove I could make it as an actor in Toronto. Creating Violet had been a reprieve from this. I didn’t write it to prove anything, I just wanted to tell a story that asked the questions: Who decides what is normal? How much is enough to provoke action? What does doing nothing do? I wanted to anger people. I wanted to comfort people. I wanted to make people question what they considered acceptable.
Violet wasn’t for me, it was for everyone else. And isn’t that supposed to be the goal? For once, I’d done something right, and I needed to stop regretting it. Violet was exactly what it needed to be.
You can watch it here, preferably in full screen mode:
Precarious Writer 