Artist Statement

I have always been intrigued by things that are abandoned: farms, homes, warehouses. Growing up in the south, there is an abundance of land. Plantation homes sink into the ground, pillars rising up out of the earth like colossal giants. I grew up running around between fields and abandoned places, ducking in holes and springing out of underbrush, and I guess that it is the duality of abandonment and mystery that I carry in my blood and ultimately into my acting. It runs through my veins, a dirty Mississippi clay. My poor mother always has to pull over on the side of the road and let me take photos of abandoned red barns during the three-hour treck to my sister’s university. Abandoned places hold a sense of mystery and possibility to me—it is as if their owners still lurk in the walls and in the upholstery of the furniture they decided to leave behind. I am fascinated by what people decide or are forced to leave behind—an old piano, a wicker chair, a sofa. Why did they leave? Why were these things, articles that made up my playground, not able to venture forward along with their owners? Lives used to be played out on that couch. It used to have a purpose. When I approach these abandoned pieces and draw or photograph them, I feel as if I am giving them a purpose again. I find that my work as an actress parallels these ideas of abandonment while I dig for purposes, goals, and objectives for my characters.

When I approach a character, I always look at it as something discarded and abandoned by its last actor. What did they leave behind? How can I inhabit it? How can I change it, fix it, grow in it, fit my form into its nooks and crannies? Once again, I feel as if I am giving this person a purpose, giving them a voice and a body so that they can tell their story. And at the end of a run of a play, after the last curtain call and cast party, I am always surprised at how quickly that character, the character I had inhabited for two months, has left. And suddenly I am the abandoned one, left only with a remembrance of lines and the way they held their chin or moved their pinkie. It feels like a breakup—you wake up one morning, and they are gone.

I treat the end of the play like the end of a relationship. I hide everything about that play and character. I stick my notebooks and research and lines in a drawer and I do not open it. It makes me sad. I will never experience that person in the same way ever again. Even if I were to play that part again, it would be completely different because of the people in it and because of the time period of my life. And even though a house cannot pick up and leave its owner like the characters I inhabit leave me, each are constantly recycled and renewed, renovated and re-owned. Every character, like a house, has their own set of walls and defenses to protect themselves—these walls create mystery and intrigue; to me, the vulnerable parts that people keep hidden from others are the most fascinating.

It is difficult to say why I do what I do. I do not know what I do. I just do it. I had a teacher say to me once, “Good acting is like the kitchen sink.” I had no idea what he meant when he first said that, but as I grew as an actor I began to understand what he was saying—good acting is not a showing off of technique. It is not deciding, Ok I will cry here, or I will impress the audience now with my ability to scream really loud. Good acting is living. It is making your technique invisible through abandonment so that the audience is seeing a human being, and not an actor. My technique is a combination of Michael Chekhov, Stanislavski, Uta Hagen, Adler—I do not rely on one specific method, just how I do not play one specific character in every show I perform in. What is important is finding the technique within the script, and then fulfilling the playwright’s wishes through the method that is found. Michelangelo once said about his work that every piece of marble has a statue inside of it and that it was the job of the sculptor to find it. He also said that he sees angels inside the marble, and he carves away until he has set it free. I see humanity inside the lines written on the page, and I deconstruct and chip away at the walls, just how Michelangelo chipped away the walls of the marble, until I find the heart, the seed, of the character. I always leave the run of a show feeling fragmented, yet unified. I am part myself, and part that character—it is as if the character has attached itself to me, and I cannot shake off their gestures or speech pattern. It is always a mystery at the end of the run of a show what is left behind the walls of the character, what I never discovered, what questions I could not answer. What is always frustrating is when six months later I awake in the middle of the night in a moment of epiphany and wonder how I was ever so clueless as to not choose that gesture or see that emotional clue. Every now and then they run around inside me, filling me with their lines like my laughter used to fill those empty spaces. I guess my characters never really abandon me after all.