Dealing with Emotional Hangover: Cool-down and the Performance Cycle in Acting

Dealing with Emotional Hangover: Cool-down and the Performance Cycle in Acting Richard Owen Geer An actor's performance ends with the fall of the curtain. Like most American directors and teachers of acting, I was bred in a system which rarely, if ever, questioned this "fact." In recent years the long- and short-term effects of performance on actors have been questioned. Feminists have made us aware that the performance of inappropriate gender roles can have an ontological effect on the women and men who play them. Performance scholars such as Richard Schechner have shown that other traditions are as interested in what comes after the event of performance as in anything which precedes it. The results of research into emotions give cause for concern and suggest possible means for dealing with the emotional problems of post-performance—what research psychologist Susana Bloch calls "emotional hangover." The actor Janice Rule, in a 1972 article published in the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, tells of a male actor who was in love with a young woman and wanted to marry. Their happiness, however, wasn't to last. He began to treat her poorly. Instead of using pet names, he referred to her in unloving ways and repeated strange phrases over and over. It dawned on her, finally, that he had ceased to love her and she resolved to leave. While packing she came across his script and on impulse picked it up. Her fiancé did not discuss his work, and she knew little about the play, not even the name of his character. However, she had no trouble identifying it, nor in discovering the source of the cruel names. In the script, she encountered the personality that her husband had become. This story, Rule says, has a happy ending. In her article, "The Actor's Identity Crises (Post Analytic Reflections of an Actress)," she explains that after the show closed, the young man gradually returned to his old self. As is common in such cases, Rule says, the actor was unaware of the change that nearly cost him his relationship. He and his fiancée married and managed to work through the emotional stress when onstage work affected offstage life. Writing in TDR, John J. Sullivan asks us to regard the problem in another guise: 147 148 Richard Owen Geer Consider the actress in a Western movie who marries the wrangler on the set. If her next picture takes her to Paris, she may shed the wrangler for a Parisian fop. If her next picture is in the Canadian Northwest we will not be surprised to see her playing the role in life, for a short time or until the next picture, of the adoring wife of a Canadian Mountie. (108; emphasis mine) Can something as unreal as the playing of a role alter an actor's life? Janice Rule gives a hypothetical example of how this might come about. An actor, she says, is to play a character whom he basically does not like. To perform successfully the actor must find sympathy for the character, a man who walks out on his wife and family at the end of the play. The first danger, according to Rule, is that the actor may unconsciously look for all the reasons that would justify walking out on his own wife and family. The role, she says, could also bring closer to the surface any repressed dislikes that the actor might feel toward his family, exaggerating them to bigger-than-life size. The second danger is that the actor receives applause every night for these character traits, values, and attitudes. This, Rule says, makes it probable that they will be carried over to some extent in private life. Not only the applause, Rule says, but the "living oneself into the part" for weeks or months makes the separation of stage and home extremely difficult (54). To review, Rule designates two major causes for post-performance emotional problems. The first is the actor's "as if" process of matching personal experiences to character behaviors; the actor probes the psyche, searching for similarities between the character's experience and his or her own. As he...