Baby Steps (9 page)

Law is a substitute for love.

—Helen McCloy

 

T
o people who aren't actors, acting may not seem like a way to dis
cover the truth about yourself and your place in the world. It may not seem like a way to stay grounded. It may seem more like make-believe, or living your life as someone else. But for me, acting has been my center and the thing that always brings me back to myself.

Through acting, I worked out my issues about love. Through acting, I found lovers and father figures, friends and mother figures, and a whole slew of mentors who played various roles in my life—brothers, uncles, even children. Acting grew me from a girl to a woman, from a partner to a mother. It has been alchemical in my life. It has established rules for my life that I have lived by, and they have worked for me, even when I broke them. Acting has been the law of my land.

Of course, that hasn't always been the case. In fact, I never even wanted to be an actor.

My first acting role was at Sarah Lawrence College. After high school, I decided to attend Sarah Lawrence, not just because my mother had gone there but because it's known to be a great school for writers, and that's what I wanted to be. A writer. I dreamed about it. I was passionate about it. I imagined myself as an intellectual, producing great novels that would change lives. My mother had always wanted to be a writer, but she hadn't been successful or made any money at it. I would fulfill her unfulfilled dream, but not just because it was her dream. It was my dream, too. It's how I imagined my future life. For me, it was the obvious choice.

Once I was in college, however, I found myself in a dormitory full of theater majors. I thought of myself as intellectual and bookish, and I was surprised and charmed by this group of loud, vibrant, dynamic circus people who loved to express themselves. Meeting them planted a seed in me. I wanted to join the circus, too. I was drawn to
them because of their openness, although I felt like they were very different from me because I intellectualized everything and tried to feel my feelings as little as possible.

Being a college student, I was also a little bit boy crazy, and there were some cute theater guys who caught my eye. One of them was a boy named Eric Mabius (who later went on to star in many movies and TV shows), who was handsome and open-hearted, and I found myself imagining what it might be like to be in a play, too—a play with
him.
I had a crush on him, and I thought that we would end up together in the cast of some play or another. The idea unnerved me but interested me. On a whim, in a moment of sudden courage, I decided I would audition for the next play that came along. Maybe Eric, or some other cute guy, would audition, too. If nothing else, all those wonderful circus people might start to see me as one of them.

I didn't know anything about the play I auditioned for. It was called
Bondage,
by David Henry Hwang, and not only did that cute Eric
not
audition for it, but I got the lead role. As the dominatrix. With the leather and the mask and the whip.

Wait a minute,
I thought. I wasn't ready for something this . . . committed. I was just trying to get some attention, maybe a date. I hadn't really thought about being in a play, in front of a whole audience full of people, especially playing a character like this. A dominatrix? I was from
Westchester,
for God's sake! What was I thinking? The whole idea seemed ridiculous.

But there I was on the cast list:

TERRI:
Elisabeth Röhm

I read the script. It made me even more nervous. Sadomasochism, racism, intimacy, sex . . . this was heavy stuff. Who did I think I was? I couldn't exactly quit, but maybe I could get fired. When we started rehearsals, I decided I just wouldn't get into it. I spoke my lines without feeling. I was inhibited in my movements. I was
embarrassed.
I was
phoning it in because why the hell would I want anybody to associate me with that character anyway? I feared I'd get a reputation. “Ooh, Elisabeth Röhm . . . the
dominatrix.”
I blushed just thinking about it.

Apparently, my displeasure was pretty obvious, and the director of the play complained to the head of the theater department, an amazing woman named Shirley Kaplan. Shirley called me into the office shortly after rehearsals had begun and sat me down and told me the director wanted to replace me. I remember feeling both relieved and offended. It was what I'd hoped for, but still . . .

“Lis, here's the deal,” she said. “Maybe you're fine with being replaced. Maybe you don't want to play this part at all. But before you decide, let me just ask you this. What's standing in your way?”

I thought about that for a minute. My pride wouldn't let me say, “Well, I was hoping this one cute boy named Eric might be in the play,” or “I didn't have any idea what the play was about.” But the real truth was that I feared I couldn't do it. I didn't know how to become a character. I had no idea what I was doing. Most of all, I didn't
want
to become a character like
that.

“I guess . . . I just don't like the character,” I said. It was true. I thought the character was slutty. I didn't want people to think
I
was slutty. My inability to play the part well was my way of proving that I had nothing to do with that character.

“Do what you need to do,” she said, “but let me tell you this. If you want to be an actor, you need to understand that acting is not about judging. You have to find the humanity in every character. You have to find their point of view, and it's very seldom that anyone thinks that they themselves are a monster or a slut or even a bad person. You have to find out why the character does what she does, why she lives the way she lives. That's the whole point of acting. That's your job, to get in there and understand her. It doesn't mean you become her. It just means you find empathy, and common ground.”

I'd never really thought about any of this before, especially since I had no intention of becoming an actor. But her philosophic approach intrigued me. If acting really was about understanding people and analyzing human behavior, that sounded pretty interesting. It was an intellectual approach I could relate to. I'd even considered psychology as a profession, and I also wanted to be a more empathetic person, because empathy was a quality my mother had, and always valued in others. This acting thing might be good for me.

I thought about the famous actors I knew about, and even my theater friends. Did I associate them with the roles they played? Sometimes, but not in a bad way. I admired the ones who could transform themselves and portray the humanity in any character. Unexpectedly, this sounded like something worth pursuing.

This was the first time I began to conceptualize the idea of a rule or a
law
related to acting. Before, it had seemed like it was all fun and games and flirting and make-believe, without structure or purpose, but the fact that there were rules and techniques to this art form appealed to me. After my crazy hippie childhood so void of conventional boundaries, I liked the idea of an artistic life, but I also craved structure. With acting, I began to see, I could be free and wild and also safe. A play wasn't real life. It had a finite ending. If I could
love
the dominatrix, if I could find common ground, maybe I could actually be good at
playing
her without having to
be
her, without being threatened by her. I began to change my mind about the character of Terri. She wasn't dangerous after all. She was an exercise in empathy.

I didn't quit. I powered through the show, I got better, and then we opened, and I discovered something else unexpected and magical about the theater. Before I went on stage, I had the worst stage fright. I was terrified. I remember reminding myself to breathe, breathe, breathe!

Then I went out there in my leather and my mask, brandishing my whip, and I did it. I performed the hell out of that part. It was like an out-of-body experience. All my pent-up emotion, all my unrealized passion, all my anxiety and doubt about myself and my life transformed into the passion, anxiety, and doubt in the character. I was standing up there in the dark in front of hundreds of people, powerful and vulnerable and overcoming all my fear. It was the most incredible feeling I'd ever had.

I remember during one scene, I had my leg up on a block and I was wearing these patent-leather high-heeled boots and cracking the whip and I was thinking,
This is exactly what I didn't want to do, and here I am doing it.
I could hardly believe it was me. I felt so courageous! At the end of the show, my character sits down and takes off her mask because she decides she needs love and she wants to have a real relationship with the man in the play. She's through with role-playing. She wants him to know who she really is. This, I completely understood. When I took off that mask onstage on that night, it was me, taking off the mask of who I thought I should be and exposing who I really was to a room full of people I'd never even met.

It was the highest I'd ever felt, and considering I was in college, I'd felt pretty high already on occasion. I became the dominatrix, and yet I was completely Lis. And then it was over, and I remember the applause and the energy from the audience rolling over me like a wave of love.

I was hooked. It was such a rush, and I was addicted. Acting wasn't just about getting attention (although I realized that I actually enjoyed that). It was also about revealing myself. It was a lesson in
me.
What had started as a ploy to meet a boy turned into an intellectual quest and then finally became visceral and passionate and transformative, and I couldn't get enough.

I began to change my plans. Writing, in many ways, was the same as acting, I realized. It had the same goal, but the medium was different. The more I acted and wrote, the more I realized that maybe I was a better actor than a writer. When I was about to graduate, I decided to give it a try. Acting. Why not?

“Lis, are you sure you want to do this?” my mother said to me over the phone. “I don't want you to be disillusioned. Acting is such a competitive career. I want you to be happy.”

I understood her fear. She'd always dreamed of becoming a successful artist, and her dreams had been dashed, but I had a trick up my sleeve. What seemed to my mother a precarious and risky choice was actually a safe choice for me. My dreams couldn't be dashed, because acting wasn't my dream. It was more like an experiment. It was fun, I enjoyed it, it did something for me, but I wasn't emotionally invested. It was still relatively new to me and I wanted more time with it, but I wasn't necessarily committed to it as a career choice. My dream had always been to be a writer. If I tried
that
and failed, I truly would have been disillusioned. Instead, I played it safe. If acting didn't work out, I would just do something else. It was a little like deciding to marry your best friend instead of the guy you are head-over-heels about because you know you'll stay saner. It wasn't a passionate decision. It was logical.

Maybe that's why it worked out so well.

After college, I got a job working for an agent in New York, and through a series of lucky coincidences and friends of friends, got a meeting with soap opera goddess and writer Claire Labine.

Claire and I connected immediately, like mother and daughter. After we met, she wrote me a three-year contract and a role on
One Life to Live.
She was in the process of adding some new characters on the show, and I was part of a father-daughter team. My character was
named Dorothy, the estranged daughter of an alcoholic journalist. Dorothy had a sad, tragic story about losing her mother, having an abortion, and having father issues she wanted to heal.