Minor Mistakes, Big Scoldings

Why is it so hard for some people to congratulate others on their excellent work?

Shortly after graduating from Célia Helena Drama School, I was hired to work on television and spent a good deal of time in Rio de Janeiro. When I came back, I was missing the theater. They say that television sucks the actor and the theater feeds. It is true. I needed to do something to nourish myself again.

I went back to Célia Helena and found out that several changes had happened. The main one was in the teaching method: instead of using the technique of Célia Helena, the school’s founder, they started to work in partnership with the Moscow Theater. Several Russian teachers were coming to Brazil to teach their methods here, which interested me greatly.

They opened a minimal class of fifteen people, who would take lessons with the principal of these teachers, a Russian big shot whose name I am not going to mention. I signed up and got a spot. We had the first class, which was fantastic. For the second class, he requested an exercise: we would have to form pairs to present a scene. In this scene, WHICH WE SHOULD WRITE, there had to be a big twist in the plot. To complicate matters, he asked for this turn to occur only in one character’s head. We should identify the upset by the actor’s expression.

Difficult, right?

But I think he wanted this to evaluate us directly since he did not speak Portuguese.

I teamed up with a girl and came up with a story: my character would be an airplane pilot coming home after weeks. The girl would be my wife; we would have married recently. When I got home, she would receive me passionately and, with a smile from one ear to the other; she would tell me the excellent news: she was pregnant!

My face would wither. She, worried, would ask what happened… And I would say, seriously: “I am sterile!”

From then on, she would have a tremendous speech while I, little by little, would change my expression. It would be the plot’s turning point. She would tell me that I couldn't be sterile since she only had sex with me, she was faithful, etc., until she remembers that she went to a party while I was traveling. In it, she drank too much, passed out on the couch, and woke up the next day at home, wearing a nightgown. According to a mutual friend, she had been taken there by an ex-boyfriend who met her at the party and “offered to take care of her.” Obviously, he raped her in her sleep… Outraged, she would ask me for forgiveness, say that she thought I would be happy since I love children, I always have; I had already said that I would love to have a big family. But now she would talk to her ex-boyfriend, call the police, how could he have abused her this way, etc.

During the speech, I would slowly change my expression. As she narrated my desire to have a large family, I would have to go through the change of mind just with my interpretation. I would “let it go” that the child belonged to someone else and assume her as mine. At the end of the speech, I would interrupt her and say that it was a lie, I was not sterile at all, and that I was delighted with the news.

At the scene’s end, she would give me a couple of slaps of anger for “my joke,” and we would be reconciled, very passionate, and happy with the family we were starting.

I confess that we were bold. It was not an easy scene to play. But the girl was a great actress, and I played every challenge they gave me (even the ones I made up), so we went ahead.

We memorized the lines, rehearsed, and went to perform. In the class, I took a backpack with airplane pilot’s clothes (I even borrowed a cap). I would use the backpack as a scenic object; it would be, effectively, the pilot’s backpack. But I thought a backpack was little for a pilot. When I arrived at Célia Helena, I saw that another actress had taken a suitcase to carry her costumes.

And I borrowed the suitcase to do the scene.

The Russian saw me asking.

We played the scene. Modesty aside, it looks great. The actors and actresses present applauded us; some people even cried. I had a huge smile on my face, my stage partner too… Until we turned to the Russian, who said:

“Whose suitcase is this?”

“Mine, I mean, the pilot’s!”

“No, I want to know who the owner of this suitcase really is!”

“That actress over there!”

“I know… Understand this, boy: this suitcase should be a scenic object of yours. Inside there should not only be objects of your own… It had to be your character’s objects! The pilot’s passport, the pilot’s clothes, the swimming cap that the pilot has because his favorite sport is swimming. The moment you decided to use someone else’s bag, the magic broke! “

“But, Russian sir… The first thing I did when I came on the scene was to drop the suitcase on the floor and never get near it again!”

“It doesn’t matter! A great actor would do this, and more! And blah blah blah…”.

We heard a sermon for half an hour saying that, because the suitcase was not mine, the scene had been crap.

Ok… I respected it, of course. The guy is Russian! Maybe their parameters are so higher than we, poor Brazilians; we have no idea.

But the respect ended in the interval when I went to talk to him, and I felt a powerful breath of vodka. This “behavior” worsened during the classes, as one day he was so drunk that he was and had to leave, and the next he didn’t go to teach.

I try to understand why someone behaves like that. Why not greet someone who has done an excellent job? Why to find such a minor defect? I’m sure that if he hadn’t seen me borrow the suitcase, he would have found another excuse to spin us up. Anyway… I spent a lot of money on that course, and the biggest lesson I learned was that:

Scruffy people are not exclusive to Brazil.