Andrew Perez (Jesse)– Andrew Perez most recently played Lee Harvey Oswald in the West Coast premiere of Oswald at Write Act Rep in Hollywood. Other L.A. theatre credits include Darren in Mercury Fur at needtheater (Ovation nomination – ensemble acting). He spent six years in Chicago, where his favorite theatre credits include Zak/Jose in Sonia Flew at Steppenwolf and Curley in Of Mice and Men at Steep Theatre.
He recently played Henry in the suspense feature film Engagement, released by FilmBuff Summer 2012. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and the School at Steppenwolf. Thank you to his amazing parents & family, girlfriend Taylor and his agent Sid Levin.



Yolanda Seabourne (Widow Begbick) — Formerly with the Business and Legal Affairs Department at Vin Di Bona Productions, Yolanda Seabourne facilitated the launch of the licensing division for one of primetime’s longest running entertainment programs. Currently Director of Licensing for FishBowl Worldwide Media, Yolanda is responsible for licensing and strategic repurposing of television’s largest library of user-generated content for use across various platforms, including feature films, national commercials and new media. A graduate of the Theater Arts program at California State University, Fullerton, Yolanda currently studies with Andrew Utter at The Mother of Invention Acting School.

A founding member of Uranium Madhouse, Yolanda appeared in the company’s inaugural production in Charles Mee’s one-person show The House of Cards. Madhouse audiences will next see Yolanda as the lusty, entrepreneurial widow Leucadia Begbick in Uranium Madhouse’s sophomore presentation, A Man’s a Man.

Alex Sell (Polly)– Alex Sell is a native of Northern California where he has done a lot of regional theater. Favorite roles include Student 2 in Shakespeare’s R and J, Mundo in Eddie Mundo Edmundo, and Shep in the Chemistry of Change. Film work includes The Caller and Wolf Moon. You can see Alex in the online webisode series Looking for Grace. Alex is very pleased to be in his first Uranium Madhouse production.



Chris Wallinger (Jeriah Jip) – — Hailing from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Christopher began acting at a young age on any stage that he could convince someone to put him in his small town. Performing in school plays and musicals as well as a Shakespearean touring company and community theaters, Christopher still wanted more. He decided to attend a performing arts high school in a small town in northern Michigan called Interlochen. From there he began moving around the country, and world, gathering as many varied styles of acting as he could while studying at such schools as Stella Adler Studios in New York; Northern Illinois University under Katherine Gately (who was trained by Sandy Meisner himself); and even at the Moscow Art Theatre, where he performed a lead role in Aristophanes’ “The Birds.” From there, Christopher moved to Chicago and contributed to the re-emergence of the venerated Organic Theater Company in 2006 as a Company Member. He performed with other companies as well, and could be seen in multiple commercials and print ads. Escaping the frigid winters, Christopher made the long trek out to the west coast. Since arriving in Los Angeles, he has expanded his credentials with national commercials and numerous short films.

More radioactive talent to follow! Stay tuned!

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

Stanislavsky famously defined acting as “the life of the human soul receiving its birth through technique.” More basically, acting is bringing a kind of life into a being, it is coming alive. The above excerpt from the Times article is highly suggestive of the profound importance for acting. The actor wants to come fully alive, and reading provides a way of coming alive not only to actualities, but to fictional things as well, to a land of make-believe. We tend to think of acting as a physical activity, as something that we “do”: speak, move, gesture, grimace, etc. But all of those things are of interest largely because they illuminate inner movements: movements of thought and feeling.

In some sense, the actor works to allow these mental activities to manifest themselves physically, in movement, in speech, in expressiveness. However, if there are no mental activities to manifest, nothing much is going to happen in the physiognomy of the actor. Receptiveness and sensitivity to the power of words (scripts are written in words, after all) is an absolutely critical skill for any actor, and there is no better way to develop this receptiveness and sensitivity than reading.

We are prone to think of acting as a fundamentally extroverted activity: actors express things, we are told. And there is truth to this: acting is nothing if not manifesting some inner life. But much depends on the richness of that inner life, and that points to the “introverted” side of acting. Actors must possess a kind of practical psychological insight, in order to get at what “makes someone tick”, they must possess richly the sensitivity to language that I previously described, and they must be comfortable in trafficing with the unreal, with the imaginary. In that it depends on both extroversion and introversion, acting is a very special, if not totally unique practice.

The second prerequisite of expertise is what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice,” a constant sense of self-evaluation, of focusing on one’s weaknesses rather than simply fooling around and playing to one’s strengths. Studies show that practice aimed at remedying weaknesses is a better predictor of expertise than raw number of hours; playing for fun and repeating what you already know is not necessarily the same as efficiently reaching a new level. Most of the practice that most people do, most of the time, be it in the pursuit of learning the guitar or improving their golf game, yields almost no effect. Sooner or later, most learners reach a plateau, repeating what they already know rather than battling their weaknesses,

Word.

It’s one thing to have some native ability, and another to put in the time, but the mark of an artist is someone who constantly wants to get better, someone who is determined to learn and grow, and is always looking for opportunities to do so. Such people take full responsibility for making sure that they are always prepared to maximize any opportunity to learn. In even the very first emails to set up the coffee date to sign a student up for the class, there are often signs that scream out whether someone is going to be such a student. How responsive are they? How much do they attempt to put their best foot forward? How conscientious are they about following up and accomplishing tasks like providing the deposit or joining the Yahoo Group? Once the course starts, it’s on to do they do the reading? Do they do the optional homework assignments and send them to me for review? Do they revise their work as instructed and resubmit it? Do they take time at home to make sure they have absorbed the practical concepts presented in class? Do they know their lines? Do they have rehearsal clothes (a costume) to do their scene in? Have they bothered to create an environment for the scene? Have they learned the lines precisely as written? All of these are little episodes of self-revelation. It’s not reasonable to expect everyone to be this devoted to their work; if the class helps them realize that acting is not the thing that they want to get married to, that’s an accomplishment. Someone learned something about themselves. But this fastidiousness about learning in a student always warms the heart of a teacher, because it is in such students that we have a hope that what we have acquired will live on.

It had to do with what cognitive psychologists call critical periods, the age range when new skills can be learned with optimal speed and thoroughness, usually considered to coincide with childhood and end with puberty. He explains a study that was done on barn owls that is one of the major exhibits in support of the idea of critical periods. I don’t understand it entirely, but it had to do with the owls’ calibrating their bat-like sound-navigation abilities with their sight. In an environment modified artificially using prisms, this calibration was disrupted and had to be re-learned. It was found that younger owls could do this, but older owls not. The age of the owl was inversely correlated with it’s ability to learn how to navigate its new environment. This seems to support the notions of critical periods.

However, Marcus goes on to explain a follow-up study that showed that if the adult owls’ environment were incrementally modified, not drastically and all at once, they could successfully re-learn the calibration. This is good news for those of us setting out to learn new skills in adulthood, but I found this interesting for actors for another reason.

I have written previously, here and here, about the importance of actors breaking their work down into manageable, bite-sized portions. There is a temptation to avoid exploring the particulars of our work by addressing everything at once and nothing in particular. I call this the “get-it-off-my-desk” syndrome. We would often rather address our work in a cursory way and then call it done than get into the weeds in the way that good art requires.

The discipline of breaking things down into units or beats, as they are commonly known, acts as a check on this impulse: by focusing in rehearsal on one beat or unit at a time, we create the space to delve into that beat or unit and discover its secrets. This sort of breakdown is often taught as a way of understanding a scene’s shape, and it can be that, but it is far more important that it function as a means for dividing up the practical work of rehearsing into small increments that can be successfully handled. This can go a long way toward dispelling the fear that looking at the whole mountain that you have to climb can instill.

The parable of the owls reinforces the importance of this: what can be impossible when attempted all at once becomes surmountable when it is addressed in increments.

He opens the book with a discussion of the idea of “critical periods”– the idea that difficult skills (like speaking a foreign language fluently or playing the guitar, or, we might suppose, acting) can only be learned by children up to a certain age.

The idea is that there are particular time windows in which complex skills can be learned; if you don’t learn them by the time the window shuts, you never will. Case closed.

But ah, not so fast, says Marcus:

The more people have actually studied critical periods, the shakier the data have become. Although adults rarely achieve the same level of fluency that children do, the scientific research suggests that differences typically pertain more to accent than to grammar. Meanwhile, contrary to popular belief, there’s no magical window that slams shut the moment puberty begins. In fact, in recent years scientists have identified a number of people who have managed to learn second languages with near-native fluency, even though they only started as adults.

As someone who learned German as an adult and went on to teach German at the university level and do a PhD in German literature, and who has an accent that can sometimes fool native speakers, at least for a time, I am living proof of Marcus’ argument.

But beyond my own experience, I have volumes of experience as a teacher of acting students who have thrown themselves into the study of the craft and improved dramatically. Acting is different from the other skills Marcus discusses, because when people are acting well, or at least not too badly, they can make it look easy. It can seem like with talent and a little bit of effort, anyone can be a really good actor without investing too much in it. In other words, it’s obvious that learning to play the violin is a lot of work, but it may not be obvious in the same way that acting is. So convincing people of that is an extra hurdle along the way in teaching acting, and then, once the student grasps this, they have a moment of truth, where they have to decide how badly they want it. I am reminded of my study of mathematics. I majored in math in college. I chose this major because I had always liked math, because it had come relatively easily to me, it would satisfy my parents that I was getting a degree that would prepare me to make a living, and it didn’t require that many actual classes, so it left me free to take a bunch of other things that I wanted to take. This worked well for a few years, as the first few years of college math were a lot like high school math: go to class, learn some technique for solving a particular kind of problem, practice that technique in homework assignments, rinse, repeat. But at a certain point I started to take classes that demanded more than simply applying a technique I had been taught repeatedly. The problems in these higher classes demanded real thought, creativity, patience, and a willingness to countenance feeling incompetent. In other words, I didn’t get to feel like the smarty-pants that I always had in math classes. I had to sweat. If I worked at the problems, I could often get through them, though not always. But I was facing what TS Eliot called an overwhelming question. Did I love mathematics enough to accept feeling incompetent quite a bit in order to learn it? The answer was a resounding no. I liked math, I appreciated it, I even enjoyed it. But did I want to marry it? No, I didn’t.

I did want to marry acting and directing. Which is why I am where I am, doing what I am doing. I did find something that I loved enough to be uncomfortable for, even very uncomfortable sometimes. Having found that thing is unquestionably one of the great sources of meaning and pleasure in my life. I have a practice that will pretty much always remind me that life is worth living, if I ever doubt that. But that is why Marcus’ message in the opening pages of his book, and presumably in the rest of it, is so important: it’s never too late.

In my coffee dates that I have with prospective students, I am asked fairly often: it’s not too late, is it? And the answer depends somewhat on the answer to the question: too late for what? Although even with that answered, the first question can’t always be answered definitively. But the prospective student usually wants to know whether or not it is too late for them to study the craft, to experience what acting is all about, and that answer is always, again, a resounding no. We all have things we wanted and have gotten, we have all had things we wanted and not gotten, we have all had to reflect on ourselves and why we did things, to repair relationships that have been damaged, we all have the stuff it takes to act.

It’s simply a question of figuring out how badly you want it.