To Want the Thing You Want the Most
To Want the Thing You Want the Most
Jessie Epstein
On Forming a Career in Acting and a Character in Self-Honesty
I
One of the best pieces of theater I’ve ever seen took place in a carpeted classroom inside a tiny building on a college campus in the Midwest. I was a freshman in my first acting class at the school, and it was the day we presented our final projects. A girl, whom I did not particularly like, stood up in front of the room for a full 60 seconds, first facing toward us and then with her back fully to us. She breathed slowly and purposefully and looked every single person in the room in the eye (no small feat in young adulthood). My breath caught in my throat as I watched a variety of thoughts and feelings pass over her face—fear, joy, surprise, pain, delight. She wore an expression that I had never seen on someone outside myself before. It was as though she was looking into a mirror, but we were the mirror. It was the first time I was aware of someone purposefully being private in public, which I had been trying (and failing) to do all semester. She was the last person to share her work, which was probably for the best, as a strange sensation passed over the room once she sat back down.
As I walked back to my dorm, I thought to myself, “That seemed both incredibly easy and enormously difficult…” A simple question popped into my head: “How do I do it?”
*
The art of storytelling is deeply woven into the fabric of my family, as it is for so many others. Laughter was always raucous and encouraged, and performing was second nature in my house. Once, when our extended family was gathered in an airport Cinnabon waiting out a layover, someone came up and asked if we were the cast from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. My bevy of aunts, amid their side-splitting laughter, assured them, “Darling, we’re Italian.”
Despite being raised among a bunch of rowdy hams, I was a painfully shy and quiet child, to the point where I occasionally hid under tables if there were too many people in a room. I journaled incessantly, writing about my life as it passed with fastidious detail in an attempt to preserve it; drafting poems about historical events in case of nuclear disaster where only my written account survived. I listened to the adults around me with intense curiosity, and blushed with gratitude and embarrassment whenever their attention turned to me. I longed to participate, but retreated into myself in equal measure, often in the same moment, constantly.
Still, an impulse to perform—or perhaps, to be looked at—was always there. I wrote plays about getting my ears pierced (forbidden) and cast my classmates accordingly, presenting the results during recess. I was cast successively in both fourth and fifth grade as frazzled adults attempting to wrangle rowdy children in our annual elementary musical presentations. It was around this time that two separate but related experiences occurred: I learned that I loved when people laughed if I was the onstage source of their amusement, and I saw the film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera for the first time.
About two thirds into the movie, when Christine Daaé goes to visit the grave of her father, there is a wide, scanning shot of Emmy Rossum walking slowly as her impossibly high voice trembles with emotion, her emerald cloak dragging languidly behind her in the snow. Something foreign and, frankly, magical happened to me: I was, all of a sudden, her. I was in the story, on the screen, walking through the graveyard, desperate for guidance. It lasted through the entire song, and when the spell was broken, I (and my prefrontal lobe) had no idea what just happened. But a single thought was completely clear: That’s what I’m going to do.
*
From that point on, I became a bona fide theater kid. Despite my commitment (or, let’s be accurate, obsession) with acting, a peculiar pattern emerged sometime around when I entered high school: I would tell myself I didn’t actually like acting very much, and the moment before I auditioned or went onstage was drenched in a desire never to be looked at again. In retrospect, I can of course see this for what it was, but I couldn’t at the time: It is objectively very painful to fully want the thing that you want most, and most of us will do anything to avoid the crushing experience that follows full-bodied hope’s disappointment.
This pattern continued every time I auditioned or went onstage, but I found that it slightly abated when I took up voice lessons in my senior year with one of the many teachers who would change my life. Her name was Jo, and I had been sent to study with her after being cast as Belle in Beauty and the Beast in my senior production—a dream come true. She instructed me in certain techniques that I still use to this day, but more importantly, she was one of the first adults I had ever met to call me on the carpet: literally. After the work portion of our lessons concluded, she would regularly allow me to stay afterwards, make me a cup of tea, and speak the wisdom of her incredible life into my own as I sobbed into the carpet of her voice studio.
She could see the inner turmoil raging inside me—desperation to be seen, and abject terror at the prospect. As a wise teacher, she knew that I wasn’t yet aware of this myself, or the crippling grief and pain I hauled around with me from areas of my life I was not ready to approach. So she gave me what I could receive: stories about her own chaotic and complicated childhood, watershed moments in her life as an artist, and recommendations of where to look for spiritual rejuvenation down the road.
I have never not believed in God, it is simply something I have never questioned. God’s goodness? Certainly. God’s timing, ways of doing things, overall mysterious nature? Regularly. But the reality of Christ has always felt very near (even when I have preferred it be very, very far away). And Jo seemed to have the same experience, though she spoke of it differently. She mentored me in many ways, but this was perhaps the most important one—that one’s individual spiritual connection to God is a lifelong mystery to dwell in; that an artist’s journey will always be spiritual, and this connection point is crucial.
*
Amidst the raging inner turmoil, I graduated high school set on pursuing acting professionally, but was unsure of how to accomplish the feat. How I landed in a theatrical building outside Chicago that would become my home for the next 4 years is another story for another time—but it was here, in a program that does not have an official acting conservatory but does have an ensemble called Workout, where I became an actor in the way I think of the word now. And this is the place where I saw that girl stand up during our acting final, doing the costly and holy work of seeing and being seen.
II
The name “Workout” comes from that verse in Romans about working out your salvation with fear and trembling. It was named thus by an incredible man named Jim who founded the program, who likened actors to high priests because they “carried the prayers of the people.” After all, the theater has historically been like the church in the way that it functions best as a sanctuary to be private in public. I did not know these things when I first entered the building to audition for Workout, but I could feel them. I later found out that decades of student actors in this program have prayed into the very walls of it—high priests indeed.
I struggled my way through my first year in the program. Much of our coursework focused on paying attention to the most mundane aspects of our lives and attempting to recreate them in front of our classmates. The purpose of the exercise was to learn to identify how we behaved when we were alone, and how it inherently changed in big and small ways when recreated in front of others. In class, whenever someone presented their work on this, our teacher would ask, “Playwriting or real life?”
I interpreted this work as a sort of challenge, which was frequently at odds with my genuine and earnest desire to do the work well. When I presented it in class, my teacher commented on the parts that I couldn’t even remember. Which, of course, were the most mundane things: taking off my glasses, putting up my hair. I crossed my arms while he gave me feedback, and made jokes when he asked me about things that I thought hadn’t mattered.
Enter the second teacher that would change my life by seeing through me: Mark. He tilted his head, knowing that there was a fierce and relentless battle within me that I wasn’t even aware of. And he said something with such kindness I couldn’t hear it, “Jessie, acting is in you to do.”
*
Something was shifting in the way I saw myself and the way I had previously thought about acting under Mark’s teaching. This germination was helped along by another idea we were presented with in our first year: The Braid. Mark explained the concept as a belief he held, in which three aspects of life—person, actor, Christian—cannot exist independently. If something happens to you personally, it will affect your acting. If something happens to you onstage, it will affect you spiritually. And so on and so on, in every combination.
In Workout, we did a variety of exercises that fleshed out this theory. We called them games, which they were and weren’t. Over my first year, I couldn’t quite understand how what we did in Workout translated to the plays we produced in the program. We spent a lot of time focusing on breath, eye contact, and waking up our bodies. This attention to and awareness of my body was relatively new to me. I had always considered myself rather cerebral, and even once joked to a friend that I sometimes forgot I had a body. Practicing listening to it was difficult for me. Where I had formerly thought of acting as “being interesting in front of people,” I was now being told, “honesty is inherently interesting.”
Most of our sessions in Workout were spent not speaking. There was lots of sound, but it was often not verbal. The way you communicated that you wanted to participate in a game was either by raising both hands or standing up. It was always very alive, and thus often filled with Big Feelings, but it was also the safest room I have ever been in to exhibit them—what happened or was shared in that room stayed there.
That safety is what made me yearn to participate, but, much like my desire to hide under the table as a child, I was often too frightened to raise my hands. I spent most of my first year in Workout participating by observation. Then, there was one exception that took place toward the end of the year.
We prepared to play a game where we ventured outside to the courtyard, which at that time was taken over by an ancient and fully blooming magnolia tree. Whoever decided they wanted to go would stand up, climb on top of the picnic table opposite where the group was sitting, and “sing their questions” in front of us. This game had a sort of reputation as a time when people were perhaps their most vulnerable, with good reason—what’s more vulnerable than singing about what you don’t know in front of 40 people?
And so, for one of the only times that year in Workout, I stood up to play the game. I was surprised by what I heard myself singing, and a bit frightened as well. I was saying things I had never said out loud before, but once I’d started I couldn’t stop. When I was done I sat back down, and couldn’t tell if I’d regretted playing.
There’s a great line in my favorite play, Angels in America (which, coincidentally, I read for the first time that year): “It’s the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do. But you can almost always live with the consequences.” It did not necessarily matter what I’d said or if anyone would remember it or how they would react to it. What mattered was that I had said it. I learned something standing on that table that has served me ever since: I could name the saddest, hardest things in my life in front of others and remain standing.
*
The summer between my sophomore and junior years, a group of Workout students embarked on a sabbatical to the college’s remote science station in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This opportunity is available once every four years, and is designed for current students to learn from graduates who come back to teach different theatrical techniques.
One workshop was led by a woman who had trained under the legendary vocal coach Patsy Rodenburg. Classes with her were spent learning the methods that I will call Presence Work. We were instructed in various exercises that taught us how to breathe and speak correctly which is, of course, much harder than it appears. The way you get into the work is by observing what is habituated in you—how you stand, how you move, and, literally, how you breathe. The point is to diagnose how you walk through the world—either protecting yourself from it, forcing yourself on it, or being present to it.
That last one is the sweet spot in acting (and yes, life). To not constantly be in the state of trying to communicate, to simply be present with yourself, which enables you to be present with another, is the only way you can truly listen to someone, onstage or otherwise.
This, yet again, rocked my world, and it immediately made sense of the tension I had lived in since I was a child—the tension of performance and hiding. It was, again, heaviness and lightness at odds, taking yourself seriously enough to diagnose the problem, but keeping enough sense of humor to stay loose in addressing it. Getting comfortable with the tension; making friendship with things that seem inherently to be at odds.
The changes I saw before my eyes in both myself and my friends showed me for the first time that acting could be—was—holy. We were high priests, not only in the Presence of one another, but in the Presence of God.
*
In the process of valuing my own story for what it was as opposed to how I was telling it to myself and others, certain parts of it were unraveling. I was learning, dimly, that acting was much more about revealing than concealing, but that both could be true at the same time if you knew which one you were doing on purpose.
I became a much more open vessel to work through, and a bit less concerned with how I was being perceived. I was learning that if someone recognized a part of a character in me that I didn’t particularly like, I would survive, and that in order for that character to live, I had to lovingly expose what I would have preferred to protect. The impulse and longing that gripped me the first time I knew I wanted to be an actor—which I now knew was simply the desire to say something true in front of others—was now complemented by tools to cultivate and foster it. I decided I wanted to audition for graduate school, and began preparing for it in the fall of my senior year.
In the month that exists between November and December, two very important people died: my writing mentor in the English department, and my grandfather. They were both sudden in different ways, and caused grief unlike any I had yet experienced. My grief permeated my final semester of college, and it changed my decision about attending grad school.
I still attended my audition, during which something happened that had not before: I knew that I wasn’t going to go to school. As a result of this knowledge, I was completely relaxed as an actor for the first time in my life. My hand shook just before I went into the room, but I looked at it and breathed deeply, consciously, until it slowed. I was about to go onstage with a secret, and I had nothing to lose.
My results were positive; I received multiple callbacks, and clicked into the autopilot mode of Good Student while attending them. I didn’t follow up with a single school. I was still fully invested in the final aspects of my theatrical education and performance in Workout, but became borderline disinterested in my future. The deep root of grief would not let me go, and insisted I find gardeners to help me tend it.
III
My first year out of college was spent doing many things, but the most important of them was my weekly EMDR therapy session with a woman named Karen. In this type of therapy, you engage the part of your brain that is normally inaccessible to conscious thought—the place where trauma is stored. Over the course of nine months, Karen gently guided me through the grief caused by these two men’s deaths, and the sundry other griefs brought up in their wake.
Looking back, there was no other option. Either I listened to what my life was telling me, or I would sorely suffer the consequences of ignoring it. Under her care, I began the process of unlearning. That is, shedding what had been inherited or treated as truth, whether that be about myself, others, or God, and getting to the root of what is. There were so many things that felt true in my life; she helped me separate feeling from fact.
Which, of course, helped my acting. The foundation of valuing story that Workout had laid in me was beginning to make professional sense in the real world: If I valued my own story, someone could not take it away from me. And if someone could not take it away from me, I could put on someone else’s story truthfully and without ego.
At the end of that year, I decided I had two options: I would audition for several apprenticeships at various theatrical companies around the country, and if I didn’t get one of them, I would move to Los Angeles.
*
I moved to Los Angeles.
In many ways, my life so far has been lessons in undoing self-sabotage. This profession is chock full of people unwilling to give you permission to do the thing you love and are good at. I cannot believe how long I have been one of them.
In walking through the corridors of the foundation of my self, I am flooded with a kind of amusement and compassion toward earlier versions of me. That fraught tension I carried throughout the first phase of my life—an earnest, desperate desire to be seen, at odds with a protective impulse to remain hidden—has culminated in a different two-pronged animal entirely: the freedom that accompanies telling the truth, and a sense of play and mystery in my work that arises in its wake.
I have been afforded many opportunities in the past three years that have changed me as an actor. I have spent a great deal of time working on the plays of Anton Chekhov, which chew on the very stuff our lives are made of: heartbreak, loneliness, boredom, expectation. For someone who spent their youth quietly stewing over these themes in the pages of my journal, it is an entirely different experience wrestling with them out loud in front of strangers, who are often not paying attention. Acting is inherently meant to be done in front of other people, there’s no way around it. But it cannot necessarily be about those people, even if you intend it for them. It is crucial to recognize that they are there, and then vital to forget them as you begin your work. The attention you pay to others cannot depend on the attention they pay to you.
*
As is no secret by now, I love acting. I have always loved it. But it is a richer love now than it was when I inherited it. I love being on set, on stage, wherever; a rehearsal room remains my favorite place to be. But what I love most about acting is the great gift it has given me of being present to my own life in ways I otherwise could not be, which in turn allows me to be so much more present with the lives of those around me. My brokenness is on display regularly and often when I am working; it reminds me to stay soft to the brokenness I cannot necessarily see around me.
And, as far flung as I may be from the communal and generous place I learned to be an actor, I am daily witnessed by God—in work and play, sorrow and joy. Of the many names God goes by, I have always loved Emmanuel best—God with us. In taking the care to pay attention to my story and in turn tell others, I am so much more aware of the bigger story I find myself in; a divine mystery in which I am a small but significant participant.
The truth is a language I am still learning to speak. I am grateful for the teachers I have met along the way who remind me time and again that making friends with these paradoxes is the only way through them. My entire faith is based on a story that happened many years ago, in which a man who listened to others like his life depended on it died that they might have a different ending. Some years I find it easier to believe that story than others. I take comfort in knowing I need not figure it out - I need only stay interested.
In some ways, my soul is regularly on the line as an actor. If the goal I continue to foster is honesty in my work, it requires an unflinching, steady gaze at what is both rotten and glorious within myself. The balance here is crucial, as either in full focus can quickly lead to demise. Acting regularly requires you to ask yourself, “I do not believe this exists in me, but it does… where?” If actors really are high priests, carrying the prayers of the people, their job requires a willingness to step into the mess of humanity—not unlike Christ himself—and assume it with embodied tenderness. Again, it comes back to this idea of being private in public; that willingness to say something true out loud in front of others. In theory, it is what clergy people do. In practice, actors have been doing this for centuries. Creation is groaning, and there is no shortage of mouthpieces.
Jessie Epstein
Actor & Writer
Jessie is an actor whose work has taken her to film festivals, off-Broadway, international theater expos, Zoom rooms, cornfields, and strangers' apartments. She studied in a tightly-knit ensemble in Chicago, where she trained in Shakespeare, the Patsy Rodenburg method, movement, and acting in the legacy of Michael Howard. After wrapping up her time in Chicago with continued study in Shakespeare and Chekhov, she packed her bags and headed west to Los Angeles.
Photography by Elia Pellegrini