Left to right, Stephen Sondheim, Edward Albee, Sally Field, Denzel Washington, and James Earl Jones answer questions from the audience. Some of my favorite short bits:
James Earl Jones: “Creating a performance requires going down inside yourself to find what is really there. Much of what you will need to find and use involves parts of yourself you wouldn’t normally want to display in public.”
Edward Albee: (In response to a student question on why people chose to spend their lives in theater) “I write plays because I am a playwright.”
Stephen Sondheim: “In theater, when you see your work, it’s constantly changing, alive. And that’s a delight, even when you’re embarassed by what they’re doing.”
Denzel Washington: “My advice to you is fail big. In some lines of work, that might not be a good thing. But I never understood people who want something to fall back on. If I’m going to fall, I want to fall forward!”
Sally Field: “My advice to all of you? Take an acting class, and take it seriously.”
Earlier in the day, Sally Field (one of this year’s award winners) gave a longer and quite nitty gritty short talk about the sequential career problems of a life spent in acting:
“I have been a professional actor for 41 years. I have survived in a profession where there is no tenure. [After a year of playing Gidget on TV] I was 19 years old and I did not want to play a flying nun. For three years of my life, everyone had a flying nun joke. The actress who played the Mother Superior took me to see Lee Strasberg, and I began taking acting lessons. I worked as a flying nun all day, and at night I was Sartre’s “respectful prostitute.”
How do I transition into being old? How do I survive in an industry that has no use for women of age?
Joseph Campbell said you must enter the forest where it is darkest, and where there is no path. As an actor you enter the forest where it is darkest again and again and again. Where there is no path, and especially not your own path.