In the second week of my college career at Washington University in St. Louis, I stepped onto a small shuttle bus heading off-campus to do something I’d never done before—take a voice lesson. If you’ve never taken them before, voice lessons, especially at first, are awkward. You’re standing in a small room with some guy you don’t know, singing vowels at him for a half-hour, then trying to sing him a song you don’t know.
Much like acting, the process of learning to sing primarily consists of learning how to relax. Some tension is necessary, but almost all of us carry too much for our own good. And when the voice tenses up, you can hear it. It’s like someone sat on a baby: you just want to shout, “Don’t do that!”
At one point in my vocal exercises that day, my teacher scaled me higher than I thought I could sing. As I opened my mouth to sing the next note, I felt the anxiety lurch in my throat. I shut my mouth before I even tried. He took his hands off the keys.
“Why’d you stop?”
“I felt like I was about to make a bad noise,” I admitted.
“Try it again. This is the place to make bad noises.”
Up till that point, the message I’d generally received from 14 years of our education system was that failure is bad and must be avoided at all costs. An F means you can’t move on. It means you have to do it again. It means stunted progress, and so a halted process. It means potentially you’ll never make it to college, never get a job, never succeed because you failed—that’s the fear, at least.
As one of my acting teachers is so fond of telling me and my classmates, “You guys are so afraid of being wrong. You want to figure everything out and do what’s safe. But there’s no being safe on stage. You must risk failure every time.” Rehearsal is just that—it’s a “re-hearing.” You don’t rehearse the play in order to get it right the first time and keep repeating. You rehearse to try a lot of things that don’t work and eventually find what does. Anyone who’s gone to the literacy center should recognize the same thing is true of writing—after your rough draft, you do a re-vision. This is the artistic process: do a bad job, then do a less bad job.
The past five months of my life have revolved around a play I wrote called The Stroke Scriptures. After submitting it to my school’s annual playwriting competition, I was fortunate enough to be told one sunny Friday afternoon last Spring that the Performing Arts Department decided to produce it as part of this year’s season. So this past summer, I stayed in St. Louis and waited tables while I worked on my play.
I’ve never waited tables before. After working lunch for a week or two, I finally got the chance to work a dinner. There was a private party of 12, and they all ordered wine (see where this is going?). The drink tray tenuously balanced on my left hand, I walked around the table placing a glass of wine in front of each diner. I was down to the last glass of red wine when a sliding sound was followed by a chorus of old-woman Oh!s was followed by a shattering. Talk about bad noises. The right sleeve of this woman’s white blouse was now mahogany red.
I found out later that this party was for a small group of St. Louis psychoanalysts. After the spill, she laughed it off, “Worse things have happened to me in my life.” While leaving the room, broken glass and dirty towels in my hands, I overheard her: “None of you know anything about depression until you’ve had a suicidal child.” She talked through the appetizers into the main course, and they all listened compassionately. My impression was that her son’s suicide attempts eventually proved “successful.”
Through June and July, I re-wrote every scene of my play. In August I came back home to Chicago and overhauled the play again under the guidance of a former teacher and mentor. After the third draft, I was sure the play was really solid. Last month we went into workshop. Every couple nights for two weeks the cast, the director, and I sat around a table and read the play out loud. Between each rehearsal I did more rewrites (sigh…) based on the confusion the actors and director were having with the play. At the end of the two weeks, there was a reading in front of a live audience followed by a Q&A session where the audience told me what they thought of the play. I was so anxious, I still have almost no idea what they told me. But I know they didn’t tell me it was the Pulitzer-winning play I suspected it might be.
So here I am, four drafts through a play that still isn’t anywhere near finished, and it’s going to be produced in less than six months. Working on it can be terrifying. I want the world to see it for the beautiful thing I believe it is. It’s my baby, and I’m afraid I might kill it.
I remember in my senior year of high school my then-girlfriend would frequently get anxiety attacks while studying that would render her unable to complete her homework. Her grades got worse and worse and so did the anxiety attacks. Her papers went unwritten, she did terribly on tests, and her sense of self-worth plummeted. Luckily, a few of her teachers understood her issue, gave her extensions, let her re-take tests, and set up times for her to sit in the classroom alone and just write something… anything. They gave her a space to make bad noises. The anxiety eventually lessened, she got her work done, and I saw her smile more.
We have to let go of this fear of failure. It can be a helpful fear. It’s a tension that keeps us upright in the world and walking forward, aiming for something better, but too much of this tension is paralyzing. So relax. Laugh at yourself. You’ve got red wine all over your shirt. You’re getting a C. You’ve hurt someone you love. It’s not the end of the world. It’s painful, yes. Frightening, too. Sometimes things do go horribly wrong. But press on. Allow yourself to be a space for bad noises. Life is a story of constant failings. I am gradually learning how to accept this and let go of my anxiety of failure, but it’s not an easy process; I fail at it every day.
Chris’s Bio
Graduated from Niles West: 2007
