Rewiring My Mental Processes
Contributed by Sarah Harris
Trueheart Productions ran Estranged Identity‘s Act 2 in entirety for the first time tonight. All in all it went quite well, although I must confess I’ve still got a few lines I slip up on. I came away from it with several new ideas for my character, Mary, as well as helpful advice from the directors. Because there are still some facets of Mary’s character that I am working to understand, I often find that like first impressions of people, my initial interpretations of a character are not entirely correct.
Like most interesting people, Mary is a difficult personality to map and understand entirely. For me, there are two points that require quite a bit of research and reflection to understand. One is that she’s extroverted. The other is that she acts insane about sixty percent of the time.
Many of you may view playing a psychotic extrovert as something effortless, like buttering toast. But I unfortunately find playing an extrovert similar to putting a square block inside a round hole; it stodgily refuses to happen. It is one thing to make a vow, as Mary, to devote your life to destroying someone else’s in an introverted manner but quite another when you have to be extroverted about it.
It is also remarkable how little information is supplied on how to behave like an outgoing extrovert when you are a rather reticent introvert. There is a significantly greater amount of information on schizophrenia, agoraphobia, and other mental illnesses. I do wonder sometimes if scientists even consider whether the time they spend studying the migration patterns of large avians will be remotely helpful to most actors.
So, while I have become quite practiced at laughing maniacally, swinging from one mood to another in a heartbeat, threatening people, invading their personal space like it’s a city sidewalk, having panic attacks upon hearing certain words, and assaulting others in fits of rage. The extroverted part is one I have not entirely grasped.
And all jesting aside, I really do find it more difficult to portray Mary’s extroverted characteristics than her psychotic ones. Because the furious outbursts and rapidly changing personalities don’t have coherent thought processes, they are simply inexplicable jumps from emotion or thought to another. On the other hand, understanding the perspective of an extrovert and how that effects the character is like rewiring my mental processing. Extroversion and introversion are two entirely contrasting differences that refuse to coalesce because they are a single continuum; in order to have a high propensity towards one, you must be low in the other.
