Nothing hangs together. There are big holes in the daughter’s memory. She cannot fathom the passage of time. Half a century ago when she was ten, sixty was an old woman. She does not think of herself that way.…
I wrote “The Orphanage” at Hunter College in a biography class while getting an MFA in creative writing. I had grown up in post-World War II Germany with minimal education. We were starving. It was hard enough to come up with the money for higher schooling for my brother; we girls were supposed to get married. When I escaped to America, I pursued acting. In Germany at that time, America was thought of as the land of milk and honey, where the streets were paved with gold, where anything was possible. How the tables have turned.
Having worked in regional, stock, dinner theatres, the occasional film and TV show, I decided I should finally get an education and managed to get admitted to Hunter. I had studied acting with some of the best in the business—my three favorite teachers were Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen and Kim Stanley—I saw no point in taking acting at Hunter, but concentrated on writing classes, poetry, playwriting, and memoir. It became clear to me very quickly that the skills required for acting are pretty much identical to those for writing.
For example place is a good place to start. Kim Stanley was a particular stickler for place. Rehearsing a scene for her, you might have to spend days working on place before she would allow you to speak a word of dialogue. She used to complain, “I’m at a play and the actors are up on stage instead of in their places.” It is indeed amazing how specific everything becomes, how much richer, the goodies I would never have thought to incorporate without sense memories connected to place.
Sense memories were given a great deal of attention in Strasberg’s classes. Not only do they conjure up intimate details, they also uncover long forgotten feelings. I find the most powerful sense memories go back to my childhood: the sight of a doll my sister loved, the scent of pine trees in the woods, the sound of the river, the velvety touch of moss on the ground. Sense memories help me create a rich and truthful world.
In essence, all three taught the same things, but Uta’s emphasis was on the action. You had to know what your character’s action is, which meant, what does your character want and what does he/she do to get it? It was best if you could articulate it with one verb. She made us explore what the obstacles facing our characters were. What’s in their way? How do they overcome it?
As an actor you only need to know your own character’s action, but as a writer I should know it for all my characters. In acting, the finished product is the physical performance: mind, body, and soul, visible to the audience. In writing all you have are words, words, words, but for me, they are created from the same source.
WALTRUDIS BUCK (writer/actor) earned an MFA in fiction writing at Hunter College in 2003. Some of her poetry and short stories have been published in Hunter’s Olivetree Review. Her one-act, Water Without Berries, was workshopped at Ivoryton Playhouse for their Third Annual Women Playwrights Initiative 2019 and won an Ellie Award. Her novel, The Berlin Girl, can be found here.
As an actor, she has worked extensively in Regional and Stock. On screen she has been directed by Tyler Perry, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Todd Haynes, Barry Levinson, and Sofia Coppola among others.
