Free Actors Anonymous by James Franco

Why didn’t you take that in? You were so wrapped up in telling your false gangster story that you didn’t connect with her. You could have taken her in and experienced a connection with her, but instead you were wrapped up in gangster land.”
    The class laughed at this. Even Sean laughed a little.
    “I wasn’t in
gangster
land,” he said.
    “
Quiet,
Sean,” said Mr. Smithson. “I don’t want to hear it. That is your problem. You always play the
story,
instead of engaging with the other person. Acting is
not
an isolated exercise! It is about connecting with the other person. If you are playing your story, or off trying to smell a lemon in your imagination, or doing anything that is going to take you away from what is going on with the person in front of you, then it’s
false
. What you’re doing is
false
. Do you understand?”
    The woman next to me whispered, “Yes,
yes
.”
    “Yes,” said Sean to Mr. Smithson.
    “You do? What do you understand?”
    “That I need to connect to the other person more,” said Sean.
    “That’s right. Okay you two, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.”
    “Yes Mr. Smithson,” they said and got up and sat with the other students in the audience.
    Mr. Smithson called two names from a list and two people went backstage and two more people that had been backstage came out onstage and started improvising and arguing like Sean and Tiffany. Mr. Smithson was stretching and stretching his rubber band.
    The class went on for three hours. At the end, Smithson told the students to rehearse and dismissed them; then he turned to the auditors in the back row and said he would meet with them. Mr. Smithson moved to the circular table onstage and all the auditors lined up. I waslast in line, behind the lady in her forties. Mr. Smithson sat with each auditor and quietly asked questions. When he got to the lady in her forties, I could hear what they were saying.
    “Have you acted before?” said Mr. Smithson.
    “Well, I was part of an improv group in college, we did comedy skits and things like that,” said the lady. She was holding her purse in her lap and kept readjusting the position of her hands.
    “And what do you do now?” Mr. Smithson was stretching the rubber band.
    “I’m a paralegal, but I hate it.”
    “Mm-hm, and why do you want to be an actor?”
    “Well, I just love it. I find it incredibly liberating and I want to express my feelings.” Her hands moved and then moved back. She was gripping the purse hard. “I feel so constrained by the structures in my life and I want to be able to be free, to be uninhibited.”
    “Good, I see. How old are you?”
    She paused, and then she said, “I’m forty-six, but I have tons of energy. I know that I am older than most of the students here, but I will work as hard as anyone. I
need
this. My husband says I am a fool for wanting to do this, but I don’t care. I can’t keep doing what I am doing; I am going to kill myself. I am cooped up in an office all day filling out paperwork for megacorporations. I would rather die than continue doing what I’m doing.”
    She was getting emotional like she was in one of the improvisations from the class.
    “Okay,” said Mr. Smithson. “You can start next month, okay?”
    “Oh, thank you, thank you,” she said and shook his hand. She walked out with a huge ugly smile on her face.
    Then I was up. I was the last person in there. It was just me and Mr. Smithson sitting across the table on the stage.
    “How can I help you?” he asked.
    “I want to be in your school,” I said.
    “Why?”
    “I want to act.”
    “Why?”
    Suddenly I didn’t know what to say. Then I said, “Because I hate myself and my life and I want to be someone else.”
    Mr. Smithson’s face was blank. I looked down at the tabletop. From the corner of my eye, I could see him working the rubber band.
    “You’re a little young,” he said. “We usually like people with some life experience. You need to have something