Failing Better:
On the Joys of Stage Fright and the Success of Failure

any years ago, a young man in one of my acting classes was working on the Macbeth monologue which begins: “Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” Midway through the speech, he suddenly quit.

“I can’t do this,” he said. “I feel like a fraud up here, trying to do Shakespeare, and everyone is looking at me like, ‘Who does he think he is, playing Macbeth?’”

“What are you afraid of?” I asked.

“I’m afraid of making a fool of myself.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Good?!”

“Well, you know, Macbeth is afraid too.”

“Yeah, but Macbeth is hallucinating a bloody dagger.”

“True,” I said, “But the only thing we out here in the audience can see is that this man on stage is afraid. We don’t know what his fear is. And if you say the line that Shakespeare has given you, we’ll believe it’s the dagger. That’s what audiences do. That’s their job. Your job is just to allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling — including your fear of making a fool of yourself — and to say the lines. But if you think, ‘I shouldn’t have stage fright,’ you will be blocking a great source of energy for the scene.”

The next time through the speech his Macbeth was trembling, but he made it through.

Of course, things are not always so straightforward. In the Macbeth monologue, an actor’s fear will serve the scene directly, but in many other acting moments, the energy of an actor’s stage fright must be reprocessed before it can be funneled in a useful direction — reprocessed, not suppressed, denied, avoided or overcome.

The fact is that most actors frequently experience some level of performance anxiety, but, even when that fear is quite strong, it is never the only emotion they’re having. At every moment, they’re also feeling things like: excitement about being onstage; anger at their scene partner for blowing a line (or maybe desire towards him or her); not to mention many of, if not all, the things their character may be feeling. Countless actors believe, however, that of the many thoughts and emotions continually coursing through them, fear is the one thing they must hide. The result is that they use a great deal of energy trying not to feel what they are feeling, and so this energy is not available for the acting work. But if, instead of trying to hide this fear, actors allow themselves to feel it and permit that energy to inhabit their bodies, they find that is workable, that they can use it to their benefit.

To introduce acting students to the idea that their fear is not a thing they must deny, I teach a version of the first exercise in Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theater, an exercise I call “Just Stand.” The first time through the exercise, I ask people to “Just stand in front of the audience and not try to do anything.” As they attempt this emptiest of exercises, most actors experience some type of performance anxiety, of nervousness, embarrassment or stage fright, and they try to suppress what they are feeling. Instead of not trying to do anything, they try to do nothing — which is not at all the same thing. After the first go-round, the actors discuss their experiences. Then, the second time through, I encourage them to allow the energy of their embarrassed smiles, their fear, to flow through their whole bodies. When they do, they discover that what seemed to be a mere smile can contain many varieties of energy, from terror to desire to aggression, and that once these emotions are acknowledged they become workable energies that can be played with. Behind their uncomfortable smiles, for instance, they discover wells of anger, of sadness and of sexuality.

In her 2016 book Standing in Space, Mary Overlie writes:

Human instinct advises us to hide information, to avoid being fully witnessed by “the others,” as a survival device in daily life. Unless a performer can establish trust in the audience and begin to dismantle their cloaking actions of “not being there,” they will continue to unconsciously hide onstage.1

The key to this dismantling lies in the realization that the energy of stage fright is fungible — like dollars which can be converted into euros or yuan — if:

• we acknowledge the kind of energy we’ve got — fear; and
• we understand how to process this energy.

The first step — acknowledging that what we have is fear — is the most important. For once we allow ourselves to experience the fear and permit it to course through our bodies, we find that what we’ve been calling “fear” is simply energy which can be funneled into whatever emotion we and our character are having. It’s only when we try to deny we’re afraid that we become stuck. It’s like the old saw about the elephant in the room: The harder we try to ignore it, the more often the elephant appears.

n my acting classes I see this fear — and its avoidance — arise in many forms. During an open warm-up, for instance, wherever I sit there is usually extra empty space on my side of the room because nobody wants to work near the teacher’s critical eyes. To help actors become aware of what is happening, I often move from one side of the room to the other as they work. Once students become conscious of what is going on, their fear-of-the-teacher becomes just one more energy source they can put into play.

This same problem shows itself in another form during scene-work. When a young actor encounters a “private moment” for her character, for instance, she may turn upstage, or face the wings, or stare at the floor, looking anywhere but straight out towards the audience. On one level this makes sense: Why would one explore a “private moment” where one feels the least privacy? But if, at such a moment, the actor instead turns out, perhaps imagining a window or a mirror between her and the audience, suddenly the energy of her stage fright will pour in through the window, mingling with the energy she is receiving from her acting imagery and increasing its potency.

e must note, however, that what an actor takes for embarrassment and fear of criticism or failure may actually be something else. And this brings us to the larger issue here: the issue of judgment. For stage fright and embarrassment are just a few varieties of the many internal self-judgments that often undermine an actor’s work: judgments whose energy seems to sit outside the work itself, criticizing it and the actor.

A few years ago, two women in my class were showing a character-laden scene that you probably know: Scene two of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, in which Amanda Wingfield accuses her daughter, Laura, of having lied about attending her typing classes. Watching these two young women perform this scene,I thought that both of them had done quite well, but when I asked them how the scene had gone, the actress who had played Laura began, “Oh, I don’t know. I felt like I couldn’t do anything right. I kept forgetting the choices I’d made in rehearsal. I just felt so inept and powerless.”

“That’s good,” I said (as I had, years before, to the young Macbeth).

“Good?!” she said, “It wasn’t anything like ‘good.’ “What do you mean, ‘good’?”

“Mmm,” I said, “Could you repeat what you just said about how you felt?”

“You mean ‘inept…?”

“Yes, just repeat what you told us, and then go right into Laura’s line: ‘It was the lesser of two evils, Mother.’”

As soon as she did so, the situation was clear — and her acting, and Laura’s “powerlessness,” became very powerful.

“So,” I said, “I’m afraid that that feeling of ineptitude you described is exactly what Tennessee Williams wants you to feel when you’re playing Laura. Sorry ‘bout that.”

Again, as in the Macbeth scene, the actor had mistakenly concluded that the thoughts and feelings she was experiencing were a “problem” she was having with her work, rather than something she could use in the work.

(In this case, the actress was having an experience many young actors encounter when they first allow themselves to fully inhabit a character. As they begin to think like the character, they assume that the emotions and difficulties that the character is experiencing are their own acting problems. So nowadays, when I teach character work, I make sure to suggest to students that, just as they will want to do a “warm-up” before going on stage, they may also need to “warm-down” after they are done.)

he Glass Menagerie incident is not just a story about the dangers inherent in character work; it is also a story about the ways in which we often allow fears of our own inadequacies to cloud our vision of what is really going on. Although failure is embarrassing, sometimes other judgments can be even more discomfiting. For example, a woman in one of my acting classes had been a stand-up comic for many years; a seasoned performer, she seemed to thoroughly enjoy being on stage. But one day, while working on Portia’s speech to Brutus in Julius Caesar, the stronger Portia’s emotion grew, the more quietly the actress spoke; towards the end, she was almost whispering. When I asked her afterward what she thought had been going on, she explained, “I’m just afraid… of being really bad.” What was inhibiting her, she said, was embarrassment and fear.

In order to make the scene Shakespeare had written into a monologue, the actress had cut Brutus’ line “Kneel not, gentle Portia.” And, along with that line, she had excised the kneel as well. The next time she brought in the monologue, I suggested that, at the moment in the text when Brutus was supposed to speak, she allow herself to fall to her knees and reach out towards the imaginary Brutus. After a short protest that falling to her knees would be “kind of melodramatic,” she allowed herself to give it a try.

When she did, her voice became much stronger, the whisper vanished, and tears filled her eyes. At the end of her speech, the other students applauded. Her transformation became a very clear lesson in how the Grotowski physical work can activate emotion (and in how Shakespeare wrote vital stage-directions into the text). But that was not all.

After the class, the actress came up to me in the hallway, smiling a little sheepishly. “I want to tell you something,” she said. “You remember when I told you I was afraid of being really bad in that monologue. Well, I lied. I realized when I did it again today that what I’d been most afraid of, but didn’t dare say out loud or to myself, was that I was afraid of being good, really good.” What she had thought was a fear of failure had actually been a fear of success. For she, like many of us, had learned that it was more bearable — or at least felt safer — to suffer disappointment and criticism than to experience satisfaction.

One of the consequences of this tendency is that if, at the end of a scene presentation, I ask an acting student, “How did that go,” often enough the first thing she will mention is something that went wrong with the scene: the lines she forgot, how much better the scene went in rehearsal, or some other negative observation. Even when the actor is feeling pretty good about her scene, she may begin with a negative comment as a sort of disclaimer before she permits herself to talk about what went well. Noting this habit, I’ve taken to asking actors to name three moments they liked before they describe the things that went wrong. (And if they object to this suggestion, I say, “Don’t worry, you won’t forget the negative things, but if you don’t name the positive things first, they can slip away, the way dreams do in the morning if you don’t immediately write them down.”)

fter years of observing actors engage in the subtle self-abuse of negative thinking, I began to wonder: How did we learn to be so self-critical? After all, we weren’t born that way.

No, our appetite for negative criticism is a turn of mind that we’ve been taught for years by our parents and teachers, and by television and advertising: Our bodies are too fat, our minds are too lazy, our hair is too straight, our hair is too curly…. And our acting? Well, most of us suspect that, if we’re not on Broadway or TV or walking down the red carpet… then something must be wrong… with us. Moreover, for many students, it is not sufficient that they engage in this internal self-denigration; they have also come to expect — even to crave — corroborating negative criticism from their teachers. Even while most students want to please their teachers, many of them also expect to be humiliated by them. As pianist and music professor David Burge put it: “Students hate it, but always assume they deserve it, and keep going back week after week for more.” 2

For many of us in America, this craving for negative feedback has become so second nature that we don’t notice how addictive it is. Studies show, for instance, that after reading a women’s magazine, most women feel more depressed than they were before reading the magazine — and yet they go on buying those magazines every day.

hen I studied with Jerzy Grotowski in 1967, as part of the physical training he had the actor Ryszard Cieślak demonstrate headstands for us: tripod headstands, elbow headstands, straight-arm headstands, ear-stands. Cieślak was quite amazing; he could slip from one kind of headstand into another, seamlessly and seemingly effortlessly as if his body were molten steel. (See for yourself.) We young American acting and directing students were awestruck.

After Cieślak would demonstrate a new headstand, Grotowski would turn to us and say, “Faites le même!” (“Do the same!”). But when we tried, instead of balancing effortlessly upside down, most of us wobbled left and right and front and back, and often we tipped over and fell down. This made us feel so inept and frustrated that one day an actor in the group demanded that M. Grotowski explain. “Why,” he asked, “are we trying to do these impossible things?” 

“The real value of the exercises,” Grotowski answered, “lies in your not being able to do them.” This sounded very deep… but what did it mean? To us, Americans who had been taught from an early age that the whole purpose of attempting something difficult was to get it “right,” the idea that we should waste our time trying to do something we could not do sounded absurd and perverse.

It was only after some years of teaching his exercises that I understood that when Grotowski said things like that, he was not simply trying to sound mysterious (though I suspect he enjoyed that, too). He was suggesting that what happens to you while you try to do something impossible is actually very interesting. It is, in fact, more interesting — and more useful — than getting it “right.” So these difficult headstands, far from being a set-up for self-criticism, were an invitation to explore. If, as we attempted a headstand, we tried to avoid the wobbling, we might end up getting the headstand “perfect”… but it would be both perfect and boring. Exciting theater requires something quite different: It requires engaging — rather than denying — what is really going on. For Grotowski, these headstands and the other exercises he called “les exercices corporels” were not just explorations of balance and full-body connectedness; they were also paradigms for how we approach any acting task, examples of whether we undertake our risk-taking as an adventure… or as a test.

At the circus, it can be wonderful to see a tightrope walker cross a high wire without a wobble — but if he gets to the middle of the wire and wobbles for a moment fifty feet above the floor, we hold our breaths. And when he recovers and finishes his walk, we cheer! Perfection is boring. What is thrilling is to see a performer working right at the edge of what is possible for him — working towards perfection.

There is a story about the composer Igor Stravinsky, who had written a new orchestral piece that contained a very difficult violin passage. After the ensemble had been in rehearsal for several days, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky to say he was sorry. He had tried his best, but the passage was just too difficult; no violinist could play it. Stravinsky responded, “I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it.”

We should note that if the high-wire circus performer were to fall, we would no longer be cheering. In order to have an exciting adventure, we also need to have a safety net. But our safety net must not be a device designed to help us avoid falling; rather, it is an attitude, a way of safely experiencing the fall. Thus, when we would wobble in our headstands, Grotowski would say to us: “When you fall, [you must] think of the ground as someone or something that loves you and will not reject you.”

The “safety net” was our understanding that every “mistake” could be experienced as a part of the adventure, that the energy of wobbling and falling — like that of fear or embarrassment — was actually useful energy. When we wobble in a headstand, within that wobble there is a lot going on: Our bodies sense the imbalance, then there is a physical correction, accompanied perhaps by fear, and then maybe there’s a bit of anger and the judgment that we are a terrible head-stander. And, if we over-correct the wobble, we may have the terrible awareness that things are getting out of hand, and then the sad realization that we’re about to fall… etc. And all of this goes on in a couple of seconds. Grotowski’s view was that any of these trains of thought are trains we could ride — but only if we don’t try to pretend they’re not happening, or call them “mistakes” or “failures” — which, alas, is what we are prone exactly to do, and from an early age.

In a New York Times article entitled, “The Many Errors in Thinking About Mistakes,” Alina Tugend reports that:

peaking about the rehearsal process, Uta Hagen wrote that she preferred the German word for rehearsal: “… die Probe, because it implies everything a rehearsal should be about: PROBING, TESTING, TRYING, AND EXPLORING — A DISCOVERY!” 4 I think Jerzy Grotowski would have asked Ms. Hagen: “Why should the ‘probing’ end when the performance begins? Why must the discovery, the adventure end when the performance begins?” To us, he said: “Having a question and not an answer to express is why many actors are better in rehearsal than in performance. They search in rehearsal, find answers, and then perform their answers. This is not creative.”

What makes this so difficult is that when we are “questioning,” there is a real chance that we may “fail” to find an answer. And as we Americans have been taught from a young age, on test after test, in game after game, and in performance after performance, that we must do our best not to make mistakes and not to fail, we do our utmost to avoid it. But the cost of avoiding mistakes is high.

Perhaps you’ve heard that those yellow paper “sticky notes” were invented by a scientist who was trying to invent a better, stronger glue. He failed. The glue he invented didn’t hold well at all; it peeled off. And Thomas Alva Edison is reputed to have said this when asked how it felt to have failed 700 times in his attempt to invent a light bulb: “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”

Clearly, not demanding perfection of oneself is not the same thing as giving up; quite the opposite. What we’re talking about here is our attitude toward the “mistakes” we encounter along the way. Do we experience them as “adventures” within which lie possibilities… or are they merely a frustrating series of “failures?”

ome years ago I was working on a song with a voice teacher. At one point in the song, as the tune moved up toward the top of my range, my voice kept getting weak, and breaking. At first I kept trying to reach for the note, but then the teacher coached me to ease up on trying to get the note “right.” When I did, I began to feel what was actually going on. A great sadness arose within me at that point in the song, an emotion that had been trying to make itself known, but which, unconsciously, I had been trying to suppress. As long as I was trying to get the note “right,” I succeeded only in increasing my internal judgment: “Oh, I’m so bad at this. I’ll never be able to sing.” When, instead, I allowed my voice to “crack,” the sadness of the lyric and the emotional power of the song became clear.

What I’m suggesting is that often the real “problem” in our work lies in our thinking that what we’ve got is a problem, rather than looking at it as an interesting difficulty to be explored. So I wonder: What would happen if, instead of calling all our acting difficulties “problems,” we were able to think of them as “interesting bumps in the road,” or, better, as “surprising sources of energy?” Perhaps it’s the same lesson one learns in clowning: The best clowns are always built out of our own stupidity, our own belligerence, and our own fears.

(And if we wonder how it is possible to practice failing, Grotowski’s answer would be: Try something impossible — a difficult headstand for instance — and then, when we start to wobble, investigate: What is there in this wobble for me to enjoy? And when we’ve figured out how to enjoy failing in our headstands, maybe we can figure out how to appreciate failing at other moments… in acting and in life.)

he next question that arises is: Can I search for such appreciation of failure not just as a performer, but as a teacher too? After all, I teach my students to take risks in their acting, and that when they “fail” at something they should treat themselves with loving kindness and try again. But can I apply this lesson to myself as a teacher? Not easy, for when I make a teaching mistake, I can feel so ashamed that — like a bad actor — I simply act as though everything is fine, and hurry on to the next lesson. And though I may be “successful” in papering over my teaching faux pas in the class, internally I may be punishing myself for having “failed.”

There are times, however, when I’m able to see beyond my panic. It used to be that when a student would say to me, “I hate this exercise,” my first thought would be: “Oh, dear, I’ve got to fix this. I need to find some way to make this student enjoy the work — and to like me.” After years of attempting to “fix” such uncomfortable moments, I began to notice if, instead of assuming that I or the exercise had “failed,” I let myself sense what was actually going on, often I would perceive that the student was angry. “I hate this exercise” was actually a sign that the exercise was working, that his anger was actually exciting, and useful, and it was only apparently aimed at me. So it was no longer a matter of my having to fix something, but rather an opportunity to help the student work with this emotion. His “problem” with the exercise and my “problem” with my teaching were both signs that, together, we had arrived at a “teachable moment.”

More difficult are those times when, not knowing what to say to a student, I find myself thinking, “I should know what’s going on here. If I were a good teacher, I would know.” At such moments, if I stopped to think about it, I might realize that the most interesting questions are: What is wrong with being lost? Would it be possible for me to acknowledge this feeling? And might I, even in this moment of embarrassment, see this too as a “teachable moment” — for myself?

Hardest of all are those times when I realize I’ve said something that has hurt a student or headed his work in the wrong direction. It has taken me a long time to learn that, at such moments, it is possible to simply apologize, and let the student — and the class — see that at least I know I’ve made a mistake.

Composer Arnold Schoenberg put it like this:

The teacher must have the courage to be wrong. His task is not to prove infallible, knowing everything and never going wrong, but rather inexhaustible, ever seeking and perhaps sometimes finding. Why want to be a demigod? Why not, rather, be a complete man? 5

So I propose that we ask ourselves: Can we, as actors and as teachers, look upon our “failures” as Grotowski looked upon our wobbly headstands? As interesting encounters with the ground that “loves us and will not reject us”?

It’s not easy. But I know that, somewhere deep in our body memories, we all know that falling is not really a bad thing. Falling, after all, is the word we use when we talk about love. When we meet someone who makes our hearts wobble we call it “falling in love” because it is something we cannot control. It is a moment of being lost, when something is leading us into the unknown… something wonderful.