First of all, i'd like to say that I deserve to be shot for my outrageous, harsh and uneducated opinion. Calling all ye classical dramaturgs! Come brandishing wood and flint. Please burn the heretic.

Let's keep things in perspective here. I am a 17 year old actor with enough passion and energy to light up New York City and enough anger to destroy the place.

Hello, my name is Marci, and I just got denied by the Juilliard School. I'd bet my copy of The Oxford Complete works of Shakespeare that several hunderedother actors are singing the same tune right now. Maybe it isn't all bad. Maybe we really won't be flipping burgers for the rest of our lives. Michael Kahn didn't send any of us home with scarlet letters nailed to our chests proclaiming our failure. But you can bet the population of waiters and waitresses in the area are going to be a little short with their customers the next few days.

But waiting to audition in a cold, underground cement room with a leaky roof and an alarm with an attitude problem got me thinking. I'm not sure if it was, in fact, the fire alarm going off every minute or so, or the eccentric warm up routines going on around me, but something set off my brain. This, you may imagine, is a very dangerous prospect.

What I saw around me in that little room, was a very gifted group of actors. And maybe it was the Tony Kusher I was reading that made me question each of them. See, for about as year now, I've been listening to those oh-so-helpful theatre speeches that everyone has for every budding young actor who runs around singing songs from Fame! "Get a career to fall back on. Study lots of subjects..." etc. I have come to believe that those voices of reason have a point somewhere inside them.

Conservatory training shouldn't be available to anyone who hasn't already studied somewhere else. The problem with conservatory training for anyone who hasn't "experieced life" in some way, shape or form is missing an essential ingredient to good acting: experiences to relate to.

For months now, I have been complaining to everyone I know about those damn people who go to those elite drama academy high schools. Can you imagine applying for a school at 13 or 14? i didn't know these academies existed at that age. But all of the students I've met from any of them have been prima donna, Barbara Streisand "artists."

Don't get me wrong, I am an artist myself. But there is more to me than that. As so beautifully stated in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood "there is more to me than you shall ever know." These Shakespeare quoting students don't know anything of the stuff these plays are made out of. They come out of school with wonderful theatre training and a Good Will Hunting view of life. Carrying on a conversation with these people is like reading a book on the Stanislavsky technique. They can quote, beautifully, passages that dispell the mysteries of acting, of the craft that many of us share, but they don't know anything of the emotions or experiences that they are imitating.

To top it all off, if I'm to believe anything I've heard lately, Juilliard grads can act beautifully, but can't boil water. Maybe that's why hundreds of 18 year old high school graduates to be got the door in the face this month. It was a hard lesson to learn. The great, and necessarily formidable Michael Kahn is telling us to live!

That is a bitter pill to swalow. As the bumper sticker says, "if you aren't mad, you aren't paying attention." So everyone out there, get mad! Get angry and use that rage. Use the rage in your work and in your life.

Or we could get a support group going... A group for actors who have been turned dowm from Juilliard. Not a bad idea.. of course, I could be wrong...

Back to the playground