Dialogue with Educators

In this Q&A, Retta Blaney, author of Working on the Inside: The Spiritual Life Through the Eyes of Actors, talks about her experiences as a teacher, journalist and theatre lover. Read on for suggestions on how to use her book in your Psychology, Social Studies, and Journalism classes!

How did you first get interested in theatre and Broadway?

When I was 5 I went to see my best friend, Gina, in a Children’s Theatre Association production of Mother Goose in Baltimore. I had been through a great deal of trauma and was a very frightened child. Normally I would have been terrified to be in that audience alone, surrounded by children I didn’t know, but as soon as the show started I felt safe — and happy. I remember thinking I could be like “normal” children and not afraid all the time. I was lifted out of myself and transported into the show. Theatre was my great love from them on.

When did you decide to become a journalist?

In college. Essay writing always came easy to me so I volunteered to write an article for the school paper and loved it — the reporting, the writing, seeing my name in print. I discovered my second great love. I took a couple of journalism courses and had several newspaper internships and was completely hooked
Now as a theatre writer I get to combine my two great loves!

What inspired you to write Working on the Inside?

I had been interviewing stage actors for years and was impressed by their resiliency. Few people are out of work more than actors. They are constantly holding themselves out for approval and meeting with more rejection than most of us will ever experience. I wanted to find out what kept them going.

What research did you complete while writing this book?

I read extensively before my interviews. The A-list actors like Vanessa Williams, Liam Neeson, Phylicia Rashad, Edward Herrmann and Kristin Chenoweth had considerable clip files at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which offer most insight than information on the internet.

How can the book be used in an English class lesson about journalism for high school students?

The actors were quite open with me and shared parts of their lives they had not with other journalists. Edward Herrmann stopped our interview at one point and said, “You’re a good interviewer. You listen and you make eye contact.”

Being well prepared is crucial to conducting a good interview. Teachers can get students to imagine what questions the interviewer might have asked and how she must have followed up. Then they could assign each student the name of someone currently in the news and ask them to do their research and come back with a list of 10 questions they would ask that person if they were interviewing them.

The questions should not be ones that can easily be answered by Googling the person, such as how did you get your start? Teach the students how to go deeper. Famous people are interviewed frequently, so it’s important to work on finding a new angle and fresh questions. Show students how they can take a quote the famous person has given in the past and how they can ask new questions from it, such as: How do you feel about that now? What did you learn from that?

The point is to try to get to the inner life. Ask specific questions. Be respectful. Talk little and listen much.

When the students return to class with their 10 questions, have them take turns reading them out loud and let the other students evaluate them. If a question is good, why is it good? If not, why not and how could it be better?

How can the book be used as a tool or provide examples in a Psychology lesson? Social Studies?

Actors may not have degrees in psychology or sociology, but they probably know more about human nature than any lay person and the book illustrates that well. As Liam Neeson told me, “Actors can give a focus. They can help show another facet of life.”

They do this by taking people out of their routines, he said.

“They’re storytellers. Maybe the faith is in the repetition of these stories. They’re relived from one generation to another.

“You’re seeing a piece of heightened reality condensed into two or three hours. You get to see some person’s dilemma and ask ‘What would I do?’ or you recognize the situation they’re in. You’re comfortable with the other audience members seeing it with you. It’s a community; you’re not in isolation.”

Actors portray a wide diversity of characters, so they are in touch with a range of emotions most people will never know — how it feels to be the parent of a murdered child, or to be a murdered, or any number of experiences. As one actress said, “An actor’s training involves a lot of introspection . . . You have to find everything within yourself for an entire cast of characters of human emotions.”

As a teacher, what advice do you have for other teachers incorporating the arts into their classroom?

I taught journalism for many years on the graduate and undergraduate level, and one summer to make extra money I signed up to teach the dreaded research paper course, the second in the two-part English comp .requirement. Students in the class had put it off as long as they could and did NOT want to be there. I wasn’t thrilled about it either, but took advice from a senior professor — teach it around something you love. Since theatre is a broad subject, I built my course around my favorite contemporary playwright, Tina Howe.

The students had never heard of Howe and some had never even read or seen a play. Howe is a WASP who writes about that world; the students were mostly immigrants and minorities. Not only were plays foreign to them, so was the subject matter of the ones they would be reading all summer.

It turned out, though, to be a perfect fit. A common theme in Howe’s plays is failure to communicate, with characters talking at cross purposes and growing increasingly frustrated at not being listened to. My students could understand that. They “got it” right away.

I never had any trouble getting them to volunteer to read out loud in class, taking the parts of characters whose lives on the surface were so different from theirs. I loved listening to them, the Russian, Dominican, Polish and other assorted accents melding together into a wonderful — transformational — experience of theatre.

It was a long, hot summer in an unair conditioned classroom on the top floor under the roof — extra hot — and they actually did have to write a research paper, and I had to teach foot notes and all of that dry stuff, but they were so involved in the subject matter they didn’t mind. They made intelligent comments and comparisons of Howe’s plays. I told them they were now Tina Howe scholars, that not many people knew as much about her as they did. They seemed really proud about being scholars of something.

On the last day of class they told me how much they loved the course and how much they had been dreading it. I told them I felt the same way on both counts. It turned out to be a good summer, and the most enjoyable teaching experience I ever had. All because I brought the arts into the classroom.

What advice do you have for students aspiring to become journalists?

I don’t know about broadcast journalism, but for getting into print, clips are important, in hardcopy if possible because that still matters. I wrote for free for community papers to get clips, and tried to get as much variety as possible — news coverage, features, profiles and reviews. Propose story ideas to editors and be willing to work on spec, which means they will look at the piece but not promise to publish it. You, of course, will do it so well they will want to use it.

Follow bylines in newspapers and magazines and if a reporter is covering an area you are interested in, ask that person to have coffee with you and come prepare with some good questions to ask her or him for advice on how to break into the field. The motto in networking is, “You never know when you will meet the person who can change your life.” Someone who is a reporter today could be a hiring editor tomorrow. Plus, networking can be fun.

Always send a thank you note and then stay in touch, even after you get a job. Network should be an ongoing operation.

Retta Blaney is a theatre writer and producer in New York and the editor ofJournalism Stories from the Real World, an anthology for journalism students with an introduction by Walter Cronkite. She has taught at New York University, Brooklyn College and Marymount Manhattan College.