TFLL: Hello. Welcome to Theatre for Lifelong Learning. Today we are talking to Robin Abrahams. Abrahams is an advice columnist for the Boston Globe, a research associate in the Organizational Behavior unit of the Harvard Business School, and a theatre artist. She received her PhD in psychology from Boston University.
TFLL: Tell us how you got into theatre.
Robin Abrahams: I got into theatre really randomly in high school. When I was a rising sophomore, prior to high school starting there was a picnic in the park with all of the theatre kids from the different schools. I went for some reason and they were actually nice to me which kids usually weren’t. That made a huge impression. I was like, “Wow! Theatre people aren’t dicks to me!” because I was a very bullied pre-teen. I started doing it and immediately I discovered that it was my thing. It’s been a lifelong pursuit of mine.
TFLL: How is theatre a lifelong practice for you?
Robin Abrahams: The things that I’m most interested in are how people tell stories and what motivates people. Those are fundamental concerns to theatre. They are fundamental concerns also to psychology, to religion, [and] to philosophy and I’ve studied those things as well. I took a ten-year hiatus [from theatre], and that was when I moved out here to go to grad school. My dissertation was on cognitive models of literary genre. After I graduated, many years later, I wound up having the time and energy to start getting involved in theatre again.
I had been on the board of Underground Railway Theater. I was a theatre patron. Because I had the Miss Conduct column, I would sometimes get asked to do after show talkbacks or preview things. I blogged about theatre, so I was this engaged patron.
I was [also] a StageSource subscriber, and sometimes they’d have “special” audition notices when a theatre couldn’t find someone for a particular part. Those were never for women. It’s always like, “Are you a male who can breathe? We need you to play Mercutio.” And then if it’s for women, it’s something like, “Are you an Inuit dwarf fluent in sign language? This is who we need for this particular role.”
To my shock, one day, Belmont Dramatic Club, they were doing one of those murder mystery plays, I think it was called Agatha Christie Made Me Do It, there was a role for a stripper, an off-duty stripper. Nobody would go out for it, so they had a special audition notice. I saw it [and] it was like, “Oh my God.” I showed up, dressed all in black and they throw the script at me [say], “Come back tomorrow at seven. We’re starting on Act Two.” That was how I got started and I’ve been doing a fair amount of acting ever since.
TFLL: That’s fantastic. It reminds me of some of those stories like when you need a chorus for a show and you go into the parking lot. You see a guy who looks relatively coordinated and say, “Hey, Do you want to be in the chorus of a musical?”
Robin Abrahams: This was literally no singing, no dancing, and all woman. Like anywhere between twenty and fifty. They were making such a big deal. “She doesn’t take her clothes off. It’s a G-rated show. It’s a family theatre. We just say she’s a stripper, but she’s off today.”
TFLL: There is no striptease.
Robin Abrahams: Not in Agatha Christie Made Me Do It. I mean, I’m no prude, but I wouldn’t want to see that.
TFLL: What is your favorite type of theatre to be involved in?
Robin Abrahams: I work with Theatre@First, which is a community theatre in Davis [Square] and that is really fantastic. I love having a community theatre base because that’s where you meet people who aren’t professional actors. They have all kinds of fascinating other jobs, like engineer, property manager, [or] lawyer, that you get to learn about. The cast parties are a lot more fun [be]cause it’s not professional.
I like thought-provoking plays that have something to dig into and are comedy dramas. I very strongly like breakout smaller parts, the person only has two scenes. That’s the role that everyone’s like, “Oh my God. That’s so and so. They were so funny.” Those are the really fun parts to me. I would love to play the lead at some point, just to have the experience, but part of the reason I do this is social. If you’re the lead, you’re on stage, running your lines, or working with the other leads to nail down all the nuances of what you’re doing. You can have a much more fun time, socially, if you have a smaller part.
TFLL: You get to do something showy and steal a couple of scenes.
Robin: I really want to play Polonius at some point as a fairly recent widow, almost like an Alicia Florrick in the Good Wife. A political wife who’s suddenly taking over her husband’s job, trying to get her two kids launched, always trying out lines for the TED talk she wants to give some day, and trying to carve out a moment for self-care.
TFLL: What’s a project you’re working on currently and how are you involved in theatre now?
Robin: I’ve started a Facebook group. We call it Section 31 and it’s a super-secret group for reading Star Trek scripts. We usually do them in a gender swapped or gender neutral way. There’s another theatre that does the original series. We do Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, nothing against the other [shows in the series.]
We’re doing scripts about once every couple of weeks. It’s mostly local people, but we’ve invited a couple of friends from out of town. When my best friend from high school comes out here to visit, she’s going to know some people. She’ll have met some of my friends. She played Lieutenant Commander Georgia La Forge. And they’ve played Dataor Q or Picard or whatever.
I’ve been doing a lot of multimedia collage work that brings out a lot of what theatre gave to me: that kind of bricolage, world creation, putting things together, the engineering of it. [I’m] finally working on a couple of new audition monologues. Yikes! You would think that I would have picked up that sooner! [I’m] also working on a workshop for actors in which I teach about what defense mechanisms are and how to use those in your acting to create more nuanced characters.
TFLL: Like taking elements of Chekhov but doing it in a less potentially destructive way.
Robin Abrahams: It really is because it can be about you. The text that I use for it is Twelve Angry Men because it’s so bland. [Y]ou tell everybody, “In this scene, decide what’s going to make the character anxious.” It could be anything from, “I’m afraid there’s going to be a Holocaust, a genocide in this country” to “I’m afraid I’m not going to get out of here in time and I’m not going to get laid tonight.” Pick something that’s going to make you anxious and then pick a defense mechanism that you’re going to use to deal with it. Listen to everything everyone is saying in that spirit and it’s like, “Wow.” Even if people haven’t rehearsed before, that’s just electric.
TFLL: How do you think theatre courses and being involved in theatre helps older adults?
Robin Abrahams: It can help them make friends which is absolutely huge. It’s really hard for adults to make friends in this country and theatre is a fantastic way to do so because, One: Everyone can contribute something. There is always something you can do regardless of your skill level. Two: There’s enough time spent standing around, painting sets, or whatever that you actually get a chance to bond with people. That’s why it’s so easy to make friends in high school and college, [be]cause you’re spending a lot of time just hanging out in each other’s presence. As adults, we don’t do that much unless you have a dog and go to the dog park or something. In theatre, you’ve got that down time.
It’s also really great because it brings in a diversity, not as diverse as it should be, but in terms of age [and] backgrounds, you really do get a pretty good level of diversity, particularly age-wise. And not only do you get diversity in terms of age, but it’s also not like people running things are all the old people and the young people are the ones doing all the work. You can have the show with the young person as the lead and it constantly changes up.
Theatre also brings up emotional and social issues and allows people to discuss deeper matters, while still in the context of actually doing an activity side by side and creating something. [If you] pick up basketball, that’s great [be]cause that’s being together, but that’s not actually talking about stuff. A lot of people are [also] not down for (and hey, I’m right there with them), an encounter group, or something that’s focused exclusively on, “We’re going to talk about our issues. We’re going to talk about our Whiteness or our trauma or whatever.” In theatre, that stuff does come up. Yet at the same time, it’s like, “Hey, hand me that cordless drill.”
TFLL: There’s nothing like extended tech rehearsal to bring people together.
Robin Abrahams: Exactly. It takes people back to that kind of college or high school [experience], whether that was their experience or if that’s something they wished they had. It’s a fun, youthful thing.
TFLL: How have you applied the skills you developed in theatre into other parts of your life?
Robin Abrahams: I would say the single biggest thing would be in the Miss Conduct column, particularly because I have such a tight word count on that. It’s about a five-hundred-word column.
I very often use a basic acting technique I was taught in college which we called, “The VOTE Method” which is victory, other, tactics, and expectations. What do you want? Who do you have to work with or who’s in your way? Who or what’s in your way to get it? How are you going to do it? What do you think is going to happen? And what kind of energy are you putting forth on this?
I analyze my questions that way so often. A lot of times people aren’t even clear on the most basic thing. Like, “It bothers you when your mother-in-law says, ‘X’ but would you rather her say, ‘Y’?” What do you want?
Sometimes people haven’t even defined what their victory looks like. Then other times, they’ll get to “Here’s my victory. Here’s what I want. Here are the other people [and] the rest of the situation.” And I’ll try and think through, “Here are some different tactics you can use depending on…I don’t know you. Maybe you don’t have the capacity to say this or that, but here you go.” I found it a useful way, more useful than anything else, for quickly analyzing small interpersonal dynamics.
TFLL: What’s your most memorable theatre moment?
Robin Abrahams: In Agatha Christie, the people in the show were great. It was a very community theatre-y mugging for the audience, that was intentional.
There was this one guy in it who had never acted, who was that guy in the garage, the “Hey you, you’re charismatic. Come be in my show, play the lothario, the skeevy lothario character.” Skeevy Lothario, young guy, he’d never done theatre before in his life, I think soccer was maybe his thing. He would be playing with the ropes and pulleys and stuff, and we’re like, “No!” We basically had to assign people to monitor and guard him at all times. It was like having a Jack Russell puppy in your show.
On opening night or a dress rehearsal when we had a half-full audience for the first time, he came backstage after his first scene and his face was transformed. He was like, “The audience, it’s like they lift you up!” My heart just melted. I was like, “Yes, Skeevy Lothario who’s name I don’t remember, it’s like, magic of fucking theatre, bro.”
TFLL: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received/given about theatre?
Robin Abrahams: I’ve received two really excellent pieces of advice, one about acting which came from Paula Plum. I took a Shakespeare class with her and she said, “You don’t have to find something unique. You are unique.” By virtue of being you, with your voice, your face, your fingerprint, your DNA, you’re going to bring something into the role that no one else ever has, which is you. That took a huge weight off me as an actor.
The best generic advice wasn’t advice per se. My mentor in undergrad directed a production of Hamlet. I was his assistant and he said to me at the outset, “Your job is to give me suggestions that I will say, ‘No’ to. If I take one in ten, that’s going to be an amazing hit rate. What do you do when you carve a statue of David? You get a block of marble and you cut away everything that doesn’t look like David. You’re going to get me really close to Hamlet. Everything you’re going to say is going to have a reason and it’s going to help me do better.”
The idea of framing rejection or failure not as failure, but as part of the learning process, was really valuable to me. The idea that even if the experiment has no results, it’s still valuable, [and] we’ve still carved away at that little bit of marble.
TFLL: What would you tell someone who’s never been involved in theatre before?
Robin Abrahams: One thing that is important with introducing anyone to any new art form is letting them know it’s okay, completely normal, and expected that they’re not going to like most of it. I used to think that I didn’t like art because I hadn’t really grown up with it. Then it occurred to me, [I’m] a huge book person, but I don’t like 90% of books. Why would I assume I’m going to go into a museum and be like, “Woo! Woo!” with every single painting? Of course, most of it is going to leave me cold. I would generally say that for anyone getting into any art form. “You may not like it. Try a bunch of different things and see what resonates.”
Photo Credit: Forden Photography, “Robin Abrahams”