Want to Tell a Story? Use Psychology and Acting

Constructing and Performing the Self is an experimental cross-college course that combines psychology and acting to teach the art of storytelling. The final deliverable was a 10-minute one-person narrative play, performed 4 times in front of a total of 240 audience members. This reflection captures the lessons I learned across the creative disciplines of writing, collaborative work, psychology, and acting.

10-minute performance - “Don’t Tell”

Process of Writing and Revising

Before taking Constructing and Performing the Self, I recognized that I had some level of performance and storytelling ability, but had only explored it under very specific, highly-controlled conditions. In high school, I had memorized a three hour(!!!) classical Indian dance and performed it gracefully and fiercely as dictated by ancient standards, and I could plan and present project slides and conferences talks and a TedX lecture on “Taking Control of Your Education” in an articulate and coherent manner… but I never had the opportunity or encouragement to truly experiment with subversive narratives, or play with humor and emotional range to fully engage the audience while also expressing myself. Within all my performance experiences there was this common thread of always presenting upon a decided topic for a specific audience in a way that my advisors strictly enforced, and I wanted to know what a different path would feel like. So, for my first real Arts & Humanities class at Olin, I decided to try the weird Olin + Babson writing, psychology, and acting experience.

Constructing and Performing the Self forced me to confront several of my bad writing habits, especially the ones that I didn’t know existed and only appeared to me because they were so exacerbated by the unexpectedness of my internal turmoil. You see, I used to believe that I could only create good writing when I was in this specific dream-like flow-state that occasionally occurred at 1am after several hours of subconsciously ruminating over an idea. Any time I had to write something good, I would wait for this state, and then stay up writing until I was completely finished with the piece. This behavior is frequently unhealthy, but I did not worry about it because it was never a big problem – one late night for one A+ writing assignment seems like a good deal. So for the big writing assignment for this class, I did just that, submitting the rough draft version 0 at 3am.

The teaching staff liked my draft. They thought it had potential, gave me a few comments, and then assigned a new draft… Here’s the thing, I’ve never written a second draft of anything in my entire life. In high school, when teachers assigned rough drafts and expected the final essay to incorporate the given feedback, I just wrote a brand new essay, and teachers quickly learned to give me no feedback further than “Great work, this is a guaranteed A+, DO NOT REWRITE”. So getting feedback on a writing assignment and submitting a revision was a novel experience for me. Saying I struggled a bit would be an understatement.

My problem was that every other time I sat down to write, I would generate vividly different remembrances and analyses. I know this feature is expected of memory. As we learned from the psychology lecture slides, memories are simply patterns of association in the brain and every time the brain remembers a memory, it changes the memory slightly based on all the other associations rattling around in the brain. And certain moods are associated with certain memories, so when engaging in free-form opinionated writing, any slight thought or experience could flood me with a new trove of memories. And some details seemed so important and integral to the story that I couldn’t let them go, but once I tried changing one detail, another change would have to follow in order to restore balance, and very soon the new piece wouldn’t resemble the old one at all. Thus, version 0 was ten minutes long, and revision 1 ended up being longer than twenty. Then the teaching team told me to revert back to version 0 in revision 2, and that worked, briefly, until I went home for Spring break, told my parents about the play, heard their side of the story – “the right way to tell it unless you are a sociopath, haha” – and made three more revisions to incorporate their view back into the story, rewriting and rewriting until the story seemed less about the story itself than about the fickleness of my moods weighed against the precarious process of revision.

Though arduous, this process was not in vain. I did eventually decide on a final manuscript, and, along the way, I learned many lessons that will hopefully make future writing endeavors go a bit smoother. The first step for producing consistent and good writing is to pick a guiding intent that the author can regularly feel strongly about. Inherently tied to the guiding intent, there should be an explicit, interesting stance or outlook that must necessarily cause conflict – this is what makes the tension worth feeling strongly about and justifies actions that carry the plot. In this case, my intent was to write a compelling tragedy that did justice to the anguish I felt while experiencing the events of the story. A nuanced stance and tension entered the story through a contamination arc that turned the presence of a seemingly “good” or understandably desirable trait into a fatal flaw and led to the consequent tragedy.

The second step is highlighting details that support the guiding intent. Just as when writing an analytical essay, elements should be removed if they don’t directly support or add nuance to the guiding intent. Curiously, the form of narrative storytelling is fundamentally different from analytical writing: the writing does not have to justify anything, the mere presence or absence of details is what sharpens the story and creates meaning. The process of choosing to include details in order to indirectly make a point is also called “show, not tell”. In hindsight all this seems obvious, but it wasn’t at the outset. This experience let me formulate a map that I can now use to effectively write and revise.

Coming back to the original intent of taking this class, I chose to write a play that allowed me to horrify, even implicate the audience that witnessed my piece. I had never been given the opportunity to express myself in a way that was so vulnerable yet tragic and serious, so the process was peculiar, particularly because I also had to find ways to be humorous in order to maintain audience engagement. While, at first glance this dictation seems similar to the restrictions placed upon me in every other performance experience, it is actually very different — I still got to choose the story and meaning, the teaching team just wanted to make sure it would be “good”.

Adapting my writing to combine both seriousness and comedy in a cohesive way was a good challenge and I made a solid attempt at it. Personally, I think the process of attempting to find humor in such a dark phase of my life has also helped me grow. Winning a couple of laughs and a couple of stricken faces in every performance made me feel like I could finally move on from the almost overwhelming sadness and numbness that had formerly plagued my recollections of the events and surrounding memories. Now I could joke about it in a way I could control. My dad, who vehemently disagreed with my version of my feelings, gave me a thumbs up after seeing my performance. I felt like I had finally, authentically, conveyed my full feelings for my dog and my loved ones and the scary topic of death. And being taken seriously without being coddled made me feel valid.

Though there is one sticky recollection I have not yet decided how to feel about but cannot stop pondering: the last moment of my fourth and final performance. Over the course of the previous three performances, I had learned an expectation for the beats of audience laughter and silence. And for the last line I had set myself a goal – shocking the audience by confessing my contamination arc and fall from idealism, extending the tragedy beyond the death of a beloved good dog – and I took the shocked silence and long clapping to mean I had succeeded.

Yet, in my final performance, when I thought I had figured it all out, the audience laughed instead. And that felt terrible, for some reason I can’t put my finger on. All I can say right now is, sharing your life story can be messy.

Choosing to Tell a Story

The life and death of my dog is an integral part of my life story. In class, I learned that people tend to value their teenage and young adult memories more when deciding their journeys of growth and self-reflection, and this is certainly true for me. I got my dog when I was thirteen, and she was the first being whose well-being was wholly my responsibility. My parents definitely recognized this: when we first saw the dog, my dad called her Tagi (anagram of my name, Gati) and I decided to keep it because it would strengthen my claim on her life. And for the six years she spent with me (my entire high school experience and first year of pandemic lifestyle), she was a main feature of both my responsibility and leisure time.

My memories of Tagi’s death were not in the original set of memories I considered writing about, because it felt either too flippant or raw to write it down immediately. Writing a positive or comedic story about my dog felt like it would be a betrayal of myself. Writing about her death felt morbid and predictable, and I worried that the story would be too foreign for audiences who had never lost a dog. Losing my dog hurt more than losing family members, but saying it like that felt insensitive.

I tried hunting for other memories that could be more humorous or interesting than a dead dog, but I did not care about any to the same extent that I cared about conveying the personal level of pain I felt surrounding my dead dog. And then, after reading All the Ways to Say I Love You, I realized that the reason I cared so much was because the extent of the pain I felt was largely unknown to everyone else involved; my family tried very hard to protect me, but they did not realize how much the events of the story affected me. Taking this understanding in hand, I resolved to share my version of the story in a beautiful way, once and for all, to feel like I could do my side of the story justice.

It felt nice to take my most sad and isolating memories and infuse them with a new association – one of working with a caring, compassionate cohort of people in the Olin and Babson communities. I found the courage to share and continually work on my memory of my dog’s death without feeling sad and lost (though it did take me a couple weeks to be comfortable with sharing my rough drafts with the others during our post-class luncheons).

I also really appreciated hearing Skye’s and Hannah’s plays (which were arranged to be right before and right after mine in the show). Our plays had similar themes about (1) coexisting with and loving family-members with all their real world peculiarities, and (2) having to live with the feeling of never being able to do enough. I felt these feelings very strongly in several instances in my life, and especially so when my dog passed away. Hearing others clearly articulate their similar experiences and gratefulness helped me reframe my own experiences in a positive, growth-oriented light.

Conflict

My piece revolves around an internal conflict where I grapple with two morally correct but conflicting objectives. I must choose one, and the partial failure will definitely hang heavily on the way I view myself.

My overarching, character-defining super objective is wanting to “be educated”, and, by extension, become a person that is trusted enough to handle the full truth of a given situation. I established both the root of this need (pain at not being told about deaths of my uncle, grandpa, and friend) and my capability to be knowledgeable, caring, and responsible enough to actually handle the burden (staying with my friend after her dad died) at the opening scene of my play.

However, my slowly growing self-confidence in handling death is suddenly challenged by a conflict: I want to humanely euthanize my dog before she suffers too much, but my family won’t let me do that. Over the course of the play, I find more reasons to support my local objective (i.e. I am a busy person with other responsibilities beyond sitting at my dog’s bedside), but I do not take decisive action until I reach a breaking point.

At the breaking point, I realize that there is a very quick way to fulfill my local objective of killing the dog quickly and actually start taking serious steps towards doing so. In this phase, post breakdown, I play with casual coherence to toe the line of plausibility between killing the dog too early (her shoulder bone definity isn’t broken) and killing the dog too late (her shoulder bone is probably broken). The tragedy is, either way, one must be true, and that knowledge is beyond my grasp. I must find a way to come to terms with this twisted reality, as conveyed by the final vet scene and the sad final line “Don’t tell mom and grandma”.

This play definitely demonstrates a theme of contamination. I start out by growing to become the sort of idealized, responsible person I want to be, only to later end up taking deliberate steps to undermine both the super-objective and objective that I care deeply about. Although I am motivated by care for my loved ones, I end up abusing the trust they have in me, saying “You trust me to be educated, right?”. In the process, I inflict even more pain on them and myself, evidenced by the lines “I know we are not supposed to traumatize grandma”, and “the dog’s shoulder bone is broken… and it’s your fault!”. I even perpetuate the ultimate transgression: becoming a liar, ending with the lines, “the vet said… my dog’s shoulder wasn’t broken” and “Don’t tell mom and grandma”. In this way, I become what had hurt me as a child. The irony being that, once I was driven by a desperate curiosity and knowledge, tackling even tough topics like death by saying “I just wanted to know”, but once I learn enough I realize that in all actuality, I really do not want to know the worst feelings because all they do is torment and shut down idealistic coping mechanisms like hope.

Framing

The realistic and memorable way Neil LaBute’s All the Ways to Say I Love You depicted the corruption of its narrator while still retaining sympathy inspired the writing I used to shape my own protagonist’s character arc. Where LaBute’s narrator tells the story of a sin only she knows about (sleeping with her student while married) for reasons she (mostly) considers justifiable (giving her husband a child to make him happy), my own character commits a sin only I know about (plotting to euthanize my dog against the wishes of my family) for mostly justifiable reasons and then have to deal with the internal dilemma of keeping the secret and finally confesses the story of the secret in a play for an audience of strangers.

The key point of realism in LaBute’s play is the way the narrator tries to tell the story of how she did something she knows to be bad while continually defending her actions and her righteous sense of self. The narrator repeatedly highlights her own positive and respectable traits (“two different citations for my teaching over the years, and one of them was city-wide” and “several service awards under her belt and a respected place in the community”) to mentally justify to herself that she is fundamentally a good person who does not deserve punishment from herself or others. The plot and conclusion of her story is somewhat predictable due to foreshadowing. This is okay because the real tension is caused by the narrator’s willful and precarious suspension of self-judgment. As the audience, we can only care about the transgression in a theoretically moral way, as we don’t personally know any of the people involved. The more interesting piece is understanding how the transgression impacts the narrator. For example, when she hurts people, we can also see or infer the narrator’s pain from the fact that she included that detail and her reactions to the inclusion of the detail. We know that the narrator, at least slightly, cares about her relationships and regrets her relationship-hurting actions because she includes details about feeling disconnected from her daughter and envying the closeness and lack of secrets between her husband and daughter. The first-person narration helps the audience to, if not sympathize, at least understand where the narrator is coming from.

In my play, I also chronicle a contamination arc from a first-person narrative standpoint. I adopted a similar style of character justifications (“dependable worker, learning machine learning… for fun”) to build credibility that, although I am telling you about this horrific time of my life, I am a really successful, contemplative, and kind person. Even as I callously hurt my grandmother (“that is your fault…”) I show that I do feel hurt and regret by including earlier memories about feeling like a jerk when I hurt my grandmother previously. Even though the piece technically follows the chronological progression of suffering in my dog’s final days, it is meaningful for a broader audience of people who don’t have pets because the story revolves around my growth as a person experiencing and sharing a tragedy.

Lastly, Labute uses a full circle to resolve the piece – the narrator starts the piece by being in a particular scenario being unable to answer a philosophical question about lying and ends the piece by re-entering that same scenario and realizing she understands enough to answer the question. This framing device both attests to the strength of the narrator’s inherent qualities (curiosity) and also gives the piece broader meaning in terms of the narrator’s development through super objective (obligation to be a good, learned teacher). My play ends up using a very similar device. I start with introducing the pain caused to me due to not understanding why people around me protect me by withholding information, and end with a more nuanced perspective: I have learned how to hurt others with information and now to protect both myself and others by becoming the person who hides information. Furthermore, my piece has the same sense of irony as LaBute’s play, as both deal with themes of regretful secrecy but confess everything to an audience of strangers.