The Quest, Part 2

Guiding Lights
by Eric Liu

(Page 2 of 2)

The last teacher she audited was Ivana Chubbuck. "Within five minutes, I knew," Eva remembers. As she watched class unfold, she responded to Ivana's directness, critiques that were tough but never abusive. It was also Ivana's searing rationality she responded to. Ivana has a system. She drills her system into her students. And here was a girl, Eva, who literally by chance was becoming a movie star, and who wanted to know — needed to know — that there was a structure to this work that she might know and master, so that what had come so easily and quickly would not just as easily evaporate. She began in the basic classes that Ivana's former students teach, and soon advanced into Ivana's own class. "She can deconstruct me," Eva now says of Ivana, "and peel all the layers back. She can give a reason for everything."

A reason for everything. I've come to know Eva at an interesting moment. It's late 2003 and she is not a household name yet but she's on the brink of — well, either becoming one or not. Her next film, 2 Fast 2 Furious, was essentially a feature-length music video with a sexy multicultural cast, including the rapper Ludacris, and souped-up cars in noisy drag races. But it was a hit. Fame has begun to arrive — the kind of early fame that puts her on the cover of lifestyle magazines, nets her a presenter role at the Golden Globes, and rates her a mention in The New Yorker as someone whose career has prospered while other starlets in her cohort, the "Almost-It Girls" like Jaime Pressley, have begun to plateau. Eva's life at this moment in late 2003 is one of ever more admiring reviews, high-profile supporting roles with the likes of Denzel Washington, a big role in Stuck on You, a broad comedy by the Farrelly brothers, and much more work already booked for the coming year, including a role opposite Will Smith. The neon halo of celebrity has flickered on, at first tentatively but now more brightly, and soon, perhaps, it may seem to everyone that she was always this way: born a star.

4

The Ivana Chubbuck Studio is a crowded windowless room on the second floor of a building on the corner of Melrose and Formosa. Forty or fifty theater-style seats. A futon, a desk, a few chairs, a table, a coatrack, and a scattered assortment of props on the kitchen-sized stage. And that's it. The central air conditioner is so noisy it drowns out the actors' voices, so whoever's sitting closest to the switch turns it off during scene work and back on during critiques, creating a thermal echo wave of stuffiness and chilliness all night long.

Before class, the French doors into the studio are locked, so the students hang out on an unlit veranda that overlooks the side street. They smoke and sit around talking in the soft nighttime Los Angeles air. A few carry on cell phone conversations, but mainly they're hanging out, as if it were a little cocktail party, or a hip vodka commercial. As we stand around, waiting for Ivana's assistant to arrive and open the studio, I'm suddenly cognizant of the fact that I've never been in the midst of so many gorgeous young people before. The men, the women, are truly the L.A. cliché — Send me your prom queens, your handsome boys with scruffy hair and sensitive eyes, send me the lithe lean beauties who once stunned your towns in the Kansas prairie and the Florida wetlands and the Idaho mountains with their floral splendor, and we will make them our waiters, our valets, our personal assistants' assistants: our acting students.

As the doors open the students file in quickly, some finding seats and others scurrying about the stage to move around the furniture and props for the first scene on today's list. These are professionals. None is famous but a few have appeared in commercials and sitcoms, a couple even in films. Many others don't have acting work lined up right now. There is no prelude, no pep talk from Ivana. After everything is set up, the first pair of actors stands onstage, waits a moment for conversation to subside, and then one says, "Ready." They begin. On this night's class, which will run from seven till past eleven, students in twos and threes play six or seven scenes. The scenes are drawn from plays and films of all kinds. A whiteboard on the wall lists them all: something from Speed the Plough, then Beyond Therapy, then The Hours.

Ivana has selected and assigned these scenes with a keen sense of intention. Isaac is a nebbishy, anxious stand-up comic who's used to performing solo; Jack is into "fine" theater, more focused on the meter and timbre of the spoken word than on the inner terrain of character. She'd paired these two last week and given them a scene in which a criminal is trying to get a priest to absolve him but the priest is too self-absorbed to listen. Ivana didn't choose this scene to make them look good. Isaac and Jack overact, struggle to connect, revert to their worst habits, and pretty much fall flat. Ivana sits in the front row, just a few feet away (the stage isn't raised), and remains silent through even the most excruciatingly awkward moments. When they're done, they look deflated, and a little surprised that Ivana let the scene go on so long. She observes, finally, that the two actors seemed to be feeling a great deal of pain. "Actors like to feel the pain," she says. "But that's bullshit. Real people try to overcome the pain." And she proceeds to prod them on what their characters would do to get out of the emotional cul-de-sac that the actors put them in.

This idea recurs in everything she says and does — that achieving an emotional state is not the point of acting; that meaningful acting, like meaningful living, involves a desire to get somewhere. To get something. To win. She conveys it with sarcasm, taunting, profanity. "It's ineffectual just to play the problem; you have to play the solution," she'll say. Or: "I'm getting a pretty half-assed effort to win here." Or: "Why don't you act like you have a dick? Show me you have one. Swing it around." Another evening, she's working with two men, a black guy and a white guy, in a scene from Knockout. They're boxers, the white guy coaching his cocky pupil at the gym. The actors play the scene like it's a buddy movie, a playful, physical interaction. They're pretty good, and their cross-racial camaraderie makes everyone in the room feel good about themselves.

Ivana tears the work apart. She asks the white guy what his character's objective is and he says something about mentoring his buddy. "Stop. Right there. Your goal is not to empower anyone," she sneers, "it's to prove you've still got it, that you're still superior to this guy." It's a brilliant interpretation: the coach's obligation to teach is not his objective; it's his obstacle. Likewise, the protégé's objective is not to be validated. It is to beat the coach. "We have to make this more than just a friendship thing," Ivana says, and she directs them to play it again. This time there's more testosterone and electricity, maybe even too much, but that's okay. "You have to have the possibility, always, that you're going to take it too far," she says. She smiles with satisfaction. They were dancing before. Now they're sparring. As the coach bobs and weaves, telling the pupil with a taunting, competitive smile that "You're getting better," Ivana shouts to the coach: "Point to yourself when you say that." She thumps her own chest for emphasis, fist balled like a boxing glove. "Point to yourself!"

Copyright © 2004 by Eric Liu. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Eric Liu is a fellow at the New America Foundation. He writes the "Teachings" column for Slate and is the author of The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, a New York Times Notable Book featured in the PBS documentary "Matters of Race". Liu served as a speechwriter for President Clinton and later as White House deputy domestic policy adviser. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he teaches at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs.