Life as Theatre

Professor Betty Bernhard’s acting class for non-actors is an exercise in compassion.

“A mother is…”

These days a definition of mother is not so easy to come by. But on an afternoon last year, a group of students from Theatre Professor Betty Bernhard’s Acting for Non-Actors class who had been pondering that question for an entire semester tried their best to define it with “The Mommy Monologues,” a not altogether unconnected parody of Eve Ensler’s popular “The Vagina Monologues.”

From social justice issues, to first memories of gender and sexuality questions, the chance to tackle tough issues has been the draw that has filled Bernhard’s class with students from all majors for a decade. She recalls, “Past topics have been ‘How I learned about sex,’ ‘Racism begins at home,’ ‘Being a minority student at The Claremont Colleges’—very different kinds of topics but all based on particularly thought-provoking social issues.” Her most recent class production, presented in February, was as hard-hitting as ever. Titled “A Piece of My Heart,” it was based on interviews with women who served in Vietnam.

Bernhard also turned a lot of heads when she used the class to explore the idea of terrorism in response to the events of September 11, 2001. “I brought a video of the final performance from that class to a theatre conference in Amsterdam, and many there were interested in American students’ response to those events. The film caused quite a stir at the conference, and it made me so proud of my class because they did it themselves. I only coached them.”

Here’s how the class works: Students search for and bring in newspaper and journal clippings on the chosen subject, in addition to conducting interviews with students and transcribing them. The actual performance pieces are culled from these original sources, then shaped and cut so as to create a dramatic monologue for the actor to perform.

“For the theatre class exploring terrorism, some students wrote monologues from the terrorists’ perspective, some from the perspective of those who fund terrorist groups, others performed an interview between mothers of women who became suicide bombers,” Bernhard remembered. The interviewed students answered questions such as, “Where were you when the terrorist act happened?” “What was your first response to the news?” “How do you think the government handled it?” “Have your ideas of patriotism changed?” “What do you think is going to happen now?”

Bernhard is adamant about fidelity to the interview: “The students do not change the words of the interviews at all. We use everything that people say and, most importantly, how they say it. We also use minimal props on stage. We want to make sure the audience focuses on the words and the emotion of the actors.”

These emotions, especially in light of the seriousness of the issues, are often unpredictable. “The interviews gave us a wide range of responses,” Bernhard says. “Thoughtful, very opinionated, philosophical, emotional, angry, funny, serious. A theme that was common to all of the different responses, though, was ‘I don’t feel safe anywhere, anymore.’”

Bernhard conceived the idea for the class about 10 years ago, when she met actor Anna Deavere Smith, who was experimenting with a dramatic form based on a number of interviews on a single issue. Bernhard thought the concept offered a perfect introduction to drama.

She also cites Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed as a primary influence.
“I have been in workshops with him and learned firsthand many of the techniques that I have implemented in the class.” Before students are ready to tackle the issues, Bernhard makes sure they have a foundation of basic theory and basic acting skills. The students are exposed to other alternative forms of theatre, including street theatre.
“The Mommy Monologues” and the class on terrorism are perfect examples of what Bernhard wants students to consider as they create their performances.

“Other than learning the rudiments of acting, the primary objective of the class is to provide a conceptually rich and globally diverse introduction to how social institutions, including the theatre, have instituted the possibility of dissenting from authority,” she says. “And, there’s nothing like stepping into someone’s story and having the responsibility of telling it truly. It teaches you compassion.”

—Joel Calahan '04

Read Betty Bernhard's Faculty Profile.