Playing vs. Becoming
I work with a LOT of young actors. They are imaginative and funny and their ideas, when set free, are absolute gold. They love playing villains and animals and princesses and monsters. They love learning accents and putting on costumes and (heaven knows) having a microphone taped to their face.
Playing someone else, be it on stage or in a role playing game like D&D, provides children an escape from their daily frustrations. It allows experimentation with foreign personality traits and grants the freedom to exaggerate until things are big enough to understand. There is safe distance built into acting and role playing that buffers failure. “My character made that mistake, not me.” These are valuable avenues for children (and let’s be real, for all of us). These are all hugely valuable tools for children (and for all of us).
But there’s a hidden gap for children whose playtime is chiefly concerned with being someone else. Decisions in game are safer because personal risk is reduced and ownership is partial. The transition into accepting that risk personally can be difficult. Kids naturally have enough imagination to pretend to be someone else. The skill most often missing is how to play themselves.
When children are involved in games where they themselves are the hero, they are flexing the opposing muscle. Think of character-driven games and self-driven games as the bicep and triceps. They can’t function at their best unless they are strengthened together!
So what does casting ourselves as the hero do differently? It strips away caricature and leaves us standing in the proverbial buff. There are no accents or costumes or magic powers. The only thing in our bag of tricks is… well… us.
This skill set requires courage (which will eventually grow into confidence), presence in the room, and vulnerability. At the outset, this kind of play is met with hesitation. We engage cautiously. As a character, failure is a step removed, but so is success. “I decided she…” is how actors tend to talk about their characters during rehearsal. As ourselves, we must take full ownership. “I realized…” becomes the language. A subtle but powerful difference.
Failure, when it inevitably comes, can’t be taken out on a person who doesn’t exist. Failure has to be owned, and then the choice remains to move on or quit. This is the truly scary part… at first. But the more children engage as themselves, the more they begin to realize that the kinds of people worth being friends with grow with us through our mistakes.
And there is the equal but opposite skill set. Playing someone else is opportunity for escape and exploration. Playing yourself is opportunity to stay present and stand your ground. When creative children finally unlock that skill, they begin to relax, become less affected in their interactions/performances and best of all, they discover that they can be the hero without anyone’s permission or approval. Everything else is just noise.
Children need the space to imagine who they can become and the space to stand in who they’re willing to become.
