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Crying has been one of the most popular activities of the past four to eight years; the ability to do it on command has been considered the apex of acting ability for much longer. Consider the 2017 Decider investigation that revealed that 96 percent of Best Actress winners over the past 50 years openly wept during their performances (compared with 60 percent of Best Actor winners, thanks to boring yet pervasive sociological dynamics that have long poisoned the human experience). Or the fact that, for decades, it was considered normal for directors to psychologically torment their actors in the hopes of getting them to break down on-camera — think of Stanley Kubrick torturing Shelley Duvall with impunity during The Shining or Alfred Hitchcock throwing live pigeons at Tippi Hedren on the set of The Birds. Hollywood’s craven obsession with crying is perfectly dramatized in a scene early on in Damien Chazelle’s 1920s Golden Age period piece, Babylon, in which wannabe starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), yanked onto a movie set at the last minute, jump-starts her career by sobbing on request with near-chilling exactitude, pausing effortlessly each time the cameras stop rolling to flash a self-satisfied grin to the roomful of stunned industry pros.
Since those glory (?) days, the camera lenses have only gotten crisper, the motion smoother, the money shittier, the tapes self-ier, and the expectations higher and more lateral (now, even the YouTubers are expected to know how to go full Sophie’s Choice at a moment’s notice). While crying spontaneously in real life has never been easier, crying on purpose, specifically for your job as an actor, remains a complicated proposition, one that has both made careers (Meryl Streep’s — even a cursory Google will reveal her name as most synonymous with the manufactured production of human tears) and ruined them (you don’t know them, because they couldn’t cry). The very concept of “authentic” stage-crying — how difficult it is to achieve, its persistent employment as a yardstick for gravitas and talent, its occasionally exploitative underpinnings — serves as the centerpiece of Kate Berlant’s one-woman show, Kate, during which she brilliantly sends up the idea of excavating trauma in front of an audience while trying as hard as she can, before the show ends, to produce just one single “real” tear.
Inspired by all of this fraught history, I decided to try to teach myself how to stage cry. My journey began with a simple question: How do they all do it, these professional emotion-fakers? Is it mostly learned technique, like Method or Meisner? Do they imagine their loved ones dying in elaborate detail, take after take? Are there different types of tears they learn to produce for different projects (Sundance Tears versus Soap-Opera Tears versus Scorsese Tears)? Are certain “tricks” — like menthol sticks or getting pigeons thrown at your head — looked down upon? Is it psychologically advisable to do any of this on a regular basis? And with a little help from a variety of experts, can a nonactor learn to extemporaneously sob in a believable way?
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Day 1: What Is Crying?
My first meeting is with Emily Adams, a friend and licensed somatic psychotherapist in the Bay Area, whom I ask to explain crying to me, from both a biological and psychological perspective. “There’s nonemotional crying: when we get something in our eye and we tear up to flush any irritants,” she begins, “and then there’s the emotional type of crying, which I think we’re still kind of understanding from a scientific standpoint.”
Emotional tears, Adams explains, actually have a different chemical makeup than other kinds of tears (onion-induced, mascara-wand-generated). They’re thicker because they’re made of a larger amount of proteins and stress hormones that your body is trying to expel. As a result, these tears stick to your face longer in a way that “helps other people notice that we’re crying and that we might need help.”
Some scientists, like Darwin, see tears as “purposeless,” but others think we cry as a way to induce bonding, a theory Adams supports: “When we’re sitting across from someone, we have these mirror neurons that activate in our brain,” she says. “The experience of watching someone cry in a movie, or in front of you, and then you’re crying — that’s our mirror neurons, and that’s literally empathy.” Adams adds that some hormones, like testosterone, actually suppress tears — though as cis men age, testosterone declines and they statistically begin to gravitate toward Kevin Costner vehicles.
Considering all of these complicated biomechanics, I ask Adams how psychically disastrous it is for an actor to induce tears on a regular basis. “My sense would be that it’s healthy,” she says. “We lean toward avoiding and numbing and not connecting to our emotions. If you’re going to make yourself cry on-camera, you have to know how to drop into an emotional space. And knowing how to do that and practicing that is healthy.” Adams does advise that actors cultivate an aftercare regimen (like journaling or meditating), so that they don’t accidentally overcompartmentalize their emotions and then go around taking it out on the rest of society, like Alec Baldwin.
At the end of our session, I ask Adams if she thinks she can guide me into crying. She asks me to “ground myself,” then very gently asks if I’ve ever experienced the loss of a loved one and if I can remember the moment I learned about the person’s death. Within five seconds, I’m crying. It’s confirmation that I can in fact cry on command — but only with the assistance of a therapist, so it doesn’t quite count.
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Day 2: The Tear Stick
Today, I’m talking to actress, writer, and director Molly Gordon, whose recent comedy Theater Camp addresses the controversial use of tear sticks: small lipstick-shaped bits of menthol wax that you apply to your eye to induce those flushing-out tears Adams had mentioned. Midway through the movie, Gordon, as the lightly psychotic theater-camp counselor Rebecca-Diane, stops rehearsal and calls out a young camper for “using” during a scene. “Tear sticks are doping for actors,” she yells. “Do you want to be the Lance Armstrong of theater?!”
I ask Gordon if the tear-stick stigma she sends up in Theater Camp is reflective of her own experience. “There is such a stigma. I feel like I’m the first person to be really open about it in this way,” she says, laughing. Behind the scenes, though, she confirms that the actors are “using” if and when they need to. “I had a conversation with my girlfriends the other day about how sometimes you can’t cry when you’re shooting a scene, and the minute they yell ‘Cut,’ you’re sobbing. It’s performance anxiety. I just wish actors talked about it more, because a lot of directors are like, ‘Today’s your crying scene,’ and then you spend the whole day thinking about it. I wish it was okay to be like, ‘If you can’t cry, we also have these tools to help you.’ It doesn’t make you any less of an actor.”
Fortunately, that performance anxiety has significantly lessened for Gordon over time, and she has since developed other techniques to help her tear up. While filming last season’s breakup scene on The Bear, she wept with considerable ease: “I’ve obviously been broken up with, and it felt very much like a world that I know.” She says that as she’s gotten older, she has also gotten better at genuinely “listening” while in character versus worrying about how her performance is coming across. She rejects the notion that you have to traumatize yourself to project authentic emotion: “I remember a drama class that I took where they were like, ‘Okay, so the first thing you do is think about the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. And then you think about it getting worse and worse and worse and then you die.’ And it’s like, Oh my God, that’s not going to make me cry.”
Instead, she sometimes uses music — “The closest thing we have to God,” she says — to produce emotional tears. To aid me on my own mission to the dark center of my subconscious, Gordon suggests that I listen to Linda Ronstadt’s “Long Long Time,” stare without blinking for as long as I can, and, if all else fails, bring in the tear stick. When we get off FaceTime, I listen to Ronstadt over and over but don’t cry. I try not blinking, which puts me in a bad mood, but not enough to cry about it. I order the tear stick online ($10.80 from Kryolan); the shipping costs $11, more than the stick itself, which is some kind of semiotic metaphor.
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Day 3: The Esteemed Acting Coach
I learned about acting coach Susan Batson via Juliette Binoche, who describes Batson’s methods as “shaking you like a tree to get the fruit down.” Batson, who’s 80 years old and has taught everyone from Binoche to Oprah Winfrey to Nicole Kidman to Zac Efron, is a riveting, commanding presence, and we Zoom for almost an hour as she tells me about her life and work.
As a young actress and a self-described “people pleaser,” she received a scholarship to study under Herbert Berghof, Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Uta Hagen, who, as she puts it, “drove me really nuts.” Batson tells me a story about how Hagen once gave her an infuriating acting assignment that involved sitting on a bench onstage alone with zero props or lines. “I called my mother, and I said, ‘Okay, she hates me,’” she moans. “And my mother said, ‘Let her call me and tell me she hates you. Then you can come home. Otherwise you cannot come home.’ So I said, ‘I don’t have a mother. I don’t have an acting teacher.’ Then I sat on that stage for a good 45 minutes. Hagen got up, and she went, ‘Bravo. Because I gave you the scholarship to come here, you thought you had to entertain me. You don’t have to entertain me. During the exercise, you got so mad at me that you didn’t give a fuck if I got entertained or not.’” I am struck silent by the profundity of this lesson, one I will probably never learn.
Several years after that formative bench experience, Batson was ten minutes late getting home after meeting with a director, and her young son, Carl Ford (who now works alongside her at her New York studio), proclaimed with genetically similar theatrical drama that she had “abandoned” him. She gave up acting to teach so that she could have more predictable work hours, and now, in her coaching job, Batson is not interested in claiming any specific method; all she cares about is “the Truth,” or, in other words, teaching you how to call upon your own specific personal details and memories to bring a sense of reality to your performance.
When it comes to crying, she is a purist — no tear sticks; real pain only. She believes “the greater the actor, the better the tear” and cites Kidman and Binoche several times. “They can rely on Juliette to cry; they can rely on Nicole to cry,” she says, not specifying who “they” are but making her point nonetheless. “I’m trying to think if there’s anybody else they can rely on to cry. Maybe not.” Like Gordon, Batson believes it’s never an actor’s “instrument” that prevents them from crying but their own psychological blocks — which she pushes right through once she figures out their trigger. “I worked with Forest Whitaker, who said, ‘You’re not going to get me to cry.’ And I thought, Okay. But I knew I could get him to cry.” (She did.) She also broke Oprah — who has said she “didn’t know what acting was” before meeting Batson — by “asking about her relationship with her mother. And that did it. When I got back to the hotel, she called me and she was just sobbing. I said, ‘Okay. That’s perfect. Very good.’”
It strikes me that the actors she names as the best criers were either born or raised outside of the U.S., and I ask her if she thinks it’s easier for them to access deep wells of emotion considering they are not constitutionally repressed, stifled down to their very core as a matter of national tradition. “I never even thought of that,” she says, looking thrilled. “That’s very true.” Anxiously, I ask her to help me, a born and bred American maniac, learn to cry on command. “Do you have something? It has to be very painful,” she says, looking serious. I tell her I do; it’s the same thing I thought about with Adams.
She slowly draws it out of me: What day was it? What was I wearing? What was the temperature? Batson asks me to whisper what I needed in the moment, then build up slowly to a yell, until I am screaming alone in my apartment on a Tuesday morning, “I needed BRAVERY!!!” A few minutes go by. I am not crying at all. I can feel how American I am being. “I feel like I’m you and you’re Uta Hagen and I want to impress you,” I say. She bursts out laughing. “You’re working the wrong way, kiddo,” she says. “I’ll tell you what Hagen would say: ‘full of shit.’ She had no patience whatsoever.”
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Day 4: The Esteemed Acting Coach’s Briefly Abandoned Son, Also an Acting Coach
Ford, who had planned to be on the call with his mother and me before he got sick, emails to ask if he can take a crack at me and my American bullshit. We get on Zoom the next morning. He is a little less intimidating than his mom, more openly jubilant, and sneakier.
To start out, he gives me a rapid rundown of the most famous acting techniques, many of which are various offshoots of Method acting, or the Method: Strasberg’s version, he says, is “inside out, where you’re going to internally build a character”; Meisner’s is “text-centric, story-centric,” Adler’s is “all about context: Who are these characters? Where are they from? How did they get here? What’s that coffee mug — was it passed down from their grandmother?” In terms of non-Method acting approaches, there’s the Alexander technique, which is “about emanating energy through your body”; the Chubbuck technique, which is “all about intention,” and, of course, the Batson technique, which is “about connecting to a fundamental core element of a character’s history to embody the transformation of the character in connection to the story and the moment.” To actors, these things sound very different, but to me they all sound exactly the same.
When it comes to the Method as a general concept, Ford considers it a “bad word,” widening his eyes ominously when he says it. “Susan and I don’t use it,” he says. “It’s like, ‘I gotta go learn to drive a garbage truck to be a garbage-truck driver.’ No, you don’t. You don’t have to kill somebody to know how to play a killer.” Somewhere in the distance, Jared Leto howls.
Now that I know every single thing about acting, we move on to my personal challenge. Ford, a skilled conversationalist, gets me comfortable and talking at length about one of my favorite movies that always makes me cry: Meet Joe Black, the highly polarizing ’90s Martin Brest film wherein Brad Pitt plays Death, as well as a human man who is hit by two cars at once, and does Jamaican patois. The end of the movie (spoiler alert) really gets me: Anthony Hopkins, whom Death has been waiting to claim throughout the film, walks over a hill to his own death at his own birthday party so that Death can leave the body of the man who was about to fall in love with his daughter, played by Claire Forlani, before he was hit by the aforementioned two cars. When I write it out here, it sounds insane and stupid, and in certain ways, yes, it is. But you have to trust me that, in the moment, with Thomas Newman’s score booming and these fireworks going off and Forlani squinting painfully into the middle distance and holding her arms because she’s outside in a very thin dress, it is one of the most moving bits of cinema ever made.
As Ford and I discuss the scene — the lighting, the editing, the music, “the humanity of our lives” — my eyes start to water, and he looks pleased. “The minute I saw you, I went, How did Susan not get her?” Ford says, laughing. “And then I went, Oh, she went to a memory instead of just talking to you.” I admit to him that the memory that made me cry on day one already felt tapped out by day three. “There was something about the therapist that was opening you up. But 48 hours later, Rachel’s different,” he says. “So it’s not that you exhausted the pathway — it’s that you tried to go back to the exact same thing. That doesn’t work.”
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Day 5: Male Tears
Corey Stoll wants me to keep the details very vague so as not to spoil anything. But let’s just say that in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Broadway show Appropriate, the actor has an emotional scene that impressed me so much that I called him up to siphon off his soul like a sea witch. “A lesson I learned early on — and that I have to keep relearning — is that it’s not important that the actor feels it,” he says, it being the deep emotion necessary to jerk tears. “It feels amazing when you really feel it, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about the audience feeling it.”
According to Stoll, directors usually present crying as an option to actors, something “you hope happens because it punctuates the intensity” of a scene. But for this show, his specific emotional moment was written into the script, so he knew he had to get to “that place” every single night. On film, he’ll occasionally pull a Batson and think about something really sad to get himself to cry, but, as I’ve recently learned firsthand, “you can only do that so many times before that particular emotional pathway becomes numb. And then you’re kind of stuck. Because then you’re searching around and you’re killing off everybody in your life. You kind of become a junkie, in that sense, losing veins.”
Onstage for Appropriate, he initially tried to “get the emotion to well up, to try and be authentic,” but ultimately he realized “there just isn’t time for that.” Now, he deploys what he describes as a “psychological gesture,” a Michael Chekhov technique that “stands counterpoint to the inside out of Stanislavski.” In other words, instead of looking inward for a cry, he starts on the outside, reenacting the physicality of a breakdown. He says he replicates the same body movements and breathing associated with crying each time until he feels the emotion internally. I ask how he works himself up to the moment. “I don’t,” he says. “I just do it. It’s all about faking it and then I start to feel it.”
Stoll has another famous crying scene: In the last season of Girls, his Anderson Cooper doppelgänger, Dill Harcourt, shows up at Lena Dunham and Andrew Rannells’s apartment sobbing about being canceled for trying to adopt a white baby. He prepared for that one a bit differently, via a technique he learned in acting school during a clown class, in which they passed an increasingly loud laugh around in a circle. “You keep making it bigger and bigger. I remember in me, something something just clicked. This crazy spasming in my abdomen just turned into the most uncontrollable sobbing, because somewhere deep in the very most primitive parts of your brain, it’s really just a physical reaction … Crying and laughing, there’s often a very thin membrane between those two things.”
I walk around my apartment laughing loudly until I start to really freak myself out and feel lightheaded. I sit down and think about the last thing Stoll told me: “Most of the time, you shouldn’t be trying to cry. It is often a sign of bad writing and bad acting if that’s what you’re thinking about.”
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Day 6: Evil Twins
Deidre Hall has been on Days of Our Lives for nearly 50 years. In that time, she has been possessed by the Devil twice, fallen into a coma, gotten amnesia, survived a plane crash and a 30-foot fall from a window, escaped several serial killers, and faced off against her evil twin, who was then murdered. In other words, she has cried a lot and is famously so controlled that she once asked a director, who’d asked her to weep on cue, “Which eye?”
Hall calls me up at the end of a full day on set; she films nine episodes per week, and I am typing this from my bed at 4 p.m. Early on in her career, Hall tells me, she wasn’t able to cry on command, but her breakthrough came as all good breakthroughs should: via her real-life twin sister, who dipped a toe into acting to play her evil twin — who was, of course, impersonating Hall’s character, Marlena — in a 1977 episode. “Andrea was not an actress. She taught special education,” Hall says. “And nobody told her crying was hard, so she just did it.”
Specifically, Andrea was brought in to testify at her own sanity hearing, during which she was meant to burst into tears. “I said to her the night before, ‘Look, when you get on the stand, don’t try to cry. You won’t be able to do it,” Hall says. Andrea was blasé, as all evil twins are: “She said, ‘No. I can do it.’ I said, ‘Yeah, okay. I haven’t done it for 20 years myself.’ And her scene came up, and they rolled tape, and I’ll be darned if she didn’t start to cry.”
After the scene, Hall asked Andrea how she conjured the ability to act without any formal experience: “She said, ‘I watched you do it. How hard could it be?’ Because that’s what twins are like.” From there, Hall says she “maybe just stopped being so tense” about her ability to cry onscreen and “stopped letting it be a big deal.” The tears eventually flowed, though she does use glycerin to create fake tears in close-ups if she needs to.
The “Which eye?” story sprang from a scene in which “Marlena was comatose or something like that,” Hall says, “and I think John [Marlena’s longtime lover, played by Drake Hogestyn] came to see her, and he was pleading with her to please wake up. Finally he leaves the scene, and the director asks, ‘Is there any chance I can get a downstage tear when he leaves the room?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I think you can.’”
I ask Hall for any specific tips, and she tells me that in order to cry, I should try not to cry. “I don’t think the tear is the prize. I think the audience’s tears are the prize,” she says. “If you cry, that releases tension. But if you don’t and you’re on the verge, the audience will release the tension for you. Just picture your grandma at her ironing board in her little housedress pressing those white shirts and having a good little cry over her soap opera.” Although it wasn’t exactly Marlena’s point, I do cry very easily imagining my grandma (or her evil twin?) pressing white shirts and watching a soap opera.
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Day 7: The Tear Stick, Part Two
Molly Manning Walker’s first feature, How to Have Sex, is an effervescent, at times painful, coming-of-age story about three best friends who go on a drunken holiday. I saw it at Cannes last year, and this morning I’m sitting across from Manning Walker and her lead actress, Mia McKenna-Bruce, who very effectively cries and holds back tears several times throughout the film.
McKenna-Bruce tells me that she has never specifically trained herself to cry on cue, but one way she gets herself there is by using the anxiety she naturally feels before a crying scene to her advantage. “It’s quite nervy,” she says of having to be vulnerable in front of a crew of people, but a shaky voice and skittish disposition can only help with the appearance of a breakdown. I ask Manning Walker how she plays into this dynamic, and she says sometimes she’ll figure out a triggering word or phrase and have her actors whisper it to one another or bring it into a scene as a surprise.
But McKenna-Bruce sometimes uses a tear stick, too: “The physical act of getting tears out doesn’t feel that natural. You can do your voice, but your body doesn’t always respond.” That night, my tear stick finally arrives from Siberia, as the shipping cost indicates. I rub it all around my eyes and wait. Nothing happens, so I text Gordon, who tells me I am doing it wrong: I need to stick it directly into the corner of my eye. I rub it into my corneas. It casually burns, like a stiff Siberian breeze, but doesn’t produce a single tear. “Ur broken,” Gordon says.
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Day 8: Public Shaming
Eliza Hittman has made several devastating films about young people in horrible situations, among them Beach Rats and Never Rarely Sometimes Always. But when I call her to discuss crying on command, she immediately questions the very idea of crying on command. “Sometimes I write in a script ‘She cries’ or ‘They cry’ because I want the reader to understand the emotional place that the character has reached,” Hittman explains. “But onscreen and in the process of shooting the scene, I would never tell an actor, ‘You have to cry here.’” In fact, instead of expecting her actors to cry in front of the camera, Hittman often suggests they hold back. She alludes to an old Frank Capra adage that Stoll was probably also alluding to: “I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.”
So in Beach Rats, Harris Dickinson has an intense panic attack but doesn’t actually cry. Hittman says she helped him “externalize the distress” by telling him to do push-ups and run around the block. In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, during a pivotal scene with an abortion counselor, she told her lead actress to answer the scene’s scripted medical questions with her own family history instead of the character’s. (This ultimately did bring her to genuine tears.) Generally speaking, Hittman asks her AD to schedule crying scenes late in the day so her actors can use the feeling of being “at the end of a long, physical, emotional, and heightened experience of making a movie,” sort of like I am feeling at the end of my demented research project.
A few hours later, I hop on the phone with Sophie Nélisse. She plays Shauna, a young pregnant teen who has survived a plane crash and untold additional horrors, on Showtime’s Yellowjackets. (If Capra’s movies are about the heights of the American Dream, Yellowjackets is what happens when that dream crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness and discovers cannibalism.) In season two, she gives birth in the woods, loses her baby, and has a (scripted) wild-eyed, primal onscreen breakdown. Nélisse cycles through a few classic tactics (sad memories, sad songs, an occasional tear stick) to cry on command for Yellowjackets. But once on set, she was having a particularly difficult time getting worked up before a take, so she went to an AD and asked him to bully her: “I was like, ‘Can you just yell at me and tell me I’m a really shitty actor?’ He was like, ‘I will not do that.’ I was like, ‘Listen, I’m telling you this is what I need. Please just be like, ‘You suck. You can’t cry.’ I was begging him.” He finally relented. She cried. “Then he felt so bad,” Nélisse says. “I was like, ‘No, we got what we needed.’”
As someone who craves external approval, this is one of the best and most relatable suggestions I have heard so far. “I don’t recommend doing it too often, because it really is hurtful,” Nélisse warns before we hang up. Later, while I am at the airport with my partner, I ask him to bully me and tell me that I am a bad writer, hoping that the public-shaming aspect will make it even more effective. He is openly troubled but obliges. “You’re a sham. You’re a fraud and a bad writer,” he says over and over. Unfortunately, all we can do is laugh hysterically.
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Day 9: Plundering My Dreams
Amanda Lovejoy Street is a Creative Dream Work teacher who deals in the unconscious, using dreams to help actors and other artists connect with a given piece of material. Broadly speaking, Street is a Jungian teacher, which means she believes “everybody and everything in a dream is you.” In actors’ case, the key to unlocking their character and subsequently their tear ducts is somewhere in that unconscious space.
But it’s important to note that Street doesn’t believe in asking people to “call upon traumas” to feel sadness. “The work I do, it’s a training in trusting your own instincts and trusting what is actually happening in the moment,” she says. “I’m interested in the complexity of our humanity and all the ways that these tears might emerge, even if they’re not physical tears.” I agree with her conceptually, but I simply must cry.
Since I am not coming to her with a specific “character,” we pretend I am playing Rose in Titanic, a role that famously requires crying and that I could recite at a moment’s notice. “We might ask your subconscious for a dream about how you and Rose are connected or how your struggle is the same,” Street says as my furious mother cinches my corset and tells me I must marry to keep our family afloat. “And the tears would come maybe from having the Titanic material deeply grounded in your own psyche.” Street might also “work with the idea that the Leonardo DiCaprio character is a part of you, and what is it like for this part of you to be dying?” she says.
It will be many hours before I can ask my brain to dream about part of itself dying, so I ask if there’s anything she can do to help me cry right now. She thinks for a moment and suggests that I “whisper-speak into my hands” what I’m feeling: “I’m having all this anxiety because I need to cry, and, actually, I feel nothing right now.” Speaking quietly into your hands — or journaling or speaking into your phone — is a way to show your body and psyche that you’re listening to them, to “unplug the faucet,” she explains. I whisper into my hands that I am annoyed with myself for not mastering the art of stage-crying; that night, I ask for my Jungian guides (who are also me) to help me dream up a solution. I wake up the next morning from one of the bleakest nightmares of my entire life, far more confused than when I began this assignment.
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Day 10: Kate
Comedian, actress, and writer Kate Berlant is days away from finishing her Los Angeles run of Kate, the aforementioned one-woman show in which she plays a version of herself who’s desperate to prove she can cry on command. I track her down for a ten-minute phone call one afternoon before she goes onstage later that day, knowing she’s my last and best hope.
Berlant says she has managed to hysterically sob at the conclusion of all her shows over the past year and a half. “But only twice doing this show, I’ve had the experience where I’m genuinely myself, Kate Berlant, hysterically sobbing,” she says. “What’s interesting to me is that the audience cannot tell the difference. My stage manager and director have been like, ‘I could tell it was really you crying.’ But no one else can tell.”
At every other show, the crying was “athletic,” not emotional. “To me, it proves the point that acting is not an emotional exercise at all. It’s a physical one,” she says. “I was rejected from acting school, so I kind of hardly know what I’m talking about, but a lot of actors have this thing of ‘Oh, you have to go there, and you have to really be feeling it to give the performance.’ And it’s like, ‘Actually, no. You don’t.’ It’s not like I’m really reflecting on the horrors of the world to get me to cry. It’s kind of a job.”
So what helps her do her job? “Staring helps,” she says, because in the end, crying on cue is “just like a muscle reaction. Sometimes I cry too soon. I’m like, Oh, no. I wish I had, for the tension of the scene, kept it off longer. But sometimes it still takes a while, and it stresses me out. It’s still a mystery to me. There are certainly no guarantees.” When I ask her if she can help me do it, she balks: “Sorry, God, I don’t know. I actually don’t know how to make anyone else do it.” She pauses to chew something, then apologizes for chewing. “I would never, ever tell someone I can tell them or teach them or give them insight on how to cry,” she adds. “Certainly not.”
Perhaps in an effort to make me feel better, she goes on to reiterate that the conflation of crying with talent is simply an “embarrassing actor thing.” “That crying is acting — and a good performance means crying — is a myth that continues to be pervasive,” Berlant says. “And I do think it’s really embarrassing watching actors cry when you can tell they’re really excited to cry.” I ask how she feels about tear sticks. “Sure, go for it,” she says. “Acting is not a moral exercise. If you give a good show, you give a good show. It doesn’t matter. I think only a psychopath would be like, ‘It doesn’t count if they’re not real tears.’ What are you talking about?”
We hang up, and I’m left with my dry eyes and a growing concern that Susan Batson — and by proxy Oprah — is going to be very disappointed in me. I sit in silence and attempt, unsuccessfully, to bring some tears to the surface like an athlete might — with sheer physical determination, contorting my face and my body. I try it in the car, at dinner, mid-conversation with a friend who looks disturbed by my performance. I think about Joe Black and ironing grandmas. I get about 65 percent of the way there each time: My chin shakes, my breathing gets heavy, but no tears come.
Later that night, defeated and exhausted from scrunching my face up so much, I open up my copy of Barbra Streisand’s memoir and stumble on an anecdote about Streisand struggling to cry on the set of The Way We Were: “I needed to cry in that scene but for some reason, I couldn’t,” she writes. “So Sydney just took me aside and put his arms around me and that was all I needed … I completely broke down.” Unfortunately, the director Sydney Pollack has been dead for nearly two decades. I resort instead to watching a clip of Streisand performing “Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again” alongside Judy Garland, the two of them joyfully clutching each other and singing like angels just a few years before Garland’s untimely death. Within 30 seconds, I completely break down, while also recognizing that this too will be an exhausted pathway soon enough. Like a psychopath, I touch my face to make sure the tears are real.
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