Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

What defines who we are? What makes us all different? These questions are puzzling, and require great thought. There are no right or wrong answers. Every soul on this planet is formed by a different identity. Identities are like fingerprints-no two are the same. An identity will always reveal everything about a person, just like a fingerprint reveals who committed the crime. There is no escaping who you are. This brings us to another series of questions. Who am I? How do I figure out my identity? Identity is defined by our actions and our past. It is something that is not created in a day, but is constructed over time. The experiences in my life, my success, and my failure have all shaped my identity. This is why everyone has different identities. Everyone has had diverse experiences, succeeded at different things, and failed at different things. I am an actor. Acting has constantly helped me to grow personally, emotionally, and even physically. It has been the most useful tool in shaping my identity. Acting has taught me not only about myself, but other people as well. A good actor requires a wide range of skills, and the ability to develop them. However, they are always molding and shaping their personal identity. Why? Well that is hard to explain unless you have truly acted before. When an actor is given a role in a play, it is essential that they analyze their character from all angles. Who was this character? What are their goals? How do I relate to this character? That last question is the most important one. An actor must care about his character. An actor must find a way into their character’s head. What is my character thinking at this moment? How would my character react to this? If an actor cannot relate to their role, then they cannot perform well. From experience, an actor must find a relationship between themselves and the character they play on stage. This is how an actor discovers who they are. They delve into the mind of their character, and learn what makes them tick, what makes them speak out, and what makes them, them. Researching a role is a very interesting process for an actor because it not only discloses important information about themselves, but information about people in general. Throughout my eight-year acting career, I have learned a lot about myself. After living through the eyes of so many characters, part of them has stayed with me. They were ingredients for my identity recipe. Feeling wide range of emotion, love, anger, sadness, laughter, and joy on stage has been very influential to me as an actor. Playing roles of gangsters, cops, Reverends, teachers, and soldiers, to deeper roles such as a victim of the Holocaust or a suicidal teenager. Each role teaching me different values that I never knew I had in me. I never knew what emotions lay deep inside of me until I brought them out onstage. There was a play in which my role was a Holocaust victim. I had to tell the story of a Rabbi who was thrown into Auschwitz and was beaten and tortured, and eventually shot to death. This was the most challenging role for me ever. How was I, a Roman Catholic boy from the city, supposed to imagine what a Jewish Rabbi went through in these horrible concentration camps? After spending hours researching the Holocaust, reading testimony after testimony, watching as many movies as I could, I felt I had an idea. Though I could not realize the level of oppression and violence that these people dealt with, I still knew what it felt like to be oppressed. I knew what it felt like to be helpless and ignored. I knew feelings of oppression. All I had to do was take those experiences in my life, the times that I had felt like this, and magnify them. I needed to feel like I had lost my family, my house, my job, my clothes, and every belonging that I ever owned. I had nothing. I was nothing. I was a number. I watched as people were shot dead in front of me. I saw children being beaten. I could do nothing. I was helpless. This was a challenge. It took an emotional, physical and mental toll on me, that is hard to explain. These feelings that actors feel on stage, the feelings that they pretend to feel, are really not pretend. They are their own true feelings, emotions, thoughts, and ideas. This is what makes an actor an actor. It is what makes an actor’s identity. They feel what their character feels. They are their character. I was a victim of the Holocaust. These feelings that my character felt, I have felt. These feelings, thoughts, emotions, and ideas are all part of my identity.