Out of lines

Fear of drawing a blank onstage can be devastating for actors

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 8, 2006 at midnight

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They call it "going up," but for actors it can be the lowest point of a career.

It means forgetting your lines in the middle of a performance. The fear of it can be debilitating. For Christopher Leo, it meant withdrawing from the role of a lifetime in December. He's afraid it also could mean the end of his acting career, but since going public with his stage fright, he's found he's far from alone.

Leo, 42, was cast a year ago as the serial killer at the heart of Frozen, now onstage at Curious Theatre Company.

"I was over the moon about it," he says.

He started working out and lost 30 pounds for the role. In the fall, he memorized the entire script. And on Dec. 12, shortly before rehearsals began, he withdrew from the play.

Last month, Leo wrote an open letter to Curious Theatre Company. "I am mourning the loss of the entire experience that would have been Frozen, and that pain is only slightly ameliorated by the comfort of not having to face the inevitable angst of taking to the stage," he wrote. "But in speaking with friends and colleagues it seems that I am not alone."

He soon heard from Jim Hunt, an actor, director and friend. Hunt took a seven-year hiatus from acting in the 1980s and early '90s as a result of his stage fright. The irony was that early in his career he had been unshakeable.

"I was known in those days as the rock," Hunt says. "I would be the person who if anybody went up, count on Jim, he'll figure it out."

He had forgotten his lines, once, in his youth. Forty years later, he can quote those lines, from A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the ease of a phone number.

It wasn't until the 1980s that Hunt found himself incapacitated with the terror of going blank onstage. He was in a George Bernard Shaw one-act, Overruled, at Germinal Stage Denver.

"I would be out onstage and I would be thinking, 'I can't do it. I can't do it.' "

Brian Norber has spent more than a decade onstage at Boulder's Dinner Theatre, and found his own stage fright eased with time.

"It was much worse when I was a kid," Norber says. "I was so painfully shy, and I used to get almost just physically sick. I just would turn white and kind of panic before I would go onstage."

He has a youthful memory of being offstage, bent over with dry heaves. But he kept acting.

"For some bizarre reason, the desire to do it overweighs (the fear)," Norber says. "You go, 'No, I'll be finished being sick in a second.' "

For Leo, though, the fear never went away.

"I was always petrified," he says. "Always."

He began acting in high school in Arvada, dragged to an audition by his friends. He got the lead.

"When I got the reaction from the audience, the laugh, I felt what I feel most actors feel that first time they get that positive reinforcement," Leo says. "I've never thought of myself as an attention junkie. Whatever it was, I felt it that day, that moment."

He went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and returned to the Denver area, working in a number of the area's small, respected theaters of the 1980s and '90s. At 26, he tried taking beta blockers to help with the anxiety, but they were only partially effective, and he decided he had to learn to work without prescription medication.

He never forgot his lines onstage, but he always feared it. Like so many actors, he developed pre-show rituals. Hunt relies on a form of meditation: "I sort of make an invisible circle on the ground and then I just put into that circle all the roles I've had success with recently. I just touch my solar plexus and go, you know, you can do this. It's kind of wooey."

For Leo, the rituals were an offshoot of the mild obsessive-compulsive disorder he suffers. He would look in a mirror and smile. Knock wood in a specific manner. Walk through a doorway precisely in the middle, touching both sides.

In the end, though, the rituals weren't enough for him.

One of his worst episodes came in 1994 during a production of Tartuffe with Citystage Ensemble. Working in verse made things even more difficult.

"I was so intensely miserable I didn't want to make my entrances," he says. "I so wanted to just walk out of the theater and just change my life and become a pharmacist or whatever. I went through with it and it was very, very painful."

In the past few years, Leo's career was seemingly on an upswing. He earned his Equity card in 2002 when he was cast in Cyrano de Bergerac at Denver Center Theatre Company. He gave a tour de force performance in Fuddy Meers at Curious. And for the first time in his life, he was able to make a living entirely from acting.

But the Equity card meant fewer opportunities to work in Denver. Leo was feeling less artistically satisfied as time went on.

"I was looking at Frozen as an opportunity to prove to myself and to make a statement as an artist, an actor, that this is what I can do," he says. "The play is wonderful, the character is wonderful and unique. It was all there. I was so looking forward to it."

Hunt told Leo about his own road back to the stage, beginning with small parts in small theaters, then bigger parts in small theaters, then small parts in big theaters.

While onstage, he devotes his efforts to being in the moment and listening to what his fellow actors are saying, rather than worrying about what line comes next.

"I don't want to tempt fate, but I feel like I'm myself again," Hunt says. "Absolutely back. And now I have a kind of just manageable bunch of jitters that I wouldn't want to be without."

As a director and an instructor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Christy Montour-Larson brings up stage fright on the first day of class. She tries to put her class at ease by pointing out how common the fear of public speaking is. And she lets them know that the fate of the world is not riding on their performances.

"It helps to know that when people see a play, they're not rooting for actors to screw up. The audience is filled with kind-hearted warm human beings who want you to succeed," she says.

"In the scheme of what's going on in the world today, what you're doing right now is just a small grain of sand."

For now, Leo is turning his attentions to directing. Last weekend, he went to see Frozen. And he's not ready to concede the end of his acting career.

"It feels like a baseball player announcing that he can't hit the fastball anymore, and that's such a vulnerable feeling," Leo says.

"I don't want to say never again. I do know that right now it's not something that I want to do in the very near future. I haven't made a decision to say goodbye to it yet. It's been so much a part of who I am."

Lisa Bornstein is the theater critic. bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5101

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