Out of the Corner, by Jennifer Grey
Continued from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5
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Chapter 10, titled "Acting 'As If''" and Chapter 11, titled "When My Baby Goes to Rio" tell Jennifer's life from the middle of 1978 until middle of 1980, when she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in Manhattan.
Grey never wanted to attend a normal college. She always wanted an acting career, primarily in live theater. She would have preferred to begin her career already in her high-school years, but her parents insisted that she graduate from high school. Her parents only reluctantly allowed her to take a few steps into her career (professional photographs, a few auditions, etc.) while still in high school.
Her parents supported her decision to attend The Playhouse School emotionally and financially. They paid for her to do singing and dance lessons after school hours. Jennifer worked in a clothing store on Saturdays to earn extra spending money.
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The school's webpage describes the first year and second year of instruction. The school must have changed much since the 1970s, but the school's obvious mission is to develop in the students practical skills to perform in live theater. There are classes in acting techniques, voice, music, singing, dance, Shakespeare, etc.
(Jennifer's mother Joan had attended the school, but had dropped out during the first year.)
Jennifer Grey describes the school as follows:
That summer [1978], I was accepted into the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. I was the youngest person admitted into the program. Most of my classmates had already spent at least some time in college.
The Playhouse was a full-time nine-to-five, five-days-a-week, potentially two-year program. .... The first-year class was made up of a hundred students, with only twenty-five "invited back" [for the second year].
The curriculum at the Playhouse was rounded out with classes in speech, Linklater voice work, along with dance classes and movement for actors. But the primary focus was on getting a solid foundation of the Meisner technique. There was the fundamental "repetition exercise" that Sandy Meisner, who founded the Playhouse, had invented, which was designed to force you to take the focus off yourself and put it 100 percent on your partner, which would eventually train you to "really listen to" and "work off" the other person. ....
An important element of the instruction was criticism -- often quite harsh -- of the students' performances.
No one was safe from being torn to shreds. When I was the one in the crosshairs of this ego-shattering event, it felt like I was getting mugged, but from the safety of my folding chair in the audience, when watching the teacher mercilessly go after one of my classmates .... this correction, as brutal as it was, somehow seemed to justify the means.
Inevitably, this devastated student became more beautiful, more real, instantly more compelling. If you could take what they were dishing out, the reward was doing good work. ....
That program was the hardest thing I had ever done. The pressure was great. Every exercise. Every scene. You did not want to fuck up. If you didn't do the work, it was obvious to everyone. Every day was brutal. And exciting. And I was committed to it.
Grey was accepted into the school's second year, and she graduated. She obviously feels the school gave her a good education for her later acting career.
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During her Playhouse years, Grey had a romance with a 39-year-old filmmaker named Patrice de la Falaise, who had a lot of family money. He and she did a lot of sex and cocaine.
After she completed the school's first year, he invited her to holiday with him in Brazil. Her parents tried to talk her out of this relationship and out of this trip.
While she was in Brazil, he paid little attention to her, having become more interested in the comedienne Gilda Radner, whom he had likewise invited -- unknown to Jennifer. Grey and Radner both got mad at him about this two-girlfriends holiday, and so they both broke up with him. Grey's Chapter 11 tells her experience with this man.
I was a paranoid, coked-up teenager, sleeping with a middle-age man I barely knew. .... I was stuck in some alternate reality. .... When I got back [from Brazil] to my parents' apartment ... I was almost catatonic. I was the most depressed I'd ever felt.
Grey got over that man, but she generally was living a life that was physically and emotionally unhealthy. However, she graduated from the Playhouse school in 1980 and then began her acting career.
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Continued in Part 7
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