Edoardo Ballerini

A piece about tonight’s reading: “Gomorra” Reaches the New York Stages

If I have a regret in my professional life it’s that I didn’t get a degree in theatre.  Countless people have done fine without it, of course, but I would have benefitted from it.  I’ve studied, and have returned to doing so, but there’s something to enrolling in a program that teaches you everything from voice to fencing to working with text, and makes you sweat it out for a few years exclusively. Read more…

Before you get the wrong idea, no, I haven’t been fired from anything, nor am I firing anybody.  I was fired from a play once, but that was years ago.  To this day I have no idea why.  I’d been to rehearsal, all seemed fine, I get home, and there’s a message on my answering machine telling me not to come back.  It was bewildering, but it taught me an early lesson in they why’s and how’s of this business.  There are none. Read more…

Last summer I did a film in which I had to deliver speeches to crowds.  And every time after filming, I nearly lost my voice, which caused me no end of embarrassment.  How can a professional actor not know how to support his voice for two days?  It was another reminder that I had gotten off-track in nearly every aspect of my life. Read more…

There is no higher art than learning itself.  Returning to study this month has reminded me why I started in on this profession of acting in the first place.  We need it to understand ourselves, and, at its best,  those of us who put our faces, bodies and voices on display are offering a way to make sense of our collective experiences in this lifetime.  We aggrandize the normal in order to highlight its significance.  But I’m not so naive to believe these things are always offered with such noble intentions – there’s that little matter of narcissism, ego, and an unhealthy need for attention that seems to linger in most actors.  Still, there are two sides to this coin. Read more…

My freshman year at Wesleyan a friend told me that I was not the type of person to ask, “What’s for lunch?” but rather, “What is lunch?”  I took it as a compliment.  Though I’ve never been referred to as a genius, I’ve always aspired to use my brain whenever appropriate, and the meaning of lunch is as worthy a topic as any other.

Today I went back to class for the first time in a quite a while.  In a stinging twist of irony it was held in the same room where I first studied acting.  The musty scent of old furniture and well-worn set pieces filled the air, and tears came to my eyes.  I was transported back in time, filled with remembrances of a clueless young man who nevertheless knew that he wanted to inhabit this strange world of props and cues and was willing to scrape nickels together in order to do so. Read more…

As I sat in the lobby of New York’s Public Theater I noticed two people laughing.  It was my good fortune to have been to the Public twice in one week, and I recalled that on my previous visit, then, too, people were laughing.  And I thought, “The lobby of the Public Theater is a remarkably happy place.”  It was so strong a feeling that I wanted to share it.  I reached for my phone to call someone.  But as I slipped my hand into my pocket a woman shrieked, and I was distracted. Read more…