Actor training - Rebecca Brooksher on her experience at Juilliard

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Actor training – Rebecca Brooksher on her experience at Juilliard

Rebecca Brooksher plays Kelly in Dying City, at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. In a Backstage.com interview [by Simi Horwitz, April 04, 2007] she talks about her decision to apply to Juilliard: “I’m not one of those people who finds the idea of [being] a starving artist acceptable. I felt that if I did not get into Juilliard, I would become a lawyer.”

But after being accepted, she “felt the school was self-important and had tunnel vision. Many of the rooms had no windows, or they were so high up on the wall you couldn’t see out of them. I don’t know if it was deliberate, but I certainly felt trapped, and the schedule was such that we didn’t even have the time to see shows outside or even within the school. Let’s put it this way: It was discouraged.

“I had to keep in contact with people and life outside the school and away from those who were innately competitive, with odd egos. In my opinion, acting is about life. If you’re not living it, what do you bring to the stage?”

She notes her experience at the school improved with time: “The pretentiousness did fade with each passing year. And I was helped by finding a country bar on 75th and Broadway. That’s my evil pleasure: a place with peanut shells on the floor and Willie Nelson on the jukebox.”
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