Performance
“In those summers at camp I began to learn to push past exhaustion and to think on my feet, and to become slowly aware that weariness and exhaustion were the twin sirens of the theatrical deep. Let them take over and they will rob one of courage and the ability to improvise in a crisis, for stamina in the long run is as necessary as an adjunct to success in the theatre as talent itself.”
So wrote Moss Hart in his memoir, Act One. Hart, one of 20th century theater’s most successful playwrights and directors, learned his craft through hard work. In this passage, it was a stint at Camp Utopia, where he was social director and responsible for entertainment, that he learned how to get past fatigue as a matter of doing his job.
Hart also learned, as he writes in a preceding passage, "that talent by itself is not enough, even an authentic and first-rate talent is not enough, nor are brilliance and audacity in themselves sufficient. There remains the ability to translate that talent, whether it be for acting or playwrighting, into terms that fulfill the promise of a play so that the performance succeeds in realizing the full measure of its potential."
Focusing on the goal
Hart describes the need to maintain discipline and focus on the goal. Talent alone is not enough; application of talent through dogged persistence and the acquisition of skills is what is necessary.
I recently spoke with songwriter Emily Falvey, who has an office on famed Music Row in Nashville. She goes there daily and writes songs. Sometimes solo but other times with another artist or two. I asked Emily how many songs she writes per week, and she said between five and eight. The trick, she says, is to exercise your creative muscles. The more you use them, the stronger (and better) you can become.
Lessons from Moss Hart are passed down to Emily Falvey and serve as measures of the commitment one must apply to succeed, not merely in show business but any endeavor.
Sometimes those who have succeeded in school think their academic learning will enable them to coast into career success. In reality, anyone who manages such folks knows that schooling is step one. The rest comes from application to the task. In Moss Hart's words, the "ability to translate that talent" produces something of value – a product, a service, or a work of art.
Seldom a straight path
Of course, talent and hard work do not guarantee success. Adversity often intervenes, which can result in failure when it does. The challenge is to learn from failure, not let it define you. “Self-pity,” Hart writes in Act One, “is not a pleasant emotion and is a fruitless one as well, for its point of no return is an onset of black despair in very short order.”
Not every play Moss Hart wrote was a success. Not every song that Emily Falvey writes will be a hit. The challenge is to adopt an attitude of humility, the willingness to learn from mistakes. Learn from what went wrong as a means of learning how to make things better.
