eunice wong
Actor
narrator
Yogi
Writer
Editor
When I moved to New York to attend Juilliard, I was straight out of a suburban high school and a Grade A Introvert. My dynamic new classmates seemed to be inexhaustible and blindingly confident social animals. “There’s been a terrible mistake,” I thought with growing terror.
I was brooding alone in the cafeteria during Orientation Week when John Stix—legendary director and acting teacher, 74 years old, small, white-haired, nicknamed Yoda—shuffled over with his lunch tray and sat next to me. He asked me kindly how I was. It spilled out: Terrible Mistake. Horribly Shy. Panicking. Must Go Home.
John chewed. Then, fixing me with his gaze, he said, “I think you chose acting as your salvation.”
I stayed.
John died in 2004. He is buried a few minutes from where I live.
I visit him often and tell him about the plays I’m doing.
“Is the work personal, connected, exploratory, honest, reaching for the truth?
Honest on the stage, in the moment, and revealing everything.
What do you want to tell us that you’re not telling us.”
“Old Henry explained to her that the Ancient People had developed masonry and pottery far beyond any other crafts… Their pottery was their most direct appeal to water, the envelope and sheath of the precious element itself…
“The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself – life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?”
