October 24, 2017
PAL PROJECT STATEMENT OF INTENT
I didn’t enter the acting profession for the same reasons that virtually every other actor does. My interest, my need, was therapeutic. My journey from the beginning to where I am today is detailed below. It is a story I have not shared widely, and certainly not to this detail but that is why I feel it fits with the spirit of the Performing Arts Legacy Project. I am going to “come out” so to speak at this late stage of my career and my life. So here goes.
I grew up with a speech disfluency that manifested itself in numerous situations as a stutter. A condition that shaped my entire life. I was so ashamed of my speech that I developed habits and techniques to mask it and these eventually became instinctive. And most damaging of these instincts was to withdraw from outward social contacts – you couldn’t stutter if you didn’t have to speak to anyone. High School was a watershed time for me in terms of how my disfluency would affect my life. I had just a few close friends, didn’t join any clubs, though I ran track and cross-country, and I went on, I think, three dates and they were all disasters. College was a little easier for me because your major course of study puts you around the same people so you can find a comfort level. College also more clearly defined the situations that prompted my speech to block; authoritarian figures, speaking out loud in class and unfamiliar girls and people in close quarters. My high school demeanor had been quiet and shy but my college demeanor had progressed to just being quiet. My major was Urban Planning and because I had done some meaningful work and won some awards in college I landed a terrific job with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development(HUD) after graduation. For me it was a dream job and I did well in my work and felt comfortable and safe and was able to mask my disfluency and still remain effective. So with this level of confidence I saw good things for myself and perhaps a long career at the agency… until my program was consolidated and moved to San Francisco. The new department head believed in giving the Reps(me) more say in how our program distributed grant money. A great and progressive idea at the time and enthusiastically embraced by my co-workers. For me it was problematic because we all sat in a conference room to divvy up a large pot of grant money allocated by HUD in Washington, DC, and of course there was never enough for all of our clients(cities and counties). It was a cacophony of voices challenging and questioning each other’s projects to keep more money available for your own projects. I would start to block when my projects were under scrutiny and unfortunately, my instincts would kick-in and I would shut down. It was a sobering revelation that I would not be able to do my job at the level I knew I was capable of unless I eliminated my speech issues.
I had read about actors and singers who stuttered in their everyday lives but not while performing. This intrigued me. And I just happened to be serving on the Board of an Asian-American acting company and they encouraged Board members to take their acting classes. So I did. I was around familiar people so I didn’t have as much of a problem as I thought I might. In fact, in a final presentation I blew everybody away with a monologue I had written and performed and afterward the teacher and fellow Board members encouraged me to audition for the Summer Congress at the American Conservatory Theatre(ACT). I picked a classic monologue I thought I could handle and they worked with me. I know some of them suspected I had problems with my speech but they treated me like any other actor and our work together paid off because I got in. Now a big decision for me as I would have to take a leave of absence from HUD. Another option, logically, was speech therapy. But at the stuttering support group meetings I had attended(in secret) virtually everyone there still stuttered to varying degrees after years of speech therapy. Also, therapy would involve appointments and that would eventually draw attention. I presented my leave of absence request to my department head as a quixotic adventure to enable me to grow as a person. He granted my request. So someone who had never before expressed any profound interest in the theatre, let alone becoming an actor, I jumped in.
After the Summer Congress I was invited back for a full year of advanced study. What helped immeasurably during this period was that you were put into groups and you stayed with the same actors through the program period. Having a comfort level went a long way toward getting through both programs. But I did have problems, especially with Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw – linguistic dexterity challenges even for a normal speaker. My voice and speech teachers encouraged me and impressed upon me the importance of doing the exercises, some of which I still use today. After I finished the full year at ACT I had another quandary, what do I do with these newly acquired voice, speech and acting tools? My everyday speech had improved considerably and I didn’t have to use as many of my masking tricks but authoritarian figures, extemporaneously speaking out loud and certain girls and people still caused me to block.
To the consternation of my family and surprise of my friends I decided to leave HUD entirely and move to New York because that’s where all the theatre was happening and I could work on my disfluency in anonymity. My plan was to go all in with exercises, classes, auditions and work if I could get it and then move back to San Francisco and HUD with a resonant unobstructed voice. Hah!! Shows you what I knew. Actually, I did have an emotional sense of what I was doing. I knew that this experience that I was embarking on had to be painful, a mixture of fear, humiliation and dread, in order for me to be successful. It was just this sixth sense I had about this journey. It wasn’t until years later that I learned there was a clinical speech therapy term for it – desensitizing. The more times you expose yourself the more chances you have to chip away at the block obstructing your natural voice. Once in New York I had a regimen and I became a maniac in following it; speech and voice exercises everyday for weeks, months, on end. Then I started auditioning to challenge myself though always hesitant that I might land a part. The first role I landed was a small supporting role, Brighella, in The Servant of Two Masters with Pan Asian Repertory Theater. I didn’t have any problems with the few lines I had but going out in front of an audience was difficult and the Director kept admonishing me for hiding my face. I got through the first theatre experience and felt really good about myself. The second role I landed was more substantial and I really labored over that script. What I discovered at ACT was that the script work help keep my mind off the words and lines that were going to give me problems. I broke down all of my scenes into beats and I gave myself an objective and obstacle in every beat. I also wrote an extensive biography about my character, from birth to death. I did have difficulty with three lines in that play and I overcame them by putting a pause in one and changing the word order in the other two. Apparently people liked what I did in that role because I got a talent manager and invitations to audition after we closed. I didn’t do my voice and speech regimen during rehearsals or the run of the play but after closing I went right back to it. It became so ingrained in me that if I didn’t do the regimen I felt I had unfinished business at the end of the day. I got hooked and started to audition for everything and seeking more opportunities to fail.
ever tried, ever failed,
no matter.
try harder, fail harder,
fail better.
Samuel Beckett
I can’t exactly say when I lost my disfluency because it goes away in micro-fragments, noticeable in a way that you might stop and think to yourself, “jeez, I haven’t blocked in a week”, then you go about your day. It’s that subtle. Unlike the anxiety and trauma that surfaces as you grow into the disfluency. I’ve often analyzed what it was that I did to myself and I’ve concluded that I rewired my brain. All of those tricks and habits that had become instincts over the years to mask my disfluency had developed their own synapses and byways in my brain in service of protecting me. The relentless, monotonous, voice and speech exercises and the voluminous instances of desensitizing served to break up those hardened impulses and allow other newer synapses born of confidence, self-esteem and fewer instances of failure to grow and takeover my mental process of speech. I accomplished what I set out to accomplish when I moved to NYC. I just didn’t think it would take so long. The most liberating aspect of where I am today? The absence of that emotional weight in the morning when I got up that asked the question, “am I going to have a good day or bad day today?”
Respectfully submitted,
Glenn Kubota
