Heroes can mean a house with chickens (ii)

Something wonderful happened today that gave me a deeper understanding of working with text. Walter was working with me on my first monologue:

I studied nursing when I was young. Everyone had big dreams for me, and so did I. I wanted to go to the United States, and become a nurse and earn dollars, and send them home and be a hero to my family. But I ended up in a country a little closer to home...

The first thing Walter said was, "Why don't you try to identify what colour you text is? So be very specific with the colour – maybe this section is red or bright blue."

Somehow, Walter had intuited that thinking in colour is easy for me. I could, for example, easily tell him, "Well, I was thinking of something warm here in my dialogue with my daughter, like yellow or orange, but I think what Haruka wanted is a bright sky blue."

So we were working on this for a while, but the real revelation for me was when Walter said, "You know, I don't hear the "nursing" in the text. What does it mean to be a "nurse", and how is that different from being a shopkeeper or a banker? Right now they might as well be the same thing. What does "nurse" mean, firstly to you as a human being, and then to Maricel?

I thought about my mum being a nurse; I thought about each of the keywords: United States, dollars (yes, green American dollars, not the Hong Kong dollar), hero…

Yes – I realised that part of the problem with this whole monologue was that everything was kind of generic. In fact, I actually didn't like the text precisely because of clichés like "hero". But now, I realised that what I could do as an actor was to give a precise experience and meaning to each of the words. "Hero" for Maricel might be mean a house with chickens, or to see her child grow up.

Words were no longer words, they became alive and fluid in my mouth. Every time I said it, it was like opening a door in one of those advent calenders. A discovery of something new.

"Hero", instead of blazing clichéd heroic, now became softer. And the incredible thing was, each reference had the ability to change the cadence of the whole phrase. "Nurse" became compressed in sound, which grounded the rest of the sentence.

Wow. Give me a dictionary or telephone book. As an actor, I can reference whole worlds of experience.