The actor's job as Stanislavski saw it in its simplest form is to bring the life of the human soul to the stage. Not the life of the character's human soul, the life of the actor's human soul. Warts and all. Especially the warts.

For me, acting is more about personal revelation than anything else. Abdomen-ripping, not-for-the-faint-of-heart revelation. A public, forehead to foot, layer by layer, scalpel slicing of oneself until everything that was inside lies piled in a steaming heap at one's feet. Not a pretty picture (apologies to any aspiring actors who hoped acting was about hiding behind masks) but a picture that (good) audiences demand and deserve and one that begs a thousand questions; the most often asked being: How does an actor do that for an entire film or play? The answer is: he (or she) doesn't. He does it only for a moment.

In his book "True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor" (in my opinion the first book on an actor's shelf and then later, perhaps the only one) writer/director David Mamet makes clear his belief that the actor's job is simply to concern oneself with the scene. Period. Forget the arc of the play; forget the arc of the character. Figure out what it is you're "doing" in the scene, reduce it to its absolute simplest form and then do it. And when that scene is finished, move on to another. Serving the scene is the only way for an actor to serve the play. Any attempt to do more than that, he says, risks undermining the writer's design which would then, as vicious circles do, loop back on itself and destroy the actor's chances to succeed scene by scene, at which time, of course, all is lost. Thank you, David Mamet.

In the tradition of Mike Leigh, Henry Jaglom, and Larry David, directors who have successfully experimented with giving actors only what they need to play the scene, Alejandro, like a mother hen protecting her brood, vigilantly shoos us (the actors) away from the arc of this story, the arc of our characters whenever one of us threatens to slink in from the shadows and grab onto one of them. The result is that we're forced to focus only on that which belongs to us: the immediate, the here and the now. It's a frightening and exhilarating way to work.

What might have scared me to the point of running in the other direction has ironically become instead an amazingly safe and freeing space for me to do what it is I do. After a few days of shooting, I am suddenly and oddly comforted to find myself flying, shakily at times, from trapeze swing to trapeze swing without the safety net of a script. It's a fair and simple bargain really. I focus on the rhythm and trajectory of the bar in front of me and catch it in my chalk-dusted palms to the best of my ability and training or I slip and die. That's the job.

I have no idea at this stage if what we're doing here will work as a whole. But then, it's not up to me to make it work as a whole. I have a strong intuition that it will. And intuition is what led me to this project in the first place. I would be stunned to learn that it would fail me now. Thank you, Alejandro Adams.