Omygod

It is a peculiarly harrowing, morbid anxiety. It is as familiar to the little boy in the second-grade pageant as it is to the Broadway star; the soldier at roll call suffers from it, and so does the speaker at a Rotary luncheon. The stomach churns. The hands sweat. The mouth goes dry and the mind goes blank. Down comes a curtain of helpless despair. The victim wishes he could be somewhere, anywhere else--now. But he cannot be: the audience is waiting.

Writing in the current issue of New York University's Drama Review, Psychoanalyst Donald M. Kaplan traces stage fright through three phases, and then sets the phenomenon in Freudian perspective. Stage fright, he notes, usually begins with the actual scheduling of an event. An actor need only recall "the simple fact of the impending performance" to bring on moods of depression, spells of manic agitation, outbursts among intimates. And that goes for veterans as well as tyros. Marlene Dietrich acted out a classic example of the problem in the 1950 movie Stage Fright. Some years ago. the late Paul Muni was in New York to do a play. "After all the pictures I'd made, after so many years in the theater--yet when I walked up from Sixth Avenue to Broadway and saw 'Paul Muni in Inherit the Wind,' I got sick to my stomach. I got nervous and unhappy about the whole thing." Says Jimmy Stewart, now starring in the Broadway revival of Harvey: "I've never been able to overcome the fear thing. The anticipation of acting is just stark terror."

Like other anxiety states, stage fright triggers defense mechanisms, but they ultimately fail because the fear "enlarges with the passage of time; the defense cannot alter the fixed moment of the performance." That failure induces a second-phase symptom: "the delusion that the audience is convening for an occasion of devastating ridicule and humiliation for the performer. This delusion is frankly paranoiac."

Backstage Defenses. The final hours and minutes are the worst. Just before his entrance, the actor may experience "blocking"--nothing less than disconnection "from all avenues of functioning, including speech." Onstage, blocking gives way to "depersonalization," wherein an observing self watches, as if from afar, a performing self. This terminal point of stage fright is blessedly brief: "Full recovery," says Kaplan, "is usually rapid."

Kaplan maintains that stage fright derives from "all levels of psychosexual development." He points to the anxious adult's tendency to touch his nose or mouth or chin, acts rooted in the infant's use of its own hand as a source of physical comfort when its mother --its source of sustenance--is absent. The actor fears a hostile or unappreciative audience, but knows he must perform, that his hands and body are strictly choreographed; he is defenseless at the height of his anxiety. (As opposed to the paranoiac, who can try to flee his imagined dangers, or to the impostor, who can regulate the time and place of his performance.) So, backstage, the actor goes through various defenses beforehand--holding a cigarette perhaps, or squeezing a rubber ball, or simply wringing his hands. Aside from these manipulations, he may steel himself with pep talk or by elaborately pretending indifference to what lies ahead.

Among other aspects of stage fright that hark back to childhood developments are a fear of losing control and "making a mess" of one's performance (sphincter control), and the fantasy that the audience doubts the actor's "adult sexual power" (early genitalia fascination).

Kaplan insists that stage fright is not a neurotic state, because it is "an induced anxiety." The actor puts up with a painful situation for good reasons --recognition, approval, money. And there is another reason: the actor is fascinated with himself, as, night after night, he enters a period of extreme anxiety and proves to himself that he is not afraid to be afraid. The surest relief from stage fright, says Kaplan, is empathy between actor and audience. The actor, of course, is eager for it, and once the audience reciprocates, stage fright has become "a creative problem" whose solution enriches the performance.

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