Libby Skala created a one-woman show based on her relationship with her grandmother, the Oscar-nominated actress, Lilia Skala.While most grandmothers would be horrified to learn that their granddaughter wanted to be an actress, Lilia instead was pleased that she would no longer be the only "black sheep" in the family. Here, Libby shares her struggles and triumphs becoming an actor, and the long and sometimes difficult process of developing her very own show.

 

How do you know when you’ve done a good show?

I usually can tell by the expressions on people’s faces. When I’ve done a really good show, people have this “transported” look on their faces, like they’re in another world still and they haven’t come back yet.

What kinds of things do people say to you after shows?

People say they wish had known my grandmother, other people say it made them think about their grandparents who they either had a relationship with, or wish they had a relationship with. Sometimes people don’t want to talk afterwards, and I get a note later saying that they were too emotional to stick around afterwards.

Why do you think strangers come to see this show… people who don’t know you, or are unfamiliar with your grandmother’s work?

Some of the people are performers who are developing their own one-person shows, and they just want to see how someone else does it. That happens a lot, actually. Do you find that more performers are developing their own shows?

I would say that overall, yes… I think it’s cheaper to produce, and there’s a greater profit margin because there’s just one cast member and the performer is generally also the writer.

But also, I think it helps people find employment. If they latch onto something and start writing their own one-person show that only they can do… it’s a showcase that they can take anywhere. It’s employment that they can initiate rather than waiting to be cast in something.

I’ve done the show at festivals in Canada, one in Chicago, and the Edinburgh festival. The Canadian Fringe Festival has a built in audience who come just because they want to see what’s going on at the festival. My show, it’s the kind of thing that, for a fringe audience, if they don’t want to see something like… Chronicles of My Penis… that was the name of one of the shows. My show is more wholesome and has a more family-oriented feel to it. So it has a built-in audience because of that.

What does your show do to an audience?

I think it gives them insight into this woman, my grandmother, and her life and her struggles and her triumphs. I hope it inspires an audience to realize that despite the obstacles that my grandmother encountered in her life and her career, she overcame them and still went on to accomplish great things. Above all, I hope the show gives people hope.

For example, there was an Asian woman who came to see the show in March, and she said that she wanted a copy of the script because she was an acting student and she wanted to learn monologues from the script. She said she came to this country and, like my grandmother, her first language was not English. And she said the fact that my grandmother came here from Austria and still managed to succeed, that meant so much to her. That gives me hope.

In a more general sense, why should people go to the theater rather than stay home and watch tv?

I think live theater is exciting because the audience is a participant in it. There’s something about being in the moment with the actors on stage, something about the possibility of anything happening. You never know exactly what’s going to happen, and it’s never exactly the same thing twice.

What attracted you to acting?

I was a pretty quiet person in school, and a friend of mine asked if I wanted to go into the city and take acting classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse. I wasn’t thinking that I was interested in acting, but suddenly in class I had this feeling that maybe this was something I could do. I could get up and do something interesting on stage. It worked… there was focus to it and it was something I enjoyed.

What was your grandmother’s reaction when you said you wanted to become an actor?

She was thrilled, I think, because it meant that she would no longer be the only black sheep in the family. She never felt understood by her family. She was so fanatical about working and rehearsing and putting that first in her life, and her family just didn’t understand. So when I said I wanted to be an actor, she was very relieved that there was someone else who could understand her.

Did you study acting in college?

I took acting classes, but my parents didn’t want me to get a degree in theater, because they felt that if they were going to pay for my education, that it would have to be a traditional liberal arts degree. I got a degree in English literature with a theater emphasis. So I was able to take classes in the English department, studying plays and Shakespeare, and I was able to apply some of my acting credits towards my degree.

How was the transition from school to the real world?

I had a very difficult time transitioning from being a student to somebody who calls himself an actor but doesn’t have anything to show for it. I went to some cattle calls and it felt miserable to me. When I went to an audition, it literally felt like I was walking towards this wooden stake that was pointed at my gut. There was no joy in it.

And I decided that if acting was painful for me, that it’s not something I should be doing! So I actually packed up and went to visit friends in California, and then I headed to Seattle and I ended up living there for seven years. That’s where I became a member of AFTRA and SAG, which eventually led to my Equity card, actually… I gave up acting and it came right back to me! I had several friends from college who were living there and writing plays and they needed people to work with. So I immediately found things to work on even without auditioning.

I worked for a season as a stand-in on Northern Exposure, and I started taking an improv class with Gary Austin. And it was in his class that I performed this character, Lilia, my grandmother. And when he heard she was nominated for an Academy Award, he said, “You’ve got to write a one-woman show about this woman!”

How did you begin work on the show?

I had no idea how to write a one-woman show, I had no idea whose perspective it would be from, I had no idea how to condense her life into a 90 minutes, nor what the arc of the story would be… I had no idea how to begin. And Gary said to me, “It’s good that you don’t know all these things!” He said just to write down everything I remembered her saying to me, every story she ever told me, every dialogue I ever had with her, and then we’d start putting those things up in the class.

So it really developed in this improv class. He’d put me in certain situations and say, “I want to see Lilia in a crisis situation.” For example, the scene would be Lilia at a party and the people in the class are guests, and there’s a fire in the building. We’d improvise what might happen in that situation. None of those situations ended up in the show, but they helped in getting me to think about how Lilia thinks and what her mannerisms are, how she behaves and reacts, her facial expressions and her physicality, her tonality, her vocal placement, and all that.

At first, I was overwhelmed about how to begin writing it, so I made a goal that every night before I went to bed I would write just one sentence. Actually, I got this idea from a woman, a very spiritual woman who is sort of a guide for others. I spoke to her about the show and she said that when she was beginning a new project, every night before she went to bed she would get a piece of paper and write “God directed…” at the top of the page. Then she would just listen and listen until an idea came to her that was clear, and she would write that down.

It kind of took the pressure off me, you know? So every night I would sit down with a piece of paper and write, “God directed…” at the top, and I would listen and listen and listen until one little memory or one little idea came. And I would write down one sentence, one memory, one piece of dialogue. And that one little idea would lead to a big long speech or a big long scene of three pages. So every night I would write three long pages with the intention of just writing one sentence.

How long was the development period? How long did it take before you felt you had a complete show?

A really long time. It was January of 1996 when I first began writing single sentences at the top of a page, and then Gary said he couldn’t spend the time working on the show with me, because he was spending more time in New York than Seattle. So I actually moved to New York because I really thought this was my thing… this is what I was called to work on.

Artistic New Directions, a non-profit theater company that puts up works in progress for people that are developing pieces, they invited me to develop my piece, which at that point was just three or four scenes and some monologues and bits of dialogue. So I literally just took two or three of the scenes and put them up in front of the audience. I think I had three chairs and for each scene I would go to a different chair in a different place in the theater.

But I still didn’t think it was a show! I still didn’t have the arc, I didn’t know what the denouement was, where the drama was, the conflict. It was just a nice grandmother talking to her nice granddaughter. And Gary said, “It’ll come, it’ll come!” Well, it never came.

Then one day a friend of mine from Seattle, she invited me to come back and do my entire show as a work in progress. And I said, “I don’t have a show!” But she said to just put together enough scenes to make a full length show, and we’d put it up as a work-in-progress.

So I did the show in Seattle as a work-in-progress and later, when I was back in New York I got a call from a woman who had seen the show. She was doing her own show at a festival in British Columbia and she invited me to bring my show. It was starting in a week and some shows had dropped out and she said I would get 100% of the box office, there would be no expenses other than a plane ticket… all I had to do was get myself there and do the show.

And, again, I said, “I don’t have a show!”

And she said, “Do what I saw you do in Seattle and call it a show and people will love it.”

So I did. It just so happened that I had frequent flier miles and I went to the festival, called it a show, and it was very well received. There was no press, but the audience wrote some very nice comments about the show, and… that’s pretty much what it is today.

So you never built in a conflict or an arc or any of that stuff you were worried about?

No! I tried many times and even after that I did the show at the Sanford Meisner theater and Trisha Paoluccio, who’s in Fiddler on the Roof right now, and her husband, Gabriel Barre, he’s a director… they came to see the show, and Gabriel called me afterwards and said he’d been asked to go to the Cape Cod Theater Project to work on a piece of his choice and he asked if I wanted to work on my show with him.

Now the thing was, Gary Austin had seen the show and thought it was very tame, very goody-two shoes. He was disappointed that I wasn’t revealing anything about myself, and he felt that was a weakness of the show. And I so I explained that to Gabriel, that I didn’t want to be wimpy, I wanted to go as far out as needed and take risks.

So at his prompting, I added some scenes that I hadn’t included in the show to that point. There was a scene about an experience in Los Angeles that was not a pleasant experience, it was a “casting couch” experience which my grandmother warned me about, but I was determined to ignore her advice and live my own life. Of course, she was right.

Anyway, we added this whole thing about me wanting to break free from my mentor… I performed the show a few times with the added scenes, but eventually ended up deleting them. I don’t know if I was just uncomfortable revealing those things in front of an audience, but it was becoming unpleasant for me . I was dreading performing the show. It had evolved into Lilia scolding me for an hour and a half and we never got to see Lilia’s charming side, flirting with the audience, all the stuff I loved about her.

And I knew that if I didn’t return the show to how it used to be, I would never be able to do it! So I threw out everything that we had developed and went literally back to that basic script from when it was little more than a work in progress. And the critics came, and they loved it. I fell in love with the piece again and it had that freshness about it, the excitement of doing it exactly how I wanted to do it.

What are your goals for the show?

The philosophy that Gary Austin teaches, that I have tried to embrace, is that instead of going to some cattle call with 600 other actors and getting cast in some bit role because you’re an unknown actor, you should create your own material and become so well known for doing that, that you’re asked to be in other things.

So, I would like to see the show pick up and take off so that I become somewhat known for doing it, and other things come to me as a result of it. I would also like to develop other material.

The thing is… I have trouble doing certain things. Like, certain commercials. For instance, I was called in for a commercial audition for a security system. And I had to walk along while speaking directly into the camera saying, “More and more people are robbed every day…” planting these seeds of fear in people’s minds. And it just felt really manipulative and I just could not walk and talk at the same time. And I think it’s because something inside of me wasn’t able to do something I didn’t believe in.

What do you struggle with as an actor?

The fear of being bad. Being bad at auditions. I can tell when things are clicking and everything is flying. And all it takes is one little speck of self-doubt to kill a performance.

It’s almost like that quote from Roosevelt, “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” It’s that self-doubt that is the killer. There was a time in my life that I didn’t have any doubts about acting. I don’t know what it was that turned that around. Criticism, or a bad review or being put down, knowing that I wasn’t living up to a director’s expectation… I don’t know. I really feel it’s almost like a fungus that gets under your skin sometimes.

This is so morbid… I wanted this to be inspiring!

What is inspiring is knowing that in spite of your fears and insecurities, you’ve managed to create something so wonderful. A lot of people would look at you and think you’ve got it all figured out.

Yeah, there’s something about knowing that we each have those frailties. I think that’s also what theater is about and why we have to go to the theater. To see human frailties because it reminds us that we’re not alone and we don’t have to condemn ourselves for not being perfect all the time. When we see people from the outside, it looks like they’re so together and they’ve figured it out, but maybe that’s not always the case.

-K.W.