Why Penn? Anonymous

Standing alone on the stage I faced the spotlight shining on my glistening bald head. The make up artist had done a brilliant job of adding a grim and menacing guise to my face. No, I wasn’t losing any hair at this tender age but I had shaved my head voluntarily to add depth to my character. It wasn’t normal for a junior to shout at seniors or make a mockery of their doings. On stage, I wasn’t the sincere boarding school student giving umpteen hours to perfect dialogues; I was my character.

Acting in stage productions gives me the leeway to divorce myself from my personality in the real world and take on the demeanor of a scripted character, with his own background, dreams and aspirations. From the sympathetic principal of a high school to the ruthless bully, from the flamboyant chairman of a firm to the overweight shy girl, I adopt the characteristics of these fictitious beings and give them life. Having followed and admired Stanislavski’s method acting and emotion memory, I feel I have lived many lives in my short span of seventeen years in the shoes of the many characters I have played. At Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences, I want to seize opportunities to evolve new personalities while remaining true to myself.

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