Whimsy: letting go of perfection

When I was a first-year acting student at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts, we had a phenomenal lecture series with such speakers as David Mamet (playwright, director), Wendy Wasserstein (Pulitzer Prize winning playwright), Catherine Zuber (Tony Awards for costume design), and the wonderful actor, Kevin Kline (Oscar and Tony Award winner).

Kevin Kline told a story that I keep with me always. He had auditioned for every single acting program out there. And had been rejected by every one. By the time he got to his Juilliard audition, he had given up completely. Juilliard, for those of you who don’t know, is the holy grail of acting schools along with Yale School of Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Mr. Kline said that he knew he had absolutely no chance of getting into Juilliard, so he went in to the audition with a sense of “whimsy.” That whimsy, that playful, buoyant, light ,and maybe even silly quality, turned out to be just what Juilliard was looking for. When Mr. Kline let go, stopped pushing, his work came alive.

He got in and the rest is Hollywood royalty history. You can see Kline’s whimsy even in his most serious characters and screen moments.

It reminds me of another story I heard from my father about the conductor Benjamin Zander. Mr. Zander was working with an astonishing cellist who travelled the world doing contests. He always came in second. One day, he came in first! Mr. Zander asked him what he had done differently and the cellist answered, “I said, ‘f%#* it!” Mr. Zander refers to the phenomenon where we let go of perfection as, “Getting beyond the F*%# it.”

This week, let go of perfection—it doesn’t work anyway. Play with whimsy and get beyond the f*%# it!