Curtain Also Rises on Amateurs : Acting Workshop Students Take Center Stage

The difference between the Saturday Matinee Players Showcase and most other Los Angeles acting classes becomes apparent during the coffee breaks.

At most classes that’s a time when the conversation naturally turns to upcoming auditions, agents and roles, both won and lost. At this workshop, which meets at a former child-care center in Granada Hills, the chatter is far less desperate. After all, most of those enrolled here already have secure, successful careers--but not, with one exception, in acting.

“For the people who take my classes for non-professional actors, acting is a hobby,” said the teacher, Susan Lehman, 38, an actress whose career has ranged from Glad bag commercials to Broadway. “And for some of them, it turns into a serious hobby.”

So serious that they are willing to go one giant step further than the private, safe confines of a workshop. On May 12, after seven weeks of instruction, coaching and rehearsals, the nurse, lawyer, psychologist, radar engineer, insurance saleswoman, property manager and others in the workshop will present a performance of scenes at the West End Playhouse in Van Nuys.

They will be performing for friends and relatives--the actors sell the $5 tickets to those they want to invite, and the proceeds go to charities the group chooses. Previous workshops have given the funds to the Shanti Foundation, American Cancer Society, Big Sister and the Wildlife Waystation.

But no matter how friendly the audience, the experience of performing in public is daunting.

“I would go to plays and think that it has to be either an exhilarating or terrible experience to be up there,” said Stephen Oxford, 36, a radar engineer at Hughes Aircraft who has never performed on stage. “I always wondered how it would feel. I guess I’ll soon know,” he added with a nervous laugh.

Oxford was intensely looking over a short play, “The Unexpurgated Life of Bernard Mergendeiler,” by Jules Feiffer that Lehman had given him to work on with Terry Kane, 31, a registered nurse. After a group meeting at the beginning of each workshop session, the students go off into separate rooms to rehearse scenes Lehman assigns to them for practice.

As the morning progresses, Lehman calls them into the living room so that she can hear their scene and coach them.

Naomi Boumeester, 39, who sells life and health insurance for an agency in Pasadena, was sitting with her scene partner, Ann Sundin White, a property manager, in what used to be a playroom at the child-care center. In one corner of the almost empty room was a rocking horse and an alphabet chart on the wall.

Boumeester first enrolled in the workshop in 1986--this is her fourth time through. “I love it,” she said with a mixture of gusto and awe. “The first time I finished a scene and came off the stage my first thought was, ‘I don’t care if anybody liked it, it worked for me.’

“I actually think they did like it,” she continued with a giggle, “but that’s not what mattered. My lines were right, the feelings I had up there were right and the feeling when I was done was just incredible.”

It was obvious that she was having a good time working on scenes from John Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves” and Lanford Wilson’s “Ludlow Fair,” both of which she did in a Brooklyn accent.

“Naomi would rob a bank, if she could be sure the video cameras would be on,” Lehman said later with affection.

Lehman, who appeared on Broadway in the short-lived “The Goodbye People” and on television in “General Hospital,” “Days of Our Lives,” last year’s “Robert Guillaume Show” and several made for television movies, primarily earns her living through teaching. Indeed, she has developed a cottage industry out of teaching acting techniques to non-professional actors. Her classes include some that give people just a taste of the acting process and others that encourage them to apply those tools to their everyday lives. One of her courses is called, “Career Power Through Acting Techniques.”

She started the Saturday Matinee Players Showcase in 1986 for her non-professional acting students who wanted to go further than improvisation games and exercises. The students pay $175 for the seven-session showcase course that is entirely geared toward scene work.

“Some of my people become total acting junkies,” Lehman said. “I call it a life-threatening hobby.”

The threatening aspect of getting up on stage before an audience is exactly what appeals to some members of the workshop. “It deals with anxieties and fears that are difficult for me,” said Craig Childress, 35, a psychologist involved in schizophrenia research at UCLA. “So I am throwing myself into a situation that is anxious and fearful so I can work on that.”

Childress and Terry Markwell were outside on the front walk, competing against traffic, jet and lawn mower noise to read through a scene from Michael Weller’s “At Home.” Markwell is the only career actress in the group. She recently returned to Los Angeles after filming several episodes of the revived “Mission Impossible” in Australia.

“I was part of the regular team on the show,” she said, “until they killed me off.”

Markwell said she was taking the workshop because she enjoyed working with Lehman and because the idea of putting on a show by non-professionals with the proceeds going to charity appealed to her. She helped some of the students through their anxieties.

White, a soft-spoken woman who was working on “Ludlow Fair” with Boumeester, said she had previously challenged herself to be more assertive in public by joining a public-speaking club. The acting workshop, White said, carries that assertiveness into her more private life.

“I got married a little over a year ago,” she said, “and since I met my new husband it seemed that all of my interests were eclipsed by his. I tried to get into the things that he likes--golf and what have you. But I was getting a little resentful. I wanted to do something just for myself.”

The results, so far, have been positive.

“He has really encouraged me,” White said. “If we both have things that we can do, separately, it makes it so much better when we are together.”

Although most of the students in the workshop consider acting just a hobby, no matter how “life threatening,” a few have been so seriously bitten by the bug that they are interested in going a step further.

Kane has quit her full-time job in a hospital to work free-lance through a nursing agency. This is to give her more time and a flexible schedule for acting classes and eventually, she hopes, roles. Vicki Roth, a bookkeeper at Beverly Hills Escrow, is looking for an agent for commercial representation as she continues with classes. And not surprisingly, Boumeester has thought about going professional.

“Toward the end of last year I actually ventured out and auditioned for a national commercial and for a community theater role, neither of which I got,” she said. “But just the experience of putting myself out there and taking that kind of risk was so wonderful that I might do it again.”

Would she consider a career in acting?

“I like my job and the security a lot, don’t get me wrong,” Boumeester said with a laugh. “I’m basically a conservative person with a flamboyant side to me.

“But would I drop everything if I thought I could make a living at acting? The answer is: in a second.”

Susan Lehman’s acting classes for non-professionals are scheduled throughout the year. For more information , call (818) 705-0654.