GO DEEPER; ASK THE "WHY" by Keith

GO DEEPER; ASK THE "WHY" by Keith - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

Harry Shifman has been teaching acting at LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in the New York City public school system for decades. Over the years, Mr. Shifman has witnessed countless arias of adolescent angst: parental break-ups, suicidal feelings and the horror of teenage relationships. His lesson to his students is simple: remain curious and empathetic. The result is profound. His students leave his class fuller people; they are more engaged participants in the world. This is the testimony of one of those students.

After graduating, I began working professionally in film, television and on broadway. It is now nineteen years later. I am thirty-seven years old and returning to complete my unfinished undergraduate education. My mentor Harry Shifman has been with me every step. His engagement in my life and development did not stop when I threw my cap at graduation. He teaches each student to live a life of action and intentionality even when pushed outside his or her comfort zone. With his gentle, sonorous voice (he is also a hypnotherapist), he reminds his students that pain is necessary for growth and is often the precursor for intellectual and emotional maturation. More than anyone I've met, he embodies the Anaïs Nin quote: "And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in the bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

He teaches acting but his classes offer a full range of intellectual scope. The goal of acting is to embody another human being. It is an intellectual and emotional effort to deconstruct and reconstruct personhood; it is an empathetic desire to understand how psychological, socio-cultural and economic influences shape a person. If the effort and intent are false, the acting will read as false. The challenge comes in how to communicate one's findings in an emotionally honest, fully realized performance that is both entertaining and trenchant. To study acting with Mr. Shifman is to move through the currents of human experience; it is to disentangle personalized and social systems and lay bare how each of us is a singular creation of cultural influences. Mr. Shifman has the eye of a social scientist and the compassion of a priest. His empathetic worldview sparked my initial interest in cultural anthropology, my proposed major at Stanford University.

Mr. Shifman also teaches theater as a connective experience. The supersonic rise of online communication and the resulting creation of a new virtual world create new need for theater. Each night of a live performance brings together disparate groups of people in a unified space (with phones turned off) to share a communal experience. This is all too rare in the present day; we are tethered constantly to the busy status games of a virtual world. Mr. Shifman understands this need for human connection. In rehearsal and class, he creates an environment that nurtures failure and brings true risk onto the stage for the purpose of creating a shared moment.

His belief in humanity is practical and personal. He believes in empowering student development towards one’s individualized gifts. How can a student’s path be cleared of rocks and debris to allow smooth movement for growth? As a public school in a city environment, LaGuardia is populated with students from varying ethnic, cultural, religious and familial situations. Like a good athletic coach, Mr. Shifman recognizes that different students need to be spoken to in different ways. During high school, many students are flooded with feelings of alienation and imperfection. Mr. Shifman is profoundly adept at intuiting a student’s language of communication and connecting with that student in his or her own personal way. During my junior and senior years, I was having a very rough time. My older brother was hurting himself and I was not accepted into the college programs to which I applied. His guidance during this watershed moment is a gift I can never re-pay. His actions were two-fold: he gave me space to fumblingly articulate my experience and also an opportunity channel my overwhelming feelings into a performance. With a very light hand, he gave me validity and agency when I did not know to give them to myself.

As I embark on this new phase of life, Mr. Shifman’s influence feels particularly strong. His mentorship and friendship have emboldened me in countless ways: to risk shifting course at this late point in a career; to believe that I can adapt and offer my gifts forward in an educational environment; to encourage others towards greater self-realization. His lesson is as simple as it is demanding: remain a curious student of the world and work to understand its humble inhabitants.