Dear Little Wenker is Lil Wenker’s advice column! Send your most pressing questions and pleas for help to lillian.wenker@yale.edu.
Dear Little Wenker,
I’m in a play at the drama school and I’ve been given a gift from God. I get to act alongside my CRUSH!!! Not just that, but we have a scene where we kiss, like make-out-level-kissing! His character does go on to stab me with a knife, and technically I’m playing a prostitute, and to be honest that is REALLY turning me on, but that’s a problem for another day.
What I need help with is this: How do I separate the acting from real life?? We have to do an exercise before each show to establish intimacy where we tell each other which parts of our bodies are green and red zones. Green means touch, red means please don’t. The problem is I have zero red zones. In fact, my boobs are… to put it delicately… extremely green. But I don’t think the director would appreciate me super-greenlighting my clit before each show.
Send help! I’m driving a car that just won’t stop.
Yours,
Kermit
Dear Kermit,
I want to state on the record that I have taken legal action to change my name to “Little.” I was hoping the clerk at the DMV would talk me out of it, but she just shrugged and said, “Is that with an ‘el’ or an ‘le’?” Before I could tell her “le” she had already called the next person in line. Now I don’t know the legal spelling of my name.
To address your problem, let me pull from my own acting experience. I’ve noticed the best actors always say “my character” when speaking about the world of the play. A model sentence could be, “My character would like to red light her butt cheeks” or “My character doesn’t want you to take her into the dressing room, tear off her period-appropriate bloomers, and treat her like the illiterate, plague-infested Victorian minx she really is.”
Finger quotes can also be useful to distance yourself from your character. You might say something like: “I ‘don’t’ want you to grab my waist and thrust me toward your body” or “It would be ‘terrible’ if you slapped my ass now and again.”
A wink every so often also doesn’t hurt.
Yours in green,
Littel Wenker
