Two years ago, in my senior spring at Northwestern University, I defended an honors thesis called “Going on Seventeen” about type, the ingenue, and specifically teenage girlhood onstage. Of the twenty-four months since then, I have spent roughly twelve either playing or understudying a teenage girl. (Favorites I’ll reference include The Music Man’s Zaneeta Shinn, Hello Dolly’s Ermengarde, The Wizard of Oz’ Dorothy Gale, Cinderella's stepsister, and the “silly girls” of Beauty and the Beast).
During that time, I’ve become particularly familiar with a secondary teen-girl-onstage “type” alternative to the ingenue: the supporting comic relief figure, who almost always dances, and frequently has very strong emotions which she must express through very limited vocabulary (of her few lines, the majority are wails or exclamations of “ye gods”). As a secondary character, some leading ingenue bonds are loosened: in particular, she is allowed to be very funny and slightly strange. However, she still tends to exist and act primarily in relationship to men, and her secondary status means that any hint of nuance (occasionally offered to a more central ingenue) is rarely afforded her. Often, in fact, her lines just don’t make a lot of sense.
Despite her differences from the classic ingenue, my thesis findings on how to positively approach frustrating teen girl roles have proven true for these supporting characters as well: a thoughtful, critical, re-imaginative approach to the text, built in collaboration between performer and director, is key to finding truth, logic, and nuance (and not wanting to vomit). The frequently significant physical life afforded these characters as dancing roles also remains a powerful vehicle with which to imbue these young women with some strength and agency.
But as an actor, no matter how many hours you spent reading and writing academically about this topic, your work must eventually move from the theoretical to the practical. Whether or not this secondary screamer is written with a lot of nuance, truth, or logic, you have to figure out how to connect with her, empathize with her, and bring the fullness of yourself to the role.
For me, acting has often been a way “try on” or “rehearse” potential versions of myself: playing the Baker’s Wife at 17 (in the production of Into the Woods we all did in high school) allowed me to “try on” womanhood as I stood on the brink of it myself; playing androgynous or male characters has allowed me to experiment with presentations of gender; playing seven different mothers in college let me think really critically about how I felt about that kind of caretaking. Playing teenagers has been an interesting practice in moving in the opposite direction: peeling away layers, or slipping back into a version of myself that I once was.
And sometimes, the fit is better than expected.
Because sometimes being in your early-to-mid twenties can feel startlingly like being a teenage girl. Maybe at sixteen our relationships to the world were a little more simple and straightforward, but in these first years out of college, you find yourself once again in a liminal space, a time of transition, a period of re-figuring-out who you are and not-quite-knowing what you’re doing.
And sometimes, this game of dress-up is about trying on a version of yourself that you could have been. Sometimes, playing a messy giggly manic horny teenager who meets up in secret with her bad-news boyfriend means slipping into a version of yourself that you didn’t even allow yourself to be when you WERE sixteen (and were too busy being the most obnoxiously well-behaved innocent boring sixteen-year-old anyone has ever met).
So until I’m back to playing moms (my inexplicable type for all of college), maybe I won’t complain about having to put all my homework on theatrical teenage girlhood into practice. I’ll text my friends 8-minute-long voice memos about my night, and the girls of river city will gleefully gossip in the corner of the gym. My friends and I will bemoan the stupidity of boys, and an abandoned stepsister will sing “what’s the matter with the man?”. I’ll gaze at tiktoks of mountain hikes, make meaningful eye contact with a friend when someone particular walks into a room, or find the crying emoji at the top of my “frequently used”, and Dorothy Gale will dream about flying somewhere else, the “silly girls” will fan themselves and harmonize when Gaston walks by, and Ermengarde will polka the length of the stage while maintaining a constant wail. I’ll stare in the mirror figuring out my new haircut, and Zaneeta Shinn will smooth her new dress and adjust her corsage. I’ll be going on twenty-four, and she’ll be going on seventeen, and somehow between the two of us, we’ll figure it out.
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