Mockingbird Response--Ming

Dear Ones,

I had a brain malfunction and posted my To Kill A Mockingbird response on my own personal  class blog.  Here's what it said:

The actors I was most impressed with were those who played grown-up Scout and Atticus Finch (Constance Macy and Dan Rodden, respectively).  

As for the kid actors?  They weren’t bad.  But it occurred to me I had no idea what would make a child actor good onstage.  I wondered what a child actor would have to do to impress me beyond simply my lauding their memorization of lines and what to do with their bodies and when. These things are more machinations than anything else, and realizing that called into question what I think good stage acting is, exactly.  Why was I so impressed with Macy and Rodden? It was something about their world-weariness.  They invested the machinations with more meaning, because they could.  Perhaps that’s what “cognitively developed” is, when we speak of it in terms of embodiment.

I was reminded when we read Whitmore’s chapter on child acting troupes of the New York Times film review of Aliens, from 1986.  Walter Goodman writes: 

“Anybody who saw Aliens can guess what has happened. The question is whether it will happen to Miss Weaver, the marines and a little girl, the colony’s sole survivor, who looks and acts like a Hollywood child actress. If that doesn’t matter to you, forget the whole thing.”

The little girl, known as “Newt”, is played by Carrie Henn, which interested me because Ms. Henn went on…not to act, or even want to act.  She was, in 2001, a CalState educated substitute schoolteacher.  A respectable school and a respectable job, but nothing flashy.  Wikipedia’s page on the film states:

“According to the casting director, Newt was the most difficult role to cast: schoolchildren were auditioned, but many of them had acted in commercials and were accustomed to smiling after saying their lines, a trait that the producers wished to avoid as it would not suit Aliens’ dark tone. Henn, whose father was stationed at an American military base, was chosen out of 500 children for the role, although she had no previous acting experience. Henn received a Saturn Award for best performance by a young actor.”

And then there’s a where-is-she-now article from 2001, in People Magazine:

“Although Henn had no acting experience, director James (Titanic) Cameron, making just his third feature film, says he was drawn to the third-grader’s “great face and expressive eyes” and cast her to play the beleaguered daughter of murdered space colonists. “There was a quiet, soulful quality that I was looking for with the character,” Cameron says. “Carrie had it.” “

Maybe what I liked about Rodden and Macy—their “soulfulness”—could be described as an ability to invest their lines and physical movements with meaning.  

Macy delivered mature Scout’s last lines, wherein she sees her own self as a child loved and protected over the years from Boo Radley’s point of view, with the same shaky voice and tearful eyes I saw in Michelle Obama at the culmination of her recent DNC speech.  What made me cry at Michelle Obama’s speech?  Maybe it was the fact that she was talking about none other than children—her children.