Playing With My Emotions

A personal essay by Aimee Zirker

Diane Roeder, Irena Synkova, Anne-Marie, Cheshire Cat, Izzi, Homer, Magic Carpet, Grace, Queen of the Farm.

These are some of the many personas that I have portrayed in various performances throughout my life. Each one of these characters holds a special place in my heart as I felt their emotions and literally put a piece of myself into each of them. I have had an emotional, dare I say, spiritual, experience with each of them. There’s something unique that happens that cannot be described to anyone else when you become a character. All you have is some lines and a little stage direction and then it’s up to you to make those things into a living, breathing human being. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never experienced this sensation of combining yourself and a character together so let me help you visualize what it’s like.

Let’s take the character of Diane Roeder, one of my favorite roles I got to play. All I knew about Diane going into my first rehearsal was that she was the wife of a big businessman who was being sued for having unsafe working conditions. That’s all that Diane would have been if I didn’t work to create a character from this knowledge. I thoroughly examined my lines trying to find out who Diane Roeder was. I began to pick out little details that helped me find who she was. First and foremost she was a mother. She looked out not only for her kids, but also for the kids in her husband’s business. She was also a wife. Her husband’s negative reputation followed her and caused her to be excluded, but she still supported her husband even if she didn’t always agree with him.

Learning about my character was one thing, but actually creating her was a whole new battle. I’ve never been a mom or a wife and I’ve never lived in the 1930s. Instead of focusing on our differences, I focused on our similarities. I knew what it felt like to be excluded. (could there be a story here) I love kids and I look out for them like Diane does. As I started to focus on our similarities, I began to connect Diane Roeder and Aimee Zirker. I felt her pain as she heard the townspeople gossip about her husband. I felt her caring nature as she stood up for children.

Pretty soon, I wasn’t just acting the part of Diane Roeder. When I was performing, I was Diane Roeder. One of her big scenes is a heated argument she had with her husband. When I was saying those lines it didn’t feel like I was pretending. The anger I felt was real and the words I was saying were my own thoughts. It actually took me a minute at the end of every show to go back to being Aimee because I was so invested in being Diane. I remember feeling so sad when I was Diane for the last time because I knew after that point that that persona would never be coming back out of me. I had a connection with Diane and that experience was so emotional that it even felt spiritual. 

One of the cool things about being in a family that was heavily involved with theater was that I was able to have those spiritual experiences with my family. My mom directed about half of the 24 performances I have been in in my life and therefore each performance was a whole family event. My sisters performed in the show with me and my dad and brother often spent hours building sets or working behind the scenes of the performances. Because we were all so involved, we were able to have some of these emotional experiences together. Disclaimer: my family is not good at communicating and we rarely talk about our emotions with each other. So being able to share these experiences while performing really drew us closer together.

This is the most obvious in a play I did called I Never Saw Another Butterfly. First off, this play was special because my mom performed in this same play when she was my age. Also, I got to play the same exact part as my mom so that was a cool bonding experience for us to both have made connections with the same character. In addition to that, this play was all about children in a concentration camp during the holocaust which created several opportunities for me to dig deep into my emotions and really feel the sadness that came from my character.

“October 12, 2019,
Butterfly really really stretched me as an actor. I have grown so much and I’m really happy with how it all turned out. Today was our last performance and I was really happy with how it went. I really brought out my emotions and I was just so proud of how I did.”
-My personal journal

As shown from my entry, this experience was a special moment for me because as I was going through this emotional battle with my character, my mom and my sisters were also there going through this experience with me. Since we normally don’t talk about our emotions, it was a deep bonding experience for us to feel these deep, real emotions together. As the director, my mom was the one who was pulling these emotions out of me and having these conversations about what this character was feeling. Because she had already made a connection with the character, she was able to help me have a connection with the character.

Along with my character development, my mom helped me learn how to deliver my lines with emotion. This was a struggle for me because I had never been in a sad, depressing play like this so I didn’t know how to act with this kind of emotion. Eventually, something started to click and I was able to deliver my lines with such strength and emotion that I could feel myself tearing up. At the end of the play, my character writes her goodbye letter to the children she looked over and I will always remember her last line:

“I have nothing left to leave you but this, what you, and all the children have made of Terezin, the fields, the flowers, and ALL the butterflies.”

It is amazing to me that I can create emotion from basically nothing and have such a deep experience because of it. Because of my many years doing theater I became more in tune with my emotions. It is an interesting thought that because I was pretending to be someone else, I actually ended up learning more about me and my own emotions. I also like to acknowledge the fact that each character I performed has played a small part into who I am today. By putting myself in another person's shoes, I get a different perspective on certain topics and I can see the world in a slightly different way. Acting is like putting on rose-colored glasses where I see the same thing, but sometimes there's a different tint that slightly changes how the world looks. It's really something special too have the opportunity to experience that. 

Theater was also special to me because I was able to go through this journey with my family which created some deep memories that really connected us. Each family is different and some are more emotional than others, but since mine isn’t, I cherish those moments where I could share emotional connections with them. 

The power that the performing arts has to bring out different emotions in people is incredible. Emotion is the driving force of theater and because of that many people are able to feel things they wouldn’t feel on a normal basis. It is a common occurrence for people to bury their emotions, but theater has a way of pulling things out of people and causing them to feel something they haven’t felt in a while. I have definitely felt that in my life and I know several others, actors and audience members alike, have felt the same thing.

I am forever grateful for the characters that are a part of me and for the memories and relationships I have made because of my years in the performing arts.