Elizabeth Dorn is an ER doctor who has been taking classes at Freehold for two decades. We talked about her acting ambitions as a young person, how she got swayed to medicine, how the practice of theatre makes her a better doctor.
How long have you been a Freehold student?
I’ve been taking classes on and off with Freehold for 20 years. I think my first class was Improv with the legendary Matt Smith, a class that I have retaken about five times, including one of his advanced classes. I quickly took the Core Progression of Steps I, II, III. That was with [FH co-founder] George Lewis. He had a method of hard-assness that I liked.
When I was young I did community theater, after school, and then I acted in high school. I had a wonderful drama teacher in high school.
What do you like about acting?
I love the beauty of going into a character and watching actors go into the world of other characters. To me, it was just so beautiful. I thought, “What a way to live life!” Where the whole point of your work is to understand and portray characters and be in different realities and portray ideas through theater. It was just so beautiful when I would watch really good actors–on film and on stage–be people.
Theater is often an exaggeration of our humanness, in order to really look at it. It’s not always like everyday life, but like the culmination of points of our life. I think it’s not exactly how conversation would happen. [The idea of imbuing] your physicality, your voice, your being, your understanding [into a character], it’s a very beautiful thing.
Can you tell us about your acting journey?
I went to New York when I was young, and I lived in a boarding house, and I worked at a theater as a stagehand, and I took classes. That’s when I went to Uta Hagen. At that time, in the 80s, as a young woman, it was very much a culture of, if you’re willing to sleep with this old director, you’ll get an audition. I mean, it was happening, and my friend did. He slept his way up. I wasn’t into that.
And so then I went back to school. I was always interested in the biological world, and anatomy. I come from a family of doctors. My grandfather was a doctor and a great renaissance man. I remember when I made this decision [to pursue medicine], I’m like, “He had a good life. I’ll live like he does.” I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, well. All the world’s a stage…I’ll see real life through real life.” That’s literally what I told myself, like, “This is another way of really looking at the reality of life,” and it’s kind of true.
I came back to the theater after I graduated from residency. And when I started to take classes [at Freehold] again, I was at a point where I had gotten sort of a little allergic to medicine. [Freehold classes] reconnected me to my humanness, and I brought that into my work. Whenever I was in a class, I was a far better doctor. It’s not like there’s a direct causation [between acting and medicine]. You pay attention in acting; we pay attention because we have to see each other on stage. And when you’re working on physical theater, you’re concentrating on how you look, how you stand in space, you’re concentrating on your voice, that you’re articulating, how it comes out, the impact of your voice on someone else. All these nuances of what we work on in acting actually make us so aware of what we’re doing as humans. And so all that awareness, and the love and the beauty and aliveness I feel, I bring to medicine.
So, going back to Freehold actually enlivened my work as a doctor. You know, the world of medicine is a small, restricted box, a lot of times. The allowed behavior is very narrow, and how we have to interact with each other is very boring. To bring in a little bit of the freshness has been great.
I’m so thankful that Freehold exists, that it allows people who were not professionals, but had some degree of talent and desire, to really learn. Freehold has a lot of integrity! It wasn’t just acting classes with bored teachers just trying to make money. There’s a lot of expectation that high quality work is done. So many of the acting teachers I had were just so high quality. [People like] Andy McGinn, Gin Hammond, people who expect a super high quality out of themselves and others.
Acting is fun. And when I use the word fun, for me that means it’s a deeply, deeply satisfying, challenging thing. That is “fun” to me. So many people I’ve been in classes with have gone on to act–that’s what they do now. They’re active actors, which is amazing to me! This is what they wanted to do and they’re doing it!
Acting is hard. Is it difficult to have the energy for acting after working a high-stress job?
In a way, acting does give me a break from the world of medicine. It makes you wake up. In our jobs, we can get into the monotony of our world. And so sometimes drinking and lying down and watching mindless things [as a form of relaxation or winding down] is actually less renovating than doing something that really renovates you. So do you want to, after nine or ten hours in the hospital, get up, get on the light rail, go to class, be there on time? I mean a lot of times you’re just tired, but you rise to the occasion because of the beauty of it; because you’re called to have deep respect for acting and wanting to do it well. Ultimately, it’s way more relaxing in the sense that it awakens and renovates in a much richer way than numbing oneself or just sleeping. But sleeping is good too.
