The Crying Game: Weeping on Cue is the Toughest Skill an Actor Can Learn. Could I Do It, Too?

Crying has been one of the most popular activities of the past four to eight years; the ability to do it on command has been considered the apex of acting ability for much longer. Consider the 2017 Decider investigation that revealed 96 percent of Best Actress winners over the past 50 years openly wept during their performances (compared with 60 percent of Best Actor winners, thanks to boring yet pervasive sociological dynamics that have long poisoned the human experience).

- By Rachel Handler

Or the fact that, for decades, it was considered normal for directors to psychologically torment their actors in the hopes of getting them to break down on-camera—think of Alfred Hitchcock throwing live pigeons at Tippi Hedren on the set of The Birds. Hollywood’s craven obsession with crying is perfectly dramatized in a scene in Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s period piece about the 1920s Golden Age, in which wannabe starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) jump-starts her career by sobbing on request, pausing effortlessly each time the cameras stop rolling to flash a self-satisfied grin to a roomful of stunned industry pros. Since those glory (?) days, the camera lenses have only gotten crisper and the expectations higher and more lateral (now, even the YouTubers are expected to know how to go full Sophie’s Choice at a moment’s notice). While crying spontaneously in real life has never been easier, crying on purpose, specifically for your job as an actor, remains a complicated proposition, one that has both made careers (Meryl Streep’s—even a cursory Google will reveal her name as most synonymous with the manufactured production of human tears) and ruined them (you don’t know them because they couldn’t cry). The very concept of “authentic” stage-crying—how difficult it is to achieve, its persistent employment as a yardstick for gravitas and talent, its occasionally exploitative underpinnings—serves as the centerpiece of Kate Berlant’s one-woman show,