Pppttthhhhttt! Harneet Kaur and the dozen students sitting with her blow raspberries at their professor, Geoffrey Hitch. Hitch (A'75) is not insulted. Rather, he grins, encouraging them not to stop. Kaur smiles, too, amused at the sounds she and her classmates are making.
This warm-up, designed to loosen the lips, is part of an elective course unlike any other at the Tepper School of Business. This is an acting class, meant to hone the MBA students' communication skills for when they enter the corporate world.
Kaur, like many others who sign up for the course, wasn't sure what to expect. She finds the warm-ups a bit amusing. "I thought it was funny to see these people that you know in a different context, all being so silly," she says.
There are more laughs to come. For a class assignment to observe a stranger somewhere off-campus in order to imitate, Kaur chose a traffic controller. Standing in front of the class, ushering imaginary people across the street makes Kaur realize acting isn't so easy. "I had a difficult time with it because when most people think of action, they think of grandiose things," she says. "All the people doing normal, everyday things seem so mundane."
She learned that every action counts, both large and small, when trying to make an impression. But the big lesson is still to come.
For the final exam, performing a dramatic monologue, Kaur takes Hitch's suggestion to find a dramatic piece that would be a stretch emotionally and physically. Kaur chooses a man, Danny Archer, from the movie Blood Diamond. Archer was involved in trading weapons for diamonds in the heart of Africa. Leonardo DiCaprio played the role in the film.
The Archer role is foreign territory for Kaur, who is from Mumbai, India: "I have no cultural connection to Africa. I had to get into the mind of the character and understand and react to the situation, to see where he's coming from."
To do so, she relies on insights she remembered reading from a magazine article profiling Anthony Hopkins; he talked about reading scripts over and over again, until each word takes on its own meaning. "The Hopkins method worked for me," she says.
The day of her final performance, she realized she understood Danny Archer. Evidently her class understood him, too. She earned an A+ for the course and learned along the way that there is nothing she can't represent if she is prepared.
—Christen Stroh
