Carol Roan

Our personalities develop, in large measure, from the expectations of others: parents, siblings, extended families, peers, teachers. How well we fulfill the expectations of those around us determines whether we succeed or fail in school, in jobs, in relationships. Even when we think we are the ones who decide to be "good" or to rebel, we make those decisions either for or against the expectations of others, with very little true self-determination.

The bad news is that no matter how well this process worked for us, no matter how charming, gorgeous and talented we turned out, we need a different persona for the stage.

The good news is that we get to create this new persona ourselves, consciously choosing the qualities that we want to share with our audiences.

We are who we are, of course, but we can be selective about who we will be on stage. If we are painfully shy, we can choose to be confident; if we are morbidly serious, we can choose to be funny; if we are homely, we can choose to be handsome. Or we can create a persona built on shyness, or morbidity, or ugliness, or any combination thereof. We are free to make ourselves up as we go along.

That freedom is subject to certain limitations, both legal and societal, but even those have been expanded by performers and other artists and can be ignored if we're willing to go to jail or to play to specialized audiences.

The expectations of our audiences affect what choices we make, as do the expectations in all our other relationships, but they are expansive, rather than restrictive. An audience expects that we will be larger than life, larger than they are, individually and collectively. They expect us to be confident, inclusive (but able to deal firmly with hecklers), unfazed by equipment failures or accidents-in other words, in control of the stage and of them.

As in any other relationship, we build our onstage persona by trial and error, by learning which mixture of qualities frees us to do our best work. But that choice is ours, as is the choice of audience that will respond to our best work.

In our offstage lives, the people around us expect us to fit in, to be like them. In our onstage lives, our audiences expect us to be different from them. They expect us to be free of the restrictions that they feel in their own lives. They want to imagine being us, being performers.

At its very best, the art of performance can give each person in the audience a new sense of who they can become.