Sheriden Thomas is in her fourth year as an instructor with the Tufts Drama Department. She has directed students in plays including "A Piece of My Heart," "Hay Fever" and "The School for Scandal." But she's also done some acting of her own - 30 years of it, in fact.
During those three decades of on-stage experience, Thomas honed her ability to understand the intricacy of human emotions.
"To see human relationships - in [their] dynamic, in [their] denial, in [their] entanglements, in [their] cause and effect, in [their] connection and disconnect - it's a dance, it's a dance of the heart, and words are minimal," Thomas said.
As a child, Thomas was aware of her ability to understand relationships, but this knowledge failed to translate into the conventional classroom setting.
"It wasn't easy for me to be in school. I wasn't scholarly, I wasn't words on paper, I was more words in the air; my knowledge of life was about the interaction of people - that has always been my fascination," Thomas said.
During her undergraduate years at the University of New Mexico, Thomas used this awareness to her advantage.
"When I became an actor in
theater in college, the music was
the playwright's words... my heart
is reflected in the sound you
hear when I speak," Thomas
said. She added that "an actor
becomes the embodiment
of that. I realized that
acting was dancing
and singing on a
very subtle, behavioral
level."
Thomas claims that
theater became her escape
from a world dominated by
Vietnam protests and government
corruption. She still embraced "hippie
liberalism," however, and the passion
that she brought to the stage was
occasionally revealed in the picket line.
"I did picket. I got into a couple of fights," she said. "An engineer got very upset with me. I kept asking him, 'What's your draft number, what's your draft number?' and he just kept saying, 'Get out of my way - you shouldn't be here, you are irresponsible,' and all of the other things we were being labeled as - unpatriotic, traitors and the like."
Thomas now considers her Vietnam picketing days to be the result of youthful idealism, not a complete understanding of war or conditions in Vietnam. "Just because you understand something doesn't mean that your heart accepts it," she said.
According to Thomas, even when she graduated, she was not "prepared" for the real world. "Upon graduation I was fully educated, supposedly, and I realized that I was prepared for nothing - absolutely nothing," she said. "I was really angry, I hadn't even thought about it, and then I got that diploma and realized how worthless it was.
"You call me an adult now? What does this mean? What does this piece of paper mean? There's the idea of this piece of paper being the completion, and it's really not - it's the beginning," she said. "This is why they call it commencement."
Thomas decided the solution to the feeling of "what now?" was to marry her boyfriend and have children. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, was not so keen on the idea of early parenthood.
Ultimately, the decision to hold off benefited her career: Instead of pursuing motherhood, Thomas enrolled in graduate school at the University of Minnesota.
Soon after, with a master's degree in hand, she went on to perform in a series of major roles with the Judith Shakespeare Company in New York City.
In the mid-1980s, Thomas expanded her skills and began to direct for such companies as the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, Mother Jones in Chicago and Manhattan Class.
Thomas spent each of these experiences building on her repertoire of "emotional understanding," using them to direct others with a finely tuned emotional insight.
Thomas humbly relegates this talent to a hindrance, claiming that her role as a "transformative" actor is essentially a personality weakness.
"The 'transformative' actors are these really shy people who would rather hide behind their imaginations than really expose themselves to the public eye," she said.
"I was lost within my masks. It's troubling, because on the stage you have these heightened ideas, but who are you at the cast party? And then when you go home at night, who's there? That's the downside to the 'transformative' actor," she said.
The breadth of Thomas' experience, coupled with her innate ability to understand the complexity of human emotion, has made her an expert in the field.
She now strives to relate these ideas and skills to her students so that they, too, "can understand the power of theater." Thomas believes that mastering the dynamics of human relationships and passion are the two crucial elements of acting.
"The theater transformed me. The theater can transform an entire audience - but it has to be done right," she said.
