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Act 1, Scene 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If We Were Villains, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Free Will
Identity and Disguise
Love and Sexuality
Theatre and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
Early the next morning, the students sit in a circle in Studio Five for a class with Gwendolyn. She leads them through yoga exercises and then tells the group that their meetings will be different this year: she’s going to push them as far as she can. She tells them that fear is an actor’s greatest obstacle. Meredith volunteers to work on this lesson with Gwendolyn first, so Gwendolyn asks her to stand up and tell the group her greatest strength. Meredith struggles to get the words out, but after Gwendolyn pushes her, she admits that her physical attractiveness and love of attention are her best assets. Gwendolyn now asks a shaken Meredith to tell the group her greatest weakness, which she finally tells the room is her fear of not being taken seriously. Oliver is fascinated with her confession and notices the same interest in James.
This is the intense environment that actors live in; theatre doesn’t afford very much privacy. For young adults, it’s a place where insecurities and desires can fester and multiply under scrutiny—a recipe for drama. Like the fourth-years, Gwendolyn seems to blur the line between onstage and offstage personas, encouraging Meredith to expose her personal secrets in order to become a more effective actor. Gwendolyn’s initial speech and Meredith’s reaction to the exercise both suggest that this is a more intense class than usual—it looks like even though the students won’t be cut at the end of the spring, the stakes for their fourth year at Dellecher are still quite high.
Themes
