12 When actors funnel stage fright back into the art.

When Martha Brigham is onstage, her palms sweat so much it’s become a joke. “I’ll get text messages from friends that are other actors, like, ‘ Hey, it’s opening night. How are your hands doing?’ ”

Fontana Butterfield’s pulse deafens. “My heart is pounding inside my head so loud I can’t even hear the other person’s line.”

For Regina Morones, “it’s like drinking two cups of coffee.” She starts talking ridiculously fast, she feels weird vibrations in an arm or a leg, and if that energy doesn’t get properly channeled through a rigorous 45minute physical warmup, she’s liable to skip a line when she performs.

The fear might go away after a couple of scenes, or even right after a first entrance. “Sort of like in movies when all ambient noise fades away and everything goes out of focus but the path ahead,” says Leontyne MbeleMbong. “And as you tread the path, words and blocking just come to you, and it’s a sort of otherworldly experience.”

But stage fright, one of the most common fears, doesn’t go away when you become a professional actor. It’s a natural response to an unnatural situation: when a crowd of people are staring at you, yet you’re not fighting or fleeing.

“Our brain thinks that we need to run away from the scary people that are staring at us — because they want to eat us,” says Butterfield, who in addition to performing also works for Speechless, where she coaches tech workers in how to deal with stage fright while giving presentations. “It is really weird for our whole nervous system to stand in a place when everyone’s watching us.”

Working as a professional actor means courting that neardeath experience night after night. One way many have found to cope is to funnel it back into their art.

“Theater is a series of these big moments and revelations,” says actor Will Dao. “It’s easy then to translate your reallife nerves to a wellwritten script that has high stakes.”

Sometimes, when I watch a show as a theater critic, I feel like I can see that shadow of the actor through a character, groping through the abyss of terror. But that doesn’t always manifest as hesitance or a lack of commitment. Sometimes it feels raw, pure, religious — as if the artist is choosing to trust us with something precious and inward, extending a hand to us for a leap into the void.

Even confidentseeming characters have anxieties by virtue of their humanity, Brigham points out. “We’re always looking behind our shoulders and checking who’s watching, and there is something in that that has to do with a nervousness or trying