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"What the hell was an Engineering student doing in the Faculty of Arts?" was a common question people have asked me when they heard of my story. I didn't know exactly what to tell them but "Hey! Give me a break alright, it's just an elective." Well, it was an elective alright but a heck of the elective because, before I knew it, I took three acting classes and became the only engineering student who got tangled up many of the Arts Faculty plays afterwards.
It all started off in the summer of 1989 when I was a third year student in the Engineering Department at Chulalongkorn University. Most engineering students my age would juggle between Ballroom Dancing and Physical Education when it comes to choosing an elective.
I was having something different in mind.
Because they were so tired of consuming those engineering textbooks, I mean literally desperately sucked into those difficult enginering courses, they needed a chance to 'make-out' with some of the girls in the college. That, of course, make Ballroom Dancing a popular course amoung us.
Ballroom Dancing is a
as looking for an elective course then.
Most were looking forward to taking the electives because we felt we needed a break from the Statics and Dynamics and the usual hard stuff at the Faculty. A typical Engineering student would have settled with something so traditional like Ballroom Dancing but I thought I wanted to try something different.
At the time, there were quite a few Theater productions flying around in the college. Some productions were from the Faculty of Architecture which drew quite a few attention from public and there were also some productions from the Faculty of Comm. Arts but the one that I found were so different from others were from Drama Department, Faculty of Arts. I remembered the first time I saw the show called 'Ko Rub Chan' which had P Ple ( Nakorn Silachai ) and Kru Chang ( A. Chonprakal Chanreuang ) as the director. As a guy who were so technogy-oriented, I was stunned by the show and I remember telling myself that - "Hey! What's that? There is something so magical about this show and it doesn't have anything to do with Micro Processor or Thermodynamics." And from that moment on I told myself I have to study drama and acting.
I didn't want to do it alone so I started asking my friends to come along and join me in the class. All my friends thought it was such a ridiculous idea..(some of them still think so). Tired of asking, I decided to go ahead with the class and became the only Engineer guy who showed up in the Drama class at the time. My first acting teacher was Kru Aw ( A. Orchuma Yuthawongse ). I remember the first day quite well. There were only four of us in the class comparing to about five hundred which was typical for an Engineering class in the first year. I've never had any problem with a professor staring at me as an individual. So I felt kind of nervous and suddenly my hands became an excessive organ I didn't know where to place them. A professor is looking at me and actually TRIED to teach me something. As out of place as I was I manage to remeber a few things from the first class. She told us that Everybody Can Be An Actor. And that acting gave us a chance to get in touch with ourselves in a way that would take us our lifetime if we lived like normal people otherwise.
