For their thesis project, third-year actors in the School of Theater, Film, and Television were asked to research a social or political activist, then develop a 10-minute theatrical piece and present it on stage. Twenty-something James Childress Jordan, who grew up in the Bible Belt town of Webb City, Missouri (population 9,000), decided to do his piece on Ron Kovic, a 57-year-old Vietnam veteran whose battle wounds put him in a wheel chair and made him a fervent opponent of war.

Thanks to his three years in UCLA’s MFA program in acting, James felt well-prepared for the challenge. "They don’t teach one certain acting technique here, one dogmatic approach," James says. Instead, students "get exposed to this eclectic range of styles." James has "taken in little bits of each technique and skill and learned how to act my own way. You gravitate to what brings out the emotion inside of you, what connects you to a role."

One rule of thumb is: You don’t look for yourself in the character, you look for the character in yourself. James had read Kovic’s book, and he talked to him about his life in several phone calls. Then, James looked inside. Growing up—as Kovic did—a patriotic American, James had seen his own politics change over the years from the conservative Republicanism of his hometown, and when the United States invaded Iraq in 2002, he felt "a lot of anger and pain." He understood Kovic’s sense of betrayal.

In addition, following Tom Cruise’s approach to the role (in Born on the Fourth of July), James went to the Beverly Center in a wheel chair. "I had to be helped," he says, "and the looks you get—for a while I actually believed I was paralyzed, and it made me angry." His 10-minute piece, which starts with Kovic going off to war, ends when he’s "forced into the chair, realizing he’s going to be trapped in that chair forever."

James made his first appearance on stage at the age of 13. When his high school English teacher, Deb Williams, decided to go beyond classroom readings of plays to a full production of Ten Little Indians, it was the first theatrical performance in Webb City in quite some time. While James loved the stories they read in class, "putting them on stage and acting them out was a foreign concept to me." Nevertheless, once he stepped onstage in the lead role, "I felt it fall into place." The acting felt natural, and it also felt like something he wanted to pursue.

At Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, James says, "In the first two days, I was cast in a play, and I was working right away. The next four years just flew by, with play after play after play"—30 plays in all, mostly in leading roles. Under the wing of program director Jay Fields, James "realized that you could have a life doing this, and that was the life I wanted to have."

It’s a life he was made for, says Mel Shapiro, director of the acting program in UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television. James is one of those people who were "born to act," Professor Shapiro says. "All their energy, which is electric, is channeled into preparing to be onstage, rehearsing to be onstage, living only onstage, never getting offstage, trying to get back onstage—it’s as though life itself were too small a vessel to contain them because they have all this imagination they need to share with whole roomfuls of people."

The professional admiration is mutual. Professor Shapiro’s presence at UCLA was the deciding factor for James as he considered acting programs in New York and Los Angeles after college. Besides being impressed with Professor Shapiro’s résumé and educational outlook, James "liked the way he talked to me and directed my audition. It made sense to me, and I was able to do what he wanted. We connected on an artistic level.".

Sometime in the future, James would like to do a one-hour television series and work in independent films, but he’s already got a stage job lined up, having helped to found the Los Angeles Theater Ensemble. Some time ago, UCLA student director Tom Burmester asked James to star in Kindred, a play about a death row inmate’s last 90 minutes of life. After doing the play in workshop at UCLA, Burmester applied for and won a spot at the Davis Theater Festival, bringing his star along. Their presentation drew the biggest crowds, and Davis’s Acme Theater Company gave them a $10,000 grant to start a company in Los Angeles. Kindred will be its first production. Three others are lined up, and Studio Stage, the venue for their first play, may provide an ongoing home.

In his last weeks at UCLA, James will present two theater pieces at a showcase the department holds for graduating actors, where agents, managers, and casting directors can see them work. Entrée to that "little circle of UCLA’s friends in the entertainment industry" is only one benefit of his graduate work, James says.

"I know how to talk about a part," he explains. "I know how to approach a part quickly and effectively and to do the job," a discipline highly prized among local producers and directors. James understands that his long-term goals may be a long time coming, and he points out that Mark Ruffalo—in his personal pantheon of actors with Gary Oldman and Sean Penn—waited tables for nine years before he got his break.

James is following the advice of a fellow actor and looking at his acting career as a journey. "I don’t expect to hit it big," he says. "I just want to have a stable, steady career that I can be proud of."

Published in Spring 2005, Graduate Quarterly