I don’t know a lot about acting. That much is obvious if you’ve ever seen me try to act. I don’t think of myself as an actor and it’s not a position towards which I aspire. But at the same time, it’s so fundamental to human nature and the perfection of the experience of life that it’s simply unavoidable to wade into those waters.
What is acting? I mean it first in a theatrical sense, but am immediately thrown back onto the general sense of it. The way one acts within the world (that which is not the “stage”) is one’s behavior. We can break that word down: behavior. To be and to have. One’s possession of one’s own self. One’s awareness of the effects of one’s actions upon others. Acting. Having an audience. People see you up there. To them, you have the potential to become something that maybe you are or aren’t to yourself. I don’t have the experience within that world to definitely say one way or another.
But there is something I’ve seen in the faces of people I’ve worked with: people who I consider to be consummate professionals – whatever else they are, who knows. Do you ever trust an actor? Do you ever trust a non-actor? Hard to say. Judging people according to the similarity to their characteristics that of oneself, however common, may not always necessarily be the best idea.
Especially because, I think, something fundamental to that of what it is to be an actor is eliminating oneself to nothing. That is, on the one hand. You’re only eliminating, maybe, a part of oneself. And that only temporarily. And you become, then, completely this other thing.
Leafed through a book on puppets I got from the Enoch Pratty Free Library, noticed distinctions between ceremonial and religious puppets and sacred fetish objects and those deemed strictly “theatrical.” Those which have a sacred purpose are believed to have the power of embodying – of giving a physical body to inhabit to a spirit, an ancestor or a god. Theatre – modern theatre, anyway mostly doesn’t concern itself with such things nowadays. It’s more about: can you stay open? Can you get asses in seats? Are people laughing? Are people enjoying themselves?
You don’t worry about things like the enthousiasmos of the Ancient Greeks: the literal experience within oneself of an indwelling divinity. Whether that happens or not is up to the actors and those experiencing the production. It’s not brought up as a matter of course, as a rule of initiation for the neophytes into the order. But order, I believe, on some level theatre is and must always be. For it is a complex system, a tradition of what is and what should be. What has been and what will be. This is how we do it and this is why. This is what we know works and what should be avoided at all costs. Not quite the masons, but a guild, a craft fellowship mostly overlooked and almost outside of time. For the media – in all its variations - exists only in the imagination. Which is why the actor must reduce himself to nothing. In order to pass through that infinitely tiny gate, the gap between imagination and reality. The doorway is wide, but narrows as you grow closer to it. The few who arrive at its gate without a prayer on their lips. They may not know the words, the language or the ritual. But they find themselves before the Great Judge of the Audience and they kneel before its myths. The cue light is my god. Not my God, but it rules my experience of the moment. Would that I had a cue light and a stage manager and a technical director wherever I went. I would make so many less foolish mistakes and have such a clear path to follow. Stage master as psychopomp. Anubis, leader of the souls of the dead into the afterlife, the Land of Living Imagination. What do you want your life to become? What’s worth anything? People laughing? Who are they? I don’t know them.
I try to do it right now for myself and not for them, but to perfect the situation. This is what’s supposed to happen and I have the ability to make it beautiful, to be – you could say – an agent of god’s grace (maybe not God’s – but who knows!) for a bunch of people who paid twenty to forty dollars to see me get or not get right my small part in the night’s or the afternoon’s drama.
And if you’re in that Golden Room, that perfect state of being Within the Way, completely Of and Because the Moment, then the last thing you want to do is ruin the Rush of That Is Which Is Happening. Then and there. To be thrown viciously back into the real world of people being unprepared for the Realities and Eventualities which we all face moment-to-moment. Noone and nothing is perfect. Not even the stage with all its rehearsals and disbursals. Amd many they are and few with a moment’s rest!
