Please, PLEASE, for your own sake, view this video of Sir Ian McKellen sharing his bountiful wisdom on the art of acting. You won't regret it--
http://www.wimp.com/goodactor/
Isn't he wonderful? I know. Okay. Now. Let's talk a little bit about acting.
As the wonderful Sir Ian says (multiple times) in this video, "I pretend..."
This video is hysterical because of how obvious that is. Of course he's pretending to be Gandalf. That's what he does. He's an actor. Duh.
So why is it so difficult for some of the people I've encountered to comprehend that I am not the person I pretend to be when I'm on stage?
My senior project, which I've written about before, is a production of the one-woman show My Name is Rachel Corrie--a choice I knew would be controversial on my evangelical Christian university campus. While it broaches the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it first and foremost tells the story of a twenty-three-year-old who looked at what was happening in the world, saw injustice, left her home to go live in the midst of it and help in the only way she knew how, and was killed while protecting the home of a civilian Palestinian family. The problem, for my community? Rachel Corrie happens to have held a very pro-Palestinian view--a perspective not widely held or accepted by many Christians, who are largely pro-Israel. I was worried that this would be problematic from the beginning, and I was afraid that I might not be permitted to perform the play for reasons having to do with politics. To my surprise, however, the politics of the play were not the biggest problem. The language was.
There are 22 words that might be considered "vulgar" in the script (depending, of course, on your definition of "vulgar"). Believe me, I know, because I had to count them up and justify them when I wrote the two different proposals I had to submit. My justification for performing the script unedited was simple: this script is different. The story isn't fictional--Rachel Corrie was a real person who really lived, but the script is also actually comprised of several of Rachel's letters, journals, and emails that were compiled and edited into script form. So if you were to ask, "Who wrote the script?" Well, in a sense, Rachel did. And to ask to edit the script? It seemed disrespectful, flat-out wrong, in some way, to try to censor and sanitize Rachel. To "clean up" her language would be to misrepresent who she was, to belie her memory. For what? To make a few people a little more... comfortable?
Really?
Fortunately, I was allowed to present the play in its unedited form, albeit privately. Which was what I'd been trying to do in the first place. I couldn't have been more pleased.
But there are people who have struggled with my performing this play. My pastor, who was opposed to the play even being read on campus, said that he was "disturbed" by the thought of the words coming out of my mouth.
But that's just it.
With all due respect, don't you see? When I am on the stage, my mouth is not truly my own. These aren't my words. They're Rachel's. That's why I have to keep them. I'm telling her story, and I'm telling it her way.
A wise theatre artist I know put it this way:
These are not your words. And this is not your play. This is the playwright's play. And she had every right to write what she wrote. Don't hide from it. Tell the truth of this story.Last semester's performances went better than I ever could have predicted. Everything went off (mostly) without a hitch (except for that one performance when an audience member's GPS began giving rather loud directions in the middle of the play). And I've gotten more positive feedback than I could have imagined possible. People got it. They were challenged by what they saw. It made them think. And they even enjoyed it. But the one thing I've probably heard the most, even from people who know me, is that they forgot it was me. They forgot my name is Kendra. They forgot that I'm a college student. They forgot I wasn't Rachel. They willfully suspended their disbelief enough to forget, for a while, that they were sitting in a recital hall in the Midwest watching a play and, somehow, the story--and Rachel--came to life. And that means I did my job.
But then the play ends. The lights come up, I walk off the stage, the audience walks out of the theatre, and my name is Kendra Emmett.
CHARACTER ≠ ACTOR
When people can't separate these two things, it can become dangerous. Don't believe me? There are tragedy/horror stories of what has happened when actors get too intertwined with their characters. It can be extremely psychologically damaging, for actor and audience alike. There was a lot of speculation about Heath Ledger's accidental drug overdose after what many would call unhealthy immersion in the mind of his character, the Joker, in The Dark Knight. In her book The Friendly Shakespeare, Norrie Epstein tells the story of an audience member in the Old West who stood up in the middle of a performance of Othello, pulled out his pistol, and shot the actor playing Iago. And don't even get me started on the disconcerting stories about Twilight fans. A girl once asked Robert Pattinson if he would bite her. She was completely serious.
That's a little extreme, but it's exactly what I'm talking about.
Robert Pattinson is not a sparkly vampire.
Ian McKellen isn't actually a wizard.
I could probably not be described as a "messy, articulate, Salvador Dali–loving chain-smoking" political activist.
And please don't misread that as some sort of judgment. In fact, a rule of acting is to never judge your character. When I've actively been trying to learn about and better understand Rachel so I can portray her more effectively, it would have been hard not to come to appreciate and admire her. Was she a saint? No. God knows I'm not either. She was a real person with powerful convictions and beliefs, who happened to occasionally use language that my university and people in my community happen to disapprove of, and who I will do my very best to bring to life for you.
Herein lies the actor's paradox. We desperately want the audience to forget, but not to forget.
I am telling you a lie. And I want desperately for you to believe that lie. While simultaneously remembering the truth.
This is why we say we make believe.
And so, in conversations about my performance as Rachel Corrie, I've been asked by at least three different people, "So... do you swear?" and, from what I understand, quite a few people thought I smoked real cigarettes.
Neither of which are inherently bad things. For some people, however, these would be indictments. Which is a whole other post in itself. But that's for another time.
So, for now, I'll just smile and say, "Have you ever heard of Sir Ian McKellen...?"
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