tuckova

as if

So I am a director for a local amateur theater. Sometimes I take it very seriously and I have to remind myself that in a town of half a million only about 500 at most might be interested in seeing a play in English and half of those won't be interested in any particular play enough to come so even though it feels important it's only important on a small scale. Sometimes I have to remind myself that most people do things for fun and when they don't take it as seriously as I do that's really ok. Sometimes I have to remind myself about the value of acts of service. Most of the time I have a good time, it's like putting on plays in high school and college, low stakes classes or extra credit, hanging out with people who are fun and intense and creative. Most of the time it gives me some days of stress and some days of joy and in the end we put on a play and people come and see it. I find people I don't know exhausting, especially in groups; "does not work well with others" was on a fourth grade report card and little has changed. The fact that I've chosen this to do with my free time sometimes feels like a step toward insanity, but the truth is I'm older and tougher than when I was nine and if I pay attention I can usually make up games for myself and retain focus and manage ok, though it takes effort. Since it's difficult for me to socialize without a purpose, this is the most social I've been in my adult life and sometimes at the end of a rehearsal I feel literally drained. But sometimes I can see that we are working together toward a shared goal and then I feel like I drank a pot of coffee and sat on a soft blanket under warm dappled light and fell in love all at once.

Interestingly, because I've been focused so much on the plays themselves I haven't paid much attention to the process of acting. I haven't acted much in the last 30 years and haven't thought about it much -- with amateurs, the focus is often largely on learning lines, so it hasn't been that necessary. For me, I just knew there was a part in acting when it clicked and I became a person who responded to the things happening in the only possible way I could respond.

But it's different for different people and a few actors have expressed interest in acting techniques and because I am not a people pleaser but a people dazzler I have set myself up to learn. Acting schools and approaches differ with culture and I didn't want to deal with that when we already, as a multicultural collective, have enough trouble agreeing when rehearsals start, but I learned to communicate about time consensus and I can learn to communicate about acting. To rectify my ignorance over the next six months (as I don't direct a play again until 2025), I bought some books on acting theory and started plowing through them.

I was on an airplane reading one of my books and trying to think of how to apply some of these ideas, which are targeted at people for whom acting is their calling and their work, as opposed to their hobby, and the man seated next to me commented that he taught theater at a university and thus noticed what I was reading and said that he thought this particular teacher had a better theory and approach than another, more famous teacher. Since the previous chapter had been a takedown of the more famous teacher, I ventured that this author certainly thought so, and we shared a laugh. Then they turned the lights off and we went to sleep, flying over the Atlantic with someone I wouldn't have noticed and who wouldn't have noticed me, now something in common. I wish people weren't so difficult for me but on the other hand I never take for granted the small chance encounters where for a moment we share something and for a moment we know our lines and it's easy. 

 

salt for such wounds

It is unlikely that anything will sting the way once, when you were so much younger, your friend sat down with you to confess that his feelings had shifted and what he had thought was a bit of fun while verbally sparring was actually an attraction and he had to acknowledge it, it wasn't worth pretending he didn't feel what he felt. He'd maybe never felt this way, so absolutely physically attracted to someone he felt intellectually matched with, and emotionally too. He needed to tell you about his feelings. And you in the blush of that moment realizing that you too had feelings, that the only reason you hadn't acknowledged them to anyone including yourself was that it seemed so certain they'd be not just unrequited but ridiculous, like falling in love with the moon. But what if the moon said he loved you, what if the moon said it first? Your heart rushing to the surface of your face. "Everyone will be so surprised," you said. "Even I'm surprised!" And he said, "So... She hasn't told you?" And you realized that ahhhhhhh this another story where the only part that is about you is how well you listen; what a good listener you are. You spent the rest of the night drinking and laughing about his newfound love.

That wasn't the first and not the last time that you have realized in the middle of a story that it wasn't about you. Nobody else's story is about you; everyone is the hero of his own story. Everyone is their own main character, this makes perfect sense. And sometimes you're not a character in their story at all. No reason for it to sting, though it almost always does, the sting of salt in the eyes and you blink it away.

And now you are more than halfway through life, the sunset years, rich with purple and gold and you want for nothing, happy to be a tertiary character in every story other than your own, swelling a progress or starting a scene or two, so to speak. It's fine. But the other day when you found yourself written entirely out of a scene while someone looked you full in the face in a chapter you'd built and told you how much other people had done as though you weren't even part of it, and the salt rose in your eyes and you felt every relegation fresh, and followed it with a shot of self loathing for ever having thought, for ever having even imagined that anyone would give you top billing or any billing at all. Of course of course of course. It's never going to stop. Keep your eyes firmly on your own work. Blink it away.