Creating A Role

He who strives will find his goals strive for him equally.

Euripides
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Hello Kapalua Hawaii
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Many years ago I saw a production of "The Taming of the Shrew" by Shakespeare. I didn't know any of the actors but I was particularly impress by the actor who played Petruchio. He filled out the role with strength, virility and a stage taking manliness. A few years later I met the actor when we were both hired to work in the same theatre company. In real life he was a young, short, gay fellow. It didn't matter. He had found Petruchio and played him brilliantly.

I auditioned for a Broadway show and was told by the director I could never possibly play the role I was auditioning for even though I had just played it in another theatre. That was his first mistake. Then he asked me to read for another part, a young man who falsely threatens to drown himself. The director began describing a horrible scene of me floating around in a river full of garbage and human waste. That was his second mistake. He didn't cast me but the show never took place. That was his third mistake but it's understandable considering his approach to the art of acting.

The man to find there was not the man who could jump into a fetid river but the man who could feel such a passion of self destruction that he could threaten such a thing.

There are two ways for an actor to depict a character on the stage: the right way and the wrong way, the creative way and the artificial way. Many actors fit a character around themselves like a suit of clothes. Sometimes they wear the suit, sometimes the suit wears them. But there is a principle of character development in acting that is almost mystical. It is best and only described as that at the same moment you set out to discover your character, your character sets out to find you. It sounds quite other worldly I know, but it actually happens, as Euripides must have known.

I remember two roles I played of men who were totally unlike me and how I found them. One was an official torturer for an unnamed South American dictatorship. The other was an older gay man being taken out for Christmas dinner by his young lover. Since I am neither gay nor could I ever torture anyone both these roles presented me challenges to find and portray these men honestly.

In the case of the torturer I didn't waste my time imagining applying electronic shocks to anyone's genitalia. There were no scenes like that in the play. He worked for the government. Torturing was his job. The play was about his relationship with his unfaithful wife and the sadomasochism that was part of that relationship. And when I began to search for the character on those terms he began searching for me. And one day I discovered him. I looked into the mirror and there he was looking back at me. We found each other. From then on I could play him, and he could play me.

Playing the gay man, on the contrary, required imagining things that weren't happening. Instead of eating the meal his young lover bought for him he drank wine and reminisced about his own youth when he was in love with his college English professor who eventually betrayed him and broke his heart.
Instead of sitting at a table in a three piece gray suit with an untouched plate of food next to him I imagined him as a young, sweater wearing poet, passionate about life, living again through all the sad and happy moments of his love affair. When I worked it that way the man showed up and sat right down in the chair with me.

Your goals may not be as far off the center of your life as mine were in those two cases, but the principle is the same. To imagine graphically is correct as long as it is appropriate. Floating in rivers and torturing people gets one nowhere, but to find the key that unlocks the door to your dream will set the dream on a search for you. You will know you've done it when the dream comes true. Then on to the next one.

DB - The Vagabond
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SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest)

Come on. 11 diverse and interesting answers so far. Where's yours?

NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.

Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?

dbdacoba@aol.com

I eagerly await your answer.

DB
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Laugh It Up

We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Nietzsche
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In Eugene O'Neill's play "Long Days Journey Into Night" James Tyrone wants to know what his young son Edmund is laughing about and he says he's laughing at life because it's so funny.

Ancient Greek theatre was a very vibrant, powerful and important one. There would be a festival at which four plays were presented all by the same author. The plays were based on ancient Greek history or legend. It often took a year to prepare them. The acting and the writing needed to be spectacular to hold a Greek audience for that length of time, and they were. Many of those plays still exist and the few famous ones, Oedipus the King, Hecuba, Medea, sometimes show up in regional theatres and Off-Broadway.

Though the plays took their plots from stories everyone knew the themes were relevant to life and portrayed the tragedies and dramas of human existence. While the first three plays in the festival were tragedies and high dramas the fourth play was a comedy. It was a parody, a satire on the same topic as the first three plays. After the audience had been put through the thunder dramas of life they were allowed to laugh about it.

Many of those ancient plays have been lost. But, and here a classical scholar, if there is one reading this, can inform me further if I'm mistaken, as far as I know only one of those final satires still exists: The Cyclops by Euripides, based on the Ulysses story.

There is a great lesson here. There isn't anything in life, no matter how dramatic, tragic or terrifying it may be that doesn't deserve to be laughed at. My developed and cherished sense of humor allows me to poke fun at everything about life, except other people. People change, life doesn't. To make fun of people is a bad way to get a laugh. I don't listen to people like Limbaugh, Leno and Beck. They take delight in putting other people down by scorning them and trying to make me laugh at them. It's cheap. low level. decadent humor and a total waste of my time.

DB
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SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)

In your opinion what is the most amazing thing that could happen during this decade? Make it as outrageous as you want but keep it within the realm of what you consider a possibility.

14 responses so far.

Answers will be published the first day of Summer.

Thank you.

dbdacoba@aol.com

DB - The Vagabond
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Foolish Talk

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

Euripides
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It doesn't take courage to observe, reason things through, to arrive at a clearer image of the way things are and a new idea about them. But it takes a lot of courage to express that new idea. I sympathize with the poor scientist or artist who can explain things in ways that challenge the status quo of popular thinking. He will inevitably have his flesh hacked away by the ignorant with their pen knives and pierced by their nails and needles.

I have been called eccentric for some reason. I suspect it's because I'm always searching for unorthodox ways of thinking, saying things and doing things. The word "eccentric" means peculiar. But it also means having an unusual set of beliefs.

A long time ago I began to notice in myself and others the habit of holding on to ways of thinking and doing that remained unchallenged and treated as if they were certain and dependable rules for living. Fortunately, with an open mind, I was able to confront men and women who did challenge those habitual ways of thinking. At the same time I noticed that many people who claimed to agree with those men and women were actually paying no attention to them. In defense of what I know to be the truth about the irregular and unsheltered freshness of ideas I began to explain what was said and to give examples. I soon found my own original thinking to be influenced by the need to think deeply into what I was reading and hearing from the enlightened minds. And that's when the trouble started.

It begins with scorn and sarcastic laughter. Resentment and hate set in when people begin to doubt and think that you may be right. It gets to the point where the backward will mount a reaction so severe that it would make you stop what you're thinking and subscribe to what is the generally excepted rule. In other words you've been taken prisoner by ignorance. There are those who would return to systems the world has out grown, to refuse the right to investigate unchartered waters, to stop scientific investigation, put out the light, burn the books or rewrite them, to shoot down the eagle in it's flight. That's when a lot of good people give up. I've given in on occasion, mainly because I needed the job or the relationship. But I was never convinced that the wrong way was the right way if there was a better way.

Things changes, mountains move, and I've grown increasing distressed over the condition of people who refuse to let go of a rope that leads nowhere. What can one man do? I throw light where I can, but I will go to the cross before I will refute and deny or cease to practice what I know to be true.

DB
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APRIL FOOLERY

Weekend Contest
This contest is open for the next 3 days.

APRIL FOOLERY
Choose as many numbers as you want and fill in the blanks
Winners will be posted on the evening of April 4.
The decisions of the nasty biased judge are final. Prizes will awarded on the basis of originality and whatever makes me laugh.

3 ENTRIES SO FAR

On the first day of April my true love gave to me
12______
11______
10______
9_______
8_______
7_______
6_______
5_______
4_______
3_______
2_______
and_______

Good luck
DB
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