By William Walls
I am one bad ex-actor, I can tell you that.
Two weeks after the closing of the show “Mendocino Stories’” at the college, I feel like I have finally learned my lines. Like I can reach out of this kitchen window here, grab a shirt off the clothesline, spin it and play my character right from here. Say my whole monologue right here doing the dishes.
At my level of acting, that amounts to reaching a goal: be able to say your lines while doing the dishes. I don’t think I ever got there, really. If I did, it was just in time for the last show.
That Sunday, that matinee. When the lines were in the background of my mind. When what mattered was who I was playing, the “big farm kid” in Potter Valley, who at 18 years of age became a Conscientious Objector in 1970, when America was sending its city boys and its country boys away to its farthest war.
To be an actor you have to get to where you aren’t thinking or remembering your lines, that’s when and not until then you can start acting. That’s when it’s easy. As easy as being a person is, which, of course, is not easy.
But you can cry when you don’t have to try and remember your lines. You can relax and laugh on the hot ice energy of the stage. You can look back and be afraid again or brave. You can be. It’s quite a thing.
It may be what I don’t want to get rid of or let go. I feel like I spent the last three months rehearsing somebody, and right now I feel I pale in comparison to the guy I played. The real person I played has a spotlight on him and a story to tell, and car doors slamming and people walking over to climb the theater steps to come see him and hear him.
The real me right now today has five dishes in the sink and a dish sponge I need to toss.
So I miss the character I played. I guess I’ve said that.
I miss the Director, the Producer, and the Playwright, too. I miss having only the problems I had while acting; how to not say the line “I’ve always felt guilty” the way I’ve been saying it for a month.
The guy isn’t angry. And he isn’t sad. He isn’t in charge of his feelings enough to be angry or sad. Me playing him angry is me taking the easy way out. Anybody can play angry. And sad is even more dishonest. No, he’s just living, with what realizations may come. In our lives there is sometimes too much to admit. His moment of “I’ve always felt guilty” is as much or more a surprise to him as it is to us. As an actor I have to catch that, and then let it go. And catch it again.
I miss the people I acted with, all fifteen of them, even the people I didn’t always like.
Putting on a play is like building an arc when you know the exact date and time by which it has to be finished. Made ready. Like it or not, ramps up.
Before Opening Night there is Dress Rehearsal and Tech Week and slipping away to meet with Wardrobe, and before then the worst of them all, though it is but a moment: “I’d like everyone to try and be off book by Monday,” the Director says. Off book means no more scripts in hand.
Most of you are too afraid to speak, but one of you will, and asks, “Do you mean next Monday? Monday a week?”
“No,” the Director says. “This Monday.”
Considering the bravery, it takes to put on a good show that people liked, like they liked our show two weeks ago, it is no wonder you miss those you worked beside; that I miss them, all those who put in the same hours I did, building an arc in time.
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