Also on Medium, 3/26/25
An appreciation for something I can’t do
Traveling all the way back in time to my 6th grade at a parochial school in Detroit, I convinced myself that I showed promise in the theater. I was cast as a centurion in a school play based on some early Christian theme. I forget now the lines I spoke, but in the 6th grade they were unlikely to rise in tone or substance to the Shakespearean. I was to be a good centurion, heralding the peaceful advent of Christianity. I don’t think it was a Christmas play, but I’ve sort of convinced myself that I somehow facilitated Mary and Joseph finding a stable to spend the night. Some good deed like that — something a good Christian inclined centurion would do.
I did well enough at the rehearsals, but in the actual performance flubbed a line and had to be prompted. It was sort of embarrassing, but forgivable given that the other actors weren’t much better. But I came out of the performance thinking I should have been the director, not an actor. I analyzed my goof and attributed it to the staging, direction, and script being clunky.
The play needed more insight into the interpersonal relationships of the characters to create more natural social interactions. If the actors couldn’t find themselves in the context, then, of course, they’d screw up their lines. The formulation of that insight, by the way, did not happen in the 6th grade. It came later, college I think.
In any event, for reasons of my own shyness and anti-aggressive demeanor, not to mention a lack of opportunity, I never had occasion to direct a play myself.
Now cruising forward some 60 years from my one and only acting gig and I let myself be persuaded to audition for an amateur production staged as a story telling workshop. The play itself was scripted around a collection of actual interviews of LQBTQ individuals in Appalachia. The interviewer was a professional storyteller who was collecting possible material for a later performance. The interviewees ranged in age from 15 to 72 and included individuals with a range of sexual identities and sexual preferences. Each character in the eventual ensemble represented a particular age, gender identity, and sexual orientation. There were twelve all together.
I auditioned for both a non-binary teenager and an older gay male. Verisimilitude wasn’t an important casting concern, but the director, spotting a good fit, cast me as the old gay man. Type casting, as it were. So okay, I could bring my life lessons, my creaky voice, and my diminished stature into making the performance credible. And it worked. I got my kudos after our one performance and left the stage satisfied. There wasn’t the problem with the flubbed lines, because all of us were reading aloud from printed scripts. It was not a staged production.
Fast forward another six years and now, yet older, I was persuaded to join another cast, this time for an actual staged play in which I had to memorize lines. Oddly enough, the role I played was of a 17 year old, white male. Sexual preference wasn’t specified, so I went with the default and assumed I was a straight boy. I was pretty sure I could pull it off. After all, hadn’t I actually pretended to be straight for most of my teenage years?
It was a family comedy anyway. If I didn’t get the portrayal perfect, my performance would generate a few laughs. The laughing would with me, not at me.
The play was being produced by a group that’s part of the so-called Village Movement. This is a loosely aligned group of aging communities around the country dedicated to keeping members in their homes as long as possible. That is, as long as circumstances keep the level of risk manageable. Basically it balances the real risks of staying independent with the just as real risks of sacrificing that independence to assisted living or nursing homes. All of the actors, myself included, were members of one such organization here in West Virginia. The audience, too, primarily consisted of other members of the group.
The cast rehearsed diligently and over the course of the rehearsals we became confident, smooth, and good. It was fun and we knew it was going to work.
So as of this writing, I’ve had a total of three acting gigs spanning almost 70 years and no directing roles. That last I’d given up on anyway, and don’t plan on doing any more acting. I flubbed some of my lines again, leaving the distinct impression that I’m not cut out for the theater.
What’s instructive about these three scattered episodes is that they stick with me, even the one in the 6th grade. I keep reviewing them in my memory and still occasionally practice my lines.
I wonder why I’m keeping the memory of them alive. They seem to be important somehow, way out of proportion to the length of time I devoted to them. It’s like there’s some kind of life lesson I’m supposed to take from them.
I’m not by nature a bubbly, Walter Middy type person, naturally drawn to fantasizing myself in different guises. I’m mostly content with the body, mind, and personality I inhabit. So is my lack of pleasure in pretending to be someone else for a half hour the problem?
I think it may be at least part of the problem, but a more likely reason is that how I was made (by God, by parents, by disposition) was to be self-critical. For much of my life I didn’t appreciate a lot of what I’d done, doubting that I measured up. I actively believed that everything I’d done was flawed in some way and this belief convinced me of the inevitability of my future error making. It was always actual errors and the possibility of making errors that drew my attention and diluted the satisfaction I could take in any accomplishment. In acting that’s a sure way to flub your lines. While you focus on whether you screwed up your last line, you go into yourself and forget you’re supposed to be somebody else. The result is you leave your character tongue-tied for his next line.
Rather than leave the impression that I’m constantly beating myself up (I’m actually not), I’ve through the years come to consider my self-critical nature to be a plus of sorts. It’s a control against adopting a superior attitude driven by an overbearing personality, the kind of disorder psychiatrists ascribe to pathological narcissists. Given the overabundance of this particular pathology in contemporary America, I don’t feel bad about screwing up my lines once in a while. I just know in the future that I should avoid the opportunity to do so. No more acting.