This post originally appeared on The Saint Constantine School blog on April 6, 2022.
Header image owned by The Saint Constantine School. Credit: Paul Latino.
A few weeks ago, students in my Upper School acting class played a game called In the Middle (a game I shamelessly stole from the ensemble I trained in at Wheaton College). To play, the ensemble lines up along one wall, facing out into the empty room before them. One actor steps out to the middle of the room, turns to face the ensemble, and completes the sentence: “In the middle, I am…”
He or she might say “In the middle, I am tired.” Or perhaps “I am trying to make sense of it,” or “I am discovering,” or “I am persistent.” It might be serious or lighthearted, one word or several. And then the actor stands for a moment, allowing their words to land, and finally rejoins the ensemble in the line.
That’s it. It’s a simple game.
It is also an enormously hard game, if the actor is willing to play it honestly.
No one who scrolls social media or reads family Christmas letters will be surprised by this: Most people don’t like to be seen when we are “mid” anything difficult. In our pride and vanity, we generally like our messy processes to be noticed only after they have reached a tidy, final form. We show “before” photos only when they can be accompanied by an “after.” We tell testimonies of hard times or harmful acts only when we can safely say “and look where I am now!”
It is a hard, costly thing to consider honestly what you are in the middle of at this specific moment in your life. Mid-crisis, mid-change, mid-question. For some of us, even declaring positive things like joy or excitement can feel risky. Whatever it is, it takes courage to name it, and it takes courage to declare definitively to a room full of people: “This is going on with me, right now.”
It is this kind of courage which the work of the theater brings out in people – at least, in those who are willing to lean in and try. An actor who cannot say what is going on with him- or herself can never advocate well for the character they portray on stage. They may be able to play at advocating – that is, they might say the scripted words, and might even have the proper timbre of voice to express a particular emotion. But if an actor cannot advocate for himself in front of others, he will find it impossible to honestly advocate for another complex, relatable human on stage. (And if the script is good, every character is a complex, relatable human.)
When done with care, the work of the theater becomes a declaration of war on pride and vanity. This may sound counterintuitive to those of us who have had hurtful or obnoxious interactions with “theater people,” but I firmly believe that it is true. The real work of an actor is not to seek the spotlight, to glory in attention, or to wow people with how many words you can memorize or how you can cry on cue (without pinching yourself, even!). In this mindset, actors are no more than trained dogs, performing the same trick night after night for the “treat” of applause. There is no love, no growth, no purpose in this kind of work.
An actor’s real work, I propose, is the practice of loving one’s neighbor. There are multiple ways of understanding Christ’s call to “love one another” in the context of theater, because there are several distinct relationships happening all at once during a performance (at the very least, three: actor/character, actor/actor, and actor/audience). Each of these is well worth its own separate conversation, so I won’t try to cover all of them here. For now, I will settle on one: the relationship between an actor and his character.
There is a beautiful – and, in some ways, incarnational – element in this relationship, because it calls for an actor to take on the humanity of a character and represent them to the world. He must, in some way, share in that character’s experience and advocate for their wellbeing. He must love them, whether they are good or not. This does not mean that he, the actor, has to agree with or approve of everything his character does; the morals of the actor still exist, and he should never pretend that they don’t. But an actor who cannot identify, in some way, with the brokenness of another human being is an actor who does not understand his own brokenness. He is an actor who cannot understand grace, because he has never understood his need of it.
Last fall, Upper School students read an essay by Simone Weil called Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God. It’s a mouthful of a title, and not specifically about theater at all, but this passage stopped me in my tracks:
In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail…belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, “What are you going through?”
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
Weil goes on to clarify that this “certain way” of looking is attentiveness: the ability and willingness to see someone exactly as they are, and to receive them as such. The ideas put forth here are not at all unique to theater, but I believe that good theater cannot exist without them: love of our neighbor begins with a willingness to see and to listen. But we will not understand what we see and hear if we have no reference point for their experience.
This attentiveness and generosity of spirit is what theater can cultivate in willing actors. The games and exercises done in my acting class push students to identify – to name specifically – their emotions and experiences. Sometimes this is private, individual work; sometimes, such as In the Middle, it is shared with others. I ask my students to do this work not to make them fixate or obsess over themselves, but to help them begin to understand how to love their neighbors through the art of theater. An actor who understands herself, and is willing to be seen in her imperfections and insecurities, is more able to approach another human being with love and empathy. She can ask “What are you going through?” of her character, or of a fellow actor, or of her audience, and receive the answer. This is because she knows what it is to be broken, and she has the courage to show Christ’s love in the midst of it.
The day we played In the Middle, the students who chose to play displayed that kind of courage, and it was an honor to witness. I pray that they continue that courageous work of loving well, whether in or out of the theater.
Vagabond Homebody 