A Hard Act to Follow

In a former life, I hung out with a lot of thespians. My partner in a bookstore was a playwright and a lot of the college-student actors who staged his plays were involved in the coffeehouse part of our bookstore/coffeehouse. They were a pretty crazy bunch, largely because acting came so naturally to them that they could easily improvise and were quite adept at slipping into another persona. This has never been easy for me. I've been on stage once as an adult, in a community theater production of "The Gazebo," during our first sojourn in Durango. I don't remember much about my performance (I can't even tell you what my role was) but I'm pretty sure I was stilted and not very convincing. I didn't understand the "pretend" part of acting, that is, that you actually need to become the role. I think at the time I thought if you memorized your lines that was it. Anyway, I remember one night at the bookstore a couple of the student actors wound up with one of them chasing the other with a revolver and shouting all sorts of things about how he was going to kill the other one. Although I knew this was the sort of thing they liked to put on, they were so convincing I wasn't really sure what was going on until they both finally broke down in laughter. They just didn't seem to draw the same distinction between reality and fantasy that I did. But when they staged productions of my store partner's plays in the coffeehouse, it was mesmerizing to watch them in action. He believed in sparse sets and forcing the audience to use its imagination. I thought the productions and the plays were very good.