by Suzy Charnas

Created on: June 07, 2008

The first thing about acting - stage acting, I mean - is courage. I come to this subject not as an actor myself, but as a writer who has done some acting to get a feel for stage character, but most of all as an audience member. There was a period of about two years when, during any business or pleasure trip to Manhattan, I would spend every night at a different play, thinking I would learn more about what a good play is in modern terms so that I could write good plays myself.

What I found, though, was a disheartening mis-match between the enormous amount of truly impressive acting talent available, and the quality of plays that writers were turning out for them. There is a reason why theaters that stay in business often do so on the back of a nearly steady diet of modern classics - O'Neill, Simon, Williams, Steinbeck, Miller, et al. What I saw that was relatively newly written - "The Real Thing" from England, "Agnes of God", "Angels Fall", are titles that come to mind from that period - struck me as very awkward and bony, in an uncomfortable way. The "bones" of plot and academic notions of the necessary structure of the "well-made play" of our time stuck out at all angles, with the dialog and characters stuck on almost as decorations, with no other function except to help illustrate all this well-madeness. Even the ones that provided a better-than-average evening of interesting entertainment ("The Royal Hunt of the Sun" and "Equus" come to mind) succeeded more on account of brilliant, imaginative staging, sets, and costumes than the actual heft and meat of the script.

I would look at the actors and think, "Good God, he has to just walk out there in nothing but his own puny and imperfect body and say the lines he's been given and wear the clothes he's been dressed in and make the moves worked out under the Director's ultimate authority - but on the night of a performance, it's just *him*, the actor, right there physically in front of us, pulling all this stuff together and blasting it out at us through his own skills, perceptions, and emotional strength, and he just has to *trust* that it's going to work. That we're not going to start shifting in our seats, coughing, snoring, laughing at him, walking out - or, worse, sitting in appalled and embarrassed silence until the curtain comes down and we can escape. All of which will signal to him that he is a failure, that we reject him, that we pull back from the gift of himself that he's offering us. And then tomorrow

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