Our production of A Streetcar Named Desire opens tonight.  It has garnered some favorable previews.  It will be interesting to see how a full audience (apparently it is selling out) will respond to a fairly radical re-telling of a classic tale.

Last night, as we warmed up for our final dress rehearsal, our director, Omar Sangare, asked the assembled actors: "why are you doing this?"  At first it wasn't clear if he meant this only rhetorically.  But he pressed us to respond, and some of the students did; "because I love to act, especially when it's difficult."  "Because this story is beautiful and we need to tell it to others."  My own thoughts were still ill-formed and did not come forth at that moment.  I've been thinking about the question and have a better sense of it now.

I am drawn to acting precisely to be in that very moment when Omar asked that question: on the cusp of rehearsal and performance.  We have taken an inert text and made it physical and audible.  And now we will truly bring it to life.  The immediacy, the urgency, of performance before a live audience heightens that living experience.  Even in my very small role, walking out on stage, feeling and absorbing the energy from a full house and then enacting our interpretation of the text, making it real for those present, is a life-enhancing occurrence.  Indeed, acting in theater, with people right there in front of you, doubles the process of living: we are physically living our own lives but we are simultaneously living the moment of the performance.  

And we manage that duplexity by emptying our minds.  In warm-ups, Omar has us bring our thoughts to the forefront of our consciousness and then gradually let them go.  In emptying our minds we open ourselves to the moment where we simultaneously live two lives.  It's a sort of hyper-consciousness without consciousness.  And that, for me, brings Zhuangzi to mind:

Just let your mind wander along in the drift of things.  Trust yourself to what is beyond you – let it be the nurturing center.  Then you've made it.  In the midst of all this, is there really any response?  Nothing can compare to simply living out your inevitable nature.  And there's nothing more difficult. (56)

In the case of acting, we are living out the inevitable nature of our characters.  And we have to just follow along where those characters take us, whatever we might think about it in our "real" lives.  We have to let go of preconcieved expectations and move with the flow of the play.  At one level that is simple; but on another it's difficult.  The best acting appears as no acting at all.  

We only perform for three nights.  But it has already been a great run.