At a previous point in my life, I would have answered this question with a definitive “yes.” I was afraid of so many things, especially confrontations. Coward. Definitely.
But I’ve been called brave so many times in recent years that I’ve had to reconsider what cowardice might mean for me. Or bravery. People call me brave when I tell the truth. They call me brave when I write about uncomfortable things. They call me brave when I risk security and money to do something that is important to me.
I don’t feel particularly brave when I do these things. I feel terrified. But as has been said many times before – it’s the feeling the fear and doing it anyway thing.
Am I a coward? Very possibly. But it wouldn’t bother me much if I were. Maybe it’s not being afraid to be a coward that sometimes makes me brave.
Hamlet
Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing, no, not for a king, Upon whose property and most dear life A damned defeat was made.
Silence can be a hard habit to break.
There are places and times and rooms in which it is my tendency to say nothing or very little and when I return to those places, once again I find a stream of not much emerge from my mouth. And I, like Hamlet here, can berate myself for the headache that emerges from clenching my jaw, my door to speech. Then the headache gets worse. I would say that the locking of the jaw is a result of holding back words but it’s more like it holds back the thought of words, it’s a silencing so deep I don’t even know what I would say if asked to speak.
He would drown the stage with tears And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears.
Thus we see the power of an emotional truth. Or rather, the imagined power of emotional truth. The truth of the truth is that we witness glimpses of it all the time. We might see it out of the corner of our eyes, happening to someone on the street or in the café at the table next to you. You can see it in Hospice homes and hospitals. You might spot it on the subway.
It is rare that we see someone who could drown a stage with tears. And if we did, we usually turn away. Naked emotion, the real stuff, is sometimes too much to bear. It’s easier to watch on a stage where we can tell ourselves it’s just a performance and we have the distance of the fiction, the stage, the costumes that can help us keep watching. I have seen people do shows about things that really happened to them and they do not drown the stage with tears usually. Nor do they amaze the faculties of eyes and ears. Usually they just make everyone uncomfortable. We need a veil of fiction if we’re going to feel it for ourselves.
What would he do Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have?
In the early days, this was one of the big attractions to acting. As someone who kept my emotions as close to my chest as I could, I would watch actors let loose and express things I could only imagine, or had only felt the suggestion of.
When I started acting, I often worried about what would happen if I had to play a really angry person. I fully believed that I didn’t get angry, that I didn’t know how to act authentically angry because it wasn’t in me. I got angry onstage long before I felt comfortable enough to express it in my life. Art was my practice in life. And life was my practice in art.
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her, that he should weep for her?
And here we have it: both the power of theatre and the power of empathy in one simple idea.
What is anyone to anyone, really?
Why should we cry over the story of the woman who lost her child in the storm? Who is she to us or us to her that we should weep for her?
Why should we be moved by any story full of strangers?
And in truth, sometimes it is easier to weep for Hecuba than someone close to us. Hecuba’s loss is so vivid, so singularly focused.
And when the Player weeps for Hecuba, so do we then echo that feeling of sadness, that empathetic impulse radiates out.
Sometimes I wonder if theatre is just a spectacularly complex empathy delivery system.
For Hecuba!
A world of loss.
Her husband killed,
her sons lost over and over again in battles,
until there were none.
Her daughters raped and/or taken prisoner.
Her grandson, too, the horrors of what has been/must be done with her grandson.
For Hecuba, there is little consolation.
Life? Exile. Servitude. A world of loss behind her.
And all for nothing.
This is a standard feeling after the show closes. When the experience has slipped through your fingers and nothing tangible has changed, it can feel like the Herculean effort to make it happen was all for naught. It’s not like when you build a building and when you’re done, you have a building and you can go in to that building and recognize what you did. When you build a show, you build a dream and while you are dreaming it, it is the most vivid, the most visceral, the most alive but then you wake up and the details start to slip away. It can feel like it was all for nothing.
Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann’d, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit?
Who better to wonder about the power of acting than an actor? And yet such is the power of this particular writer that we almost never feel that. We think of Hamlet as a person, going through his experience and the Players as the actors. It almost makes the outside story more real because there are actors acting inside it.
These lines are also a great clue to the actor playing The First Player
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
My friend Christopher organized something he called the Hamlet Rave. It was more party than performance but the entire play was read or performed from beginning to end in the midst of music, twitter updates, video and commentary. The only time the chaos paused was for the soliloquys and Christopher asked some of his best actor friends to perform them. We got to choose which one we wanted to do.
I asked for this one and was thrilled to get to do it. It was a privilege to ride the roller coaster of the words, to speak this juicy language, to give a speech that marvels at the power of theatre in a theatrical context. It runs the emotional gamut and to really explore the range of that, to use all that Rasaboxes training and switch quickly from one state to the next. Oh it was thrilling.
I’d love to get a chance to tackle it again.
This speech is often referred to by this line. People will say, “Oh, are you doing rogue and peasant slave?”
That’s why I’m thinking about the performance of it now, with this line, as opposed to the line about Hecuba which is actually how I think of it. My shortcut for it is the Hecuba speech – the “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her. . .” But then I am slightly obsessed with Hecuba in this play.
All that aside – this first line gave me trouble for a while. I didn’t understand why the slave Hamlet feels himself to be is a rogue and peasant one. Then it occurred to me that rogue might not be describing the slave but be an identity in addition to it. That is, it could be two thoughts “a rogue” and “a peasant slave’ Two things. Like being an asshole and a jerk.
Now I am alone.
I was just sitting here thinking about what my friend said to me on the phone this morning, “And are you doing all of this all on your own?!?” And pretty much, I am. I don’t particularly WANT to be doing it all alone but when colleagues and collaborators and partners in crime keep dropping away like this, it’s hard to proceed any other way.
And while it is hard to proceed all on my own, I will say that there are benefits. I answer to no one but myself and this gives me ample opportunities to just follow my own impulses, to ride the wind, as it were. I’d change that in a second, though for a creative partner I could really jam with.
The Hamlet Project 