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Forgetting
Your Lines
by Marvin
Payne
Do you ever
forget your lines? Try looking on the fleshy tables of your heart.
Well, I don't
know if this has ever happened to you, but I woke up this morning,
an hour or so before I was supposed to, with these words ringing
in my head, "John Peyton, according to your grand jury testimony,
you were a member of the Warsaw Militia. That right?"
This is not
the phenomenon known as the "actor's nightmare." Mainly because
I was awake (sort of). The "actor's nightmare is when you find yourself
on stage and, for any of myriad reasons (or for none at all) you
don't know your lines. All actors have this nightmare.
Somewhere in
cyber-land, some reader of Backstage Graffiti is struggling right
now with the question of whether or not they're really an actor.
They acted in school, or in the stake production of "Saturday's
Visionary Doodler," and they're wondering if there is greasepaint
in their blood or merely stars in their eyes. (I myself wonder this
at the closing of every show, or while looking through any given
eighty pages of dialogue that need to be memorized.) I suppose
either condition can interfere mightily with normal physical functions,
but here is the answer you have been aching for. If you dream the
"actor's nightmare," you are an actor. If you don't, you aren't.
(But wait! Does
this mean that if you dream that you are careening toward the forty-niners'
end zone and you're about to leap up and snatch out of the sky the
long bomb that is spiraling from fifty yards behind you and one
defender pass-interfered but the official didn't flag him and the
breath of another defender is burning on the back of your neck and
fifteen San Francisco fans holding the small ends of beer bottles
are gathering in the corner of the end zone toward which you are
careening and suddenly you realize that you are wearing no helmet
and no pads and maybe nothing at all, that you're having the "NFL
wide receiver's nightmare" and according to the above definition
that makes you an NFL wide receiver? I've heard that Meridian Magazine
is talking to Steve Young about a column tentatively called "Locker-room
Graffiti," where you may find the answer to that. Meanwhile...)
I was not having
the "actor's nightmare." I was having the "actor's very bad daydream,"
wherein you are smack up against the dreaded rehearsal when scripts
are no longer allowed onstage. (You can still, in a moment of forgetfulness,
holler out "Line," and the stage manager will prompt you, but this
privilege, too, will soon be withdrawn. If you've never done theatre,
here's
an image that may amuse you: Eliza has asked Josiah to go west with
her and the Mormons. He is deeply moved. She grasps his hands. He
is more deeply moved. She kisses him. Deeply moved, he gazes into
her pleading eyes and yells "Line!" Yes, you may be amused. The
actress playing Eliza, however, may not be. Unless she takes it
as a compliment, which, given the
attractions of the actress playing Eliza who kisses me in Hancock
County, she is abundantly entitled to do.
Hancock
County is the play that will be born and thrive in the Pardoe
Theatre at BYU through the latter half of February, sort of an alternative
entertainment to the Winter Olympics. It's quite a wonderful play
by Tim Slover about the trial of the murderers of Joseph Smith.
They have brought me in (there are several grown-ups in the cast)
to play the prosecuting attorney, Josiah Lamborn, a morally compromised
and spiritually starved alcoholic who happened to have been the
most recent Illinois Attorney General. (The lawyer defending the
leaders of the mob was an astoundingly pious guy--famous for pious--who
subsequently kind of founded the Republican Party.
This is history. Go figure.)
Working on this
piece has been an entire pleasure for me. Our director, Tim Threlfall,
inventive and sensitive and respectful and devout, though expecting
excellence from us, has demanded of us no unreasonable thing.
Except one.
After some reading rehearsals in late November and early December,
he asked us to return from a long holiday break to the beginning
of blocking rehearsals in January with our lines pretty much memorized.
Nobody did. You see, all of us, over the course of lots of plays,
had come to rely on more than our heads to learn lines. In a well-performed
play, the conversations are real (they just happen to have been
written down), the emotions are real (they just happen to be connected
to events that have already occurred) and the physical movement
is real (just plain real).
The line "Or
would you prefer the rule of Tom Sharp, the exterminator?" has a
certain weight and staying power when it's merely printed on a page.
It has a greater weight when Tom Sharp is glaring at you across
the courtroom. It has a greater weight when, as you speak it, a
jury is spread out before you. It has a greater weight when you
punctuate the word "exterminator" by the firing
of an imaginary rifle. (Especially if, as revealed in a recent column,
you have become a "frequent firer" of rifles and are acquainted
with the damage they can do.) After your body and heart has experienced
the glaring and the jury and the rifle, your mind is more likely
to remember the line.
When a course
of questioning occurs to you that might allow you to confound your
courtroom enemies and win back your place in the "charmed circle"
of Illinois law (and maybe even save your life), you will hunger
to know how to proceed to your damning conclusion. If a playwright
has been kind enough to provide you the words, you'll be happy to
learn them very quickly. Your verbal weapons in the private showdown
with the defending attorney come to your mind more quickly and powerfully
when you're standing toe-to-toe with him and see the blood pulsing
in his face. On your feet, you feel things about Eliza, about the
dead prophet who begins to astonish you, about the woman whose husband
beat her into lying under oath. You want to know what to say to
Eliza, what to say about the prophet, how to avenge the beaten witness.
Of course you memorize, because there's a life you're already living
every night in the rehearsal space and you need those words in order
to live it fully.
My next-door
neighbor is continually amazed (well, not steadily. I mean, she
feels other emotions, too) that I memorize all the scripts I do.
I encourage the amazement, but I haven't talked to her about how
learning the script is the smallest part of learning a show. It's
like getting acquainted with a blueprint. After that, there are
still nails to be driven and walls framed and, well, a house to
be built. In which lives will be lived.
Paul wrote the
Corinthians (the second ones, to be precise), "Ye are our epistle
written in our hearts, known and read of all men...written not with
ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone,
but in fleshy tables of the heart." (3:2-3)
It sounds like
the Lord talking when in Proverbs we are told to write mercy and
truth on the tables of our heart. (3:3) It's through experience
and passion and physical motion that things like that get written
in "fleshy tables of the heart."
That process
makes good theatre. It makes good life.
Last night my
wife and I watched the beginning of a movie (only the beginning)
where the humans that were photographed (notice I'm avoiding the
word "actors") were clearly reciting lines that other smart-alecky
people had written in smart-alecky offices someplace. It just drove
us nuts. It wasn't acting. It was commercially-enforced memorization.
The "like unto
us" part:
Have I given
talks that were of that particular brand of detached memorization?
Have I born testimonies that were detached memorization? (I'd like
to bury my testimony and I know this church is true...) How many
real-life conversations have I had with Father's infinitely precious
children that were merely constructions of memorized bits? How many
of my listeners would have pushed "eject" if only there had been
an "eject" to push? (And how many found a way to push it anyway?)
THERE IS A JOURNAL
CONNECTION! And here it is. People could read the lives of the (second)
Corinthians. Said Corinthians were walking around nearby. The folks
who open our journals maybe won't be able to hang out with us and
read us like walking letters. What they read in our journals pretty
much has to be, contrary to Paul's wish, written in ink. But if
the words are the same that have been written deeply into our hearts,
does it matter?
If we do something
beautiful or see something beautiful or feel something beautiful,
does it matter if the script is written before or after we do, see,
or feel it?
I hope that
in the course of memorizing the gospel, we can walk through some
of the blocking, look steadily into the eyes of some of the other
actors, see what it feels like to shout parts of it and then whisper
parts of it, try on for a rehearsal or two the feelings of people
who might be more wise, more wounded, more happy than we are, and
engage vast engines of imagination. The words will mean more.
Well, hey, sorry
not to have been sillier. Chances are, when I'm in a funnier play
I'll write a funnier column. But it's nice to be with you.
Thanks for reading.
I have to quit now. My daughter needs a ride back up to Weber State,
an hour-and-a-half north, and she's agreed to help me memorize a
certain troublesome eleven pages of Hancock County on the
way.
--------------------------------------
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marvinpayne.com!
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unto Christ, and lay hold upon every good gift..." (from
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