Acting Responsibly

I have always loved theater performances, whether I was in the audience or acting on the stage. I was, however, typecast at a young age. My kindergarten teacher cast me in the role of Mother Goose for our class play which recreated a number of the well-known tales. I thought it might be because she recognized the “old soul” storyteller within me. She told my mother it was because I was the only child responsible enough to leave on stage for the full duration of the play.

What followed through my grade school years were a series of roles in school plays that bore a striking similarity: mothers, teachers, judges, librarians, soothsayers. In real life I’ll admit I was the goody-two-shoes, the brainiac, the teacher’s pet, the crossing guard, the Hermione to everybody’s else’s Harry Potter. But I wanted to stretch my acting skills, explore my alter-ego “bad girl,” and play the vamp, the tramp, the biker chick. What I got to do was perform in the Mark Hopkins’ Hotel lobby in San Francisco at a dental convention playing Wanda Pick, trusty secretary to the detective Brush Floss who was out to rid the world of decay in “The Great Cavity Caper.”

My only starring role was that of Little Mary Sunshine in the play of the same name. I was pure, I was sweet, I was obviously going to need Captain Jim to save me from a dastardly fate. The fact that Captain Jim missed his mark so that instead of kissing my finger and putting it to his lips (our hot love scene) I kissed my finger and rammed it up his nostril was not my fault!

I wondered if I should pursue the theater arts as the venue for my storytelling skills. I was trying to become one of the “drama club gang” when I was cast in my final school play as the plucky comic sidekick to the heroine in “The Bookshop Mystery.” My character was supposed to be loyal and clever but clutzy. As an 8th grader I had the clutzy down and did twice as many pratfalls as the script called for simply because I kept tripping over props and stumbling during my entrances. I had a crush on the guy playing the hero of the play and after our performance run was over I approached him one day to flirt with him. He commented, “We’re not in a play together anymore so I don’t have to be nice to you.” I never became a drama major.

Thirty years later I was a stage mother. My life path had intersected with that of a drama director for a church’s youth ministry and I thought my daughter should have the chance to see if theater arts was something in which she excelled. I tried not to shout stage instructions at her and instead focused on driving her to rehearsals and working on my bible study in the back of the sanctuary while she worked through her drama exercises with the rest of the students on stage.

In her first play she was cast as the principal of a high school, although she was only a 7th grader and smaller than all the other members of the drama group. Her second play she had the role of the plucky comic sidekick to the heroine. Her third play was entitled, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” and it was a dramatic retelling of the gospel story, staged in the 1920’s prohibition era of U.S. history. Instead of the Sanhedrin, Jesus was up against mob bosses. Instead of the woman taken in adultery there was the mob boss’s moll. Jesus was pulling disciples out of a cross-section of flappers and dapper dans of the late 1920’s, early 1930’s. Instead of a Roman centurion supervising Jesus’ crucifixion there was a hitman and a lackey whose stage directions included shooting and stabbing Jesus.

As the results of the auditions were being read I kept expecting my daughter to be cast as one of the disciples or even as the moll. When her name was read as the lackey I felt compelled to ask the director why she had cast my daughter, the second smallest person in the cast, as a murderous thug. The director replied, “You see the kids I have to work with . . . your daughter was the only one I’d trust to handle a stiletto and a prop gun back stage.”

Do all youth drama directors make assignments based on student responsibility over talent? Are the conscientious kids who memorize their lines and remember their marks doomed to always be the nannies and nuns and knights? The months of rehearsal for that play were agony for both my daughter and myself because she had one spotlight moment in which she gave her line and then delivered the death blow that kills Jesus. She was supposed to represent all the repressed resentment toward the Jewish people held by Roman soldiers posted to Jerusalem in the late A.D. 20’s, early 30’s. But every time in rehearsal that she said, “You people make me so sick!” and went to stab the long-haired darling of the drama group who was cast as Jesus, she got the giggles. Or she tickled him and he got the giggles. Or she squeaked or mumbled or spoke calmly as if she were politely pointing out he had a smudge on his nose. The director coached her publicly. I coached her privately. Instead of the cautious, polite, respectful girl that she was she had to act like an angry, vengeful, assassin.

The show opened and I was there with friends and family in the audience and my daughter delivered her line amidst technical difficulties of the lighting and gun-shot effects. Her line was correct and well-projected but you just didn’t believe that the little girl in the oversized zoot suit meant to murder the Son of God. It was more like accidental manslaughter.

I alone went with my daughter to the final night’s performance. I had been through this play dozens of times and was just glad to be at the end of it. Unbeknownst to me, the Jesus of the cast was equally disenchanted with the production and led the kids backstage in the kind of unruly behavior teenage boys are famous for when unsupervised. My daughter just wanted to get through the play and was disgusted and angered by the general idiocy.

So I’m in the pews of the church, watching the dramatic finale with my usual apprehension. The lighting changes, Jesus gets shot in one hand, then the other hand, and now my daughter is approaching in a threatening manner. But instead of her little girl voice, she summons all the annoyance and frustration she’s held toward the actor for his highjinks backstage and roars, “You people make me . . . so. . . SICK!” Then she shanks him for all she’s worth. The moment is so convincing, so dramatic, that the audience gasps in horror.

Then this woman’s voice rings out, “YES! That’s how you do it.” It’s only when all the nice church people turn to stare with revulsion at the woman who’s so pleased to see the Savior of the World snuffed that I realize the exclamation has burst out of me.

I guess it’s easier to act responsibly on stage than it is in real life.