Recently, I’ve been dealing with my actor past, trying to figure out why my face isn’t on billboards, and why I get notes from my bank that begin with “ahem…”
And then I remembered, like waking up from some dream all of a sudden, that I’m NOT AN ACTOR!
The memory reminded that, once upon a time I was cast in the stage version of It’s a Wonderful Life. It was community theater, which is why you can’t quite find it on Netflix.
Oh, it was a glorious role, filled with all the stuff that makes an actor want to be an actor. Got to kiss a pretty girl night after night. Packed the house playing a role pioneered by Jimmy Stewart. OMG, that was a blast.
Except on opening night. It’s a community theater, the house is absolutely packed to the rafters. It’s Christmastime, rain pattering on the roof.
If you know the story, you know it’s about George Bailey, a talented architect who gives up on his future to help his home town by standing by the tiny, family-owned savings and loan against the evil tyrant Potter, who wants to take it over.
Things go awry and it looks like he’s going to lose the savings and loan, and he wishes he was dead. Enter a heavenly angel who shows George what the world would be like if he wasn’t in it.
It’s such a horrifying vision, that, at the end of it, George drops on his knees and pleads with the angel to make things different.
“Forget about me, just save my wife and children,” he wails.
Except for my opening night.
The house is packed. The rain is pattering. The scene is so moving, so well directed, all you can hear is the rain. The audience is emotionally overwhelmed, completely caught up in the moment.
I drop to my knees in supplication.
“Please, Clarence, please forget about my wife and kids…”
Wait. What?
The audience shifts uncomfortably. We’re now all in uncharted territory. I just totally, totally got it waaaaay wrong. There’s no way out it. I seriously got it wrong.
“Is that what you really want?” the genius actor playing the angel asks with a surprised look on his face.
“No! No,” I recover, thanking the theater gods that this man has thought of a way out. “No! No! Forget about me… save my wife and kids! Yeah, that’s it!”
You could feel the whole house breathe this big sigh of relief. The emotional scenes that followed were certainly a lot more emotional for me!
That’s live theater, and it came much later in my life, when I’d learned how to act. When acting was a potential career choice, I knew how to act like an actor, but not how to act. Trying to make a career out of it back then would have been brutal.
So, there’s a writer’s story for all of us in there, isn’t there?
How many of us are acting like writers, writing what we think a writer would write? Telling ourselves that we’re being authentic, but knowing down inside that we’re just faking it until we make it?
What is real writing? What is real acting?
Here’s what I do know: I ain’t no actor!
John D Reinhart 