Part Two:  The Dead Return 

A week ago, when I posted the first half of this reminiscence of my very brief career in my twenties as a performer, I had intended the follow-up to be a light-hearted account centering on one of my two objectives back then in pursuing acting: meeting girls. 

But every time I tried to write that story, the face of one actress in particular, and her unimaginably horrific story, kept materializing like an admonishing wraith, and I realized that this instead was the story I needed to tell.

I had noticed this young woman, whom I’ll call Laura, in the opening moments of the first day of a weekend workshop in dramatic improvisation, and thought she looked distantly familiar.  But I was caught up in the demanding class, which focused on “mask work,” or the use of masks to allow actors to temporarily efface their own identities and get in touch with deep emotions without dwelling on their appearance or image, and so I instantly forgot about her. 

The German poet Heinrich Heine makes reference in his writings to maskenfreiheit, or “the freedom conferred by masks,” and within the first minutes of this class, I began to grasp the effectiveness of this technique.

Though as an actor I was hopeless, I had some minimal ability as an improviser, and, from behind the safety of my mask (an eerie, completely blank white visage) I improvised a monologue that, for the first time in my performing “career,” seemed to be capturing the audience to some very small degree.

The other actors, behind their identical expressionless visages, were equally impressive, and some, in the intensity of their emotion, a little frightening.  As each of us finished our monologues, we removed our masks and watched the next performer in line.  At last, near the end, one young woman, the one I had glanced at and thought I recognzed at the beginning of the class, removed her mask, and seeing her face revealed so abruptly, I suddenly remembered who she was:  

It was Laura, who had died many years before.

Laura had, almost literally, been “the girl next door”; she lived two or three houses over (I can’t remember exactly) from my own childhood home in Chicago.  I used to talk to her a bit when I was perhaps twelve or thirteen and skateboarding on the sidewalk, and she nine or ten, playing with her own friends a few sidewalk squares away.  After that, my memory goes blank, until, shortly before I left home to go to college, I heard that she was killed in a terrible car crash on a family trip to Champaign-Urbana.

And now, here she was again, back in the world of the living.

Within one second of her removing her mask, I blurted, “I thought you were dead!”   She took a moment of her own to stare back at me and then turned…well, I was going to say “as white as her mask,” but that wouldn’t really be accurate; her face, for an instant, actually flushed, because, of course, I had embarassed her in front of the class, and then turned grey and slack.  She laughed uncomfortably and said, “no, that was my best friend.  I recognize you now; your name is Michael, right?  Don’t you remember?  Everybody in the neighborhood used to talk about how she and I looked alike.”

And then I remembered.  Laura, the woman I was talking to, had lived across the street from me, not down the block, and in fact had looked enough like the dead girl that in my memory I had somehow conflated the two into a single person.  Nor was that my only mistake; when Laura and I went out for drinks after class, I discovered that the car crash hadn’t occurred in Champaign-Urbana (where I’d gotten that idea from, I have no idea) but rather on a busy street just about a block from our respective houses.

There was much more to the story I hadn’t known about.  Laura and her friend had been invited by some drunk teenage boys who worked at a local service station to go for a joy ride.  There was a crash; Laura’s lookalike friend had gone through the windshield and was decapitated.  And here was the part of the story that was difficult enough to hear, and unimaginably more difficult to have lived: Laura, seriously injured herself, lay in the street and, unable to move, was forced to look upon the head of her doppelganger, her look-alike, her best friend. 

I suppose it is possible that Laura was embellishing or exaggerating; obviously, I had heard nothing in the neighborhood of the details of this horrific accident.  But her description of those long moments on the street waiting for the ambulance to take her, and what remained of her friend, away, seemed utterly desolate, and beyond all pretense. 

We talked for a bit about the old neighborhood, and I recalled a time when I had seen her walking home from a grocery store loaded down with an overstuffed grocery bag and a gallon of milk.  I had come up behind her and offered to carry the milk for her, but instead of talking to her, I had, like the gauche fourteen-year-old boy I was, loped ahead to her front door and, gallon of milk in hand, waited impatiently for her to arrive.   

But mostly we talked about her life after the accident.  She had, she recounted, been hospitalized, had also spent some time in a mental facility, had abused drugs, had struggled to find herself.  She’d even lived, for a couple of years, with a very well-known rock star, and now she was trying to create a career as an actress.

I thought then about her performance from a couple of hours before.  Like mine, it had been suffused with a very personal brand of emotion — this was, after all, a class in dramatic, rather than comedic, improvisation — and obviously her wells of emotion were much deeper than mine; I had never, thank God, experienced personal tragedy at a level even remotely comparable to hers.

I have no idea how much, if any, success she ever experienced as an actress; I have forgotten her last name and have no idea how to find out what she’s doing now.  But if she did experience success, I don’t for a minute believe that this well of emotion, this tragedy, would have been what made the difference.  Acting is about insight and instincts and technique, and without a command of all of these skills, and for that matter considerable charisma, the ability to access and express deep trauma or other profound emotions, while perhaps necessary, is not at all sufficient.

For my own part, I wonder if this brief incident (brief, that is, from my perspective, not Laura’s) revealed something about my own inability to build a convincing character on stage.  Creating a character is about individuation and observation, which is to say looking very closely at a real or scripted individual and faithfully inhabiting and replicating the external and internal behaviors and motivations that make this person different from every other person who has ever walked the face of the earth. 

As a writer, I detest cliché; but as a actor, I was perhaps too tolerant of “type.”  I looked at Laura and thought I knew what she was, when in fact, even though I had lived across the street from her as a child, I didn’t even know who she was.  She was an individual with an amazing story to tell, but in my conflating of her appearance with that of her best friend (the fact that they looked alike was only a partial excuse) I might as well have been gazing upon a featureless white visage. 

To the very large extent that I was unable to see the real person behind the “mask” in the characters I had been granted to play, I was a failure as an actor.  There, in my early twenties, I already knew that acting was not for me.  Writing was still something I hoped to pursue, and one of the measures of my capability in the regard would be the extent to which I would be able to cast off my own masks, and those worn by others (the “maskwork” that we had been practicing that day being, after all, only a crutch, or a means to an end) to see, and faithfully recreate, the real human beings that breathed behind them. 

 

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