Immortalizing the Theatre

My senior year in high school I was cast as Tevye in our end of the year production of "Fiddler on the Roof". After our final performance, for the first time since I began acting, I felt genuine sadness at having to say goodbye to a character that I had grown to love over the past few weeks. Tevye the milkman is one of my favorite characters in drama, and I think it's because so many people can relate to him. He reminds many of us of our fathers. He shouts and is demanding and strict, but if you ask him the right way he will eventually give in. I remember sitting in my Economics class after closing night, daydreaming, and feeling this sense of loss. I was never going to be Tevye again. He was gone.

I bring this up only because it has happened again with my recent production of Martin McDonagh's "The Pillowman". I played the character of Katurian, and after working on this play for five months, having to say goodbye to him has proven to be quite difficult. I loved being him every night. The great transformation that he undergoes within the two-and-a-half-hour running time of the play is a testament to McDonagh's spectacular skill. I miss Katurian, and his brother, and the two detectives. And it is a strange feeling to know that that world is one that shall never exist again. Sure, there will be many more productions of the play throughout the world, and I may even be in one of them, but this particular production will never be again.

It is one of the unique traits of the theatre that most everything created by it exists only for an instant and then is lost forever. Novels and poems and films and music can live for decades, become immortal. But a moment of magic on the stage will only live on in the memories of the people who were there to experience it. Some people try to get around this by filming their performances, or documenting them down in a journal. But the truth is that theatre artists create work that is, for the most part, temporary. We rehearse and work on a piece until midnight for months and months, only to have it exist for a few minutes before a live audience. And once the audience has left, our work is gone.

It is a sad concept, but one that I think drives us all to create something so incredibly provocative and honest and unique and memorable, that it hopefully does in fact become immortal, but not in the pages of a novel, or the verses of a poem, but in the hearts and minds of the people who were lucky enough to be there.