Half Acting & Half Being
& so the tradition continues of me posting essays i wrote for class that i’m proud of instead of writing real blog posts
What is in a play?
A performance? What makes something affecting, or personal? Why even act? For many performers, acting is second nature. They are unable to answer the question “why act,” because their answer will always be “why not?” Art of all kinds can be a form of discovery, but for many actors, their craft is the ultimate form of self discovery. Each performance is a way to not only explore themselves, but to use who they are within to bring new life and meaning to their character. To truly discover themself, they must impersonate the other. The characters in M.L. Rio’s novel If We Were Villains experience this phenomenon to the highest degree when their insulated acting conservatory experience is torn apart. Their experiences are also reflected in different ways in Peter Weir’s film Dead Poets Society, and Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie. Not only do the characters in these three works (though in Rio’s novel in particular) use their personal experiences to bring life to the characters they play, the act of performance in a theatrical setting gives them agency in their personal lives, allowing them to live more truly, and oftentimes, allowing them to express themselves coherently when simply speaking would not do.
Framed in five acts, M.L. Rio’s novel If We Were Villains is told by its protagonist Oliver as ten years in the future, he recounts the events of his final year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, an intense arts institution. He goes through the events that lead up to and follow the suspected homicide of one of his classmates in his tight-knit acting class, culminating in his eventual decision to confess to the murder in place of his best friend, James. The novel as a whole is actively in conversation with the Shakespeare plays it invokes, everything from Romeo and Juliet to King Lear; the characters’ performance of these works in their school does inherently tie it to the world of drama and theatre (such as in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie), but even beyond these plot points, the actual text of Shakespeare’s works is implanted into the novel, in everything from the characters’ usage of Shakespearean dialogue in their everyday lives, to the plot of the novel reflecting various moments from the playwright’s works. While all of these connections are significant, firstmost when considering the relationship between acting and self-fulfillment is the characters’ attitudes regarding their craft, in Rio’s novel and the two other works.
Conducting her notoriously difficult acting class, Gwendolyn, an instructor at Dellecher, tells her students: “‘we’re only ever playing fifty percent of a character. The rest is us, and we’re afraid to show people who we really are’” (Rio 27). This extrapolation between an actor’s personality and experiences and their portrayal of a character is also visible in Peter Weir’s 1989 film Dead Poets Society. Neil, a young man from an incredibly strict household, tells his roommate and friend, Todd, about the town’s open auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “for the first time in my whole life, I know what I want to do. For the first time, I'm gonna do it! Whether my father wants me to or not, carpe diem!” (Weir 46:50). Neil then goes on to audition, and ends up getting the part of Puck. Neil constantly struggles with balancing what he wants for himself and what his father forces him to do, and Puck famously portrays many contrasts within his character, such as the line between dreams and reality. Tom Schulman, the writer of the screenplay, could have easily chosen any play for Neil to participate in, but his choice to make it A Midsummer Night’s Dream is significant in that it creates a parallel between Neil and Puck, allowing Neil’s character to draw similar comparisons between his own life and that of the faerie he plays on stage.
Carrie in Sister Carrie experiences a similar sense of connection to her character, as she finds herself reacting to the other actors’ lines about her character as if it were people talking about herself as a person: “at the sound of her stage name Carrie started. She began to feel the bitterness of the situation. The feelings of the outcast descended upon her” (Dreiser 124). Carrie’s connection to her character is what allows her to make a compelling performance in Under the Gaslight, igniting her love for the craft and leading to her eventual rise in fame in New York by the end of Dreiser’s novel. This connection between person and character and subsequently character and audience is also addressed in Rio’s novel as Oliver thinks to himself, “how could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance” (Rio 114). He acknowledges the use of acting as a way to hide one’s true nature, but also acquiesces that by hiding one’s true nature behind a character, they are actually being true to themselves, in that to successfully portray the character, they must tap into their own life and emotions. In other words, to play a character that successfully connects to an audience, the actor must first successfully connect to the character as a performer. As Gwendolyn tells Oliver nearly one hundred pages earlier, delivering a successful performance means half acting and half connecting to yourself, in an attempt to connect with others.
This attempt to connect with one’s peers through another’s words is clear during performances, but the actors at Dellecher do so in their everyday lives as well. Throughout Rio’s novel, the characters emphasize their connection to the texts they study and their depth of knowledge of them by speaking to each other in Shakespeare’s words. Occasionally this is in fun, to simply joke with each other, but often in If We Were Villains, Shakespeare’s words are used to convey greater meaning beyond the performance, and beyond the words themselves. Ten years in the future, Oliver speaks to Detective Colborne, the lead on his case, about what truly happened during his final year of college. Colborne asks Oliver, “‘How much of what you told me about that night was true?’ / ‘All of it,’ I say, ‘in one way or another.’ / A pause. ‘Are we going to play this game?’ / ‘Wherein I am false I am honest; not true, to be true’” (Rio 146). It is possible that Oliver quotes Shakespeare’s Cymbeline just to be witty, but more likely is his disposition to use quotations in everyday conversation due to a feeling that the quotation brings greater meaning to his words than if he were to say them directly. Oliver uses the line to express the idea that he is being true to his perception of the events that occurred, and that this perception might not necessarily align with what may be considered the absolute truth, but that does not mean it is any less important. During a performance of Romeo and Juliet in this same school year, Oliver again uses a prewritten line to express himself: “we stared at each other, and the crowd faded around us into indistinct shadow and set dressing. With a jolt I remembered my words, but not quite the right ones. / ‘Be ruled by me,’ I said, a few lines too soon. ‘Forget to think of her’” (Rio 239). In this moment, Oliver, who unbeknownst to himself is in love with his best friend James and blinded by jealousy as James falls for their classmate Wren, uses his lines to expose his true feelings; he knows the text so well that he’s able to quote it effortlessly, using it to say how he, Oliver, feels, rather than Benvolio, his character. By skipping forward in the script, he expresses himself the only way he knows how to, because in his and James’ everyday interactions, he is unable to find adequate words to describe how he feels, or why, perhaps, he is so against his relationship with Wren.
This double meaning in performance appears to be a well-used tactic in stories involving theatrical performance, as it also occurs in Sister Carrie and Dead Poets Society. During her performance in Under the Gaslight, Carrie performs a short monologue, saying, “‘[a woman’s] beauty, her wit, her accomplishments, she may sell to you; but her love is the treasure without money and without price.’” (Dreiser 128). Carrie is not aware of it in the moment, because Hurstwood is yet to trick her onto the train to Canada or move her to New York, but her life will come to follow her lines. She will eventually do well for herself as a stage actress in New York, effectively “selling” her beauty, wit, and accomplishments, but her love for Hurstwood fades after she sees him as he truly is, and after he stops treating her with the same reverence as when they first meet. Similarly, in one of his final lines as Puck in the town play, Neil makes direct eye contact with his father, who stands angrily at the back of the theatre, as he says, “‘gentle, do not reprehend. If you pardon, we will mend” (Weir 1:36:55). Even the action lines in Schulman’s script denote this double meaning: “the interlude is over. Neil stands on stage alone as Puck. He addresses the audience but these next words are particularly for his father” (Schulman 81). Neil knows the significance of his lines as his character in the play, but he also knows the significance of them to his father; he uses his one moment of upper hand, when his father is unable to argue, to state that he knows that their relationship is strained, but that if he is willing to forgive his son for going behind his back to perform, they will be able to survive.
Beyond being able to use lines from plays to articulate themselves clearly, the characters in these works also feel a sense of longing in regards to their roles, and emptiness when considering their own life in comparison. As Carrie sits in a theatre in New York, she looks around the room, and finds herself wishing she could “take her sufferings, whatever they were, in such a world, or failing that, at least to simulate them under such charming conditions upon the stage” (Dreiser 209). There is the sense that were one’s life events mere plot points in a play, things would work out. Even Oliver notes this, saying, “‘you can justify anything if you do it poetically enough’” (Rio 249). Despite the tragic situation, to Oliver (and perhaps Carrie), if the events play out poetically, as they often do in drama, there is a sense that these events are justified. In Dead Poets Society, Neil is immediately hit with the weight of his actions and the joylessness of his reality when he steps off stage at the end of the performance only for his father to whisk him home, lecture him for disobedience, and pull him out of his school. Neil goes on in the next minutes of the film to commit suicide, but it seems significant that he puts on his Puck “crown” before doing so. This moment is unscripted (at least per Schulman’s shooting script), but it plays like it is Neil’s last act of taking back power for himself, the only way he can: by putting on the remainders of the costume that gave him freedom in the first place.
This sense of bleakness in the absence of performance is also seen in If We Were Villains, when James, following his own impromptu decision to kiss Oliver on stage as well as in the face of the looming presence of Detective Colborne, “lay limp on the floor, as if Edmund’s life had left him and whatever remained of his own was not enough to move” (Rio 338). James, in this moment no longer able to use the facade of Edmund in King Lear as protection against the outside world, finds himself at a loss due to the many impending problems he is about to face; he knows that the jig is up, and that someone, most likely himself, will be arrested for the murder. If, as Gwendolyn posits to the Dellecher students, a performance is half character and half self-exposure, once the role is finished, there is at least a small moment when the spirit of the role leaves the actor and leaves them with half of themselves, before they return to just being themselves following the performance. A performance is half acting and half being, so once the performance is over, there is, if only briefly, a moment when the performer has only half a being within them.
Although art is not always derivative of personal experience, this is the case when it comes to the acting of If We Were Villains’ Oliver, Sister Carrie’s Carrie, and Dead Poets Society’s Neil. For them, personal experience is intrinsically tied to stage performance. The dramas that each of these characters take part in is reflective of who they are or who they will become, and as writers, Rio, Dreiser, and Schulman use the device of a play within their works to portray the realities and conflicts within their characters. Oliver explains to Detective Colborne that “‘Shakespeare is real, but his characters live in a world of real extremes. They swing from ecstasy to anguish, love to hate, wonder to terror. It’s not melodrama, though, they’re not exaggerating. Every moment is crucial’” (Rio 248). The same is true of the characters at the heart of these works; Dreiser, a naturalist, intentionally did not write Sister Carrie as a melodrama, but in the same way that Oliver’s life is filled with high stakes relationships and Neil’s life is filled with contradictory belief systems, the events of Carrie’s life still hold weight and dramatic effect. Carrie, Neil, and Oliver bring life to their performances and are convincing in their parts because, yes, the narrative demands it, but also because they use their real lives and real emotions to portray truth in the roles they play.
Works Cited
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Doubleday, 1900.
Rio, M.L. If We Were Villains. Flatiron Books, 11 April 2017.
Schulman, Tom, screenwriter. Dead Poets Society, 1989.
Weir, Peter, director. Dead Poets Society. Touchstone Pictures, 1989.